What Amazon's Ban of Incentivized Reviews Means for Marketers

What Amazon's Ban of Incentivized Reviews Means for Marketers

 My original piece initially published in Marketing Profs on October 6th, 2016

http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2016/30786/what-amazons-ban-of-incentivized-reviews-means-for-marketers

Amazon announced on Oct. 3, 2016 that the company was no longer allowing incentivized reviews (except for advanced copies of books), effective immediately.

Amazon had previously allowed incentivized reviews, such as those done in exchange for free product, as long as the reviewers explicitly disclosed that they were incentivized.

Why Amazon Made This Change

This change is a strong benefit to both Amazon's customers and to brands.

Credible reviews drive confident purchases. The rentable reviewer model undercut that confidence and became a growing concern. Incentivized reviews went from 2% of all reviews on Amazon two years ago to now a large and growing majority of all new reviews, according to an analysis of 7 million Amazon reviews on ReviewMeta.

Moreover, those rented reviewers are leaving inflated rviews that substantially change a product's ranking. Those rented reviewers are high-frequency reviewers, creating almost 10X as many reviews as your average Amazon customer, 232 vs. 31, states ReviewMeta. They erode consumer confidence and bury superior brands and products that have earned their great reviews organically through their own customers.

Though Amazon has required the body of incentivized reviews to have disclosure, biased reviews still influence the ever-important aggregate five-star rating connected to each product. 

Why Marketers Should Care

A veritable cottage industry of companies has sprung up in the last few years that rent out their existing opt-in base of high-frequency product reviewers. A significant amount of established consumer electronic, household, and packaged goods companies have depended on them as a "check-the-box" item to support new product launches and campaigns.

Though Amazon isn't the only destination for reviews, it's a big enough slice of the pie that skipping Amazon isn't a good option for most brands. It's also likely that many more large ecommerce channels that provide a platform for reviews will shortly follow suit or risk losing shoppers who see Amazon's now more credible reviews as a competitive advantage.

Brands will have to find new methods of reliably driving authentic reviews, and the opt-in reviewer community vendors will need to fundamentally restructure to survive.

What to Do

Build a great product. Earn authentic brand love. Actively foster non-incentivized advocacy.

Reviews are more important than ever, so losing presence just isn't an option. For large existing brands, the best answer is to better use their existing brand advocates, who talk about the product because they authentically love it. Fostering that advocacy between each brand and their own true customer advocates has long been the fundamental core of my company and works because it's inherently built to work with real human trust, not against it.

Brands that have fostered that asset can and still should find opportunities to prompt their satisfied customers to leave a review, to sample and seed new products to relevant brand loyalists, and to coordinate this asset into product launch strategies. But they'll need to use their own customers instead of renting someone else's high frequency and inauthentic opt-ins, and they'll need to be certain when they do seed product to not do it in exchange for a review.

Brands with the best products and an effective method of capitalizing on that brand love will rise to the top and see an increase in buyer trust in authentic reviews and testimonials.

Back and active in 2016

Hi Everyone,

I really appreciate all of the encouragement and kind words. After several useful working sessions via e-mail, shared documents, and more, I'm really excited to start publishing much more actively, and using this blogger account as the digital hub for coming activity. If you've been involved in the past, or looking to get involved again, please reach out. Very interested in hearing what tools, tricks, and methods you've been using as well, and to see what we can work into the mix.

