[5] She loved Reeses Pieces. Eliese Colette Goldbach is on Facebook. A white, perfect body splayed dead on the straw. The judges verdict. Im a lifelong Clevelander, and I never realized what it entailed to work in a steel mill until Eliese told us., Plain Dealer Historical Photograph Collection: Republic Steel. And the sound of when the mill is going, you can feel it through you. She dreams of torturous rape and rape under palm trees and gang rape. It will stand and suckle and sniff its mothers scent. Clinging to the blanket is a desperate gesture to stay warm and hide, and its not going to work. She didnt start her book with the intention of weaving all of these threads into her steel narrative. Her childhood troubles do not make sense. Eliese does, however, know about horses. 33, no. She couldnt remember if she said no. The fury in his eyes is gone. Dammit, hold her still. Eliese Colette Goldbach is a steelworker at the ArcelorMittal Cleveland Temper Mill. It was the struggle to pay off her student loans that prompted her to apply for a job at the steel mill. The party smells of sweat and moldy dishwater. By the age of eleven, Eliese had developed an eating disorder. She washed for hours, but the smell of the mens bodies wouldnt go away. 33, No. In short, everything about her packed a wallop. He loaded a knife with black paint and pulled it down the canvas. [8]. Dammit, hold her still, someone scolds. She does, however, know that the memory induces panic. You dont want to look like a slut. Come on, he says. You cant tell anyone about this. The very thought made her woozy, light-headed. She is a woman, although she feels like a girl. All rights reserved. The conversation be held after a staged reading of a personal essay called White Horse, about a campus rape and the aftermath, written by Elise Goldbach and featured in the current issue of. So Eliese championed what was left of her memory. I was an ignorant steel worker to them, she writes. She knows equitation and conformation and equine disease. She wants to tell you a story, but she lacks so many things. Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, the ArcelorMittal steel mill on the Cuyahoga River was the backdrop to her childhood, but one that she shunned. [9] Well, she said, what girl doesnt? She followed the handyman into the garage. She tells us at the outset that she has a genetic and biological propensity for bipolar disorder, and it is in Steubenville that it emerges. The noise is thunderous, and the place stinks, too. Yes, Eliese said, I remember him. A backdrop to Cleveland, ArcelorMittal steel mill was once shunned by writer Eliese Colette Goldbach. It goes black. Even if Eliese were to remember the bottom of the stairs, it would only give rise to a new shame, a new doubt, a new search for yet another ameliorating violence. The mill is a vast dystopian landscape, a grisly amusement park, with chimneys jutting up at freakish angles, crumbling concrete, stairways to nowhere, gantry cranes, catwalks and everything, even the workers in their jumpsuits and hard hats, is covered in dust. We know in Alaska theres been a lot of effort to be really almost draconian about how sex education is delivered to our young people and I just feel strongly that until we can really talk about these things openly, thats just one piece of the puzzle. You realize how imminent the threat is, and everything is very real and immediate, and you are just trying to protect yourself and other people. After all, there is only one bathroom in the house, and we have been in the woods for most of the night. The man unzipped his pants and began masturbating. Men who seem older, more worldly. Particle physics, for example. Eliese pushes the mare backward, and the stallion finishes. I really like to masturbate while I watch couples have sex. He tied a tourniquet. Or maybe Eliese is a woman who watched the most stunning sunrise of her life while swimming in a beachside pool on the Atlantic Ocean. The memory fades. She said, It gives me time to think. . Her chest tightens at the thought of those stairs, but she doesnt know why. So, everything true of a white horse is true of a brown horse. The glint of the bathtub faucet before she blacked out. You dont want to look like a slut. Born to a working-class, devoutly Catholic family, Goldbach grew up in Brooklyn, attending Corpus Christi and St. Augustine High School, where she was valedictorian in 2004. In this book, a woman loses herself in a snowstorm. You are bad, and I am not. They stretched their arms toward one another, as if speaking, but they had no mouths, no faces. Entenmars Poetica.Southern California Review, vol. Eliese lets them imagine. I told a therapist. While everyone waited outside for the funeral to begin, Elieses young niece danced in the sunlight. This legacy of messages of shame and messages of blame, they really persist. I told these administrators what I remembered: I had been under a tree, and one of the men moved on top of me, and the other urged him to hurry come on, hurry up, someones gonna see and my white underwear lay in the dirt, and the roots of the tree dug into my back, and the November breeze pricked at my thighs, and the men had given me something to drink in a red cup a red cup I hadnt watched them pour and the branches of the tree were mostly bare, and everything blurred after I drank from the red cup, and I could no longer stand, and so much of my memory is unclear even the tree fades in and out and now I cannot stop