“The chestnut trim of the windowsills is supposed to be extinct or something,” Dee said.
“I wish it was open plan,” the Actor said. “Then it would better fit in with the nature around it, like the porch does.”
“Maybe we can ask permission to remodel,” she had said.
And he just laughed and said: “Permission granted.”
Dee and the Actor did not know it, but this furniture—and indeed the house itself—had been picked by Masha and Senderovsky because it was happy and light, the opposite of their parents’ dark armoires and heavy Eastern European curtains.
But lying on the bed now, alone, eyes still blinking in the austere early morning sunlight, Dee’s long, wide mouth （“Just horsey enough for my tastes”—The Actor）， began to open and slacken, her breathing became irregular, panicked （“I love to hear you pant, baby”）， and her hands curled with great, almost tensile strength around the innocent shell of her laptop （“I can tell you used to work out before all this”）。
What the hell was happening?
A different line of attack was presenting itself across the blue-and-white landscape of her favorite social media channel, and it wasn’t the sexist blather about her appearance versus Elspeth’s. No, these comments, multiplying in real time, were about an essay Dee had written about the seminal American racist film Gone with the Wind, which was having a moment after a new streaming network decided to remove it from its offerings after the recent uprisings.
The essay had been written just as the initial burst of enthusiasm for The Grand Book of Self-Compromise and Surrender had begun to die down among the country’s small but ever-bored readership and as another book about growing up poor and white began to overtake it on the lists.
Dee had decided to skew provocative at that point, while still functioning within the safety of the left. The essay—not her finest, she would be the first to admit—centered on a childhood obsession with Gone with the Wind, which had started with a trip to Atlanta with her mother and her abusive boyfriend of the moment—he had recently learned that the key to his broken Datsun could better serve as a weapon—a trip which proved to be a great financial and psychological expense for her family （they had stayed at a crumbly motel on the outskirts of the Georgian capital and had run out of gas money on the way back）， but which also became a life-changing trip, as it inspired young Dee to buy the novel upon which the movie was based, which then led her to keep her first journal, written on the backs of a ream of Agway customer service forms that had fallen off a truck （perhaps this had happened, perhaps not, but this was how she chose to tell the story）， which culminated, two decades later, in a graduate classroom with the drunken Senderovsky and then all the rest of it.
On the face of it, the essay was hardly a lit match thrown into a gassy oven. It started out by first laying out all the obvious things wrong with the movie, beginning with the servile portrayals of its Black characters. But then the essay pivoted to the poverty of its viewers （the Cameron family included） and a longing for a fabled, romantic past these Scots-Irish folk had been forced to live off after everything else （the jobs, the hope） had been taken away.
The essay danced along these lines, gently herding the reader in one direction and then surprising her with a shunt in the opposite. Throughout, one could find Dee’s patented bare-knuckle tone directed toward the moneyed reader of leisure. How dare this reader not consider the sources of Dee’s poverty and her own complicity within the scope of rent-seeking capital? How dare she condescend to young Dee for her love of the only narrative in her life that wasn’t disposable trash bought at the “Facial Care” aisle of the Piggly Wiggly?
At several junctures, Dee referred to her impoverished compatriots as “my people,” including at one point a long descriptive list of her kinfolk. （As Senderovsky used to say in his graduate-school class, “When you run out of ideas, just write down a list. Readers love lists.”）
Dee’s list included “…Part-time coyote skinners, drummed-out Fort Bragg PFCs, psoriasis-covered Bible-school lunch ladies, social security disability regs thumpers, racist cops just itching for the right motorist to pull off the tarmac…” Concluding with the line: “As much as you might hate them, as much as you would loathe sharing the aisles of a big-box store with them （you’re more into small, well-scented shops in formerly Black neighborhoods, anyway） and their screaming, undereducated children （my nieces and nephews）， these are all my people.”