Pictures of Zenith pocket watch

Pictures of my Zenith Pocket Watch for identification

Listing, Short Story

The sun had now cleared the ocean and the hood of the truck, casting a soft but bright light onto the vinyl dash and the notepad beside him. It was a winter light, and without waves and the blowing of sand, it was hard to know how cold it was without being outside, without feeling it. He wasn’t hungry and he hadn’t been, but the cold of the cab and the fog of his breath made his mouth feel empty. He pushed as much air as he could out of his lungs and the windows seemed to steam. Absently, he flicked the lead of the chewed pencil against his left index finger where it marked the heavy callous. He didn’t know what he was going to put down. He knew the list would have 22 things. He had, with a crude line, demarked two categories, but as an afterthought had circled an area down the page for possible inclusion as a third category. He had been doing this for months now, and knew occasionally the lists would require more ambiguity than he might initially plan for.
This would be a list of reasons to go or reasons to stay. He had done this one before, and the first few came to him automatically, and he intoned them under his breathe as he wrote, in monotone, like a prayer he had memorized.
There was familiarity. Familiarity was always on the list but often on different sides. There were the houses he would pass that would tell him stories about himself, about the people that he knew or had known. There was the yellow square of window light from the attic bedroom of a girl he knew, when he drove by the house slowly. There was a week, right after high school when her parents went away that they practiced being grownup. The rest of the short relationship, the girl herself were not significant, but that week was always something singular. He remembered her as being unfathomably soft, fit, but all rounded angles and curves. He felt his own boy’s body all elbows and lank and bony prominences she was too tolerant or naïve to mention. He remembers leaving for brief errands in the middle of the week, and her coming to that small yellow square of light to watch his car back out of the driveway. He remembers how it felt, knowing that he was coming back, and knowing that he was missed.
There’s the old school. You can’t see the building, except for a few patches in the fall, but you can see the driveway and the sign and the yellow buses pouring in and out during the year. Those few from his class who have remained are a loose coalition. Outside of a few good friends, there are the very familiar acquaintances. Those he’s grown up with, and sees once a year when a mutual friend drops back home and wants to pull together some old gang from memory and fiction. There’s that look that they exchange. There’s the conversation of course, the brief and awkward summation of one lost year. There’s the repeated false promise that of course, since they’re so close, they’ll be sure to hang out now, maybe in a week, or maybe a few. But the look. First there’s the look. The secret handshake of despair, the unspoken promise not to illuminate the shared secret of those who did not leave. He scrawls the look down on reasons to go, and makes a quick underline.
There was the Ocean, but there would be others. There were the seasons that made him feel older. There was the old maple by the bridge over the small river that cordoned the town line that would transform so completely every season. He had noticed it as long as he could remember, in a private way that resembled ownership. It occurred to him, briefly, that if he left for too long, the tree might die before he could come back. The thought of it, gone, or worse, still there, dead and unattended, barren unchanging branches marching gradually to rot.
There was watching the sun set behind clouds, and being able to then tell what way the wind would blow in the morning. In the morning, he’d take his coffee out to the picnic table left in the yard, even in the cold, and watch the steam rise off it to be carried away in a decipherable location. There was the sturdy picnic table, the same rust color that all New England picnic tables are painted. Abandoned to constant use, left out all year, its signs of wear were apparent, but not excessive. There was no rot and the boards never creaked or swayed. There was the burden of well made things, built to outlast you, an aesthetic of unceasing utility.
The radio is on for the comfort noise brings, and there is a bit of story over the static that has been all over the news. Local man, seventy years old, wakes fully after 58 years in a coma. They don’t call it a coma, they called it sleeping sickness back then, and it sounds colloquial for the newscasts. They talk about the era America has passed through, about a ninety year old nurse he has never met that took care of him for twenty five years, being flown in from her own nursing home in Florida for a reunion. They mention how well cared for he has been, how his hair was always kept so neat, his old man body so relatively unused he could live to be one hundred. There is no one alive now that knew him very well then, no family to speak of. They line up news crews and camera men, and pose him with Kennedy campaign buttons, with posters of sports teams come and gone in the half century plus. Each picture, his unchanging pose, oblivious to the room’s merriment, a terrified twelve year old, staring at his withered and unused hands. Reason for leaving.
