The World Wasn’t Made Straight Up and Down by Heather Lanier
The cherry tomatoes look like little planets on their vines, their centimeter-sized axes tilted this way and that way in the sun. It’s September. Will they ripen enough for next week’s salad? Will they sweeten into October? I don’t know. I’m a clueless, newbie tomato grower—and a relatively new homeowner in this small New Jersey town. But tilt your face to the sky, and you can feel it: the sun’s angle is lower. Next week, we reach the equinox, when light and dark sit evenly on the day’s scale. And although the Earth is warming a fraction of a degree every year, it’s still hurling away from the sun in the usual way it has done since the beginning of its hurling. It’s still angling this Garden State and the whole northern hemisphere toward darkness—and giving the southern hemisphere a turn at extra light.
I read recently that seasons only exist because “God didn’t make the world straight up and down.” I didn’t know exactly what the writer meant. The concept of queerness came to mind. God made the world gay. Which is true, or partly true, for the part of the world that’s gay. Then the concept of moral ambivalence came to mind. God didn’t make a world of perfect justice. The world we inhabit is often not “made right.” Which is also true. Like in this case:
My small Jersey town has been gossiping recently about a vacant lot that finally sold. That lot, they wrote in neighborly online forums.
That one sold?!
Yes, that one!
A mile from me, on a street of mostly one-story homes parsed out on small square plots, one lot sits vacant, like an eighth of an acre escaped suburban colonization. It’s a rare patch of land allowed to lie fallow. Over the years, a “for sale” sign pops up, then disappears, pops up, then disappears.
What’s wrong with that lot? Another neighbor was new enough to ask the same question I had.
Someone else linked to a news story.
Nine years ago, a house sat on that lot. A sixteen-year-old boy who lived there burned it down. His parents were still inside.
My God!
F-ing monster.
Then came the assigning of culprits.
Video games!
Cell phone use?
The gossip pivoted to whether the lot would become a single-family home or apartments for college kids, the latter of which residents predict will be very loud and disrespectful of parking laws. And that is how we, of the Internet, went from death by arson to where we put our cars.
But later down the thread, someone quietly, as in without comment, shared a longer article.
The boy’s father was out of work with back pain. His mother was in the last stage of leukemia. He decided that if he burned his own house down, his parents would escape, and they’d collect insurance. That’s what he told police. The idea came to him in a dream, he said. “I was kinda laying downstairs watching TV . . . and then I kinda fell asleep and kinda had a dream of, like, us having, like, more money and my mom being fine and everything like that.”
The parents lived for a week before succumbing to burns.
Nine years ago, a house sat on that lot. A sixteen-year-old boy who lived there burned it down.
The judge said that, because the boy’s parents suffered especially painful deaths, the boy should be tried as an adult.
This is what I thought the writer meant when she said: God didn’t make the world straight up and down.
The boy got 20 years. When he’s released, the lot’s new house will be six years old, the same length of time his mother lived with cancer.
But that’s not what the writer meant at all. She meant:
“If God had made the world straight up and down, we would have no seasons or change, just the sun shining straight at the equator all year round. The tilt made the way for long light as well as long darkness. The earth moves, sometimes giving and sometimes taking, then spinning around and giving something or taking something back again.” (Emily P. Freeman)
A week past the equinox, the vines in our front yard are still erupting small green orbs, shiny as bald men’s heads. Over the span of days, the cherry tomatoes still turn from yellow to orange to red. This surprises me. It’s officially fall. We’re still taking small bites of summer.
This isn’t the case for the heirlooms. They rot before they ripen. Or they crack in spirals at the top, because (we’ve been told) we both over- and under-water them, which is apparently a thing. To give something both too much of what it needs, and not enough.
I pass “that lot” on my runs. Over the weeks, it acquired a port-a-potty, a few men in day-glow orange, a small digger, and then a big hole, with mounds and mounds of dirt.