crying, and I cannot get clean, and I can still smell them I can still smell them on my body after I wash and I cannot forget their smells, and I cannot forget their voices, and I cannot forget how spectacularly the branches of that goddamned tree forked the moonlight into tiny beams. These foals always dieeither naturally and painfully over the course of a few days, or through euthanasia. View of the ArcelorMittal steel mill in Cleveland, 2016 (Flickr/Roy Luck), Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. [10] Eliese wanted to speak, to yell, to curse, to cry out. Lets put a happy little tree right here, he said. The tomboy. Join Facebook to connect with Eliese Colette Goldbach and others you may know. But then something happened. And it often repeats "culture of poverty" rhetoric blaming the alleged personal and cultural deficiencies of poor people, instead of exploring structural and systemic problems. In a place along the periphery. She remembered her white underwear. She dreams of rape perpetrated by kings and princes and vagabonds. She stopped sleeping. For instance, she could have told the judges that shed only ever had one boyfriend, and shed never done anything more than kiss him. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your Privacy Choices and Rights (each updated 1/26/2023). A third sign or portent appeared when the author, exhausted by a stretch of 12-hour days and swing shifts, and feverish from a cold or flu, takes a blanket to work with her. Hello. A new, white life. Nothing happened when I was eighteen, she said. The therapist said date rape, and the college administrators said consensual, and my friends insisted I confess my sins to a priest. I am with the dark-haired recluse from Florida. It is easier to let people imagine the worst. Multivariable calculus. Eliese remembers the men and their violence. Maybe the cops are coming, maybe we should get out of here, so we get up and stow our booze in a backpack and walk through the woods. Im being invited to a party by people I dont even know. The shame is a part of her, and she must find its beauty. The stallion is usually a calm, steady horse, but there is something furious in him now. She could not be accused of crying wolf. White Horse by Eliese Colette Goldbach | Goodreads Jump to ratings and reviews Want to Read Buy on Amazon Rate this book White Horse Eliese Colette Goldbach 4.00 4 ratings2 reviews 15 pages Book details & editions About the author Eliese Colette Goldbach 2 books32 followers & Can't find what you're looking for? The other is a clean-cut, pre-theologate student with a killer smile. The mare lifts her head. If she touched the mans arm, then maybe she asked for it. One thing I had found out about her when she was in high school was that she loved physical work. Together, she and the horse jumped fallen trees. She conveys the sights, smells, heat and exhaustion of her work. You cant tell anyone about this. When Eliese told college administrators about the incident, they held a small trial judged by Elieses peers mostly undergraduate students with religious, conservative backgrounds. You should find a man to take care of you., Some of these things were said in a joking manner, Goldbach tells The Post, and some of them werent. She loved it when the handyman came. Not just to talk about the ideas but to deal with the emotional piece of it, the emotions that are raised. [3]. The white Hanes underwear. There are only men at this party. Instinctively, Eliese stood between her niece and the handyman, shielding the young girls body with her own. We've received your submission. Cleveland, Ohio - The flickering orange flame. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Your email address will not be published. She is in her grandfathers house, but her grandfather is not there. Unhinged, she returns to Cleveland. Why cant we change that? Your chakras are out of balance, the woman said. Eliese Colette Goldbach is the author of "Rust: A Memoir of Steel & Grit" in which she discusses her experiences working in the ArcelorMittal steel mill, as . No matter how much she washed, she couldnt get clean. Eventually Goldbach began to see the mill differently. Dream, instead, of the white horse circling the herd, its tail lifted, its voice so shrill and potent it makes your own mouth itch to speak. One worker at the mill called her Greenpeace because she tried to recycle water bottles. A man rides over on a white horse. What happened when you were seventeen or eighteen years old? He wears an army fatigue jacket that accentuates his massive, muscular arms. Well, did you? Maybe, if she closes her eyes hard enough, she will be released from her guilt. This, of course, created a troublesome paradox: Eliese could remember the army fatigue jacket, but she could not remember whether she had said no. I told a few people what had happened. To understand sexuality and sex as a normal part of life. I will just wait for the party to wane. And not just because of Goldbachs gender. They took me into the woods. Particle physics, for example. Eliese Colette Goldbach is the author of Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit, which was published with Flatiron Books in 2020.She received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. Eliese does not know what happens next. Its really more complicated. She could not help watching. She knew what had happened when I was eighteen years old. This is a great example. She received the . 