Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  14

  At My Least and Most Aware

  NOT much has changed. I’m still a difficult woman who startles easy. I still forget to wash the apple before I eat it. I’m still oddly thankful for the rush of hot air let off from the sides of buses. Like things could be hotter, grosser. I’m still doubtful my stories possess a clear point. The sound of men gulping water still bothers me. I still interrupt. I’m still unprepared for how unusual it feels to receive a postcard; the traveled touch of card stock; of tapered handwriting chasing vertically up the side, allowing for a squished, tender sign-off. Thinking of you. Miss you. An unforeseen Yours. Even the faint sound of a postcard falling through my mail slot and landing on my floor is, somehow, still enchanted.

  I still prefer counting to fourteen instead of ten. I still don’t mind, perhaps I even like, ice cream’s cold swallow rising up my throat so I can swallow it back down again. I still only have nightmares when I take naps. I still wonder what stops me, what version of me would exist had I let someone take my picture when I was younger, wearing a bikini with my hair up, while in the background an out-of-focus lake contrives to mislay the mood. Because hanging over pictures of lakes and girls and summer is the impression, often, of a missing person.

  I still have trouble discerning between loneliness and solitude, and Sundays, and Schubert’s sonatas. I’m still dismally unfunny; restless when I sit on grass; too much of a daughter to forget about the dead. Even though I own none, I still love the size of LP records. Their square, tactile bigness. And I still believe that people who buy them and collect them aren’t snobs at all, but true blues. A record sleeve is unwieldy. To hold one is to sometimes appear like you’re hugging one.

  It still comes as a shock to me how irreversible life is. How there’s no going back to whatever version of me existed before I saw that movie—the kind that switches me on to new streaks of consciousness by showing me a woman I feel strangely, formerly, acquainted with. Or watching Spielberg instill in me not a fear of sharks but a love for movie sound tracks and their wily, persuasive ploy to make my innermost thoughts sing. Or before I took pleasure in doing nothing, before I figured out there’s no one way to live, before I tasted city smog outside another city’s airport and knew right then that I was a city kid. Or before I felt my father weep into my arm the night his mother died, or took Angela’s class fall semester and read Marguerite Duras’s account of a river and its current, a girl, a lover, a mother, of memory’s weakness for women and gold lamé heels. Or when I was woken up by the news and this planet’s despairing chorus—how it dislocates the heart and coaxes cynics and makes a mass out of individuals. Or whatever version of me existed before I met that boy whom I loved for one winter and well into spring, when the magnolias in early bloom looked not just pink but elaborate, ambient, and grand, like my insides were seeable—flowering so forcefully, like nature cautioning me: Durga, this won’t last.

  I still get shivers on the hottest summer days. I still think feeling startled, for instance, by a Post-it unsticking from my wall or by fluff flying in front of my nose is a subliminal reminder that I am alive and that being alive is a beta test full of little frights. I still confuse being misunderstood with feeling shame. I’m still hungriest when it’s not quite dinner or when it’s way past several bedtimes that would have allowed for a sensible sleep. I still believe it’s impossible to experience anxiety sitting on a veranda and, contrary to popular imagery, possible to experience sharp panic in proximity to the ocean, the spray of waves, and the crescent sweep of a beach.

  I still imagine my brain is peanut-sized, especially when I can’t understand how bridges are built over large bodies of water; especially when I consider painters who paint hands that reflect a life and writers who thoughtfully clarify what is halfway known to them yet somehow lingering.

  I’m still drawn to—since childhood—violet and lavender accents: hand towels in a guest bathroom; O’Keeffe’s leaves and Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes; the insides of Dumbo’s ears; Sherbrooke metro’s louvered ceilings; Helen Frankenthaler’s rinsed, puddled shores. Agnès Varda in a crowd.

  Recently, my mother said to me while driving, “People don’t change.” I had just seen someone from my past, and the encounter had been tense and artificial. We labored, he and I, over niceties. Listening to him felt like work. It was as though we were both trying to retrieve a mutual tenderness that had fallen from our hands and rolled into a storm drain. How unfamiliar it now was to merely look at him, and as it happens, unresolved arguments that now felt colorless managed to creep back in. We weren’t fighting so much as reusing old motivations to rile the other person up. Like testing to see if they still worked. It was, I’ll concede, wonderfully juvenile. Unfortunately, the verbal construction of rehashing—of jaggedly saying something again and again, just differently—debilitates. We returned to that whole district of emotions, long forgotten. It was unavailing. Impaired and confining. It’s bunker-speak. “Let me rephrase” might be the tautest way to try to win someone over.

