This essay is the winner of ACM’s second nonfiction contest. Each year, the winner receives publication and a free residency at Shannaghe in Belfast, Maine.
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Many men that stumble at the threshold are well foretold that danger lurks within.
— Shakespeare, Henry VI
0-18. The first porch was perilous and beautiful: a collapsing wrap-around structure that
overlooked fields of wheat and corn and orange sunsets framed by telephone wires. When cars sped by and disappeared into flat distances, Dad would shake his head disapprovingly and say, Someone’s gonna get killed out here.
0. But there was a time before Dad worried about anyone getting killed, least of all himself. He grew up in a house without a porch, a three bedroom with eight siblings split between two bedrooms: one for the boys and one for the girls. Dad got to drinking early and by the time he was a teenager he was downing cases of Coors and touching live wires, already needing to feel both more and less. I always asked him to tell that story again, the one about the time he and his siblings all linked hands and he, the littlest, touched an electric fence in the hopes that they could all feel it.
6-12. On the first porch, we gave each other haircuts, blunt and uneven, leaving a spray of trimmed blond ends – darker as we grew older: strawberry, honey, ash. We husked corn, unskinned it like animals tearing towards some tender center, leaving green casings and piles of silk that Dad swept down into the road.
i. Another way to think about a porch: as a threshold – a space one passes through on their way somewhere else, a waiting place, between in and out.
ii. The root of threshold relates to the Old English threscan from which we get thresh, meaning to separate seed from from a harvested plant.1 There is also thrashing meaning, to beat soundly. One must thrash in order to thresh: to separate seed from stalk, the grain is beaten upon the ground. And who among us has not been thrashed as they are threshed? Has not been harmed as they are loosed from the husk of youth and flung into the wide field of becoming?
iii. In many agricultural traditions, corn is thought to be inhabited by a fragile spirit, an impossibly young thing, a child who is separated from its mother by the stroke of the sickle.2
16. There are many photos of me on the porch before my first dance – Homecoming – and I’m crying in every one. At sixteen, I am so clean and pink, have never tasted alcohol or had a pill on my tongue – eyebrows plucked thin and spaghetti straps made pitiful by the weight of my breasts. Framed by the pillars of the porch and the fields sprawling behind me, I am so young but already overfull of everything inside me, already in need of an edge to cleave myself against.
iv. The etymology of edge is full of danger. Edge, in its earliest iteration, evokes the collision of two sides of a sword’s blade. Edge. A thing that can cut and can cleave. A sharp place, a deep wound.
1.2 In Shakespeare’s balcony scene, there is no mention of a balcony. The stage directions read [Enter Juliet Above]. What he must have had in mind was a threshold: a space between the safe inner sanctum and the exposure of evening. What he needed was an edge: one that could thrill and could cleave. Stony limits cannot hold love out.3 Juliet’s balcony, lit behind by her bedroom and above by the moon, is the precipice of the adult world and all of its mesmerizing dangers.
17. When I wanted to move to the city for college, Dad didn’t want to let me go. We fought close in each other’s faces, grappled for car keys on the ground. Hang thee, young baggage, disobedient wretch. He took my door off its frame, changed the locks. Hang, beg, starve, die in the streets. At the back door, we screamed some version of that eternal argument and I put my fist through the pane of the back door, the glass ripping a deep gash on my forearm spilling blood and showing yellow fat and pink muscle. A relief.
16. Dad chased boys from the porch like he was running vultures off a carcass. There was one, whose arms were covered with bruises and burst blood vessels, who I thought I loved. I was sixteen and he was twenty-eight, without a car or a phone or a winter jacket. We rode bikes through the cold and sat outside all night – him in two layers of sweatshirts and nothing but cigarettes and my body to keep him warm. He owned nothing and lived nowhere, was so vulnerable he was dangerous. I could not call him, but often he’d appear, coasting down the steep of the tractor path. When he was gone, for weeks at a time without a word, his absence opened me like a wound. I told myself then, and for a decade afterwards, that there is more beauty in peril than in safety, that the only love worth having is the kind that threatens to annihilate you.
