Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  Rewinding two generations and picturing my grandparents before they were even parents is like watching fireworks backward: tinsel swallowed into the night sky instead of spitting out from it. Undoing time for a moment and expunging myself from the record is, strangely, confirmation of my lowercase history. A remembrance of what’s impossible to remember. A sixth sense I’ve long guessed is special to those who are born with leftover matter ferrying them rearward. We’re the type who ask too many questions—an irritating amount, really. But who ask without claim or exigency. The want is the want and it goes on like that. My prelude was a waltz Dulcie loved to dance. She and Felix then, are like Etta James in concert: potential energy.

  On January 8, 1947, they were married. Morning Mass followed by a wedding breakfast, and later, a party. Dulcie’s dress was cut, my mother once told me, from postwar parachute silk. It’s what was available at the time. In the only photograph I’ve seen from that day, the newly married couple’s smile looks ten seconds gone from original mirth. As if the moment has lapsed and the marriage has begun. Dulcie’s white-gloved hand is tucked inside Felix’s elbow so elegantly that conjured quick in my mind are replicas of her hands everywhere: pawing piano keys, buffing brass, folding a handkerchief on its diagonal just so. Steadying her grip on a steel banister as Schroeder, their Labrador, lovingly shoves himself between her legs. Hands like Dulcie’s—long fingers that form a low mountain range from simply resting on the edge of a table—are unmistakable. As with nearly all elegant things, they photograph eerie. The way a rose stem looks arthritic.

  In that same photograph, Felix stands tall, square, and sturdy, wearing his pin-striped suit—the lapels wide. Occasionally my mind wanders to that suit and I’ll consider what happened to it. Where is it hanging? Was it folded into a box? Where do wedding suits end up? Was it given away or did it outlive my grandfather like how a favorite reading chair might outlive its person? The sallow tuft of its seat, eternally styled just for one. Tailored pant legs on anyone else become costume: roomy chutes, flaccid, or goofy and squat. I’ll see old men on the street shrinking into their clothes—trousers girded around mini guts, jacket shoulders too stubborn to sag—and I’ll think about my grandfather.

  He was a large man whom I only met once, when I was three years old, visiting Calcutta for the first time. I have no memory of the trip, though of course I do. I have unintelligible copy. Recall the texture of chiffon. I have the impression of a city, of looking down just in time to skip over a puddle. The sustained toot of car horns. Of bare lightbulbs hanging above fruit stalls at night and sun halos flecking my vision from having peered up at palm trees, absorbed by how they siphon blue sky through their plumed leaves. While I’ve been back to visit over the years, that first trip is, I wonder, when my memory switched into gear. When I began to pile experiences, grafting them without motive—suddenly hyperaware of the cone-shaped hats on the clown pattern on my two-piece pajamas, or how making eye contact with a stranger could seal that stranger’s face in my mind. How now I have at my disposal a whole catalog of strangers’ faces, for no reason at all.

  One image in particular from my first time in Calcutta comes to mind: of me and my cousins, barely clothed, enjoying the hell out of pretend-coiffing Felix’s hair. He’s sitting shirtless at the massive teak kitchen table, noble as ever in an imaginary salon. We’re jumping up and down and standing on our tiptoes, pinching plastic clips into his hair. It’s possible I’ve been described this episode or that it exists more readily as a photograph conspiring to reshuffle my clarity. Like when I use someone else’s keyboard—the letter E is jammed; the space bar’s lost its spring. Or how a cover of a familiar song usually forces further consideration before I can identify it. How, all at once, what I know for sure—the words to a damn song—can feel frustratingly just out of reach.

  There’s no use in trying to figure out which came first, my memory of the hair clips in that Calcutta kitchen or my mother’s telling of that afternoon nearly three decades ago. I’ve come around to the conciliatory quality of untruths. Memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. Memory isn’t a well but an offshoot. It goes secretly. Comes apart. Deceives. It’s guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you’ve emotionalized.

  And besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. To believe that something you’ve experienced will build on your extent—your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things—without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened. Substantiating is grueling, monotonous. It’s what life expects of you. Memory is trust open to doubt.

  Perhaps they weren’t hair clips but clothespins. Who knows. We were children. Recycled containers were toys. Fonts on cereal boxes provided an exciting new style for drawing the hanging loop of a lowercase g. I played house because keeping busy looked entertaining. The hectic woman was a character in a video game, reaching the next level. Her unavailable stare as she opened and closed cabinets while listening to a child’s tedious story, or, by instinct, sponging the sink’s grime while talking on the phone strangely appealed to me. Perhaps it’s because, as a child, I perceived responsibilities as possibilities, carrying around one of those Sealtest bags of 2 percent milk, pretending it was my baby and returning it to the fridge before it got warm.

  To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial. A woman carries her inner life—lugs it around or holds it in like fumes that both poison and bless her—while nourishing another’s inner life, many others actually, while never revealing too much madness, or, possibly, never revealing where she stores it: her island of lost mind. Every woman has one. And every woman grins when the question is asked, What three items would you bring to a desert island? Because every woman’s been, by this time, half living there.

