Laura van den Berg: 3D

be the highest ranking Asian American in US history. Now that Joe Biden has officially picked a woman as his running mate, can we talk about his weird, uncomfortable history with women. He was talking to me while he was rubbing my nose with his mister Biden himself said, it was never his intention to make anyone uncomfortable. And our social wars began to change or shoot it and the bomb is a protected personal space have been reset. I get it. I get it. Oh, yes, we're going to

go there. With the election looming. It is an uncomfortable subject, but it's there. Joe Biden has been a handsy guy throughout his career and it's had a chilling effect on some of the women he touched. What just happened? Did that just happen? Did I think what just happened is actually what happened? Laura Van Denberg's new book is a collection of surreal stories about women making their way through dark worlds. It's called I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.

She says, Biden's transgressions are emblematic of our time. Me too has changed things a lot, but really has it. I have been there, you know. I have absolutely had those sorts of encounters with men and then sort of been through that process of second guest saying and sort of talking myself out of my own understandings and my own perception. So I was interested in writing into that psychological territory. In a world gone haywire, sometimes art is the only thing that can make sense of it all.

For a long time, only one person on earth, her closest friend, knew about the incident. They used to work on the hill, and what the Vice president had done was insidious and hard to name if you weren't familiar with the way some men in politics like to handle

women as though they were overgrown babies. No harm in a little tickle, a pinch on the thigh, the incident had occurred as a fundraiser, and when she whispered the details at some desolate after party bar her friend had asked if she planned to tell anyone, and she said, of course. Now he's the vice president. I'm a nobody, nothing.

So she could not believe it when the former assemblywoman from Nevada came forward many years later and described news cameras how the vice president had touched heart, smell my hair. He had recently announced that he was running for president again, and the assemblywoman believed that people needed to know. In the middle of the press conference, her closest friend called and said, you're still a nobody, a nothing. That woman

you see on TV right now. They will ruin her life. Later, as she packed for a three day conference in San Francisco, she reminded herself that the vice president hadn't raped, hadn't pressed her to a bed and waved his dick in her face. She told herself that he wasn't a dangerous person, just oblivious to realities in which he did not sit at the center. She tried not to think about how such obliviousness was one of the most dangerous ways for

a person to be. She fell asleep to the news where the assemblywoman was still talking, asking to be taken seriously, to be believed in San Francisco. She had no idea that her fate would be altered by airline miles, for had she ended up on a different flight, or even in a different row, she would have likely heeded her friend's advice, run her business, gone on with her life.

But then at SFO, a gate agent called her up, said she'd landed a complimentary upgrade, and printed a new boarding pass for seat three D. She heard her seat mate before she saw him, his voice like thunder sounding in the wings of a stage. When he appeared in the aisle, he was flushed and booming into a cell phone. White, broad shouldered, thick waves of sandy hair. He wore a yellow polo and khaki pants and brown leather loafers without socks.

He flopped down next to her, knocking her complimentary bottled water to the floor, and kept on booming. She opened a travel magazine and shrank down into her seat. In the air, her seat MAT's attention turned to the flight attendants. Apparently, he took at least forty six first class flights a year, and in his opinion, everything about this one was wrong. The hot towel was too cold, a replacement towel too hot. The drink cart lacked some obscure brand of whiskey. Both

flight attendants in first class happened to be women. When one of them, a tall brunette and a red neckscarf apologized about the whiskey for the hundredth time, the man asked for her full name. He said he planned to file a report. He demanded to know if she liked her job, if she thought she'd deserved to keep it, And then he laughed, a seat shaking, thigh slapping laugh, like the whole thing had been in an extended, practical joke. Only then was the flight attendant permitted to walk away.

It was the laugh that made her stomach clench. Right when things were getting bad enough that another passenger might feel compelled to intervene, or the flight attendant might feel justified in using words like verbal abuse, He'd wielded his laugh like a shield. Don't be so sensitive, take a joke already. Everything is normal here. That was the worst thing about these incidents, she thought, as she watched the flight attendant and flee the way They destroyed your confidence

in your own perceptions. She glanced around at the other passengers and realized she and the flight attendants were the only women in first class. She wondered if these other men had noticed what she had just now, what it would take for one of them to call out their own kind. She finished her magazine, she drank a glass of wine. Her seat mate watched ESPN and drank copious

amounts of a less obscure whiskey. She found herself thinking about the warm grip of the Vice President's hand on her neck, the way he pulled her in sudden and close, his nose brushing her face. She had been terrified that he was going to kiss her Somewhere over Nebraska. Her seat mate resurrected the whisky situation. Why don't you have what I want? He roared at the second flight attendant, an older blonde and a black cart again, who stood rigid by the drink cart. She stretched up in her seat.