The mounds reminded me of the dirt my next-door-neighbor dug up last summer. A nurse in her sixties, Helen moved in because her daughter and son-in-law lived five houses down. She wanted to be closer to her three grandsons. She wanted to turn her backyard into a swimming pool for the boys.
Men cut down trees, dug a big hole, and then shaped and paved that hole. They added a textured cushiony bottom meant to protect her grandsons’ boxy little feet.
“I’ve never spent this much money in all my life,” she said to me. “Promise me you’ll use the pool.”
I nodded.
“Really, it’s for all the kids,” she said hopefully. “It’s for the neighborhood.” She gestured to our street, which was quiet because no neighbors were outside.
Hundreds of years ago, someone decided we should all live like this: in these silos, these cubes of apartments or houses, solo or with our closest people. Not with cousins or friends or greater collectives. And so, we do. When Helen moved in, she replaced a middle-aged social worker. Helen’s house came with five rose bushes between our lot and hers, rose bushes that the former owner had regularly tended with sheers and gloves and a wide-brimmed hat. Hundreds of reddish-pink blooms flourished. I could smell them from my front door.
But Helen split her time between her grandsons and her gig as a hospice nurse. On some days, she helped a one- and four- and six-year-old learn how to live, and on other days, she helped eighty- and ninety-year-olds learn how to die. Or, as she’d probably correct me, learn how to live while dying.
“Dying is a part of life,” she once said. We were standing beside the rose bushes, on opposite sides of our shared wood fence. I was not actually sure whose fence it was, hers or mine, and I liked it that way. Whenever a wonky beam fell, one of us put it back into place.
The rose bushes grew a little gnarly, covered in white five-starred remnants of blossoms. They still bloomed, but sporadically. Green leaves were yellow-tipped. Because Helen was too busy tending to her grandsons and her patients, she didn’t have time to tend the roses. And because my children were partly hers, in the sense that she offered to watch them whenever, it seemed like her roses were partly mine. So I, a person who manages to simultaneously under- and over-water tomatoes, was seriously considering the project of rose maintenance.
But I never maintained Helen’s roses, because the world is not made straight up and down, and tomatoes burgeon and blight, and Helen’s grandsons only had two summers in that swimming pool.
A suited man in a button-up, no tie, gathered the town’s parents into the high school cafeteria. He said the words, new state formula. He said the words, district restructuring.
Because there is a very finite number of dollars in the pot used to educate children, the state takes a town’s variables and plugs them into a formula. But the state’s old formula was deemed insufficient—some districts hadn’t been getting enough. Which meant other districts had “too much.” These were called “overfunded.” Our town had “too much.”
Ours is a small town, a one-by-two-mile grid of residential roads and a main street running east to west. Small towns are not economically efficient. A building still needs to be heated, no matter the number of kids inside. And each kid gets a dollar-amount delivered via the formula, a formula that has never enabled our district to employ buses—the kids walk, or parents drive them.
The meeting with the suited man really meant: school closures, job losses. Teachers got cut. The ones who didn’t have tenure found themselves shuffled into strange spots.
A seventh-grade Language Arts teacher became a fifth-grade self-contained special ed teacher. My former next-door neighbor was the social worker but became our daughter’s special ed case worker—or maybe both. The high school art teacher was now the director of special education. This meant that the guy who used to teach fifteen-year-olds mosaic portraiture was now the boss of the program for kids with disabilities. And one of Helen’s grandsons is autistic. And the district had not yet supplied Helen’s grandson with the aide his IEP guaranteed him. Which somehow resulted in the former art teacher putting Helen’s four-year-old grandson in a physical restraint.
Because Helen was too busy tending to her grandsons and her patients, she didn’t have time to tend the roses.
But get this: Helen’s son-in-law, Joe, was the person who stepped into the vacant position of high school art teacher. Which meant he was now teaching mosaic portraiture while his autistic son was being restrained. And his child’s restrainer was also a superior administrator.
