Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  I was also someone’s girlfriend and, subsequently, the emotional commerce of being someone’s ex-girlfriend, or the person whom you write emails to at two in the morning, or the person you might expect to dislike, or the person who finds herself stuck between a plant and a kissing couple at a stranger’s party.

  I was a roommate to three people and a cat, a roommate to one person and two cats, a roommate to someone turned sister, forever.

  I was the loyal friend but also the girl who never answers her phone but who will text back immediately: sorry. everything ok?

  I was the witness at your wedding, who took a tequila shot with you before City Hall in a bar full of midafternoon men with bellies. They all swiveled right, in unison, as we walked out. You in silver-plate heels and me in black linen overalls.

  I was the woman whose shoulders are too bony to lean on but whose thighs have cushioned his naps in that hour on Sunday before dinner when the hangover has worn off and the sleepy sets in.

  All of these relationships, crucial as they were and are, accelerate involuntarily. Being Someone’s Someone is cozy in theory—a snug image like two letter Ss fitting where the convex meets its concave. Unfortunately, I felt little of that snugness. I’d sculpted myself into what feels nearest to apparatus, a piece of equipment that was increasingly capable of delaying my desires. There was always tomorrow, I told myself. There was always next semester, or spring, or the uncanny extent of a summer day. Or winter. Or winter, she says. The most fictional of seasons because winter is lit for the most part with lamps and candles and, in some cases, the arbitrary oranges of a fireplace instead of the natural brightness, say, of the sun. Winter’s wheaty indoor amber glow emboldens the bluesiest approach to oneself, which is by nature the easiest to deny. But repudiating the would-be is a quality that many women can attest to no matter the season, because from a very young age we were never young.

  I can wiggle my way into small spaces. I’m more flexible than I appear. I sleep in the fetal position. I do everything in my power to stifle a second sneeze, and if that fails, I apologize mid-sneeze. Because I have a low pain threshold, I seem to have developed, as a reaction, a high tolerance for the swell and plummet of other people’s moods. And so I whittled myself away because—and this is where as a writer I duck and cover—I’ve been for most of my life confusing the meaning of words. I’ve confused privacy with keeping secrets, for example, and caring with giving.

  3.

  In the past my response to conflict was, by some means, bogus math. Prescriptive as though the advent of apology was, I was convinced, my first move. Figuring myself into the equation would come second because I had disciplined my definition of “relationship” into rationale. Ensure he feels proud of his work before you can focus on yours. Read little into what she said last night; she’s having a hard time. Listen. Listen better. Master listening.

  But living alone is the reverse of mastery. It’s scuttling around in surrender while hoping you don’t stub your toe, because living alone is also a series of indignities like bouncing around on one foot, writhing in pain. Living alone is an elaborately clumsy wisening up.

  Since moving into this apartment on the fourth floor of a building just one street over from my previous place, I regularly trip over things: shoes, computer cables, the leg of a chair, and of course, ghost things too strike. Just yesterday I placed a clean pot back on the top shelf of my kitchen cabinet only to have it slide back out and conk me on the head with such aggression that when I yelled FUCK, everything went silent: my buzzing fridge, the patter of rain on my air-conditioning unit, the slow and sped-up metronomic tick that resides inside of me and competes with my heartbeat for what really compels me. Any vain attempt to expect jokiness, for instance, from a pot that mysteriously falls on my head no longer exists. Since living alone, grievances occur in silence. Deep and shallow thoughts court and compose me like deep and shallow breaths.

  4.

  As someone whose central momentum is having connected, similar to the high of having written, my life before living alone was, to exaggerate, one very long practice session. I’d been avoiding myself with such ease that even when an obstacle presented itself—like the pained limits of a friendship that had run its course—my response was to adapt around it the way we circle street construction on our way to the subway without much thought, as if the ball and sockets of our hip joints, anticipating those orange pylons, swerve so as to save our distracted selves from falling into crater-sized holes.

  Avoidance can be elegant, certainly, because elegance, like restraint, is a spectacle that assuages. Even the word—avoidance—smooth as if meant solely for cursive’s sleek lines; a speedy unthinking gesture like one’s signature.

