Wholesome Midwest Girl
I'm every woman but mostly this one.
I miss the seasons in Missouri; my dying town…
– Chappell Roan, “California”
When the river went its way, it carved a southbound squiggle. If you squint, you’ll see a distinguished man in profile. Maybe Abraham Lincoln’s, or a real American leader’s.
My balancing act along the Missouri-Illinois border has wavered only twice. Too young the first time and still young the second, Massachusetts and Ohio broke my falls. I watched as the wash of blue over the former place in my mind’s eye began to bleed out in crimson. I ambled diagonally at the crosswalk. I counted cows but not sheep. After I’d rested enough—it turned out six years would suffice—I had my wits about me. I made no mistake about the color before me. A queen-sized bed surrounded by cracked earth was where I settled. Toledo told me so much about itself without ever clearing its throat. But neither Northampton nor northwest Ohio really factor into this story.
This is a story about home, and my ironclad sense of it. It’s set in St. Louis. I made someone out of somewhere on the banks of the mighty Mississippi; a stainless steel parabola cradled me when I wasn’t confident in her.
“What constitutes a ‘Midwestern culture?’” Jessica wanted to know. I paused for a beat, then another, then our meeting was over. But I carried her inquiry to bed with me and then to my drafts the next morning. Here is how I wish I’d answered.
You have ten seconds minimum after a stoplight turns green before it’s safe to accelerate. This rule makes room for the rampant light-running culture my city has cultivated. After midnight, bump it up to twenty, because that’s when stops turn into suggestions.
More likely than not, expired tags decorate the backside of the car that just sped away. Otherwise, you’re looking at the most inventive vanity plate you’ve seen in your life, until you encounter the next one.
Some of my favorites, or at least the ones I’ve been fortunate enough to capture with my phone camera, include:
TURNIP
KREAMY
WEEB
NACHO 2
MS CHOC
321 BYE
A BELLO
MOON
212
DLANEY
STAG
S4DGRL
And I would be remiss not to challenge you to find the elusive and infamous
K8 BUSH.
Allow Missourians to (re)introduce themselves.
“My city has…not been particularly adept at acknowledging its sins, past or present, let alone attempting to atone for them,” Eileen G’Sell observes in her 2023 essay “Unlocking the Gateway to the West.” I think to Dred and Harriet Scott’s embracing bronze bodies, situated outside the Old Courthouse downtown. To nights parked in front of CNN, immobilized by rage and grief as a suburb thirty minutes north went up in flames. To the conveniently retired Veiled Prophet Ball, a moneyed masquerade wherein the metropolitan area’s old guard railed lines and lusted after girls in the grade below me. To Black Lives Matter activists found dead in their cars.
The red light gives way to green. I wait to feel safe.
On Monday, you have only a handful of options for lunch.
After nine on a weeknight, forget about ordering dinner.
Outside of Cardinals’ season or a concert series, you have no reason to visit downtown. You will hear this parroted often.
There sits a gigantic Yoshitomo Nara sculpture in Citygarden. In any other urban area, White Ghost would be swarmed with photo-ops from sunup to sundown. But there is limited haunting to be done here.
I spent my twenty three years in St. Louis in orbit among its innermost ring of neighborhoods. While others, mostly students at the elite research university that is my alma mater, complained of sleepy streets and limited social opportunity, I found my chosen family and built on the whole a fulfilling life for myself. When I tell my story in its entirety, much of its earliest pages will detail that life and honor that family.
In class we covered the city’s sins more than its sweetness. We heard of human zoos on campus and race riots just across the river that spilled over into downtown. Chicagoans used to mistake me for a Louisiana native, and what with our harrowing history, I can hardly blame them. There is something decidedly Southern about a city within a state that, from the outside looking in, seems to repeatedly vote against its best interests and, since at least The Great Divorce of 1877, eats away at its own square mileage and population. Like me, Missouri is prideful, and may the Arch collapse from its apex before St. Louis herself admits she’s in the wrong.
I’m not here to defend my state, nor my city. I don’t feel the need to. When my peers looked down upon both with wrinkled noses, I reminded myself that hailing from one of the thirteen colonies seemed infinitely more embarrassing. Speaking to St. Louis in particular—we have indisputable weaknesses. Our signature pizza style has the mouthfeel of cardboard and our potholes will send you through your sunroof. But I’d easily wager it all that we do accessible arts and culture and cheap beer better than anywhere else. We love our athletes hard and our actors harder. (At least, that’s how I love Jon Hamm.) And perhaps most importantly, when I come home at the end of December, I know there will be a community waiting for me that would win over even the staunchest coastal elite. As well as an espresso tonic, which I can’t manage to find anywhere in this town.
A Midwestern girl is destination-oriented. She has to be: hate paved the interstate highway system and hindered any other way. Her three-ton hunk of steel careens down I-64, volume maxed out on Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” and then the (STL-born) Angel Olsen cover. Home is a pastiche of cliches like these. It’s exclaiming, “Ope—there’s the Arch!” every time she crosses the Poplar Street Bridge. It’s checking out a shopping cart of frozen toasted cheese ravioli and a 30-rack of Busch Light at Schnucks. It’s playing “Gloria.”
When she is able to wander, it’s usually through the hushed halls of the St. Louis Art Museum. She’s in search of Gerhard Richter’s Betty, a photorealistic painting of the artist’s preteen daughter turned away from the viewer and suspended in motion, reacting as though someone called her name. It’s the one work she always makes sure to greet.
Or up and down the cluttered stalls of Treasure Aisles Antique Mall on Big Bend Boulevard. She contemplates a purchase every time a Snoopy collector’s item enters her line of vision…which is often. Her finger traces the stacks of CDs, looking for a familiar act. Her grand total never exceeds $50.
Or across the marble floors of the Chase Park Plaza Hotel, en route to their concessions stand. She orders a large popcorn—no clarified butter—and a large Cherry Coke before the feature presentation begins. It’s a movie called Lady Bird, and it will change her life.
After the Civil War and up until 1920, St. Louis became the fourth-largest city in the United States. Today, its population hovers at just over 300,000. If it isn’t yet clear what happened, I’d ask you to consider why the neighborhood where I grew up appears in red on historic maps of the place, which, not for nothing, resembles an anatomical heart. Or why rush hour traffic heading west on a weeknight looks the way it does. How we got here is at once glaringly obvious and crudely obscured. To my abandoned town, I’d say—unfollows hurt but community heals.
My nana let out of a peal of pleasantly surprised laughter when I said I loved St. Louis over the phone yesterday. It’s something I divulge often, but perhaps it was news to her. How often does a teenager-turned-twentysomething admit that it was right to stay in her hometown when her urge was to flee? Perhaps only when the place in question boasts dysfunction and decay and delight and a desire to do better.
According to Forbes, “St. Louis Is Still A Nice Little Secret.” But it won’t be for long if I have anything to say in the matter.
I’ll be waiting at the confluence for you to catch up.
To my elders, who took a chance on a city by the river, and on themselves. Your strength is a salve on lonely days in Ohio.
kennedy!!!!!! making me cry over here !! this is everything i love and feel and thank you for putting it into words better than i ever could have