Joe is a soft-spoken illustrator and tattoo-artist with a beard and long blondish hair he puts into a bun. And when I say soft-spoken, I mean it. I can hardly hear him. I very much want to hear him. He and his wife, Blair—and Helen, and I—all fly rainbow flags on an otherwise not-so-rainbow-flag-flying street. But Joe will not raise his voice across the lawns when we chat. He will not raise his voice amidst the neighborhood’s aggressive fleet of leaf blowers. He will not even raise his voice after his pseudo-superior calls one day to report that he had to physically restrain Joe’s four-year-old. The leaf blowers raged, and Joe reported this with a Buddha’s expression.
Joe’s wife, Blair—Helen’s daughter—works with autistic kids for a living. She is fiery and passionate and wears leggings of wild prints and calls herself “a spazz.” So when the high-school-teacher-turned-special-education-director called her to explain why physically restraining her son was the only viable option in a district that hasn’t supplied him with the aide he needs, Blair understandably lost her shit.
It wasn’t that restraining a child is absolutely forbidden. Blair knew it was sometimes necessary if a kid posed imminent danger to themself or another. But she said that wasn’t the case with her four-year-old. He was restrained for swiping stuff off desks and taking off his pants. He was restrained because they didn’t like his behavior.
She collected herself to meet with her kid’s teachers, where she tried to teach her kid’s teachers how to teach kids with autism.
You know what I’m saying, right? I’m saying the world was not created straight up and down.
A friend of mine is an excellent tomato grower. She grows so many that she has to grind them up and blend them with jalapeños and onions and make salsa with them. She has so many tomatoes she gets kind of sick of them, because she can only eat so much salsa. She cans it and gives it away, or stores it for winter. Do you need any salsa? She will gladly give you a jar.
“They didn’t even know what a [blankety-blank] was,” Blair told me in front of my driveway beside Helen’s—I was about to say our—gnarly roses.
I didn’t catch the blankety-blank, but as a mother to a kid with disabilities, I understood blankety-blank to be a basic, requisite teaching tool for kids with autism.
I said that’s fucked up.
Blair shook her head in disbelief.
Then one day, Joe’s pseudo-superior-slash-child-restrainer informed Joe and Blair that their four-year-old could no longer attend the school. Like, at all. And Blair had to explain to him that it is unlawful for a public school to refuse educating a child, that it has been unlawful since Congress passed the IDEA act in 1975, a law Congress has never actually funded it to its full promise. In other words, the bill to fund the education of all kids is literally “underfunded.”
The former art teacher (-slash-child-restrainer-slash-pseudo-superior) handed the family a list of possible schools and told them to call around and see if someone would take their boy. Meanwhile, he said, the district would send someone to their home to teach him—for 90 minutes a day. “Basically, baby jail,” Blaire said. But the child was not permitted to attend the local school, which—on account of the fact that Blair’s family (not to mention my family, and Helen) paid about 10,000 dollars a year in taxes to fund—was actually his school.
The loud-legginged autism specialist and the soft-spoken tattoo artist put up a for-sale sign.
A few months later, Helen did too.
There they go still! Three weeks later, officially past the equinox: green orbs still dangling from brown, blighted plants, sending wishes into the fall. It feels like they’re giving us promises they might not be able to keep.
Writing checks their bodies can’t cash, my mind hears from the eighties movie, Top Gun. A lieutenant commander barks it into the face of young Tom Cruise. The line turns a body into a bank, a person into a repository for limited resources, which our culture sometimes does. It’s why we feel bad if we get sick, or can’t work, or just want to sleep in, which we will probably want to do even more now that the northern hemisphere is creeping toward its longest night.
Candace Fujikane’s Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future is a dense read, but she offers a useful phrase: capitalism’s “rhetoric of scarcity.” As a fourth-generation Japanese settler of Hawai’i and a scholar of the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), she contrasts capitalism’s “rhetoric of scarcity” to what she calls “Indigenous economies of abundance.”
“Capital produces a human alienation from land,” Fujikane writes, “In what I refer to as the settler colonial mathematics of subdivision, cartographies of capital commodify and diminish the vitality of land by drawing boundary lines around successively smaller, isolated pieces of land….”