  Edmund White once wrote about Marguerite Duras in The New York Review of Books: “Her work was fueled by her obsessive interest in her own story and her knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event.” In less than thirty words, a tally of four hers.

  I count living alone as, in a manner of speaking, finding interest in my own story, of prospering, of creating a space where I repeat the same actions every day, whetting them, rearranging them, starting from scratch but with variables I can control or, conversely, eagerly appeal to their chaos. I can approximate what time it is on sunny mornings by glancing at the frontiered shadow that darkens on the building adjacent to mine, casting a crisp line that cuts the building’s sandy-yellow brick, lowering notch by notch as quarter past six all of a sudden becomes seven. It takes me fourteen steps from my bed to my bookshelves and nine steps to walk from my front door to the globe lamp I’ve propped on a stool under a wall I’ve half decorated, of which a poster I’ve framed hangs asymmetrically next to nothing more than blank white wall. That globe lamp is the first light I turn on when I return home. For nine steps when I walk in at night, after shutting my front door and placing my keys on their hook, I navigate the slumbered mauve and moonlit darkness of my space. It welcomes me, the darkness.

  5.

  Living alone, I’ve described to friends, is like waking up on a Saturday and realizing it’s Saturday. That made-up sense of repartee with time. Abundance felt from sitting upright in bed; the weight of one’s duvet vanquishing, by some means, all accountability. Rarely traveling for half of last year and staying in my new place all to my own was similar to the emotional pluck those first few sips of red wine supply, or from riding the subway after seeing a movie; riding it the length of the city only to forget that this train rises aboveground as it crosses the East River, suddenly washing my face with sunlight or, in the evening, apprising my reflection in the train’s window with the tinsel of Manhattan’s skyline.

  Precision of self was a quality I once strived for, but since living alone, clarity, I’ve learned—when it comes—furnishes me with that thing we call boldness. Self-imposed solitude developed in me, as White wrote about Duras, a knack for improving on the facts with every new version of the same event. Living alone, I soon caught on, is a form of self-portraiture, of retracing the same lines over and over—of becoming.

  There’s just one problem. Nothing catches me off guard quite like suddenly—sometimes madly—seeking the company of someone else.

  In those moments, loneliness imposes temporary amnesia. How did I end up here? Had I lectured myself into some smug and quarantined state of solitude? Was living alone analogous to the emotional moat I construct around myself whenever I listen to one song on repeat, again and again?

  Becoming is precarious terrain, and in spending so much time on my own, I had perhaps developed in solitude an acute distrust of myself. Seeking, I’ve since learned, is okay. How many women, I wonder, caught off guard by an unexpected stream of tears, have walked to their bathrooms and glanced at their faces in the mirror? A brief audit: dewy eyes, flush cheeks, damp and darkened bottom lashes that cling like starfish legs, but mostly the way my face, shook by what is happening, to the daze of unforeseen peril, finds solace in all the inexp
licables that on some days come at me with suggestive force. I am a daughter, I remember, with parents whom I can call. I was once someone’s girlfriend for those formative girlhood-spun-sovereign years, so that’s surely something I’ve carried. What else?

  I tend to forget or, rather, rarely cash in on the proximity of people. If I wanted, I could walk a few blocks and find a friend, a friend who is likely experiencing coincidental gloom, because if there’s one thing I know to be true about New York friendships: they are intervened time and again by emotional kismet. Stupid, unprecedented quantities of it. We’re all just here, bungling this imitation of life, finding new ways of becoming old friends.

  6.

  There’s a painting by one of my favorite artists, the Swedish painter Karin Mamma Andersson, titled Leftovers. In it, a woman is depicted living in her apartment, occupying the space in five separate moments of time. Sleeping. Dressing or showering, it’s hard to tell. Sleeping once more. Washing her face. Going out. The space has the meticulously worn character of a stage: set-designed attributes like a lone chair, blouses flopped on a coffee table, and the miniature dollhouse-like synthesis of square footage. In this way, Leftovers reminds me of my apartment. A collection of stuff, all hers.