  So I listened to this person I once called “Baby, Boy, Babe” until I’d hit my limit or, perhaps, found my stride. I interrupted and said something rude. Cutting, cruel, and unnecessary. How else to protect the momentum I’d accumulated over the last little while? I’m sure there’s a better way to do it—to be gracefully immune—and yet, these rare mutinous flashes are satisfying. We both agreed it had been unwise to meet up. “A bad idea,” he said. Foolish, I later told my mother.

  * * *

  “I’m telling you,” my mother insisted while we were stopped at a red light. “People don’t change.” My mother was, I gathered, speaking about someone from her past in order to empathize with mine. It’s been lovely in adulthood to share this changed design for connecting with my parents. I am now in possession of a history that, like theirs, often pulls. We can relate without laying bare all the details. Like speaking alongside; a new responsiveness that doesn’t pry.

  Because even though I am still their youngest—taller, wiser, yet happiest when I am barefoot in their home eating sliced fruit—I have outlived an impasse; many even. I can identify what constitutes a dilemma, a big drama, and the difference between the latter and a minor, reparable scrape. Like the stuff that goes on in those early-morning hours, eased by tequila’s burn and a decoy debt to stay out. Like the hurt we cause when we’ve been enduring too much in silence and have started to trust our own fixed claim that everything is okay.

  But being barefoot in my parents’ home. Eating fruit. Standing barefoot just outside the front door. Is there a symbol for return more comprehensive than that? It’s pleasure mingled with nostalgia and the quick fix shelter provides—how it lightens but also strikes at the heart. How standing barefoot on the steps outside is repossessing for both the parent who is admiring and the child—now grown—who has come around to “home,” not just as a place but as an idea she can tend to. A belief that it’s possible to let one’s guard down and enjoy the emotional knowledge that orbits a home and the memories, while not all good, that confirm her. The sound of onions browning on the stove and the charismatic flop of a daughter’s shoes kicked off by the door safeguard the story of a family.

  But.

  But. While my mother said, “People don’t change,” what she meant is, I’d estimate: I shouldn’t try to change a person. That the effort exerted is often ineffectual and upsetting. Nobody adjusts himself or herself, unless prompted first, by some interior gurgling. Some deep mobilizing. Urgency forms in the belly. And change, I’ve come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. The body’s clever ways for communicating shifts can make a person crazy, but also move a person toward life.

  In suggesting I shouldn’t attempt to alter how this person from my past thinks or finds his focus, my mother also meant: Be wary of overvaluing what he gives. Be cautious of how proportioned my ability to love is with how impressionable I become. What moves him to create belongs discretely
to him. What lights him up from inside and incites growth is what will ultimately specify his dimension. Not me.

  I think that’s what my mother meant, anyway. And as she kept driving and our talk turned to dinner, I stayed half present, obligated to my nerve center and that funny way a car’s window offers a scrim for me to solemnize and star in some mini scenario. To emotionally migrate yet stay put. Because the gray zip of highway, those accompanying blimp clouds, and a passing swath of people all provide the perfect blur for seeing things not as they stand but as I’d like them to, in time, reel out.

  What is it about moving on that maroons me? What is it about recuperating from a failed relationship that feels nearest to a slow-drip, unconcealed crack-up? Are the many lives we’ve lived immortal? And which is more crucial: That I regenerate or that I carry? That I hold true, build upper-body strength, expand on my catalog of what I consider fun, or wear more navy because it’s not quite black and faintly adjusts frame of reference, and hesitates between looking meant and like a mistake. Or do I squarely retain this person—his textures, how he concentrated my world. Or do I develop an improved tendency for reclaiming myself? Do I double over, obsess, fly in the face of, listen to my mother, be still?

  I’m not sure what I believe. That not much has changed is, all at once, off-putting and also pleasing. Like reinforcements. Even the bad bits, like the boy I used to call Boy. Whom I still care about and think about, particularly when there’s nobody else I’d rather sit next to on those strange afternoons when freak dread sends nameless pangs my way and all I want is a person to be my pillow so I might feel less random, spinning, negligible. A person who listens while I don’t finish my thoughts because maintaining completeness grows tiresome. A person so acquainted with my treasury of reluctance, with the lines of my body, that I forget I have one, and he forgets he has one, and limbs become logs to rest our heads on, and are we even people anymore? Or merely two souls whose condition is best described as “awaiting clearance.”