  What other imaginations decked my childhood? Riches I perceived simply from staring long enough at something plain, and in staring long enough, I was recasting it. At Christmas, the tin of Quality Street chocolates had the allure of, not hidden treasure exactly, but close. Cellophane has that effect. Little wrapped jewels that came with a map I studied close. Purple twist = Hazelnut Caramel. Green = Milk Choc Block. Pink = Fudge. Nobody ate the Toffee Penny. They outlasted the holidays entirely. Even today when I see the nugget-shaped toffees, I’m reminded of how blank those days that followed Christmas and New Year’s felt. How now I often regret not being tucked into bed before midnight on December 31.

  A Bruegel print hanging in our home was essentially my jackpot. I mined that peasant-wedding scene so intently that elements of its narrative details, like porridge bowls, the lip of a jug, that pureed Bruegel red—like tomato soup from the can—and a child in the foreground licking a plate, all belong to my memory’s reel. It’s the merging that occurs from housing a mental archive instead of contending with the sound of parents who were speaking to each other in a strained tone. Of momentarily acquitting myself of childhood grievances: of all the birds we hear in trees but never see, but know are there.

  Rarely shelved in our home was a copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism. Some books were just left out like that. No reason, no mind. The mess drove my father mad. I stared at the book’s cover, watching it fade over the course of one summer, where it sat on the edge of a table in a particularly sunlit room. Either the dining room or the living room, the same year new curtains were being sewn at the tailor’s with fabric my mother had brought back from a recent trip to Calcutta. The book’s cover features a painting by the nineteenth-century artist Jean-Léone Gérôme titled The Snake Charmer. A blue-tiled wall, an audience of armed men, a fipple flute player, and a naked boy whose back is to us. A large, thick snake is coiled around the boy’s muscular body. I remember the boy’s bum. It looked real; round like me
lons. I was only slightly scandalized by the painting because I couldn’t understand why the boy was naked. I somehow knew it was intentionally plotting intrigue. The West’s fascination with the East. I knew this, but I didn’t. The notion was vague. A sentiment I’d heard expressed at home and one that wallpapered our bookshelves—the bindings of academic tomes, somehow bolder than fiction. Isn’t it curious how some fonts appear more dogmatic than others? How italicized neon pink on a book of nonfiction is suddenly: Commentary! Sometimes I think our house was too full of ideas, near choked by them. Other days I’m grateful ours was a house of unrest, because isn’t that what ideas are?

  It was a house where adults came and went: for meetings; for tea; to discuss, to organize, to speak with their hands; to flex histrionically about history. My father’s theater group or the South Asian women’s center my mother cofounded. Potlucks. Dinners. My parents had built a home, and continued to build their separate homes later, where ideas circuited the space, and where I gathered what I could or, rather, what I cared for, like the round shape of that boy’s bum on the cover of Edward Said’s Orientalism. At any rate, comprehension was a series of clues. The Snake Charmer’s whole scene looked precarious because it didn’t seem like a painting but a photograph. Rarely does a subject disturb me as much as when it slopes my ability to discern what’s real and what isn’t. Likely because I fear—more alarmingly quick as years pass—the fine line between being conscious and becoming jaded.

  I’ve been so young for so long and so old for longer—so heart-wrinkled and naive all at once. So brow-furrowed but heart-open too; a detective. Snooping yet easily sidetracked. I’ll believe anything because I want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts.

  It’s part of what happens when you develop an optimism that wasn’t inherited, necessarily. An American optimism. A Canadian one. A pop-culturally American one. A North American one. A TV optimism. However you like to delineate your geographies. It’s an optimism of remove. Of untying myself from my parents’ lives by becoming enthusiastic—at times forcefully—about my own. The con-artistry that first-generation kids learn young: to adapt, yet remain amenable to your home. To identify how seamlessly the world expects you to adapt and, as a result, how early you practice pushback. You are born spinning. In dispute. I was my own project.

  But memorizing the Bruegel or the cover of Said’s book was part of my practice formed early to repossess. Or to confuse repossession with the distraction it allowed. Zeroing in and slingshotting far were tantamount. For a girl so alert, I was absent. For a girl so AWOL, my insides were a microcosm of raw materials. Or rising sea levels. It really could be either. It’s as though I miscarried all that glee we are entitled to in childhood. At picnics, I was impatient to wipe the sticky off my fingers. Honeydew was a drag.

  Because ever since I can remember, I’ve been captivated by life’s second ply. The sharks inside the sandbox. The horror of seeing faces everywhere. On electric outlets. In food. Or how daylight looks curiously divine when it shines underground through subway grates. Or the woman confirmed by her superstitions, who says little and wears sunglasses indoors; who attracts attention like a big house set back on its overgrown lawn.

