Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  When Baldwin asks a question, it does not ferry the inflection. Instead, he issues it declaratively, testing the acoustics of a room. Close your eyes and, sure, Baldwin has a sermonizing tone, but one that bounces like someone hurrying down a flight of stairs without holding the railing. Baldwin’s voice multitasks, and requires of me to pay attention. His words have carried their repercussive meaning into today, so much so that in August when the headlines read “No Fly Zone Over Ferguson,” for a minute, I only heard those words in Baldwin’s voice.

  2.

  My father has taught our two-year-old Welsh terrier, Willis, to “Play dead.” PLAY DEAD, I’ll hear him say when I’m home for a visit, sleeping in and playing dead myself. PLAY DEAD. Two words that I can now never unhear. PLAY DEAD; two words that oppose but aren’t opposites. One is meant to be light: Play! The other is blunt. It moors.

  When Willis hears PLAY DEAD, he lays flat on his side and possums into a jelled state. In those seconds, he is the ultimate state of “dog.” Meaning, he is expectant. A treat is on his horizon. Sometimes Willis will side-eye my father, like, “C’mon, man.” When a dog side-eyes you, the whites of his eyes can deploy more attitude than the most teenaged of teenagers. The most silent depiction of exasperation. A limit has been reached. The dog is letting you know.

  And so, sometimes I’ll stand on our stairs and spy my father saying PLAY DEAD, and even when Willis only half-obliges, my father stills hands him a treat and lies down beside him. In those moments my father is the ultimate state of himself: father first and everything else second. And in those moments when the two of them are playing dead, I quietly climb back upstairs because, as time passes and as I spot my parents doing young, lighthearted things, I’m overrun by some cruel and preoccupying sense that I’m watching the memory of them.

  3.

  There’s a recording of Nina Simone’s “Ain’t Got No,” where Simone, after listing all the things she doesn’t have—a home, shoes, money, class, a country, schooling, children, sisters or brothers—she begins, around the two-minute mark, to list all that she’s got, that “nobody,” she sings, “can take away.” Hair on her head, brains, ears, eyes, a nose, and her mouth. She has her smile too. Her tongue, her chin, her neck, and, my favorite of all, her boobies. When Nina Simone shouts “my boobies” in her syrupy, cool-wail of a voice, it’s as if she’s invented a whole new body part. Boobies. These aren’t just breasts, they’re boobies; they bob and hang. They’re funny and beautiful. They’re boobies. And I can never unhear Nina Simone claiming hers.

  4.

  I was eighteen and hiking with my classmates in Mexico’s Copper Canyon when, while crossing a rope bridge, my foot broke through a rotten plank of wood and I plummeted thirty feet to the ground, landing on a dried-up riverbed of rocks. I don’t remember falling—that was quick like something that didn’t happen. I came to, and I remember the sensation of my tongue touching my gums and the taste of blood, and mostly the pain of vanity—I’d lost some teeth, it was clear. I remember the faces of my classmates rushing toward me and holding my neck and asking if I could wiggle my toes. I remember thinking, lie. Even if I couldn’t wiggle them, I would lie. But I’m a terrible liar, and I remember deliberating on that too. These were my thoughts as blood trickled down my cheeks and as I committed to memory the faces of people I knew, whose faces now were stricken with panic. Warped worried brows and young eyes suddenly wiser because holding back tears will age you. Lips quivered and smiles cracked as I lay there answering questions—my name, the date, where I was—and as I learned by heart, as if studying for an exam, the way John’s eyelids blinked slowly as if allowing himself a few extra seconds to look away from my busted face as he held my hand, or the way our guide spoke at a gentle metric like a robot with a heart.

  The adrenaline that was pumping through me and masking my pain was also prompting my everyday discomforts to surface: I really did and still do hate being the center of attention. I’m no good at answering questions about myself even if they are basic and were meant to address possible head trauma, like, “Durga, what did you eat for lunch?” I stumbled on the word sandwich and couldn’t remember if I’d eaten my apple or if it was still in my pack. Never before had I imagined that misremembering my lunch would yield such concern.