There’s the first weekend in June when the people come back. There is that Monday in October when the very last of them is gone. There is waiting in his car, on this beach, writing this list again on another October when the streets are empty, looking at the houses and wondering who he knew that stayed. There are the houses with the lights left on, or houses where the lights turn on mechanically to give the false impression of occupancy. In a few hours, across the bay, in the clear cold dark, they sparkle almost the way stars would. He wonders how much darker, how pitch black this dim winter beach town would be without them.
There are reasons for staying. There’s knowing what there is to do at any given time, regardless of wanting to or not. There’s not dying in a nearly unfurnished room thousands of miles away, waiting to be found until neighbors complain or a landlord wants his check. Neighbors with not much to say, no one really knew him, he just showed up from we don’t know where, kept to himself.
There are the white crocuses that will come up early in the spring, when it’s still too cold, before anything else. There are the weeds that will grow beside them, and the dandelions, but the groundskeeper will take care of them, and no one will notice anyway.
There’s his dentist appointment in the fall.
Knowing the name of where he was. Not just town and county, knowing the points on the map, the names of the lighthouses, small islands that would surface on eep tides. Clevelend Light, Halftide rock, Sculpin Ledge, Pulpit Rock,. Real names, as old as any map. So few people knew them they were almost secret. You can’t move to a place you’re not from and ever know the names of places like a town you’re born in. Who knew, in California if anyone bothered to name what used to be a reef where the sea floor dropped fifteen feet. He loved the poetry of the sound of them.
The list, having filled the columns of the notebook provided for them, had finished in a tie. The decision was too big, something would have to make it for him, something would have to tell him why. No one he knew had any knowledge of leaving. A newspaper sheet made its way across the parking lot and stuck on the jagged wooden remainder of a dune wall. Its halves inflated like jib sails, anchoring it perfectly. If the paper blew to the right, he would leave within three days. Within a week, left, and he would wait another season, wait until that first week of spring when he was always happy.
Five minutes and the paper doesn’t move. He’s staring at the ocean, at the way it changes from dawn to morning, and now the waves have come with the tide shift, and the wind brings the lull of sand against the car. There is a boat, moving quickly across the empty horizon, almost to the lighthouse. It’s a big ship, a working boat he can tell. It’s coming towards his direction but it is listing, significantly, despite the moderate sea. He can tell something is wrong, and the boat is sending up too much oil smoke. He knows there might be no one else looking out at it, and thinks, maybe, to do something, but doesn’t know what. The boat would have a radio, or might just be dragging something heavy, or working out its bilge. He knows he won’t do something. He can’t picture the captain, but imagines the crew. From the boat, you can see the shore, but it’s too far to swim in cold waters. Blue smoke might catch in your eyes, and the sound of untied cargo crashes from unhatched shelves. Maybe you’re from someplace far away, and can’t understand the sound on the radio. The animal howl of urgent voices in a language you don’t know.
It’s listing heavy now, and he knows the movement of boats enough to understand trouble. Listing, once your momentum moves from a decent equilibrium to leaning, how you take on water, how you can’t bilge fast enough, you sink further.
That moment. It strikes him with cold panic and breaks a sweat across his neck he doesn’t feel. That moment when you know you have to leave the boat. When you think of the pictures you have with you of the people you know and not the people themselves, who are too far away. The labor to begin swimming the distance you know you can’t bridge, your own voice with no one to hear and no one who would understand you, not knowing the names of the places around you, of the islands and currents and reefs, but knowing you would stay there amongst them. Reasons for staying: the final end to familiar things, knowing you wouldn’t be familiar to anyone ever again. Desolation. The fear of dying in space.
His attention is pulled back from the ocean as the paper luffs in the shifting wind. He squints and convinces himself that it’s a trick of new daylight and angles, that the boat would be alright, and there would be no reason to watch it regardless.
He feels the truck shudder into reverse, closes his eyes for a brief second, and visualizes every aspect of his ride home. There’s the same drive through one of the town’s two main roads, their intersection in the empty center of the town, the potholes he avoids without having to notice. There’s the parking lot by the beach that will fill up with cars in the summer, the small stretch of three season restaurants that will swell in summer with people who he’ll never talk to. The stretch of road by devils foot island, the lookout spot to coffin point. There is the church they’d marry him in next to the graveyard where he’d be buried. A last gust of wind, and the newspaper blows right and keeps moving until it is small and distant and beyond him. He was leaving. Obviously, he was leaving. He turned the page in his book before closing it, enough room still left in the notebook that he wouldn’t need another one yet. He closed his eyes for a brief second, and saw the road again in front of him, could taste the salt of the air, the mix of oil and noise shaking him awake as the truck kicked into drive.

