You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2009.
With the challenges that we know we face as a country, we want so desperately for everything to be all right. Already, attitudes have changed, as though awakened from years spent in a splendorous trance. The rules we had counter-intuitively accepted as true (“Spend! It’s good for the economy!”, “Wealth is a matter of moving debt around wisely”…) we now doubt. We are awake, perhaps sighing relief that we never had it to invest anyway. We are awake, perhaps regretting the former necessities of life, blaming ourselves for listening to the person shaking our hand, and not to ourselves.
We have spent years now making jokes (we hoped) that our homes were tapped, our thoughts under surveillance. We have watched our country at war, in fear, bumbling around airports without shoes or sufficient quantities of hair gel, detaining suspects, defending their torture, all while we at home–or at least many of us–wondered for whose America these actions were supposed to represent. Since November, we have waited for something different. And now we have it.
Watching the ceremonies with others, I realized a few things, perhaps not unifying. I may be in the minority, but I liked Aretha’s hat. I thought rather than going over the top, she played it down by wearing grey. I love Aretha for her soaring, incredible voice, for her style, for all she has given to us. The hat was the least of it. I realize that most others find poetry a delay, a nuisance. But the inaugural poem seemed appropriate, Whitmanian, as the entire campaign has seemed to bring us back to that similar pride in our individual strengths, our collective strength. For the music, the non-essential elements of the day, let us all find patience. Let us all join in our hope for the future.
We have done many things for the first time in this election, but in the end, it has brought us back to the defining principles upon which our nation was founded. Hope, and above all, courage to keep hoping, and to keep working for something better.
All good things come to an end.
I could have seen this coming with the first mention of the word “recession”, but it is over: Libby Lu has closed. My daughters are crushed, and as much as I tried to avoid the pink and purple sparkles when the store first opened, I am a little crushed, too.
It was easy to dismiss a place like Libby Lu. It seemed to stand for everything I never wanted for my girls. Hannah Montana and High School Musical dominated the merchandise at the entrance to the store. In the air, fairy dust and perfume clouded the judgment of the most rational human beings, putting a bit too much emphasis on appearance, and not on personal worth. Or so I thought.
Disney’s overbearing princess presence repelled me from the door as the powerful magnetic girl field attracted my daughters. The merchandise was over-priced, over-blown, and over-pink, and my girls could spend hours just looking at glitter, even if we rarely bought a thing.
One day, the Girl Scouts started popping up in the store. I was even more surprised at the involvement with St. Jude’s Children’s Research Center. These affiliations sometimes made me cringe, sort of the inverse of seeing a soda pop vending machine in an elementary school. Still, the association was curious. It was not what convinced me that Libby Lu was not so bad, though.
No, what made me love Libby Lu was Thursdays. For the past three and a half years, Thursday has been the day that we women of the family do something special, without men. The divorce agreement set things up this way, and so they remain. At first it was piano lesson day. Then, when the piano was taken, we simply spent time together. After a while, though, it became clear that certain activities are best done when men are not present. This is the stuff of Sephora and Julia Child, of tea rooms and clothes shopping. It is stereotypical girl talk on so many levels, and in so many ways I despise it.
They like to chat about the dresses they will wear tonight,
they chew the fat about their tresses and the neighbor`s fight.
Inconsequential things that men don`t really care to know
become essential things that women find so `appropo`.
But that`s a dame, they`re all the same.
It`s just a game, they call girl talk, girl talk.
(“Girl Talk” by Bobby Troup)
I despise the thought of my daughters being reduced to a stereotype, defined by the merchandise available in an irresistible store. Why don’t these girls read a book? write a book? follow their own dreams somewhere beyond becoming a pop star?
Perhaps they already do.
I do. And still, I love being a woman. I look forward to my bubble bath, with perfume, with flowers and pretty things for my hair, with pink perhaps, or red since I am grown-up now. I find myself looking for the glamour in the everyday, for the lace underneath and the soft on top.
Still, if glitter and pouf were all that Libby Lu had to offer, the shine would have worn off long ago. We rarely bought anything in Libby Lu, but we were never discouraged from spending our time spinning wheels and running fingers through feather boas. The same faces greeted my daughters, with smiles and patience.
My daughters discovered news of the end on the company’s website, unceremoniously. That Wednesday evening, they made a card, saying that they would miss the women there. Thursday, we went there, as we always did. As they picked out a final extravagance among the discounted Spa Sparkle merchandise, the manager asked the girls what they would choose, if they could have anything they wanted. Anything. They filled bottles with shampoo of all colors, lotion with glitter, brushes and curlers. As the manager wrapped up the packages, and handed them to the girls, tears streamed down her face. The girls counted through their last few dollars, looking to me to make up the difference. The manager left the counter. We waited to pay, forever, and finally a clerk came to the front. She said there was no charge. I asked again. She checked. No charge.
