Too Much and Not the Mood Page 10
There was also the FilterQueen. Hard-to-reach corners of carpet in our living room meant hearing the brown R2-D2 vacuum butt against bottom molding. My father recently informed me that that vacuum was one of the most expensive items my parents ever bought for the house. He also added, surprising me with this next detail, that he and my mother nicknamed a close family friend of ours “Filter Queen.” Apparently this woman had made a habit of spinning the truth meddlesomely in her favor.
When my father texted me those two details, I considered scrapping this essay entirely. The thought of my parents investing in a vacuum cleaner was somehow too depressing. Too proximate to the dimming I associate with building a family that above all—above all anecdote and filial affection—must function day to day. Must vacuum, ration most luxuries, account for pairs of mittens, fix lunches with damp carrot sticks, fix fights before guests arrive, schedule predictabilities, and coordinate dentist appointments for two kids in different schools, while eternally I remember these words well: Find parking.
Dimming, I’ll admit, might be the wrong word. Accurate perhaps, only as much as it’s an entirely amateurish thing to say. I don’t mean to sound punitive, just mindful of time passing not in days, years, gray hair, but with a better understanding of what went on behind the scenes. In the front-seat silence of two parents saying little on our way to dim sum—speaking, sure, but that’s altogether different. Or in the kitchen at night when they assumed we were asleep. Sleeping, sort of, with my head pushed into my pillow, lying in my bed, which stood adjacent to our house’s heating duct and its sound channel, where whispers reverberated with very little discretion for my mother’s tears or the choked no-sound of two people waiting for someone to speak first.
Mostly though, the thought of my parents teasing a friend, speaking in code, calling her “Filter Queen”—even now, with both of my parents happily remarried—that image of them, near-rascally and light, pads my nostalgia. All of a sudden, the good parts chime. Beluga-whale watching in Tadoussac. That picture of my mother and me. She’s wearing her russet-brown Nehru-collar vest. I’m wearing my bowl cut like a helmet of dark hair secured around my big head. Sitting on her lap, I’m a daughter full of Whys who need only turn her neck to ask them. I am safe having never felt unsafe. The water behind us, blue like a green lozenge.
I remember Saturday breakfasts listening to Astrud Gilberto; how her voice—diaphanous, unconcerned—seemed to waft through the house. “Corcovado” was a breeze. I’d fill my plate with greasy potatoes and sift the serving dish for those extra-crispy ones. My eggs would go cold. I was indifferent to fried tomatoes. My father would quiz me on my times tables.
There was also my brother’s friends. Patrick, Matthew, Nicholas. There were two Matthews, I think. How his friends’ names, and mine too remodeled our family’s language. A coherency of extra characters that dotted our dinner chatter.
Two of those boys have since died. Occasionally their goofy laughs, their stammer and sweaty hairlines, reenter my mind. I hesitate to indulge despite only seeing fragments: the dregs of ripple-cut chips crumbing the bottom of a bowl; wet swimming trunks clinging to chubby thighs; the dangle of a dirty Band-Aid peeling off an elbow. Reestablished clearly is the first time I noticed the curl of a summer haircut growing out on the back of a boy’s tanned neck. Or how the raised estuary of veins on a boy’s forearm was unexpectedly attractive.
When I think of my brother’s childhood friends, of the two who are dead, I become, in those seconds, not inconsolable but wanting for my parents. I am homesick. Parent-sick. Cousin-sick. Okra-sick. Sick for the perfume of our linen closet, for the block prints on bedspreads that ornamented my periphery as a child. That I’d trace with my fingers, authoring elaborate stories merely by fixating on the frequency of a pattern. On pinks that were once red or purples that faded to blue. I am sick too for running errands with my father, accompanying him to the shoe cobbler. The smell of Barge cement and leather intoxicated me. And then, after, to the bank, where the tellers were flirts, I thought. They reminded me of Law & Order ADAs. That variant of tall white woman beauty. Strong jaws. Skirt-suited. Cleft sternum bones in sight.
I am sick too for the sanctuary of a home with a piano that never got used; a mother whose pardoning mien meant dust collected and papers piled, and a stray baby shoe was saved. It sits on a bookshelf in her home; the way objects in museums are no longer objects but artifacts.