99-105. A pod of dolphins played in the surf, and a man wrapped his arms around her waist. They feel horribly heavy. She would rather think of herself in other ways. You were on the right path, cosmically speaking. Those parts of her that bring shame. Only stupid little girls. The party promises more alcohol. All this rings true to my own experience, two generations earlier, growing up Catholic on the West Side of Cleveland except the toilet seat. Her family was not especially rich, but nor were they poor. Why was it so difficult to speak? The day after being raped, Eliese had searched frantically through her drawers. Other Publications A new, white life. Sometimes, she simply says, I was raped. [6]. I need to find a bathroom, I think. Growing up, she was told that a college degree was the ticket to a good job, that she could grow up to do and be anything. Where I expected Goldbach to offer an alternative political vision, she instead seemed to argue for transcending politics by attending to the positive individual qualities of the Trump voters in her life. Bile runs hot down my neck. The genre presents the working class as a white, male, union-laborer monolith, instead of a politically and racially diverse, largely female class of service industry and gig economy workers. On her way home, Eliese sat down at a bus stop and pondered her faulty chakras. She thinks of all those things people say she is. Its a shrine to the men and women who have been killed or injured in the fight for better pay and safer working conditions. The title of this book, part memoir and part social commentary, references the colloquial name 'Rust Belt' which was given to the north-eastern states in America where a major decline in the steel industry occurred from the 1980s. When an old friend showed her a pay stub from his job at the mill one day, she was shocked when she saw the yearly pay was close to $85,000, almost four times what she was earning as a painter. With the lead line held loosely in hand, Eliese walks forward. 4, 2014, pp. The violence of a harbored, hidden waste. The judges verdict is, perhaps, the reason Eliese wants so desperately to remember the handyman. She looked away, into The Gap. Nothing else in her childhood predisposed her to such dysfunction. Michael Scanlan's revictimizing response to her after her assault. He takes the woman in his arms. She faints. The horse wasnt interested in oil changes. In her descriptions of the mill, her talents for evoking atmosphere and creating a layered sensory world on the page are on full display. 158-170. Like a lot of kids who grow up in Cleveland, Ohio, I mostly wanted to leave, Goldbach writes near the beginning. Sometimes, she smokes pot behind the grocery store. Yes, the woman said, something bad happened. The genre obscures the fact that Trump enjoyed support from wealthy and middle-class white voters across the country, not just from working-class white people in "backwards" regions. Remember? Its a story weve heard before but is new and deserving of our attention every time. In front of the bus stop, the man in the black bra dropped his silk shirt. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Western Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and Best American Essays 2017. Yes, shed touched his arm and smiled. She stopped eating. Doesnt surprise me. Goldbach also explores her struggles with mental illness, her stepping away from religion, and politics in the form of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Rust.. His eyelids were heavy with heroin. Nearly ten years after her eighteenth birthday, Eliese walked down a busy street in San Francisco. Once, when Eliese was still a girl, she followed the handyman into a garage and watched him change the oil on a rusted Chevette. Do not think, however, that Eliese feels no shame at these intentional omissions. Its a she. Eliese steadies the mare, but she is not steady herself. Despite her best intentions, Goldbach had become the one thing she thought she would never be: a steelworker. She wants to tell you a story, but she lacks so many things. The handlers take the stallion back to his stall, leaving Eliese alone in the paddock with the white horse. Flies land briefly on Elieses burnt and sweating skin. Rust by Eliese Colette Goldbach. For a moment that was enough. The memoir is set in Cleveland, but in those above ways, it could be set nearly anywhere in the country. I vomit. Free shipping for many products! She turned and faced the man. Cheryl DeBono/Michaelangelos Photography. I turn to the man in the army fatigue jacket and smile. But deep inside the foals gut, something has gone wrong. Anyone can read what you share. Goldbach is a millennial feminist from a lower-middle-class Catholic Republican family in Cleveland. Thats a first for me, the man said. She tried to call his name, but she didnt have enough breath to form the words. Of course I said no. I told the administrators of the Catholic college where the men and I were students. She wore a wine-colored Renaissance dress with a plunging neckline. She is a horse person, and she would go to the barn and move hay bales all day. He ran a pawnshop, and one of the items in the pawnshop that pleased young Eliese most was a toilet seat made of pennies. Joshua Gunter, The Plain Dealer: ArcelorMittal 2009, Its kind of stepping back in time when you go down there, she says. During her final year of college, Eliese attended a Halloween-themed drag show with her boyfriend. As expected, he waits outside the door. Dr