Blair had to explain to him that it is unlawful for a public school to refuse educating a child.
I think of our silos. I think of the small square plots on our streets, including the street with “that lot.” I think of the lake just a few blocks from “that lot.” Filled with seaweed, unsafe for swimming, it lived downstream from the literal “worst” Superfund site in America. Benzene, toluene, xylene, methanol, arsenic, lead, mercury—all of it was dumped into the landfill by chemical corporations. All of it seeped into the lake. Leukemia cases climbed. The lake turned strange colors, was declared “dead,” was drained, remediated, and refilled. Today on my runs, I spot people at the lake’s edges with fishing poles, but I’m told they always toss back what they catch.
And then I read this Fujikane quote:
“Capitalist modes of production manufacture the perception of scarcity….” And I think of when my family and I moved to this town. I explained to the school district that my daughter would need a one-to-one aide. Their official reply was: “Aides are in short supply. There are no more aides.”
Then they met my daughter. Two days later she had an aide.
The school district used a rhetoric of scarcity to determine which kids it would support, and which kids it would restrain, and eventually remove.
You might say that in creating the IDEA Act—the law guaranteeing all kids the right to a decent education—Congress wrote a check that its body wouldn’t cash, had no plans of cashing.
My friend Dave drives a truck with a bumper sticker that reads, Sure You Can Trust the Government Just Ask a Native. When I ask him what tribe he belongs to, he names the people native to this land: the Lenni Lenape. Translated to mean true people, the Lenni Lenape believed the land could not be owned.
Don tells me that when his grandmother was only six, she was taken from her parents, split from one of her siblings, and sent with another sibling to a white school. If she spoke her native tongue, she was beaten. Now in his sixties, Don’s trying to learn what he can of his tribe. It’s hard when his ancestors were violently torn from their history—his history.
The Penn Museum says there are no known speakers of Unami, the language of the Lenni Lenape.
“Mapping abundance is a refusal to succumb to capital’s logic that we have passed an apocalyptic threshold of no return.” –Candace Fujikane
The world was not made straight up and down, and consequently, humans learned to farm. Farming was a way to respond to the seasons of growth and scarcity. Farming took more time and energy than hunting and gathering, but it yielded greater output from the land. The land could produce 10 to 100 times the caloric energy as it did when we hunted and gathered—even if the calories themselves were less nutritious. We got more out of the land. So about twelve-thousand years ago, we became land-rooted. Not all of us. Not the Lenni Lenape and other tribes. But gradually, most humans stayed put. Towns grew up around them. Then city-states. Then political power. Kings. War.
“Whereas hunter-gatherer societies generally viewed resources as belonging to everyone, agriculture led to a system of ownership over land, food, and currency that was not (and is still not) equitably distributed among the people.” – Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future
Multiple scholars argue that farming marks the beginning of social injustice.
I don’t want to turn the tomatoes into commodities. I want to live in wonder of them. Green in these shrinking days, they ask me to hold myself in awe of their bulbous selves. They grow in a season that will end them. Yes, the cracked spirals on their tops mean I’ve both under- and over-watered them. But the cracks also evoke the mathematical precision of fractals: spiral galaxies, curled fern leaves, nautilus shells.
Nobody actually knows why the boy burned the house down. Or if he burned it down at all. Later, he said he didn’t do it—said police forced the confession. Still later, he pleaded guilty—probably for a lighter sentence.
The prosecutor said it was the most troubling case she’d ever worked on.
His public defender said he could not publicly weigh the boy’s remorse, but that the boy felt “very badly.”
A family friend reported that, just days before the fire, his mother had told the boy that she was giving up on her six-year fight with cancer.
The boy used to lie by her bed at night to care for her.
The boy’s fire—was it a counterattack on medical bankruptcy? On capitalism? On living in these fragile little silos? On a world of not-enough?
Or was it a fluke? A faulty spark?
Most humans stayed put. Towns grew up around them. Then city-states. Then political power. Kings. War.