I am sick for those years when I was paying attention without purpose. When I was arranging stories free of import, and when my imagination could draw courage instead of warrant that I stay in.
I am sick for days of the week. They carried more meaning when I was younger. Nowadays dates are what are significant. We save them. Save up for them. Cancel them. Plan ahead while our calendars fill up fast and Tuesday, on its own, means little. I am sick for Tuesday.
I am sick for using change to buy lime popsicles. Sick for slamming doors to emphasize my temper. I am sick for not perceiving winter. For being unbothered by February’s frost; what I now observe as twenty-eight days of sky reflecting street slush. A whole spectrum of gray. I am sick for packing a snowball but being too shy to throw it and so I’d carry it in the gloved pillow of my palm like a pet snowball.
I am sick for using small scissors to cut cardboard hearts; for gluing them on paper doilies and writing someone’s name with felt marker. I am sick for cardboard and paper and markers, and the time it took to make things before gifting them. How the world subsides when you’re carefully inscribing each letter of someone’s name in calligraphy you’ve reserved for special occasions.
I am sick for my incorruptibility. Sick for believing. Sick for my body before. Before I’d ever noticed I was in possession of one. Before full-lengths. Before I knew anything about valleyed collarbones, a stomach’s folds, smooth legs, small wrists.
I am sick not for innocence as merely asylum, but innocence as custom. After a rainstorm, amid the general chaos of a home and what still needed to get done—laundry, dinner, dishes—my mother would always remark on the smell. I am sick for the custom of my mother looking up to smell the gospel of wet ground.
I am sick for wearing orange. For those years when I knew nothing about the need to abide. When I smiled with my teeth.
I remember the cool touch of my mother’s palm on my forehead before bed and how both my parents had a thing for my brother’s and my foreheads. How they’d push my hair back and cup the top curve of my skull, and tenderly point to the chipped shape of a chicken pox scar dented into my nose. Briefly in those moments, my mother or father looked, all told, peaceful. Abundant with zero trace of the day’s bulk. It was as if in their minds that smooth plane of skin above my eyes kept me small. Would keep me small and hold back time, so long as it never outgrew the size of their palms.
Because I doubt any parent is ever ready to part with his or her child’s smallness. That beautiful delusion of believing the whole universe is compacted into a tiny frame. Thinking back, the deep well of love my parents have for their two children, the labor and restorative leisure of it, even if we’ve outgrown certain comforts and warred at times over life and where it’s taken us; even if I go days without a consequential phone call with them and sound curt and ungrateful when asking for a favor; their love has never been—not once—hesitant. This much I know.
The morning we found the squirrel, I watched from my window as my mother balanced the net’s long pole, using her whole body to dip it over and place the dead squirrel … where exactly? Near the rhododendron? Here’s where my memory goes static. Here’s where I wonder if maybe it was my brother who scooped the squirrel from the pool. If so, did he grin mischievously, threatening to hide the dead squirrel under my bed? Does it matter? Here’s where I realize maybe it wasn’t even a school day and I was simply mad at my mother for some crimped and fiery but unnamed daughter reason having to do with being a daughter with a mother. Here’s where I worry that my recall is, in fact, some ramshackle excus
e for recall.
What I’m sure of is the dead squirrel’s body and how I can’t unsee its dark brown corpse like a blotch of balsamic in our aqua-blue pool. That house, its backyard, the lilac bush, my green shag carpet, the older girls, the boys, the squirrel, still wind me up. Like omens I neglected, like apprehensions I would only later—much, much later—understand as how my body was, in its way, anthologizing my childhood.
3
Miserable
PRONOUNCED miz, as in Ms. magazine. Uh as in an expression of hesitation. And rull, as in rhymes with dull. In my family, when someone is miserable, we say miz-uh-rull. We say it like this because, as a kid, I couldn’t pronounce the word miserable. The B sound eluded me. I couldn’t push beyond that second syllable and form the last two: the ruh. The bull. It was as if I was encumbered by the word’s very meaning; too dejected to complete it. miz-uh-rull, it turns out, was my very own, self-styled onomatopoeia. Whatever inextricable despair I was experiencing at the age of three, it outdid me.