1. On the first porch, Dad re-poured a crumbling cement block and before it was dried and settled he scraped my name in all caps with a nail: THERESA and pressed a penny from the year I was born. In those days he was shirtless and drunk, still a fragile, hopeful thing, reckless with impulse but relatively unmarked. Maybe even then he was trying to catch and keep me, already needing a record of my fleeting existence.
1.2 Juliet worries that Romeo’s proposal is too impulsive, too inspired by rashness born of a nighttime balcony and fleetingness of the moon: O, swear not by the inconstant moon, that monthly changes in her circled orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable. She knows that promises made on a porch might not hold up when you re-enter a house: This contract […] is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning. Images of ephemerality abound on the balcony and it is this sense of fleetingness that makes bold declarations possible, but also threatens their immutability. At any moment love might change shape like the moon or vanish like lightning; nothing lasts forever.
0-32. I used to believe that nothing counted on porches, felt the breeze of a life absent permanence or consequence. I used to think that I existed outside the inevitable progression of cause and effect, that every choice could be revised, that beyond every precipice was a field of possibility. I used to be more hopeful than fearful, enthralled by that unpredictable gap between the house and the world in which almost anything might happen.5
18 – 32. I will tell you only about the first and the last – there were many porches in the middle –stoops and fire escapes and a one flat rooftop, vast and barren as the moon, from which it felt like I could see everything that lay ahead: sprawling, gleaming, possible. In those years, I held my life with a careless and unsteady hand, but there was freedom in this recklessness: the thrill of being cut loose in becoming.
21-22. Maybe there is one worth mentioning: a fire escape in Bed-Stuy where I drank fifty-cent tall boys of malt liquor called Crazy Stallion emblazoned with a horse whose mane was made of turquoise feathers. I watched boys play basketball late into the evening, marveled at the grace in their bodies. I rolled my own cigarettes, bottom shelf Midnight Special tobacco with a smoking train on the pouch. At twenty-one or twenty-two, I felt like a runaway train, or like the sort of person who might hop onto a freight car and go wherever it led. I had a Craigslist roommate who was prone to extremely loud and protracted fits of sneezing and when I’d run out of my booze, I’d drink some of her bourbon until she sharpied an angry black mark on the side of the bottle; a warning I wouldn’t heed for years.
20. At a Halloween party in Brooklyn, we crammed thirty costumed people on a precarious second floor porch, peeling paint and sloping off the side of the house. When we needed room for more bodies, we tossed Adirondack chairs over the edge, watched them split at their joints in the street. I kissed a stranger dressed as David Bowie, hard and without warning. We felt like we could say anything to each other out there: Confess our hunger and our emptiness, smoke cigarettes right down to the filter. There are things you can do on a porch that would never hold up in the house.
20. I have seen porches strewn with the wreckage of aftermath: broken glass, backwards lit cigarettes, a pair of pants slung haphazardly over the railing. In the morning, we barely knew the people we’d been on the porch, hardly recognized the splintered furniture, barely acknowledged the destruction we left in our wake.
6-16. During summer thunderstorms in Pennsylvania we’d pile out onto the wrap around porch and pad back and forth – barefoot and frantic. We’d cheer on sheets of rain as they flattened the fields and beckon the slow grumblings of thunder with our outstretched arms. We wanted it louder and more sudden. We wanted a flash of lightning or an ear-splitting crack to shake us to our very bones. We’d lean forward, beyond the shelter of the roof, and poke our heads into the downpour. We’d whip our hair back and soak the backs of our shirts. We wanted to leave the porch, to run out into the road and through the cornfields. We wanted to be lit up, struck down, split clean in half.
10. Dad loved damaged things. He’d go looking for felled trees: a sugar maple that a bolt of lightning split down center, an evergreen cedar that succumbed to disease. He’d take a chainsaw to the trunk and bring back slabs, older than us, ringed with years of existence. Parts of the grain announced themselves as if black ink had been worked into their swirls. Dad explained that this was spalting, a scar left behind by rot. When a standing tree dies, it continues to take water from the ground. Spalting makes the wood weaker but more beautiful. The upward trail of water leaves a dark line, the ragged heartbeat of a thing already dead and gone.
vi. Maybe it was from Dad that I inherited my affection for broken things. Maybe I felt sentimental about suffering because I had seen all that beauty in damaged things. Maybe the chasm I felt opening in me was also his. Maybe I was one of the damaged things that he loved. Maybe he thought he was to blame for all the things that were wrong with me. Maybe I thought so too.
