Please welcome today’s guest writer, Bethany Dubman-Williams. Bethany graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in Biology and Public Health and a special interest in food systems (think gardening, nutrition education, and food benefit programs). In our current age of public health infrastructure collapse, she has returned to school for a Bachelor’s in Nursing. Bethany is technically a published poet, the finance deacon at Sherman Street Church, and an avid lover of bugs and weeds. When they’re not studying for the next pharmacology exam, they brainstorm themed movie months with their friends, stumble through simple crochet projects, and walk-and-talk endlessly around southeast GR with their spouse.
When I was a child, my aunt used to work for a health museum for kids. Now forever shuttered, in its heyday, the place was packed with various exhibits about different body systems or factors in health, with well-designed intentions for the attention of children. You could learn what the different colors of boogers signified, wander inside an enormous intestine, and ascend a climbing wall made to look like the surface of skin. A much-beloved movie theater in the back pioneered a 4D film experience as you learned about the nervous system; and, nestled somewhere among these imaginative exhibits, there sat a clear plastic armchair filled entirely with cigarette butts facing a small television screen.
From what I remember, if you sat in the Cigarette Chair, you would be audience to a short, cycling documentary on the effects of smoking. A note of context: no one in my family smoked; while that was the case, I was familiar with the strangely repulsive and intoxicating presence of cigarettes, which were extremely common at the time in Indiana—in fact, I did some research to make sure I wasn’t exaggerating and found that Indiana did not ban smoking indoors until 2012 and that the prevalence of adult smokers around the time of my childhood was about 1 in 4. I was at the age where my body and its relation to other bodies was my whole world: what do I look like compared to everyone else? what does my body mean in relation to everyone else? what does my body mean for my life? My developing brain full of fertile furrows made the Cigarette Chair the perfect opportunity for something to plant a seed of deep fear in me.
Admittedly, I can’t remember any of the particulars of this video, and I imagine that some of the imagery I associate with the Cigarette Chair is probably an amalgamation of the video’s contents, other anti-tobacco PSAs, and good ol’ child imagination. What I do know is that this fear also became somehow connected to E.T. Perhaps his long neck that appeared like an exposed trachea alarmed me, perhaps he reminded me of the poor elders they’d recruit for these films who’d explain through their tracheotomies that they wished they’d never smoked; regardless of the connection, E.T. became for me the symbol of the loss of my body, the uncanny fear of disfigurement that lurked in the shadows of my mind.
Around this same time, I reached the age where I began taking showers instead of baths which felt like the most terrifyingly vulnerable situation that I could possibly be in. The water shooting out of the showerhead would hit the tub with a constant roar; I needed to be enclosed from the rest of the room by the curtain; and (this was the scariest part) it was necessary for me to have my eyes closed for what felt to me like an unsafe amount of time. I would stand in the shower with suds on my head, holding out for the moment that I would need to dip backwards into the spray due to the worry that, when I’d open my eyes, E.T. would be there. E.T. was behind every closed door, at the end of every dark hallway, sending the hairs on the back of my neck up. Strangely enough, though, he never did anything threatening to me in my imagination. His presence itself could sit forefront in my mind as threat enough, coloring the world around me with what I can only describe now as an uncanny existential menace. Locked in the gaze of his wide, bulging eyes, I would imagine the deterioration of my body in the ways that I learned from the Cigarette Chair: my young, pink lungs shrinking and filling with tar, my teeth rotting out of my mouth, my skin sagging and cracking, my life becoming dust.
One day, as mysteriously as he walked into my psyche, E.T. walked out of my life. My guess is that I somehow gained a little more perspective on the agency I had over my body, or maybe something else replaced him. My memory of the time in my life after this is fuzzier. And what of the accompanying existential fear? I now know too much about the body to think that I will get out of embodied living in one piece, and think back with gratitude on what must have been a herculean effort to pry Indiana from Big Tobacco’s grasp. I have since seen the eponymous movie as an adult, and found it touching and the E.T. character very endearing. Just as a child’s open mind can create fear out of nothing, so, too, can it create a friend.
Bethany Dubman-Williams (she/they) graduated from Calvin in 2021 with a degree in Biology and Public Health and a special interest in food systems (think gardening, nutrition education, and food benefit programs). In our current age of public health infrastructure collapse, she has returned to school for a Bachelor’s in Nursing. Bethany is technically a published poet, the finance deacon at Sherman Street Church, and an avid lover of bugs and weeds. When they’re not studying for the next pharmacology exam, they brainstorm themed movie months with their friends, stumble through simple crochet projects, and walk-and-talk endlessly around southeast GR with their spouse.