  Moreover, life’s second ply meant envisioning with enough detail, for example, the DJ whose voice seemed to grow out from the radio each morning. Based on how she spoke, I decided she had a fondness for long-haired cats. For French manicures, a glossy lip, and glittered eye shadow. Her face twinkling—communicating at all times—even when she was silent. Makeup as Morse code.

  Pip’s eloping understanding of the world; that too is an example of life’s second ply. How on the first page of Great Expectations, he imagines his dead parents, whom he never met: “My first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father’s gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man with curly black hair.”

  Like Pip, my first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things may as well have occurred in a marsh. On an inclement beach where the sky is broth and gusts of wind flare up like shameless hints. Similar to Pip, I might miss the big ideas. I’ll devise another layer to avoid what’s at stake. I care little for plot and prefer a lingering glow, and often flip back a few pages because I overlooked a crucial turn while half reading on the train, distracted by a group of French teenagers who are, by some chemical law or cultural precedent, cooler than I’ll ever be.

  Increasingly, I find it hard to read on the train. My mind roams off the page, and no matter what novel I’m reading, I’ll angle instead for its less essential stories; the ones I raffle might spout hope or an image I can more readily hold on to. Like the burnt-cork mustaches Sonya and Natasha paint on their faces at Christmas; that they wear as costumes to the widow Melyukov’s party. The burnt-cork mustaches that Sonya and Natasha don’t bother wiping off before bed, lying awake for a long time, as Tolstoy wrote, simply “talking about their happiness.” What comes to mind when I think of War and Peace is the moonlit sleigh ride on Christmas Eve. The frosty air. Sonya’s fur coat. The earth speeding past and the “magical kingdom” that Nikolai perceives. The kiss that smelled of burnt cork.

  There are times when the degree to which I just don’t want to know manifests in, recently, overhearing a man on his phone say to whoever was on the other end, “There’s no proper way to say this.” The man was standing next to me on the corner of West Thirteenth, and because I couldn’t bear to overhear what his next words would be, I dashed across Seventh Avenue, leaving behind a perfectly warm patch of sunlight. As cars zoomed past between us, I looked back at him. He was not so much pacing but pivoting on the ball of his foot like someone who was now patiently at the mercy of another person’s reaction. I bought a small bag of grapes from a fruit stand and started eating them, tasting the filmy dirt-wax of unwashed grapes; pleased that I’ll never know what that man owned up to. That his privacy belonged to him was less an indication of my courtesy and more a combination of other factors. The mystery! Obviously. Judgment too stirs my imagination. It’s awful, but there’s nothing like arbitrary judgment to reposition how badly I might be feeling; how, briefly, a stranger’s drama can recirculate the air.

  There’s also the sheer unfeasibility of overhearing as much as one does in a city so dense as New York, without a break—without the truce of silence. Even in elevators you can still hear car sirens. At home, the neighbors are fighting.

  I’m fairly confident my compulsion for stockpiling has kept me at a distance from possessing answers to my own questions. I suspend them—the questions, that is—in my writing. I ignore them like I ignore the incessant drip of my leaky faucet; putting on my headphones and turning up the volume. I ignore them like someone who goes to sleep in her bed but hopes to wake up—still in her bed, but in a field with only the clean range of anonymous field in view. As if the field was on another planet where the flora is familiar-ish. Earth-ish. Blades of grass–ish. The breeze, occasional. Where every sound is contained; nothing incoming or fleeing. A sanctuary for my one mode of being that has no name other than it exists as some substratum of myself, from which images emerge and come into sight unannounced. It’s there that the commotion begins. The quietist riot, at first. What’s irrepressible shoots up, and all of a sudden I am life-driven, numb and tingly. Opulent and part velocity. I am on the move and spared another day of panic; of feeling outdistanced. All of a sudden the words are meant. On the loose, but meant. I am individualized. I have my own attention.

  How many versions of happiness involve a smile? Are determined by feeling fulfilled? How many versions of happiness require acquisition? My version swears by distraction. By curling up inside the bends of parentheses. I digress, but not idiomatically. I digress intentionally. This piece, for example, is largely composed of interceptions. Starting somewhere, ending elsewhere. Testing the obnoxious reach of my tangents. Likely failing. While
I rely, perhaps in excess, on my wad of massed-together nostalgia and unrelated brain waves, my hope is that there is in fact a frame. That conjunctions are accomplice. That awareness isn’t merely a stopgap; that it develops beyond a tally. How a stranger’s laundry line discloses the arrival of a newborn or the week’s absentmindedness: once-white sheets and T-shirts, all flapping in the wind, all tinted pink. And how for some, to-do lists are indiscriminate and often unintelligible. Un-poems:

  1. Toothpaste

  2. Advil

  3. Coriander

  4. Shirley … Last name?

  5. Dried apricots, feta

  6. Dinner with Collier

  7. Steel wool

  8. Find an alternate

  9. Email Jonathan

  10. Tell Lucy about Lucy, the cream poodle on West 11th with hip dysplasia

  11. Consider Halifax; a yellow lampshade

  12. A low heel

  13. Return her Hardwick, her sequins

  14. Walk to the water