Cartography, Short Story

Cartography

I’m building a map of my apartment. Not just the physical obviousness of it, 400 nondescript square feet, but also a detailed, physical cartography of every memory each space of floor provides. I’m mostly done with the living room so far, meticulously cordoned off into one-foot sections with thin strands of twine, like an archeological excavation of something past and buried. I stand over each, page open in the book, and think of whatever comes to mind in that particular spot. Standing over it, I sketch its outline, and enhance the details of whatever I think conveys the specific connotations of whatever occurred in that one spot. The large L shape dent where the heavy kitchen phone broke when I threw it.

Dividing the living room into measured squares took most of one long day. The paper is graph paper, to keep everything proportionate, and I’ve filled 97 pages so far. One square of apartment per page, 83 more and I’ll need a new book. A little more than three books, 180 pages each, and I’ll have the whole place plotted. It occurred to me that my graph pad was one and a half feet tall by one and a half feet wide. If I was to tear the pages of my notebook and lay them out, my end result would be a 600 square foot map of my 400 square foot apartment. Enlarged to show detail.

It still makes sense to me, 97 pages in. I’ve lived here for four years, and mapping begins to have some significance. It’s an old building, 80 years maybe, but how many people have spent four years here? Only a few, likely, and how many have found, have looked for and found, such significance? My history here was uncharted, under-preserved. Details would be forgotten, significance would be lost if this effort wasn’t taken. In history, whenever anything has been explored, has been discovered, it would next be mapped. In the footsteps of every conquering army or intrepid explorer came the cartographers, making sure all gains would be substantiated, sustained.

If I was to leave, or be removed, the majority of my personal experiences here in the past 4 years would immediately erased or gradually forgotten. When the thought occurred to me, I was almost panicked, but I feel much better about it now, prepared. Now, with very little reason to leave, I have hardly left at all since beginning the map. That was about two weeks ago. I’m finding more then I imagined I would. Only today, I was drafting a spot on the wood of the floor, between the rugs, where a patch of faded scratch marks had made their way into the oak. This is exactly where I used to have the couch, I was reminded. Feeling the grooved pattern on the floor, I reflected on any specific times I might have moved the couch, or caused the couch to move, of how the apartment had seemed before the couch; how I used to have a mattress in this very spot for the first two months I lived here, out in the living room without money for furniture. I had remembered being new here, with my one cheap mattress with nice sheets, two months falling asleep in the middle of it, lowering myself to bed. And once, sharing it, lying awkwardly off to one side and staying self-consciously awake throughout all of one long night. I had forgotten this, and, in drawing, in standing over thinking, contemplating on details, realized how much I had forgotten, and that if I didn’t take the effort to preserve my past, no one else ever would.

There are portions of the map which I have completed which were essential to draft a comprehensive diagram, but were not individually captivating, the vast majority of general landscape with an ordinary memory or two. There are squares that I have finished which are very important, and others I have not yet reached that I keep thinking of.

At the corner of the rectangle outcropping I am drafting near the window, a black marker line on the wall. It took me a while, took me a long time staring to try to remember why there was a two-inch line, what personal circumstance would have caused it. I have never been that height in this apartment. I have never measured to hang a picture, not with such a quick black streak. I have never drawn anything against this wall. I had given up, had halfheartedly started sketching the outline of the preceding square, unadorned or unmarked, still standing at the spot when it occurred to me. The calendar that used to hang there, those first few months only. Upon examination, I could see the small pinhole where the calendar had hung from the wall. I didn’t mark it all the time, rarely, actually, so it must have been something. From its distance to the nail, I knew it was a middle of the month. October, November, or December only, that first winter with the calendar, living mostly in this one room. End of the week, obviously, a Saturday to run off the calendar and onto the wall. Enthusiastic. Not work related. The second or third Saturday, in one of a handful of months exactly four years ago. I can’t remember what, but still feel the excitement of a discovery that would be meaningless, indiscernible to anyone else’s efforts. I am my own archeologist, discovering the Pompeii of my past, irretrievably gone, but frozen at exactly the moment of its demise. These were all moments of someone’s life, and that life was mine.