My girls were happy, of course. No. Elated. But they never really realized, I don’t think, how their small expression must have meant so much to one person on that day. I could only imagine myself, what details we had never known beyond the bubble gum and tiaras.
This home of glitter is gone now, closed, dark. It does make me sad to wonder what became of all the women who worked there, whether they are happy now, whether they could even find new jobs.
But fairy dust is magic, too, you know. In carpets, hair, clothes, the stuff gets everywhere, appearing years later where you least expect it. And magic fairy dust inspires great things, apparently, in sharing, in the small but great kindnesses that reach far beyond glamour and appearances, right to the heart of things. It is the magic of moments when we show that we care, of the small moments that matter most in our lives.
(n.) The termination of something by causing so much damage to it that it cannot be repaired or no longer exists.
He found them. He found the journals I had written when I was young, younger, youngest–before I knew him. He found the journals I had written when I was dreaming. In the page he found, I had written about a boy who thrilled me, a boy who gave me more time to create him from my own mind than to know him in any sort of reality. I knew I would never really have him, was never sure I wanted him. I wrote then, so long ago, as if to contain my glee, to keep it safe and still to dream, to imagine myself, desired. I defend those ancient words–my words–whatever they were, now.
But then, after the storm, I found the pages, and wrapped them up, wondered where I might hide them first. I could not hide them, not forever, so I burned them. Words of my past went up in flames, with the letters to a me who was never good enough for my husband, letters to me hidden in a cigar box. “Te Amo,” the box spelled, words of love and summer and youth in that box, memories of me, testing out me on the world. I cherished that me, but left it behind, severed it from my body as if to save myself.
I look back, wonder why I let myself disappear, or why he wanted me to. They say this kind of thing happens slowly, insidiously, as charm turns to coldness and cruelty. That is the only explanation I can find, some sort of hypnotism. That is the only thing that could explain why I woke up one day and realized that I was lost.
My husband did not tell me when he had found those long-preserved thoughts. That summer evening, I returned with his parents from the movies. They came in, wondered where their son was, and left. My husband was there nearby all along, in the dark, in the high-ceilinged room where we had set up shelves, the computer, in this home-to-be. The boxes from my childhood home were emptied, and pages sat open. I knew then, but scarcely remembered what he might have learned of me, the me I was before he had begun to create a more suitable me.
My belly pushed on pants that used to fit, I felt the pushing on my skin, my shape, felt it change me as I knew the life inside of me. The pages were open, and my husband looked at me, me: disgusting to him, vomit on the floor, worse. He told me that I had no right to lie to him. I had deceived him.
Glimmers of forgotten scenes of our life together flashed in my mind. I only remembered them at times like these, times that I thought he really might leave me. A long-distance phone call while he was out of town–an old friend (male) set off a string of accusations (from him) and defenses (from me). His mistrust and lashing out seemed so unreal. Then, words softened, returned to the good stuff. That was the first time.
I never realized it then, but I was more careful after that, discarded the less acceptable parts of myself, when I could. Pieces still came through. I longed for music, music, and bought tickets to see Sonny Rollins. When my boyfriend stood up during the second song and announced he was bored, I left, too, looking back at the empty seats, wondering what I had left behind. My boyfriend expressed his distrust of reggae, Dylan, democrats and George Eliot; I avoided the undesirable (when I understood it), found other things, compromised, abandoned parts of myself to shelves that grew dusty over the years. I became farther and farther from myself, subtly. He disliked my old friends; I feared they might reveal the best of me to him, and left them alone, as if to preserve myself. He disliked my family, got me to see their shortcomings, insisted they never cared, not really. I felt guilty–or more than that, sad. He claimed that he was the only one who understood me, and after a while, he was.
My boyfriend was careful with me, and watched out for me. He protected me, and walked me home from work, took me to doctors’ appointments. He drove me to the store. I had no use for a car, and sold mine. “Good, we need the money,” he said, and we did not, but we spent it, on things that defined our love: motorcycles, car race tickets, things I never liked but tried, for him. My friends, my invitations, my curiosity evaporated as we drove off on some adventure together, far, far away from the world, in our own world, beyond the world. My boyfriend cherished me, and I married him.
My husband suspected me. The foreign men whistled in Vienna. I tested higher than he did in German. These things were my fault, my attempt to make a fool of him. But publicly he threatened someone, said it was impossible that I was better than he was, changed the grades. “I know how much you like it when they want you,” he lamented late into the night, late so I could never sleep, late so I could prove I loved him, and together we avoided night, Heurigen, Kaffee, blue Danube, Ringstrasse, and I prayed he would stop, fall asleep there where there was no way to leave him, I wanted to leave him. Men whistled, followed, and he mocked me when I told him I was scared of them. I wanted to leave. I dreamed of it, waited for the moment back home when I would pack my bags and walk away. I was scared, and then, I asked him to save me. He trusted me again. It was as if it never happened. But once in a while, he whispered a word, looked at me in a certain way. I shuddered, and turned away, but I remembered.