6-12. When I was a girl, Dad and I threw things from the first porch, watched them smash in the street. It wasn’t anger that moved us, something closer to curiosity, the indulgence of an impulse that we did not question the origin of. On Easter, I’d haul my basket of boiled eggs out to the porch and take aim at the old oak tree, consoled by the crack and the spit, the painted shell and the soft center. After Halloween, we’d hurl pumpkins over the edge, watch how they broke open at unpredictable seams, wonder at the pulp and the guts. We felt ourselves most alive in that zone of lawlessness where we could break things open, split them to seeds, let the insides out.
14. Around the time I became a teenager, Dad and I felt a field of aversion open between us began to repel each other like the matching ends of magnets. And for all of our similarities, there was that eternal difference – the further I was from childhood, the louder it announced itself: I was a yielding body, a fragile thing, a woman. He had raised me on porches and now he wanted to put me back in the house. All of the fractiousness he’d loved in me as a girl became catastrophic later on, all my wildness, a kind of weakness. A wild man is free to do as he pleases. A wild woman is an open wound.
vii. The first record of precipice denotes a very steep or perpendicular face of rock. From the latin prae (before) + ceps (headed). Literally: headlong, headfirst. Figuratively: perilous, rash. Go wisely and slowly, Friar Lawrence warns the lovers, those who rush stumble and fall.
0. Our town was full of impossibly windy back roads: Flint Hill, Ridge Court, Holben’s Valley. Before I was born, when Dad was still young enough to believe that there was no harm that could befall him, he drove fast and drunk. He had a legendary orange construction van, The Pumpkin, and when the fields outside the windows blurred, he laughed, he turned up the stereo, he saw nothing before him but unbroken expanses of road.
0. Dad drove The Pumpkin off an edge, flipped it headlong, was spat through the front windshield like an egg bursting from shell. He came-to in a field of wheat. But what he remembers most is the prostrated shape of himself: the weight on his knees and his forehead to the ground. How his palms were turned towards each other, how he was not a religious man, but it struck him as some kind of prayer. How he couldn’t stand, how he crawled to a farmhouse for the phone. He remembers the head wound, and how the hospital was not an option because he was drunk, unlawful, ashamed. My grandmother came with her sewing needles. She asked dad questions: How many fingers? What day of the week? Where did you come from? She didn’t need to ask him why, because Dad himself had already begun to wonder about that.
32. Like all love affairs fueled by the thrill of precarity, my relationship to porches would require a reckoning. There is a kind of love that only exists amid the threat of great harm and a kind of freedom that is only possible amid destruction – but living that way comes at a cost. For every peak there is a matching depth, for every edge, an imprint where there was once nothing but unbroken skin. So much of our wildness is tamed by experience, but never without leaving a mark.
32. The last porch was in Boston, where I lived in an apartment always warm from the whir of radiators. I taught teenagers at the sprawling brick high school. I could view the very top of it from the porch: the little lights of fifth-floor classrooms and the distant bell that announced when to move on from one room to the next. I had whole classrooms full of faces who regarded me as a reliable adult with a coherent life. Through them, I saw a possible version of myself: strong and capable, all weight-bearing edges and sturdy shelter. In spite of this, I continued to drink, and when I came to school hungover, I burned with the shame of my secret: I had learned almost nothing.
33. So when I woke, on that back porch in Boston at dawn, hurting all over and stinking like gin, I was sorry. How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore? The hideous confusion of hangover stuck me open handed. There was a lump at the back of my head from a forgotten blow, a mark inflicted by my own free-falling body.
5.3 When we get to the end of Romeo and Juliet, students have little sympathy for Juliet: How reckless, they say, how rash, how stupidly self-inflicted. How had she held her life with such a careless hand? How had she let herself be carried by the promise of the world beyond her balcony towards such disastrous ends? And after all, she alone had been the one to hold the knife to her skin, had split her own body asunder. O happy dagger! This is thy sheath; there rust and let me die. A woman like that could not be pitied.