The other passengers were all reading newspapers or sleeping or otherwise useless. She thought of the assemblywoman speaking on TV. She tapped the man's shoulder, and he paused in his tirade, giving the flight attendant enough cover to hurry the cart down the aisle. You should be ashamed of yourself. She felt light headed, her chest was tight, but she pushed on, you've been acting like a bully this whole flight. He lurched back into his seat and stared at her, panting

a little. She felt the heat rad heat from his body. His cheeks were swollen red, his eyes slid around like wet marbles. She imagined he'd probably already sized her up during boarding and determined her to be a nothing. Hey do you think you are? He slurred. She told him that was three D by Laura Van Denburg, the narrator with Cindy Cats. How are you doing today, Laura, I'm good, Ashley. How are you doing? I'm pretty good. I've got to know you leave us hanging there at the end. What

do you think she told him there at the end. Yeah, Well, this story was inspired a bit by interaction that I had with a man on a flight who is like maybe the most appalling human being that I've ever encountered in public or up there. So in my imagination she said something maybe that was kind of close to what I said in life, which is, you are being verbally abusive. Your behavior is completely inappropriate, and I see what you're doing and you have to stop. So what did he

say back to you? So he said something very close to with a man on the plane set in the story, which is, who do you think you are talking to me like that? And then I repeated what I had said the first time, and then he was really angry for a minute and then just kind of passed out and seemed to go to sleep, which everyone was happy about. Yes, I like that. I like that you wore him down. This story really gets into the situations where women feel uncomfortable.

They are insidious situations, and the men in these situations are often oblivious. What do you think women lose because of what men won't allow themselves to see or hear? Yeah, it's like how much how much time do we have? I understand this is, you know, really painful line of conversation that's come up in the me too dialogues. This idea that because something happened to a woman early in her career, she didn't pursue a particular path or she

didn't reach in a particular direction. And I think like, in some ways, you know, the greatest cruelty of the kind of violation that I write about in this particular story is again just the way that they can undermine our own perceptions and our own grasp on reality, and the way that you know, maybe our body is telling us this is what happened and it was wrong, but our brain, for all kinds of reasons, because we don't

want to lose opportunity, because we're scared of consequence and repercussion, is trying to talk our body into a different story. And so I think that estrangement from the bodied reality and the intellectual reality, that feeling that maybe we've lost trust in ourselves, I mean trust in oneself ability to sort of see a situation to say, yes, this is what happened. I believe what my body is telling me. I think that that's a really profound loss that so

many women experience. I mean, I would count myself among them, and I know quite a few women who would stand right alongside me same. This story was inspired by this narrative in the media of Joe Biden and his history of being handsy with women. How do you think the vice president handled those allegations where you paying attention to that story as it continued, Yeah, I mean, I think his handling of it has been poor in my opinion.

I also want to pause and say I intend to vote for him, despite the many things I could say in response to this question. But yeah, I think his handling of it has been poor. I'm not sure that he really understands or has really absorbed the pain that he's caused. When there is sort of more of a gesture in the direction of accountability, chalking it up to how norms have changed and times have changed, and he

understands he needs to change with those times. It's sort of really taking himself out of the equation, like at a different time, this would have been fine, but now we're in this new world and it's not fine anymore, and it's like, no, you don't get it. It was never fine. But the differences is that you have women coming forward and saying this was not fine then, and is not fine now and will not be fine in the future the end. Can you think of your ideal

way you would have wanted him to respond. I think a step in the right direction would have been accountability in the sense that he was wrong to have done these things and that he was wrong to have violated these women in these ways without sort of pinning it on changing social norms, but to say something like it was wrong, then it was wrong. Now this is why it was wrong, even if it wasn't particularly sexual. This was an abuse of power. I was in a position

of power, and I abuse that power. As a starting point, I would say, a greater degree of self honesty on Biden's part, I think would have been a step in the right direction. Early on in the story, the narrator doesn't want to call out the vice president, like he's the vice president and she's a nobody. According to her friend, she's on the wrong end of a power dynamic. But at the end of the story she finds her voice

to speak out what changed her. So, in my understanding, I think that the confrontation on the plane and why that felt to me like an apt container for this story. But because it comes from a headline, we sort of have a sense of what happens next that right, she does come forward with her allegations, I think coming into contact with a man who's like toxic masculinity on steroids,

you know. And it's so explicit and it's so not ambiguous, and it's so clear that someone has got to intervene and say something to this person and take a stand for decency that it clarifies her thinking ultimately about whether to come forward or not to confront the vice president in this way. Laura Vandenberg, thank you so much for your story and thank you so much for coming on the Chronicles of Now podcast. Thank you so much, Ashley.

I loved your questions. You can read my full interview with Laura Vandenberg on our website Chronicles dot fm, where you can also read the story you just heard and other short fiction torn from today's headlines. Our sound designer and composer is Bart Warshaw, our producer is Curtis Fox, and our associate producer is Emily Rosten. Tyler Cabot is the executive producer and founder of Chronicles of Now for

Pushkin Industries. Our executive producer is Leetlmlat. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg, Carly Migliori, Heather Fame, and Eric Sandler for the Chronicles of Now podcast. I'm Ashley Ford. Thank you so much for listening.