  Parsing Andersson’s painting was, for one summer, a pastime of mine because I had chosen it as my laptop wallpaper. Staring intently at this anonymous woman’s space, her camel coat and mustard floor lamp, her bathroom sink—too low, as most bathroom sinks are—I began to endow her anonymity with qualities of my own. These are the games we play as women because, since birth, interior spaces have been sacred; have been where we imagine furniture mounted on ceilings or marvel at the weight of curtains and fabricate for fun what lies behind them.

  Perhaps she too leans against her kitchen sink in the morning as she sips coffee, worrying without right about everything, or cruelly and quite shamefully envisioning the funeral of someone she loves. Perhaps in living alone, she, like me, experiences self-voyeurism, self-narration, self-spectatorship more sharply than ever before. Doing domestic things like the dishes or dumb young things like ordering takeout while perhaps still drunk the next morning. Both versions of me, since living alone, have settled into a one-woman show that I star in and attend, that I produce and buy a ticket for, but sometimes fail to show up to because, as it happens, living alone has only further indulged the woman—me—who cancels a plan to stay in and excitedly ad-libs doing nothing at all.

  And yet, I’ll still attempt pursuing these delusions in spite of reality’s firm hand, in spite of that which keeps us indoors: money, panic, books that lay in piles near my Nikes, books I absentmindedly begin reading instead of tying my laces and walking out the door.

  7.

  The first thing I ate in 2015 was a pear my friend Katherine left at my place on Christmas Eve. The pear, brown and stout as if missing its neck, was a pear unused, spared from a dessert she had prepared for dinner that night. Something with cinnamon and whiskey and perhaps another ingredient. Lemon juice? Before leaving, she placed the brave little stray on a shelf in my fridge. It sat there for seven days and eight nights, wrapped in a plastic bag that clung to its coarse skin as if suffocating it. Pears, I thought whenever I’d open my fridge during those haphazard days that wane between Christmas and New Year’s. Pears should never be wrapped in plastic. Paper, I concluded, is what suits.

  It’s likely this notion has something to do with The Godfather, the second one, because one of my favorite scenes in the trilogy occurs moments after Vito Corleone has unfairly lost his job yet still returns home to Carmela carrying a pear wrapped in newspaper. He gently places the gift on their table while she busies herself in the kitchen, and in those few seconds I’ve always been taken by what I can only describe as the privacy of kindness. Those moments leading up to—that anticipate—the testimony of kindness. Kindness before it has been felt, before it, by nature of its mutual construction, even exists. Kindness at its clearest.

  On New Year’s morning, I woke up and placed a cutting board on my stovetop and sliced Katherine’s pear in four fat slices that I then halved so as to begin the year with a sense of plenty. I stood at my counter and ate each piece as if I had intended to do so all along, as if I had waited all of 2014 to eat that pear.

  That’s the thing about living alone. Artificial intention blurs with real intention, and sooner or later, more choices than not—like eating a pear first thing in the New Year—seem decisive, so much so that even a pear can deliver purpose, and if you’re lucky, peace of mind too.

  10

  Tan Lines

  COME summer, my reluctance kicks in. It’s as if the sheer persistence of a July day—the sun’s glare, its flecked appraisal of pavement and trees, those bonus evening hours—solicits from me an essential need to withdraw. Thankfully, writing is an indoor sport. Sometimes I go stretches of days without much sun, and even in the swell of midsummer I maintain what could be characterized as my winter pallor. Though pallor might not be accurate. How might I describe my brownness, my very fair brownness, that following winter appears even more fair? What’s the opposite of glowing? Dull? Drab? Run-down? Blah?

  These questions are not as good-humored as they seem but are fixed instead to my tendency for self-scrutiny, activated long ago when I came to understand my sense of belonging—my who-ness—as two-pronged. The beautiful dilemma of being first-generation and all that it means: a reflection of theirs and mine, of source and story. A running start toward blending in among mostly white childhood friends who were rarely curious about my olive-brown skin, the dark shine of my hair, my chestnut eyes. We were kids, after all. We were one another’s chorus, encountering parents—and the elsewhere that entailed for me—only in consonant environments: a birthday party, ballet recitals, rides to the movies in my parents’ burgundy Toyota Previa.