On the wood trim differentiating the living room from half kitchen, a green mark against the wall where the Christmas tree tipped, while I was steadying it not quite one year ago. I lift up my pant leg to examine a small crooked line down my shin where the jagged metal stand cut into me at the same time it went against the wall, our matching scars. It helps me feel connected to this place, bonded.

When I am working, the front of my thoughts are put to the task at hand, drawing each square the way you smooth over a jigsaw piece before you snap it into place. I think of what comes to mind in each square, but I keep thinking, the whole time, of the squares still to draw, of the pieces I’m most afraid of losing.

The mark on the right side of the doorframe from the entry hall, where I brought my first bed in, a large cracked triangle where the grey of plaster is visible. Humble, the bed still seemed too big at the time. Too much for myself, or for me to carry alone, still new here and without friends to help, moving its awkward weight around the corner in heaving pulls from the front. The mark on the left side of the doorframe where I took the same bed out, two year later for something a little nicer, this time with the help of someone else to navigate it around the turns. A small white dent against the paint, barely there.

The light blue spattering of paint in a color I’ve never liked, for a piece of furniture now gone, by the other wall in the bedroom. Brown rings of diffusion on the bedroom windowsill where cheap tea candles burnt down to their tin bases by the window, which, in Summer was full of one large tree and a breeze that would come in and cool everything off as we slept. A small hardened stain of glue and the adhesive bottom of duct tape, by the front door from another project I had started and never finished. Not yet, anyway. Tiny darkened scars in the small wood floor of the kitchen where I always dropped the knives I would toss when cooking.

The square outline of dirt on the floor of the hallway separating the kitchen from the living room where the stereo would play records I initially found charming, and then passable, until eventually I grew to memorize and loathe them, hating every single note just seconds before it would play. I think of drawing the vanity and small desk where I keep expecting them to be, but do not. This is to be a map of what’s still here, a map that will define myself.


Two yellow diagonals of tape in the hallway, still holding small corners of paper where something had been taken down in a hurry. Something recent. Several small fine scratches and a faint indication of blood not yet scrubbed in the bedroom from where a picture frame had been broken, when it had taken me days to get to cleaning up the glass from the floor, and the small shards had ripped imperceptible tears in me, staining my white socks in small imperfect red circles.

The spot on the floor by the door where I saw her leave, the spot by the phone where I first knew she wouldn’t be coming back, the spot on the couch where I told myself I wouldn’t care. The window by the wall where knowing what I had done became important.

There’s no exact instance when I realize a square is done. No spot yet has been all about one thing only. I start on something, the obvious markings, the indications of use and history, and so much else comes to mind. I try to separate it, to see what is the space itself, what actually is and actually happened without putting my own perspective on it, but I can’t. I spend an hour just looking, staring at a corner in an empty room by my feet, and I am overwhelmed. With reflection, I have become self-absorbed. Everywhere I look, I find full of myself, full with my own intention, my own stained experience. There’s no evidence of anything not stitched together with the thread of myself, and I know there’s no one else’s world I exist in but my own now, no one else keeping track if I don’t. Symbols become larger than the things themselves. The things I end up doing not nearly as important as what they mean.