  Or, perhaps, the only way to track change is to acknowledge these constants as a criterion that habituates me. I’ll always need those steps outside my parents’ home—some aspect or imprecise concept of them—where I can sit and watch the light dim as the evening breeze makes nice with the day’s complaints, and as I hear a small dog jingling before I see him trot past, and as my appetite builds because just inside, so amazingly close, are my parents cooking dinner. The sound of which has never changed. Utensils sliding in a drawer, the fridge opening and sealing closed, a knife’s thwack, the slight chime of glasses knocking against plates, the quick shuffle to make room at the table for something piping hot, and the loving “Careful!” that strikes curt.

  The many overall movements of a home, required to sit down and eat, are, especially with family, somehow impersonal. Particular yet detached. Everything becomes concrete. The fork is a familiar fork. The clatter is mindless. Potatoes are matter-of-fact. There is love; it lives in the practical details. A family is more than it shows. That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, is, I reason, the hope. The discord, the din, what stays the same, what reappears, what’s underneath, the misremembered and all there is to fathom. Growing up, for a long period that’s not worth mentioning here, I thought the expression was “Play it by year.” As in, take your time. A whole year. More. Whatever you need. There’s no rush.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my editor, Emily Bell, for her willingness and heart. For understanding this project’s roving, inconclusive zigzags even when I didn’t. Thank you to Maya Binyam for her thoughtful notes, often near-telepathic. Thank you to Jonathan Galassi, who wasted no time and asked me what I wanted to make real. Thank you to Rodrigo Corral. Thank you, FSG.

  Luc Sante, thank you for getting this whole thing going. Dayna Tortorici, for suggesting this title was not someone else’s but in fact mine.

  I am grateful to Gaylord Neely, Chris and Carla, and November in Provincetown. Thankfulness to Lena Dunham for counsel and reading early drafts. Kim Witherspoon for her strong, good sense and for inspiring in me new exciting wants. Hilton Als, for Christmas and for reminding me to keep those near who allow me to hear the voice in my head. Tavi Gevinson for the walks, the correspondence, the nook, the deep love and care you give to connecting.

  Some minor changes were made to previously published essays, those edited by Doree Shafrir, Mark Lotto, Jessica Grose, and Haley Mlotek. Thank you for saying, Run with it.

  Sarah Nicole Prickett: I’m so happy that we met. Isn’t it wonderful when we’re in different time zones? When we get four chances at 11:11? Thank you for being maddeningly good at finding, in your words, the stray gesture. Teddy Blanks, thank you for encouraging me to write about what’s off to the side. For going to the movies with me.

  Collier Meyerson, Jenny Zhang, Doreen St. Felix, my sisters in daughterhood: You’ve been so impactful. Thank you for how you write and what you write about. For introducing me to your families. What a privilege. Katherine Bernard for re-centering me when this project needed it. Fiona Duncan for sending me into outer space.

  Thank you Max Neely Cohen for book talk, ball talk, reassuring me through this process, and answering all my questions no matter what time of day.

  Gratitude to Echo Hopkins, Tait Foster, India Nicholas, Rachel Levy, Bryn Little, Mark and Deirdre Silverman, Jackie Linton, Lucy Morris, Heben Nigatu, Ayesha Siddiqi, Amy Rose Spiegel, Ross Scarano, Ashley Ford, Jazmine Hughes, Sam Axelrod, Ian Blair, Dana Drori, Marcelo Gomes (Dear M., the conversations, so many that we’ve had, are in here), Katie Baker, Judnick Mayard, Arabelle Sicardi, Cord Jefferson, Akiva Gottlieb, Zoë Worth, Almitra Corey, Jesse Klein, Lauren Smythe, Vinson Cunningham, Monika Woods, and Brian Morton.

  My family—from day one and as we grow—Dolores, Rana, Lisa, Mritiunjoy, Siraj, Kim, and Willis. I’d be spinning or stuck doing something I don’t love if it weren’t for you. You are my light.

  A Note About the Author

  Durga Chew-Bose is a Montreal-born writer. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, Filmmaker, The New Inquiry, and The Guardian, among other publications. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Heart Museum

  2. Part of a Greater Pattern

  3. Miserable

  4. Gone!

  5. The Girl

  6. Idea of Marriage

  7. Moby-Dick

  8. D As In

  9. Since Living Alone

  10. Tan Lines

  11. Summer Pictures

  12. Some Things I Cannot Unhear

  13. Upspeak

  14. At My Least and Most Aware

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Copyright

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 2017 by Durga Chew-Bose

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2017

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Chew-Bose, Durga, author.

  Title: Too much and not the mood: essays / Durga Chew-Bose.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016041344 | ISBN 9780374535957 (paperback) | ISBN 9780374714680 (e-book)

  Subjects: BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | POETRY /
American / Asian American.

  Classifications: LCC PS3603.H49 A6 2017 | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041344

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