Or was it a response to the entire concept of loss? A way to say to pain: enough.
The Spanish teacher at my kids’ school was needed to translate for new ESL students, and I guess there was nobody else to teach Spanish, because a Language Arts teacher started teaching World Cultures. The kids now study World Cultures instead of Spanish, which, ironically, most need even more because an increasing number of their peers speak it.
For their first World Cultures project, the kids are making murals. My daughter tells me her group’s theme: summer in winter.
“What’s summer in winter,” I ask.
“Like, snowmen at the beach,” she says. “Things like that.”
Just a month ago, they poured off the beach and into the classroom. Their families might even still have sand in the backseats of their cars. Mine does. If my daughter’s group members are like her, they spent late August bemoaning school structure, the loss of long days in the sun. Forget that snowmen on July sand wouldn’t survive—Olaf taught them that. The mural is an alternate reality. It will keep the world tilted, but also let it orbit straight up and down. Or it will stop the earth’s orbit altogether. It will hold everything that comes and goes, comes and goes, all at once. Abundance of everything. Scarcity of nothing.
Cherry tomatoes ripening against the backdrop of snow.
My neighbor Helen, still swimming with her grandsons next door. Autumn leaves tumbling into the warm pool around them.
A boy still in his parents’ house, his mother well. He’s a child, and he’s also grown.
But isn’t that what the judge did? Tried a teen as a man. Turned a kid into an adult.
A week after learning about the murals, I ask my daughter how they’re coming along. She says summer-in-winter was only half-finished. World Cultures is only forty-five minutes long. The murals had to be abandoned.
Time is another limited resource economists measure.
Our house is a 1400-square-foot cape cod. It was built in 1960, when multigenerational living dipped into a decades-long low. In the four years that we’ve been here, we’ve tried to build a beautiful life. A little world made right—straight up and down. We planted the tomatoes. We befriended the autism advocate and the soft-spoken illustrator who we thought would one day teach our kids mosaic portraiture. We accepted Helen’s backyard generosity, and admired her roses that could have needed me. We believed we’d become more and more entangled. We believed our entanglement, our neighborly agape would serve as dissent against these small silos someone decades ago agreed we should live inside.
We still have other neighbors we lean on, and neighbors who lean on us. Ten-year-old Dave from around the corner tumbles through the front door each morning, and we help him get to school. On Saturday mornings, Ellen beeps, and one of our kids piles into her car for art class, so I can take the other to adaptive soccer. There, another person helps my daughter learn how to kick. We need more people because we have more people in our silo with needs. Which is why Helen moved onto our street in the first place—to be close to her people who needed her.
And this feels beautiful. But also scary. See “that lot.” See terrible choices when not-enoughness threatens to swallow a family whole.
Joe and Blair’s old house is now owned by a single guy named Derek. He doesn’t have kids yet. I haven’t seen much of him except on Halloween night, when he gave out candy. That’s the only day when Americans agree we should all give something away.
The house on “that lot” is now a wood frame for what will clearly be a two-story colonial—far larger than the small ranchers around it. You can see right through the beams. The walls are made of air, are made of the image of the trees behind the house. Wind blows through what will soon become a new home, for another family.
We still have other neighbors we lean on, and neighbors who lean on us.
On my runs, I say a little prayer as I go past. A prayer is a form of giving, but it doesn’t feel like enough. I’d like to give something more practical. Like what? Medicare for all? Or at least the vote for it—if politicians would give us the option. For now, I say a prayer for the boy, who is now a man, and I say a prayer for his parents, who are probably beyond time and have probably long forgiven, if the dead even need to forgive.
They say heaven is beyond time, which I think means it’s never at a loss for resources.
A realtor once told me that a swimming pool makes a home less desirable, so I wondered if the new pool would hurt Helen’s attempt to sell her house. Sometimes economics isn’t about not enough of something everyone needs, but too much of something nobody wants. Like, that lot—too much loss. We are used to some loss in a family’s life, but not that much. Or like those kids—a barebones school district wants some kids, but not others. Not the neurodivergent ones.