  But what comes to mind most from that day is the sound that slipped from my mouth as my foot fell through the plank. It’s hardly a sound and mostly a breath. A gasp that was cut short, as if sliced by a butcher’s knife: it sounds something like Huh. Huh like the laziest reaction. Like a giving-in to. An agreement, sort of. I can never unhear that gasp. It wasn’t the sound of my life flashing before me. It was the very human understanding that gravity was real and that I was about to fall and that nothing was going to catch me.

  5.

  I can never unhear Allen Iverson saying the word practice. On May 7, 2002, after being eliminated by the Celtics in the first round of the Eastern Conference Championship, Allen Iverson, who was the previous year’s league MVP, gave a different kind of history-making performance: a press conference that lasted almost thirty minutes. For some NBA fans, like myself, Iverson represents a precise time in the sport when the league-small six-foot A.I. played with a conceit that realized miracles on the court, like his rookie year crossover against Michael Jordan. Iverson’s signature crossover was the kind of basketball that could make anyone a fan of the game—the sort of speedy sparring that, even now when you watch clips of him play, unfolds as if there’s a spotlight following him. There was no denying Allen Iverson, and so, when his 2002 press conference, following the 76ers’ elimination from the playoffs and reports that he and coach Larry Brown were at odds with each other, aired, there was a sense that Iverson was working his on-court crossover, off court—choosing to spar with one reporter in particular who brought up the topic of Iverson’s absence from one or two practice sessions. “I’m supposed to be the franchise player,” he responded. “And we in here talking about practice? I mean listen, we’re talking about practice. Not a game! Not a game! We’re talking about practice. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last, not the game, we’re talking about practice, man. I mean, how silly is that? We’re talking about practice.”

  Iverson says the sentence “We’re talking about practice” no less than thirteen times, as if delegitimizing its implication with each slackened delivery of the word practice. Like Iverson freestyling with an opponent for a few seconds only to get low, fake right, and then make a quick crossover dribble to his left and lose a defender entirely, Iverson’s press-conference dissidence was showy but earned. I can never hear the word practice uttered by anyone without Iverson’s disenchanted tone hurtling to mind, because yes: What were they talking about? Practice?

  6.

  In the basement of the funeral home where family were soon to arrive, my mother, my aunt—my father’s older sister—and my stepmother all gathered in a stark white room where my grandmother Thama was lying dead on a table wearing a white sweater blouse and petticoat.

  That morning, my mother had asked if I wanted to join her later as she dressed my grandmother in the sari my aunt had brought—green with a gold trim is how I remember it, but I might be wrong. It could have been navy. I was seventeen at the time and said yes the way seventeen-year-olds say yes. I said, “Sure.” Mostly, I was eager to witness my mother and stepmother in the same room. I was worried they might fight, that someone would yell. Nothing could have prepared me, though, for how silent those next twenty or so minutes would be.

  I walked in behind them, shyly observed my dead grandmother, and proceeded to stand just beyond the door’s threshold, attaching myself to the wall. There we were, five women, one dead.

  My aunt unfolded the sari, and from that moment on, all I heard was: nothing. Nobody spoke. I will never unhear that nothing. It was the loudest nothing I’ve ever experienced. Three women folding and tucking and pleating the silk sari. Forest green, now I remember.
It was a subterranean green, darkening where the sari gathered and glimmering where the gold embroidery caught the room’s awful fluorescent light. They lifted my grandmother and worked around her limp body with a delicate simpatico that was born right there and then. None of these women were particularly fond of one another, but they loved my Thama deeply. Circling her body, they were done quickly. I remember my aunt placing her hand on her mother’s hand, and briefly, death was, I wanted to cry out, the most incredulous, excessive invention.

  I rarely think of that room or the five of us in it—or should I say four? That silence, though, occasionally dawns on me. Noiselessness, I’ve come to learn, is simply how some memories age.

  13

  Upspeak

  AT a wedding in Palm Springs, I met someone whom I’d only previously known through our correspondence online. He’d introduced himself to me four years prior, in an email that opened with, I think, our mutual love of certain film directors and, as it happens, our mutual roster of friends. Since we lived in separate cities, we’d Gchat and email, mostly about movies, and sometimes basketball, and our own projects too. At one point in 2012, we were each writing our own feature-length screenplays. We’d even made it to the second round of a writing-lab competition, and while we were excited for the other person, we weren’t exactly demonstrative with our encouragement. It’s possible I acted cagey when describing what my script was about—possessive to the point of sounding paranoid. Neither of us moved on to the third round. We stayed in touch.