Growth, Short Story

Growth
I’m getting taller. It started as a glimmer of a thought three months ago, and has now built to obsession. Something extraordinary is happening to me that outweighs the rest of everything that I’ve been doing or has happened to me. There’s no one around to confirm any more, these past three months or so, but there’s evidence, or near evidence, overwhelming and compelling. I remember growing, remember what it felt like, a dozen years ago when I was still barely edging skywards in my mid teens. I thought I had forgotten, but it comes back, like riding a bike. Sitting, an odd tingle, a shudder, and thinking, that was it. I’m bigger now. Growing, a hard balloon in the pregnant hollow of you, each breath making you bigger, each second making you an exact increment more than you’ve ever been before.
I haven’t been to the doctor in a few years, and it seems my measurements from past checkups have been arbitrarily distributed somewhere around six feet to six two, standard deviance. Attributable to the shoes I was wearing or how careful the Doctor felt like being. This is different, this is, for the first time in a long time, growth. I don’t have anyone around all the time now to gauge against. I should try marking the doorframe in my kitchen, if this keeps up. I’ve tried to find ways to casually bring it up at work. I feel it, but I don’t have any exact way to measure.
I have one of my father’s suits, one of those odd things that someone thinks to give you and out of sentimentality or obligation, I’ve kept it, dry cleaned, hanging stiffly, waiting. He was always bigger than me. When I think I’m tall enough, I’ll try it on. If it fits, I’ll know for sure.
It’s not dramatic, I mean, it’s not like sci-fi gamma ray too big for my house growth, but it’s enough. An inch at least, maybe an inch and a half. It doesn’t ache. I don’t remember if it did back then. I remember the phrase growing pains, but don’t remember if it should hurt, the parts of me pulling apart at every seem, working to fill in my near constant fissures.
It started as a feeling, but changed, became more serious a month ago. It was a Sunday, and I was helping the guys from the moving company take away a few things. I knew they were coming. Furniture, mostly, a dresser and vanity, the love seat. On the back porch, there was a plant in a handmade planter I remember hanging three years ago. I remember having to lean on the railing to fit it through the eye hook in the ceiling, my feet off the ground, for some reason, the image of it stuck in my head. That Sunday, the planter came to me as an afterthought. It wasn’t on the list of things to take away, but I wouldn’t use it and the plant seemed to be dying with two months of disregard. I reached up, without thinking, and unhooked the planter. Easily, just reached my big arms off my large frame and handed it down to the two movers, both of them had been scrambling for a step ladder. I was so much bigger than them both. I walked back into the apartment, with some of the furniture gone, and I could tell that I was bigger in the more empty space. Walking in to the kitchen, I could see more of the back of the cabinets.
That next day, someone I work with, a short woman I don’t see all the time asked me. She saw me, and first thing she said, she asked me if I was taller. Said I seemed taller. I know she might have meant it half kidding in that fake way people prattle on about dumb things, but obviously, it was noticeable. I was almost embarrassed to tell her, even though she asked, nervous to admit that yes, I think I have started growing
In the past month, I have become my own favorite science experiment. My research is twofold: Gather empirical evidence that can confirm and measure my growth, and chronicle the factors, and the relationship between factors that might be causing it.
As far as gathering evidence, some of it is less measurable. I stand in a room in my apartment and try to remember what it used to feel like, and how different it might be now. Also, every piece of the house has evidence. The wear patterns in old shoes I haven’t worn in months, trying on outfits I have pictures of myself in, the one of us at her sister’s wedding in my suit, us on vacation by the ocean, where the hem of my bathing trunks comes down two inches from my knee. I ride the elevators I used to ride when I’d come to meet her at her work for lunch and see how high the buttons feel, test where my back rests against the bench across the street from the elevators when I’d take the bus to get there. I’d recopy notes I had written and kept, and ones that had been returned, slowly going over them all, comparing where my handwriting might have changed, smaller loops in my L’s, staccato dots on my I’s.
Recording the things that have changed over the months required a notebook. The one I bought was graph paper, by mistake, but it’s lent itself well to charting things I’ve noticed, when helpful. Chemically, my eating has changed. I’ve started drinking more milk. I’ve been eating more grilled food. More food from microwaves, more time by the microwave. I’ve been falling asleep with the radio on. I’ve been sleeping more. Some days, when I don’t work, I’ll be in bed for hours at a time after waking, without gravity pulling me down. I hardly ever talk on the phone. Less sunlight. I started listing food additives, cosmetic ingredients, environmental exposures, but then thought that started to feel too much like when I saw The incredible shrinking woman, and I felt foolish and stopped.