Heather Adams is the moderator for a panel discussion of the essay, White Horse at the Anchorage Museum Thursday evening, beginning at 7 pm. People wouldnt ask her if she had said no. She . As the stallion advances, the mare pins her ears. You cant tell anyone about this. The two women could find only one area of relative peace: the display window at The Gap. It was interested in galloping, so it galloped over wrenches and drill bits. He will not relieve the shame. I would say that one of the root causes is that we dont have models, we dont have support for women, especially young women, to talk about their sexuality. Eliese Colette Goldbach is known for Today (1952). I had always wanted to do a memoir about losing faith and finding it again, and it just kind of merged into this book.. In Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit, (Flatiron Books), out now, Goldbach takes us inside the mill, among the hulking cranes and vats of molten zinc, the forklifts and the railroads, the noxious smells and deafening noises, the dust, the rust, and the network of humans that provide the world with the steel that makes our cars, our appliances and our lives run. When his eyes fell on Eliese, she immediately looked at the ground. She knew she was being swindled. You had to take your bruises without tears, but you couldnt be too passive.. The Plain Dealer At age 29, Eliese Colette Goldbach found herself dressed in a visor and heat-resistant jumpsuit, leaning over a giant vat of molten zinc with a garden hoe, strapped into a. Rust is an elegiac look at an overlooked segment of our country: the working women and men who put on their hardhats every day and risk their lives and health doing heavy labor. At first, I didnt heed the advice of the men. Eliese wants to relieve her doubt, her uncertainty. Many had fallen away. She does not understand the different types of is the different types of to be but she intuits a meaning outside of logic. Strong union protections allow her to keep her job, afford consistent treatment and receive accommodations for her mental illness, after the sharp return of her symptoms brings her to the emergency room and a short psychiatric hospitalization. Literary Representation: Sarah Levitt at Aevitas Creative Management . The Trump Country genre attempts to explain Trump's election to coastal liberals by describing the allegedly "backwards" cultures of Appalachia or the Rust Belt. A strange man with red hair walked up to Eliese. This is only the second time Ive consumed alcohol outside of a family gathering. His hand reaches, as if to help me up, but instead he grabs my head. 7 p.m. Thursday, March 19: Lakewood Public Library, Main Library Auditorium, 15425 Detroit Ave., Lakewood. Eliese will tell the little girl this: do not imbibe the belief that you are in need of saving. Eliese does, however, know about horses. In the class of 24 newbies she trained with, only three were women. The man in the black bra lowered himself onto the curb. Of course, the happy little tree turned out perfectly. [1] She imagines it happening to her in dark alleys, or during parties at swanky nightclubs, or on the asphalt after its just rained. Messman-Moore, T., & Long, P. (2003). The violence of a harbored, hidden waste. While Eliese thought and waited, a man at the bus stop pulled a syringe from his pocket. Eliese Colette Goldbach (Michaelangelos Photography/Cheryl DeBono) Rust offers a liberal take on the Trump Country genre, written by a Rust Belt native and former steel worker. As Eliese clanked the horses hooves on the sunlit driveway, the handyman stood in front of her. After high school, she enrolled in Franciscan University in Steubenville, where she thought she would meet other likeminded pious young women. Eliese Goldbach at work at ArcelorMittal. Alaska Public Media 2022. And she is not. Once, a maintenance worker slipped and fell 30 feet onto the side of a giant vessel of molten iron as they were tipping the metal out. When I, years ago, learned about women who had to give a child away for adoption because they had that child out of wedlock, it was news to me. Multivariable calculus. Suffering with untreated bipolar disorder, Goldbach confronts the realities of health care in the United States: dreading losing parental insurance coverage at 26, unable to afford Plan B as she fears a possible unwelcome pregnancy, enduring the callousness of health care professionals when she does seek help. Eliese wants to tell you the story. She received an MFA in nonfiction from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program. Her father waved off Trump's comments as "locker room talk." In her discussions of rape and its aftermath, Goldbach demonstrates the same skill in bringing the reader into her world that marks her stories about the mill. Did you say no? Eliese stands beside a white mare in a paddock. I didnt know how many people still worked there. The 2023 Iditarod starts this weekend. Things lost. These foals always die either naturally and painfully over the course of a few days, or through euthanasia. She dreamt of rape long before she had a word for such a thing. Eliese thought of the two men. The verdict devastated Eliese. He mounts quickly, and the mare lurches forward. She has always dreamed these dreams, even as a child. Eliese Colette Goldbach, CLSC Author She told them that the man had certainly been there. Its a first for me, too, she said. Eliese started to cry. A tiny, sorrel stallion approaches with his handlers.