  Now it was May, some years into our correspondence. We were both invited to the wedding of a mutual friend, who was marrying his longtime girlfriend. The plan was to meet in my hotel’s lobby and, with another friend—not the one getting married—cab to a welcome dinner that functioned too as the rehearsal dinner.

  In the lobby we hugged hello and continued casually, uneventfully, catching up. Speaking online for that many years had, I guess, doused all initial nerves. We talked about movies, basketball, how indiscriminately hot the desert is, and how happy we were for our friend who was getting married. I must have talked about palm trees—I can’t help it when I’m in proximity to them. Palm trees pipe my sense of awe into its purest form. Puppies asleep on their sides, lattice piecrusts, and women in perfectly tailored pantsuits generate a similar response. So does young Al Pacino.

  His “sad, lustrous, and doglike eyes,” Lynne Tillman wrote in her 1992 Sight and Sound essay, “Kiss of Death,” describing his performance as “Mikey” Corleone before he transforms into Michael Corleone, when he can still promise Diane Keaton, “That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.” Those young Pacino eyes capsize me. His battery of protean gestures is absorbing. Young Al Pacino makes me giddy. I sink into my chair. I experience the full-blown, bodily preoccupation of having a crush. Watching him is like discovering a long-lost audition tape, because his delivery, then, was intimate, kept, mild. I cover my face. I even once, not long ago, ducked under my desk while watching a scene from The Panic in Needle Park, before Bobby and Helen—played with disconsolate, plain beauty by Kitty Winn—spiral downward together and before Helen is using, when they’re just getting to know each other, actually. Because in this scene, Bobby is eating lunch with Helen, and he’s smiling between sips from his can of Coke, and, well, who am I to survive that smile? The curl of his bottom lip is uncommonly expressive. The stillness of his voltage seduces. He tells Helen, “Don’t just go around leaving people for no reason.” The first time I saw The Panic was the first time I’d heard that sentiment expressed gently. Young Pacino is perfect as a small-time dealer whose speech is fleecy and whose walk is bright. He bounces like he just landed a backflip, like he might be attempting another one, like he doesn’t know how to backflip at all but gets you thinking he can. Playing stickball and claiming he was once the “Babe Ruth of West Eighty-first Street,” or lifting a TV from a van and impishly trying to pawn it off for more money than it’s worth; or the way cigarettes and lollipops dangle from his mouth the same—all of these gestures, blink-moves, and hijinks reduce me to a ridiculous woman. Watching him in Scarecrow, grinning while he towel dries his hair, listening to Gene Hackman tell a story, I float into a state of feeling like my insides are sinking but my body is pirouetting ever so lightly, like a stray feather in no rush to touch down. The last time we ever see him so young is in the second Godfather when Fredo is ordering a banana daiquiri in Havana. Pacino, in those seconds, lets slip a smile only John Cazale could have drawn from him. I could go on. It wouldn’t be hard. Young Al Pacino unsteadies me. Like young Al Pacino might say, terrifically.

  But anyway. Palm trees. Palm Springs. The wedding. My online friend. For whatever reason, at the dinner and then the next day at the ceremony, and then following that, at the reception, I didn’t spend much time with this friend I’d only known, up until now, through our emails. I was distracted. I was reunited with friends from college and dancing in gold sandals I rarely wear, and watching generations of one family dance together. How knees bending at funny angles and sweat mapping the same regions of a shirt are just as heritable as curly hair or a dry sense of humor.

  At sunset, the San Jacinto Mountains turned pink-green shades of lithic tourmaline. It caught me off guard. Their likeness to rear-projection was an embarrassing reminder that I’ve limited my sense of panorama to city skylines. A city’s horizon appears more spatial, believable, and substantive than do mountain ranges. I am mountain illiterate even though mountains are—like nature’s narrative-build in general—the most legible telling of the story of time.

  As the evening progressed, and as the venue’s sequined strings of twinkle lights began blurring with purple bougainvillea vines, and as I was circuiting between the bar and other guests’ untouched plates of cake, I knew it was soon time for bed. First, the hotel pool and then bed. It was a beautiful night.