I go to the movies alone. Late show on a Thursday night. I sit in the middle front row, my large back swelling over the small plastic frame of the seat meant for ordinary sized people, my legs pushing against the armrests. I can sense the people behind me straining to see, girlfriends whispering to boyfriends to ask me to move or slouch, cowed boyfriends whispering excuses into popcorn tubs and soda straws. I would not slump, would not lessen this. This new height was my gift. I think about what I will do as my height increases. What I will do six months from now, at six four, what I could do in a year. Basketball leagues, guest lecturing at medical seminars, ad campaigns.
Every time I start finding patterns, something comes around and throws me. After three pairs of pants with hems that felt too high would be an old shirt that hung too big on me, a chair I’d sit down on and feel lost in.
I never would have called her. I hadn’t in two and a half months, but I needed to know. There was no one else in my life that might carefully remember me. That might remember how I looked in certain clothes, what size I felt close up. I called her. I told her I couldn’t go into it on the phone. Told her it was about something different. I needed her to see me. It was a short conversation, under a minute. She sounded tired, but familiar. I didn’t hear anyone else there. She yawned, told me she’d come by after work the next day, but didn’t say when.
I woke up early. I had set the alarm, but woke looking at it a minute before it would go off. I turned the shower on hotter than usual, and let the steam spill across the mirrors and fill the room before getting in. I washed myself, threw away the soap, opened a new bar, cleaned myself again. I shampooed twice. I trimmed my nails to a raw biting quick, scrubbed myself red.
It was waiting for me in the closet. I could remember him in it. It hardly swayed on its hanger, the thick captured air inside of it not moving at all. I brought it to the foyer, where the full length mirror wasn’t fogged. It was odd, being naked for the first time in a room in my own house. I hung the suit off the banister, putting each piece of it on carefully, examining to see how I looked different in each individual piece, watching for a change. I remember watching my father putting his suit on, straightening the drape of his coat, the dimple of his tie. The intricate formality of it so special and odd to me as a child. An outfit for a very specific task, my father, determined, driven, prepared for an expected world that was waiting for him.
Each piece, the black socks creeping up my legs, the white undershirt I never wore under anything, the too stiff dress shirt whose crisp collar pressed tight into my neck. Each piece of the suit, layering over me, sealing me in, protecting me like armor. Once I finished dressing, I couldn’t look in the mirror. I couldn’t trust myself the way I could trust her, candid, unattached. It felt right, though, the suit. It felt like I filled it, like it was mine.
I knew she’d come, so I was a little shocked to see her without being surprised. I was standing in the front hall, and the key turned in the lock though I had left it open, and she was suddenly inside the house. She took her jacket off and pushed slightly past me to hang her jacket by the wall on the hook that wasn’t there, and put it on the banister instead.
Her hair was slightly longer on the sides, moved more than I remembered, bouncing over the delicate bones of her collar. Her thumbs ran a constant inventory over the fingers of her hand. It struck me that she had aged, and settled into her age while I wasn’t noticing. Her always pretty face framed by its prominent bones, her broad forehead defined by a hint of wrinkles. Her eyes, often cast as reserved or judgmental had gone softer, comfortable, broken in. My father would have called her striking, my mother would have called her handsome.
She looks to me like people look to radios when they’re expecting to hear something important.
“OK, first off, let’s get this out there. Are you dying?”
“What, No” I said, and she seemed almost disappointed or allowed to be mad, and it occurred to me for the first time that I might be. I hadn’t thought of it at all “I don’t think so.”
“You don’t. You don’t think so? Listen, on the phone, you seemed so. You told me it wasn’t about us.”
“No. It’s. It’s something about me. I appreciate you coming. I am sorry I had to call you, and I really appreciate you coming over.”
“What about you, what are you doing?”
“No, I’m not doing. I’m not doing anything. It’s hard to say. Listen, I haven’t really said it yet to anyone, and I think I know how it sounds.”
“You’ve found Jesus?”
We both smile a little while trying not to.