6. There is a scene on the first porch that exists in my memory with the detail of a photograph. I was only six, but I must have sensed an edge because the shutter of my brain closed on the scene and fixed an image.
6. I’m standing on a braided entryway rug, the kind of thing you might imagine a cat taking a nap on. Dad is crying, hiding his face from me, begging for something I did not yet understand: mercy or sympathy or the chance to go back and begin again. Mom is trying to close the door on him, tender but unwavering. His posture has a reaching quality, it is not one of willingness, he keeps one foot firmly inside the door and one on the porch. Straddling the threshold. And there’s his threadbare denim shorts, with a square the size of a pack of cigarettes etched in the back pocket. There are his scrawny legs and his delicate ankles, startlingly fragile and hairless beneath thick white socks and steel-toed boots.
6. Dad–who rolled cars and laughed about it, who walked across steep roofs like they were prairie plains, who always had at least one black fingernail from his hammer; Dad who barely batted an eyelash when he almost cut his finger off on a circular saw, who could fix anything that was broken, who threw me high in the air and caught me just as easily. Dad was on his way to rehab, and I’m not sure what he said in that stance between staying and leaving, but the thing that stunned me was how little he looked, how much I could see the stooped boy in his shoulders and the helplessness in his hands. The whole twisted shape of him was an apology and though I did not understand what for, I knew he was sorry. When it was my turn to go to rehab, he wrote me a letter and said so.
33. It took me 33 years to get sober, it took Dad 34. And how could we have known that it would all cost something eventually, would ask some penance we’d find we could not pay? We were ashamed at our empty-handedness, sorry for ourselves and the people who had to suffer loving something so bent on its own destruction.
6-12. As a girl, I wanted out for as long as I could remember. Sometimes I even packed a suitcase or tied a wad of blanket to a stick and left. The porch was usually as far as I’d get. I’d sit on the front steps and wonder at the dangers that passed: hillbillies in souped-up trucks, long-bearded bikers with women wrapped around their waists, eyebrow-pierced guys blaring bass. There were guns in glove compartments, bumper stickers to announce them, and fat, loud mufflers spitting black exhaust. I had already begun to imagine myself in the passenger seat of these cars. I thought the greatest tragedy that could befall me was to wonder about the world without knowing it. I understood there was nowhere to go but out.
∞. In the stories of our lives, there is always an edge: a sloping porch or a raised balcony upon which it seems so much is decided. And when we try to see ourselves at a distance, we have the impression of precipices: places where we fell into some kind of newness, the people we were before on the other side of a wall that can’t be breached. But life is disordered and diffuse, an accumulation of debris that we can hardly ever see the shape of. Still, we long to find some order in it all, to identify a clean chain of cause and effect, to understand how we arrived here, at this.
Notes on Sources
1. All quoted definitions and discussions of etymology (threshold, edge, precipice) come from Merriam-Webster.
2. The story of this agricultural tradition comes from anthropologist James George Frazer’s comparative study of mythology and religion, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. His discussion of corn comes in Volume 7, “Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild” published in 1912.
3. Quoted lines of Romeo and Juliet appear in italics throughout. The version of the play consulted is The Folger Shakespeare Library edition, edited by Barabara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles.
4. In his seminal 1909 work on liminality, Rites of Passage, Arnold van Gennup writes “whoever passes from one side to the other finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds.”
5. In his 1974 work Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Victor Turner builds on van Gennep’s work and describes a “moment when those being moved in accordance with a cultural script were liberated from normative demands. In this gap between ordered worlds almost anything may happen.” Turner refers to this as the liminal state.
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Theresa Dietrich is the 2023-24 Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at NYU, where she is working on an architecturally-inspired memoir about growing up in a hundred-year-old hotel in rural Pennsylvania among four sisters, infinite cornfields, and many rooms, rooftops, and doorways. Her work has appeared in Atticus Review, Quarter After Eight, and Teachers & Writers Magazine. You can follow her writing on Instagram @trzajane.
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