That night, when I trembled, pregnant, depending on him for my whole world, he found my writing. I felt myself drawn forever to him through the blood of a child, and I was. I knew my love, never strayed, gave up all I knew, my degree, my work, for the life of a child, a home, a family. I gave up myself to prove it all, so desperate I was by then, and still, he made a promise that day.
“You make me sick,” he said, first. I reassured, swore my thoughts were simply thoughts, tried to remember, felt my words quoted, twisted, rearranged into something I could not have been or said, something sick, something he did not want. I tried to explain, justify, calm him. Why?, I wondered, I pondered what I could have done, or not done, what I could have said or not said, what could have made him so upset. I swore I would never write another word.
“You could be like my mom,” he said. Oh not her, I thought. No, lonely mother, depraved–or so the in-laws claimed–not crazy, certainly not ill. Not her. “You could lose everything,” my husband said. He told me, that day, the beginning of our new home, our new lives, that he had to approve of my actions. He told me to behave. He told me that if he found out I was different from the person he wanted me to be, he would consider it grounds for divorce. I looked around at the stained glass, his baby pictures, my spoons, our lives melded together forever now through a beating heart. I looked at our lives, my love, and wondered who he was. I looked deeper, and tried to remember who I was. He promised that if he ever divorced me, he would destroy me.
I did wake up. Something in me was not destroyed, completely. He kept trying, though, but now, years later, he has stopped pushing me on the stairs, yelling in my face, threatening me in the streets. He has learned that lesson well–he was always smart enough not to bruise or break. Now he knows more subtle forms of torture. He steers clear from the overt abuse that bears witnesses. It is quieter now, more abstract. A letter from a lawyer. A motion to modify. An order. A statement: lack of evidence. Denial. It all seems legal, not out of line. He is upset, sometimes–who wouldn’t be?? I am so difficult at times. Everyone knows that. “No, she can barely hold herself together.” “No, she seems to jump for no reason.” No, she imagines things, the rattling of the door at night, his car driving by the street once, twice, the missing book, the coincidences. No one could believe the terror, the fear he can still inspire with a glance in my direction. No one could believe the loss and the pain, and worse, perhaps, they may believe it, and fear it, too.
Four hearts beat now, depending on the forces that brought them into this world. Four hearts tell me how they want to hide how they feel, and I feel the vulnerability in that desire to hide from the destruction. They want to be loved for who they are, and not for what they have to be to survive life in a reality that someone else imagines. Four hearts need strength, not shields: they need love to love themselves.
No, make that five. One more heart beating, not destroyed, stronger perhaps, even without the validation. At times I still feel the strikes. At times I still feel desperate.
But then, on second thought, yes. Destroy me. Destroy, (v.) Middle English, from Anglo-French destroy-, destrui-, stem of destrure, from Vulgar Latin *destrugere, alteration of Latin destruere, from de- + struere to build to un-build. No, on third thought, let me destroy the me that he created, let me take apart my life, block by block, wonder what might have remained if his creation had remained standing–or was it ever capable of that? Let me ponder what sort of creature it was that could love, even as it was being destroyed. Yes, I loved him once: destruction began not after the divorce, but far earlier, from the moment he first knew that I loved him.
I find myself in my own destruction, as I take a pen. I find myself again, deconstructing my heart, wondering what it was, that heart that still beats, that person, wonder, simply wonder why. And in that wonder, I rebuild.
n
Chez les Français, was black and white, women in boatneck sweaters, nipped waists, full skirts, men with thin ties and sportscoats. It was breathless, capris and Jean-Paul Belmondo, umbrellas and Catherine Deneuve and Michel LeGrand, cigarettes and baguettes and puppets and red balloons and bicycles and flowers. And then, in a moment, it was all that was brim full of life and wonder, wonderful smells of smoke and lavender and sin beneath the surface.
This was a 1960s textbook, left on the shelves of French VI with Madame Eggers, even though the district had moved on to more modern series, books with dialogues that start with “On va à la plage?” and excerpts from Sartre, and the Minitel, and I knew after some years that those old Chez les Français pictures represented a long-gone time before universities had chalkboards in dorm rooms and toilets with no seats. Still, the first time I saw Paris, drowsy from the overnight flight, riding a bus into the city as the city awoke, I found exactly what I had expected. It was all that.
I want it back now, the parks and drizzle, the noise and the chic and the understated, the grimy and the elegant. Where is Paris when you need it?