  In terms of family, this elsewhere—my parents’ who-ness—was abundant yet imperceptible. It was my home. Where I ate and slept, and wore big T-shirts to bed, and watched TV, and played Parcheesi, and fought with my brother, and savored the leeway of a Saturday morning, and where I would get scolded for tossing my jacket on the divan, or be corrected for answering a question with “I don’t care” instead of “I don’t mind.”

  And, come summer, I reexperience with particular clarity these accumulations of a home, not merely through memory’s piping but in actions. Despite New York City’s stifling weather, how the air distorts into a muggy mass, I drink hot tea and eat hot soup. It cools me down. Because in that sly way science naturally alloys with what we inherit, I’ve been told since childhood that hot liquids provide remedial chill. This slight reprieve on especially sticky days, I like to imagine, is a discreet reminder that my parents are not always but sometimes right. That the knowledge they’ve imparted to my brother and me is not purely an expression of love but firm testimony of their own provenance, and how what keeps us close reveals itself not just in facsimile but, over time, in what kindly amounts in kernels. An everyday tip, a turn of phrase and its unusual construction, reminders to not sit on my bed with “outside clothes,” for instance, or how in the summer my body yields to the season’s balm with what I’ve come to regard as heritable agency.

  Those beads of sweat that collect on my nose are entirely my Mama’s. The annual, deep-healing effects of humidity on my dry skin; that’s hers as well. If friends come over to my apartment and I offer them “some tea,” those two words conjure my father’s anticipant inflection on scorching weekend afternoons when he sits on our porch having proudly just fixed something without needing to replace it, like the broken nozzle of our gardening hose or the loose legs of a chair.

  In my case, inheritance has never simply been what trickles down through traditions but is also the work required to disallow how those traditions fade. To recover the various genetic dispatches like those from my grandfather Felix, whom I met once, long ago, in Kolkata, in a kitchen, I think, of which I remember little except for the color green. A tablec
loth, maybe. A moss stain on a concrete wall. Perhaps the whole memory is enameled green because for no discernible reason some colors naturally coat nostalgia with geography. India, for me, has always been protected in a layer of green.

  There is also my paternal grandfather, whom I never met, and his wife, my grandmother Thama, whom I did. And there is my other grandmother, who died when my mother was a teenager. Her skin was far darker than mine, a trait I noted as I studied one photo album in particular, confusing the musty scent of protective parchment sheets with what I imagined she herself might have smelled like. I remember foolishly wondering as a child if my much lighter skin was an outcome of brown girls growing up in cold climates. A discordance that epitomized how split I felt between life at home and life outside, overcome and enamored by my white friends and every so often experiencing waves of assimilation met by lulls of wanting nothing more than to seek lineage, move backward, claim the brownness of my skin as I only knew how: through family.

  I became more aware of my skin, as most of us do with our bodies, in adolescence, and especially when summer arrived. Halter tops. Shoulder blades. Crop tops. Sweat stains. Denim skirts. Shorts. A growth spurt marked by how my knees now knocked my bike’s handlebars as I pedaled to the park. The many ways we learned to twist and tie our T-shirts so they’d ride up our stomachs or whorl around our waists. Bathing suits. Boys. The convention of boys in the summer; how, suddenly, they memorialized the season. Still, I became heedful of the sun’s currency on my body. The sun’s signature on my skin and how the contrast of tan lines carried merit. That I was expected to feel virtuous was strange to me. I tanned fast. Brown to dark umber in a matter of hours. But what struck me was this: it was as if my white friends were wearing their tanned skin—bathing in it—as opposed to living in it. The thrill of becoming temporarily dark was, for them, an advantage. It would take me a decade or so, longer even, to consider or be faced with what dark skin means in the world and how my relationship to my skin is further complicated by how fair it is and the access it allows me, and oh, what a luxury to be allowed a decade or more of girlhood in the first place.