Some babies, once born, remain unready. Despite our smallness we are in possession of a lair of apprehension, chambered in order to lodge how estranged we feel when someone, say, tosses us a ball. Or expects from us pure jubilation the first time we encounter a Slinky. As a child, a Slinky stalled on a flight of steps caused me acute stress. The way it would cede to its coils—sometimes pause and appear to levitate—and then fail, abandoning all momentum. I couldn’t cope with the suspense. In photographs, my little hands are holding each other tight, or gripped around my wrists like clamps. Concern, far beyond my scope, was compacted into me.
There’s something about a distraught child that is instantly significant. She gets it: the world is often ten seconds away from tasting like cold french fries. The world can assert itself like a category-3 shitstorm of major letdowns, and minor ones too, which I’ve learned are harder to make peace with because they are somehow inexpressible. Averting one’s attention; reacting unreasonably with no tools to recuperate; seeking sanctuary in the company of friends, who are also unprotected from feeling wrecked; mending on an empty stomach; experiencing life as if you’re watching it from behind a shoulder-high wall—ducking when it’s too much, peering over to discover more, both wise to and oblivious of everything out of view, rashly tossing your effects over the ledge and starting over with nothing. The illusion of nothing, that is. There’s no suitable language for feeling adrift when on paper you seem all right. Arguing with yourself into becoming someone else is next to impossible. And then the world disappoints. And no amount of interpretative power could have prepared you.
Perhaps I’m still too young to have ideas occur to me. Perhaps I learn and then forget. I’ve Googled many times what poison ivy looks like and I still can’t identify it. Perhaps I’m still unready to conceive of a life entirely my own because I’m preoccupied with the quality of blue in pictures of my parents before I was born. At twenty-nine—that cusp, almost craning, turgid age—I so badly miss hearing, of all things, my father fill the dishwasher, precisely, just as he’s always done. Or how he still yells into the phone when he’s speaking long-distance, to an uncle in India. How expressions of deep love in Bengali somehow boom throughout the house like disagreements might in English.
And what about life’s near-invisible blips: those private ones like an email from my mother at 9:04 on a Thursday morning. “Just saying hi,” she writes. I know she sent it from her computer, in her study, sitting at her desk of papers where, I imagine, in order to press the ENTER key, she has to brush aside the corner of a loose page—maybe her class schedule or minutes from a meeting. My mother’s papers are overgrown. A jungle. My mother’s Just saying hi is meant and sent with every atom of her mother brain, body, heart. She misses me. A mother’s lowercase hi is catastrophic. It’s the apple grabbed from the bottom of a pyramid display. I hadn’t meant to be hungover on a Thursday morning, and yet. The culpability that accompanies daughterhood—while it might fade over the years—never fully lets up. I’d estimate even, it reestablishes itself. A whole planet of worry that’s working in collusion with that part of my gut trained to fear the absolute worst when someone leaves a voicemail or when a friend texts “K.”
When I search the word miserable in my inbox, most of the results are from friends who’ve had colds. Who were writing to say, “I can’t make it tonight.” Miserable, in these cases, connotes the purely physical. A runny nose and fever, a sinus infection. The morning after a bad bout of food poisoning. Miserable meaning a weakened state.
Then of course there is the quality of being a deplorable person. It comes up in my inbox with regards to men. Miserable men. In one email, I mention to a male friend how a movie I’d recently seen is centered on miserable men. I go on to complain that there aren’t enough movies about miserable women, but I’m careful to distinguish how miserable women are fundamentally different from unlikable women. In the email I sound superior, as if I’m trying to impress this male friend, who I’ve now come to realize is perhaps one of the most miserable men I’ve ever met. I’ve since decided that miserable men, unlike miserable women, are, in fact, unlikable too.
In 2009, one friend uses miserable while Gchatting with me. It’s a Monday and she’s recapping her Friday night. My friend describes how she spent the night overcome with jealousy, having thought she saw her girlfriend flirting with another woman. My friend tells me how she felt “miserable and then crazy for feeling miserable.” This, I’ve decided, is an excellent use of the word. Feeling miserable is, by nature, a spiraling condition. Almost antigravity despite its Eeyore gloom. It’s a looping state with that touch of screwball. Miserable, I’ve decided, might be the most good-humored way to characterize being in a bad mood.