It is time for a journey. It is time to venture out onto the long-lost roads of fate, away from time as we know it in the everyday world, time to create markers for the time line of our lives. “Remember when?…” we’ll say years from now when we glance at one another, and we’ll both know exactly what that means.
It must be now, a bag packed hastily, a toothbrush, a camera, a swimsuit. You put your sunglasses in the overhead compartment above the front seat, clean out the mileage notebook and parking receipts, the half-finished Dr. Pepper from Burger King that your client left in the car last Saturday. I’ll stack blankets to throw in the back–in case of stars, a warm night, a field. I’ll pack a basket, grapes, burn CDs frantically before you pick me up–Johnny Cash, Cesaria Evora, Bach–then just give up as I hear your old car turning up the street. I scoop up all of them, all the songs I ever heard, and yes, the matching panties, and yes, the perfume, and yes, the wine glasses, and yes, that dress (you never know).
Your tie is gone, and you are wearing cologne, as you never do. Your hair is combed back. I wore the dress, after all, and the hat, and the world is waiting.
Yesterday at the market, I picked up the bottle with the red top. Not the blue. Not the green. Red. It is a treat.
Forever, it seems–at least since I was a chubby child–low-fat dairy habits lead me to skim. Doctors insist. Mothers comply. But are they right? Skim, as if to skim off… something. Milk with its nutrients, but not whole. Not a whole food. This certainly could not be good.
It is easy to grow accustomed to going without, to withdrawing pleasure just as it is about to complete us. It is tempting to improve, to discard the most volatile and unseemly (or unfashionable) parts of a thing, but I wonder how this alters us as we choose only that. What happens when we refine more often than we simply appreciate?
It is a chilly morning, not cold in the typical January sort of way: warm enough that I smell the diesel fuel of trucks passing, cold enough to form a thin layer of ice on the sidewalk. I open the door to wave goodbye, cup in hand. My coffee, dark rich coffee, with hot whole milk, steaming. The coffee sticks to the fat of the milk, recreates the caramel hot, coats my mouth in heaven, protecting perhaps, or at the very least.. satisfying. No, indeed: not at the least. Satisfaction is sublime. I drink this coffee, savor in the complete contentment of a moment, a morning, the beginning of a new day.
“Toco tu boca, con un dedo todo el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me basta cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mí para dibujarla con mi mano en tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.
Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez más de cerca y entonces jugamos al cíclope, nos miramos cada vez más cerca y los ojos se agrandan, se acercan entre sí, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, mordiéndose con los labios, apoyando apenas la lengua en los dientes, jugando en sus recintos, donde un aire pesado va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa instantánea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mí como una luna en el agua.”
from Julio Cortázar, Rayuela (Hopscotch), chapter 7.
Fluency in Spanish escapes me now. It was another world, one of passion and silliness both, and sometimes I miss the person I was when I spoke it well. So, to compensate, I read.
Cortázar is difficult, even translated, but so rewarding in the end–and in moments like the chapter quoted above. I read it aloud, and I believe I have been studied, kissed, merged into another, transposed into something more beautiful.
It starts (I translate roughly), “I touch your mouth, with my finger along the outline of your mouth, I keep drawing it as if I were creating it with my hand, as if your mouth were opening for the first time, and I only need close my eyes to erase it and start again, I create each time this mouth that I desire…” In the next paragraph, the world expands, scents grow, sounds, hair, flowers, fish, death and beauty, and finally, a trembling moment, moon shivering on water. Yes. These words find their power not in the translation, but in the reading, and in hearing our own voice find the shape and sound of them, like ice cream on a hot day and all that eating it conjures up, like summer, like a world away.
It was heavy wool, warm, South American. It was the sweater I received on my 21st birthday. I found it today, tucked into my cedar chest of memories, near books of his poetry, a few pictures, the only love letters I never threw out.
Sometimes I wonder what it was that brought us together. It felt like fate. No, it was piropos, treasures in a mundane, midwestern world that I wanted oh so badly to escape. There, in a church basement, he looked into my eyes until I laughed, then whispered to me: “Ah, you translate. And so do I. Let me translate your heart for you; I speak the language of love.” I ran from him then, and he followed until finally, one day, I let him catch me.
The streets I knew so well, all my life, the alleys, the corners and hidden benches, all were adventures now, the sky sparkling. He was a louse–I knew it then.. but like a roller coaster that is a little too fast and a little too high, you go anyway, ride, and feel sick later. And then, later still, you look back marveling at the ride you had. I found myself, my real self, in my passion and in the wildness of the dreams I dared to dream.
This is a grocery store.
This is a picture of a can of Campbell’s delicious Chicken Noodle Soup.
So, I was indeed disappointed to learn that a very similar-looking place does not stock the same brand…
True enough, this is not a grocery store.
And Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art does not have any Warhols.