“Why don’t you. Maybe, Look at me. Hold on” I frame myself in the doorway leading outside where I know I look biggest.
“Look at?”
“Yeah. Just wait. Ok. Now. What do you notice?”
“Are you going to court?”
“The suit”
“Very second interview of you”
“Anything else?”
“You’ve got another one of those rectangle head haircuts you get. You’ve got to tell them when you have it cut” She comes in close and tries to straighten my hair out in the way she does that always makes it look worse, but this time I let her. Something about the familiarity, now that we aren’t.
“No” I don’t know what to call her now. I don’t want to call her her name. “No. I’m. I think I’m taller. I’m growing.” I try not to blather or sound dramatic about it. It feels ridiculous the moment it leaves my mouth, but feels good to have said.
She looks at me for a long second and she laughs at me, not cruelly, but in a way that starts slow and gathers until it seems cruel. “Oh God. That is so fucking you. People don’t grow taller, they shrink.” She gets quiet and studies me again. She cocks her head and measures me silently.
I step into her until we are almost touching. “I am though. You think I look bigger, don’t you?”
“I’m exactly the wrong person to ask. Guess what, I’m goddam shrinking.”
I don’t know if she’s teasing me. “People don’t shrink in their early thirties.”
“Yeah, much more likely they start fucking growing, isn’t it. I don’t fit my clothes right. I’ve been over my sister’s, and she’s exactly my height now. Sometimes she’s taller. I’ve always been taller than her, you know that. I can’t reach things I used to be able to.”
I lean in towards her. I’m surprised and think she might be shrinking. “I don’t think you’re shrinking.”
“Settling they call it. One thing I’m sure of. If this happened to me. If I did start this horrible old lady processing of shrinking now, you’d sure as hell find a way to start growing again. Fucking perfect. One more psychosis to keep me up at night.”
She looks up at me from an impossibly growing distance, and she looks frail, delicate in a way that I don’t remember her, as if she could break if I moved wrong.
“So you’re saying I might. That you think I might be taller.”
“This is crazy” she says, and moves her mouth as if to say something, but does not. It becomes very important for me that she acknowledges the possibility of my growth.
“Why would you start growing?”
It also hadn’t occurred to me to try to think of that. I had spent all this time calculating the if, obsessing over the how. I hadn’t put a single thought together regarding why, wondering what my new body was being built for. Her saying it made me feel foolish.
Her in the house. The same shampoo smell, the same small noise her tiny feet spend on the stairs, there is a familiarity that is strange too, hearing your name called in a crowd, in a city street by someone looking for someone other than you. But when we start to argue, the distance is halved and halved infinitely until there is too small of a space to know where I might end and she might start. There is a perfect cadence to our argument, an intimacy that fits in so small a space. There is so much to say and so few words to fit on each breath. She grabs onto the lapels of my father’s suit angrily, wrinkling it, and I retreat. She smiles, my wound revealed, the smell of blood readily fills the red room. She hangs her hands ready at her wrists, like daggers. She pulls against the sleeve of the suit, deliberately. I withdraw and I smile without wanting to or knowing why.
She hooks her hands onto the chest of my father’s shirt, bunches them in her tiny fists. She slides around in back of me and unhooks the buttons of my coat, removing it roughly and tossing it on the chair. Her small frame comes into my shadow. I move my big feet carefully, I step out of my massive shoes. See how tall I am with nothing up my sleeve. I can’t tell if she’s moved from malice to affection or what the difference might be. She circles around to face me, and smiles into me. I smile back and want her to let go of me.
She strips me naked before she starts to take off her own clothes, won’t let me help. I’m cold before she comes to touch me. Her touch fireball hot, more than I ever remember. I check to see if she is sweating, but she is not, the same dry, steady burn. Here a brief awkward pause while we don’t remember where to start, and then it starts and we know exactly where we are again.
During, I think of her. Not her now so much, but other memories of her. And I think of the universe, when the universe started, when it was moving out and pulling in at the exact right measure, and how it’s dissipating out into infinite vastness every single second we do nothing, or maybe its waiting to start collapsing back into itself. And I think of her. Panic blooms inside me like a wetted sponge. And I’m almost sleeping, watching my father’s suit coat, dress shirt, suit pants, wrinkled and carelessly thrown over the back of my chair, wondering tomorrow if all of it will fit. Tonight, she fills perfectly the hollow of my long arms, as she always has. I close my eyes, not really away, and think maybe the house has grown around us.


End