  A couple weeks after the wedding, the friend who’d shared the cab with us from the hotel to the rehearsal dinner texted me that my online friend had too started emailing with her. He told her it was nice to have finally met me but added, though I can’t understand why, this next bit: he confessed to her that he was surprised by how high-pitched my voice was in person. When she told me what he’d said, I thought, huh. It seemed like the sort of pointless thing one says when trying to make a point without properly making it.

  It’s true. My voice is—I’ve been told on numerous occasions—unlikely. Childlike, almost. Not seductive. Informal. My voice is the voice of one’s own voice when recorded. How it makes us cringe when we hear it. The pitch: elevated. Prohibitively hesitant at times—hooking declarative sentences into questions. I sound hasty. Unthinking. Like I have a wide frame of reference, of which I’ve fallen under the influence, but also of which I haven’t considered with more depth, patience, time. I sound like the next-door neighbor in a situation comedy who always drops by uninvited. I sound like I’m wearing a backpack.

  The older I get, the more my voice seems to disagree with what people perceive of me. Maybe they imagine a more serious tone. Modulated to reflect control. Or starched and matter-of-fact, like I’m reading aloud the instructions for assembling a bookshelf or slow-cooking beef stew. Or maybe people imagine that my voice would be silvery and pleasant. Maybe because in my own writing, descriptions of fruit, of women, of the changing light indoors play determining parts. As does vague melancholia, and the blow of failing to communicate. Perhaps every writer’s long con is how openly she might write about joy, yet flops when experiencing it openly in her life.

  While my voice doesn’t bother me, how its inflection surprises people does. There are worse assumptions to be made, certainly. And yet, this one grates.

  Still, I’ve wondered: Should I try to change my pitch? Should I try to sound more staid? I recently asked my father this question as we both stood in the kitchen, loitering in the quiet that follows a meal. He’d overheard me earlier in the day on a work call with one of my editors, during which I too had heard myself. The
re was, unfortunately, an echo I couldn’t eliminate no matter how many times I tried dialing her again. I heard myself speak the entire call.

  As my father and I stood in the kitchen, I asked him, unseriously, “How can I change my voice?”

  Wiping the counter with a sponge, he thought for a moment. Then he looked up at me, smiling. “You know how to do it?”

  “How?”

  “Stop reacting to everything.”

  We laughed. But just as quick, I considered how depressing that would be. How regulating and unlike me to not be disposed to palm trees, the sharp pleats in a pantsuit, young Al Pacino. How unnecessarily held captive life would feel if I didn’t react. If I wasn’t susceptive and quick to greet what awakens me. My voice is, contrary to whatever insight accommodates how others think I should sound, the most like me. My least restrained quality, it rises and rejoices when the mood suits, and tendrils even when I’m doubtless. It’s how I deliver. How I divulge. It’s my noise. How it rises and falls, and then vaults. My “Oh yeah?” expresses confidence, like I’m willing to bet on something, but also “Oh yeah?”—as in, sincere interest, as in Go on. I could be voicing disbelief or absolute thrill when I begin a thought with “Apparently.” Why give that up? The spoken dexterity.

  From what’s been expressed to me, my voice’s junior quality, let’s call it, could use a bad cold. A ballast. Some sobering. Some humility. A series of milestones that supposedly authorize a woman’s voice.

  On those days when I speak to no one until evening, when I’ve made plans with a friend, only for dinner, so as not to disturb the writing I hope will have been achieved—that so rarely ever is—it’s on those days I forget I can speak. That I am capable of noise. I’ve spent hours molding the silent commotion in my head—a noise in and of itself, not sleek like a setting-loose but inharmonious, like rummaging—that to say anything more simply exhausts. Writing, like the hours that follow a concert, coats me with a static buzzing, well after I’ve closed my computer and rejoined the world. A day spent transmitting tendencies and chasing the occasional, phantom idea that hovers in front of me, only to disappear when I attempt to toss words on it, would—how could it not—take time to cast off. But when I sit down for dinner with a friend, and my first words do come out—cracked, slowed, and flat—and I think, Isn’t that nice? my next reaction is to hurry and recover. To not savor, too warmly, this expected-of-me alternative. Those fixes I arrange myself into. How slippery it becomes to make amendments. The dicey irreparableness of being. I ask the waitress for some water. I clear my throat.