But Helen’s house sold in days.
She writes from her new place in a different state to say that everyone’s doing well, including her autistic grandson. He has an aide now, which means he has the support to stay in a general education classroom, which is what Joe and Blair wanted for him—and what, fifty years ago, the US government promised kids like him, and kids like mine.
Helen also reports that my new neighbors are very nice people, and grandparents too. It was the pool, they told Helen, that sold them. They have a granddaughter around the corner. She loves to swim.
I don’t know my new neighbors yet—they haven’t moved in. I don’t know if I’ll feel drawn to care for their roses, or if they’ll even let me. I know that there was a car in their driveway all day yesterday. It had a bumper sticker that read Medicare for All. Which, regardless of your politics, is another way of saying Enough for Everyone. Or For Everyone: Enough.
Sometimes I run because I’m trying to pant out my rage at a world that’s so imperfect. That’s so not-right. I pant clouds of white into the frosty air and think things like:
If God had made the world straight up and down, the schools would have enough money to pay for all the teachers. And the teachers would know how to teach all the kids.
If God made the world straight up and down, the judge would show mercy. A boys’ dreams would always lead him to a love we understand.
If God made the world straight up and down, no group of humans would ever seek to annihilate another group. My friend would be able to learn the language of his ancestors.
If God made the world straight up and down, someone’s enough would never cause someone else’s not-enough.
But really, if God made the world straight up and down, every day would be twelve hours long—everywhere. And there would be no seasons. Which means a few places would always have tomatoes, and most places would never have them.
Scientists aren’t sure humans would have evolved on such a planet anyway.
It’s November. The leaves on the tomato vines have finally darkened a blackish-green, wilting like lettuce gone bad. They drape over the cylindrical cages. The frost came.
I pluck the last of the green heirlooms, which remarkably haven’t blighted or cracked. I place them on a southern-facing windowsill, bottoms-up. Eight green orbs in a line. Zero checks offered from their globular bodies. Zero promises. Just green beauty. Maybe even possibility. Maybe they’ll ripen.
If there is a God who brought all of creation into being, then this God only made the world slanted. And this God brought humans to this slanted world. The justice, I think, is up to us. Maybe this Maker slanted the world so that we have to reach for each other. So that our abundance of tomatoes must be shared. So that we sometimes need, and cannot ever, any of us, go it alone.
I remember what that was like as a new mother: the strange, arms-free feeling when someone takes your baby.
If that’s the case, these silos we’ve built are offenses in a battle against our tenderness. They are lies against our gift of mutual need. The world is not made straight up and down: we’ve responded with a pathology in how we treat each other. In our architecture of border fences and budget formulas, we’ve responded with a pathology of independence and scarcity and disregard. Which means we need to knock on each other’s doors. Offer our jars. Become more entangled. Oh, but we need so much more than that. We need to rewrite ourselves an ethics of care.
“Clouds do not abide by man-made boundaries, traveling across them to water the land.” –Candace Fujikane
One hot July day, I found myself floating in Helen’s amoeba-shaped pool with Blair and her three boys. Blair was holding her youngest, the giant ten-month-old. I offered to hold him so Blair could float solo. She didn’t wait even a second to accept.
I remember what that was like as a new mother: the strange, arms-free feeling when someone takes your baby. The knots in your back holler with relief because they’re no longer tightening to hold another body. For as long as Blair’s third son let me hold him, Blair was free. So, for as long as I could, I held her giant baby, making goofy, wide-eyed faces at his grinning, nostrilly, goofy self. And the water held me a little as I bobbed. And the water held Blair, too. And Helen was holding all of us, because she had gifted us the water to hold us—and of course because she’d also held Blair as a baby. Helen had even held, inside herself, the part of Blair that would hold, eventually, her three boys. At the time, though, Helen was not herself being held by the water—she was at work caring for her patients. And this, I think, is what it means to accept the tilt of the world: neither having “enough” nor having “too much.” Just being held and holding.