My father, however, uses the word miserable differently than anyone else. In an email from long ago, he worries, for instance, that my brother is making a “miserable salary.” Or that the bathroom in the apartment I’ve applied to live in is “just miserable.” When he writes, It’s your decision, he means, What are you thinking?
In 2012, he keeps me informed about my mother’s sister’s cancer treatment. The chemo she’s undergoing leaves her feeling, he says, miserable. When your mother’s big sister feels miserable—the aunt who’s made and custom-decorated all the birthday cakes for all the cousins, dyeing shredded coconut and piping buttercream roses—there’s really nothing to be felt, because your entire body becomes a wound. In the hospital, in bed, not wearing eyeliner or her glasses, she probably looked lost.
It’s clear to me when my father says miserable, he means it in a way that makes me wonder if I learned it, all those years ago when I was buckled into my OshKosh overalls, from him. If you’ve ever had a sad parent, then you’ve grown up learning how to perceive sadness when it’s being expertly concealed from you. When it occurs merely in how someone needs to conjure spare strength for basic tasks like pushing his arm through his winter coat sleeve or needing to sit at a slight remove from those other parents huddled close on the park’s bleachers during a match. You’ve not so much witnessed sadness but sleuthed it. You’ve absorbed it, and, without understanding what it is, you might even mimic it. You’ve acquired a capacity for providing conciliatory silence. So silent even that one day on the way to work, my father, who every day dropped me off at day care before heading to the office, completely forgot I was sitting in the backseat. When he pulled into his parking spot and turned off the car, I said, “Baba, no day care today?” He turned around and gasped.
When I consider the context, there is a measure of charm to this piece of my childhood. Miz-uh-rull sounds less like an adjective and more like a collective noun. Like a miz-uh-rull of stalled Slinkys. Of wet basset hounds. Of empty seats, front row. Of stale restaurant rolls. Of introverts at orientation. Like a miz-uh-rull of Knicks fans. Or a miz-uh-rull of tossed Christmas trees on the sidewalk, well into January. A miz-uh-rull of—they can’t help it—tuba players. A miz-uh-rull of tents in the rain. Dogs during fireworks. Dela
yed passengers at the gate. A miz-uh-rull of self-help books in the “Free, Please Take” pile. A miz-uh-rull of tangled necklaces. A miz-uh-rull of boarded-up storefronts by the beach. A miz-uh-rull of friends at a party listening to Whitney—she gets us moving, she’s voltaic, a flash storm in D major—only to abruptly and quite mutually all feel the wrench of Wow, she’s really gone. All of a sudden, you’re a miz-uh-rull of friends listening to Whitney Houston.
The other day I was FaceTiming with my father and stepmother. I can’t be sure what we were talking about, but it was evening and I was sensing, more so than usual, the current of daughterhood. It sneaks up on me when I can spot in the background, perimetered by my screen, their umbrella tree, for instance, and how it reinvents them, outside of me. Living their routines, watering their plants, going about their days. The phone will ring at theirs and it’s Ray. Who is Ray?
After we did some catching up, I could tell my parents were about to turn on the television and watch the news, so I said—though it wasn’t true—that I was meeting a friend. I pushed my face closer to the screen and waved like a maniac to suppress those tears that aren’t tears, exactly, but a warming of my face, because my body reacts disobligingly, and confounds goodbye with just bye. Though I’d hoped to say, in jest, in some wimpy grown-daughter way, how this evening I was feeling vaguely miz-uh-rull, the call was already over. They’d pressed END, and the rude slight of my face was reflected back to me. How is it that coming upon one’s likeness, my own face, can feel like an unsolicited affront? Vulgar. A harsh blow, not just to my vanity but also to my personhood. My screen-lit contours—somehow soupy—and the blunt quiet in my apartment were, momentarily, impassable. Those seconds that followed the call were a miz-uh-rull of seconds. A reminder of how damning too late can feel.