Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

15. Don’t forget the pie!!

  16. Coconut milk

  17. Tell Mama

  18. Tomatoes

  It’s true too that in childhood fending off the need to adhere was easier if I devised my own rhythm. Whatever I could drum was a drum. Mixing spoons were mics, though I was too shy to sing louder than a hum. Even today, no matter how simple the tune, I’ll ruin it. The tricky jump of “Happy Birthday” continues to give me trouble.

  Power line transmission towers were giants guarding the dry, somewhat planetary, outskirts of what lies just beyond city limits. Dal was a moat on my plate of rice. Salt and pepper shakers were united in holy matrimony. I thought David Bowie was Dracula. And Lou Reed was Frankenstein’s monster. I didn’t really. But I didn’t not, either.

  And my grandfather Felix was—for one day in Calcutta—my life-sized doll. I hope it was clothespins we were pinching into his hair. Like little soldiers at attention on his head. I’ve never heard a recording of my voice as a kid, but I’d guess my giggle was full of spit, and just a bit carried away.

  That first trip to India is blotchy, untidy. Only floret-sized memories bloom. Because unbeknownst to me, I was familiarizing myself with the lineal estate of where I’m from—with the premium of being a jet-lagged three-year-old who was too occupied by the advent of cousins to remember to close the mosquito net in the bed I shared with my mother and brother whenever I’d sneak out in the early morning and play with a bootleg Mickey Mouse toy. He had green ears. His painted eyes looked strung out. Everything there was the same but different. A good lesson to learn very young.

  In my aunt Jennifer’s telling of “Such Fine Parents,” she calls Felix and Dulcie “Mummy and Daddy.” Over the phone, at nearly seventy, she still says Mummy and Daddy. There’s a salvaging property to her tone as though my aunt is recovering her first self: daughterhood. When the world was demarcated by two parents and two sisters and a bird menagerie on the veranda. When the act of wanting was, my mother recounted to me, the burning desire for bell-bottom jeans. Like the ones she’d seen in American Vogue while flipping through the pages, listening to the Supremes.

  For Easter this year, Jennifer and my mother are taking the train from Montreal to Toronto to visit Lois, their middle sister. It’s her birthday. Whenever the three Chew sisters are together—three sets of round cheeks cushioning the bottom frame of three pairs of glasses—I imagine them making great riches from speaking in old sayings and chattering about nothing in particular, such as a cardigan that was on sale. I imagine them laughing until the air around them bends. I imagine them sitting on a couch, crossing their legs at their ankles, wearing the slippers they bring with them everywhere.

  I imagine them young again too. Having not yet crossed the Atlantic, living in their Elliot Road flat; a short walk from Loreto House, where my mother went to school. I imagine them going to the tailor. Wearing cat-eye glasses. Attempting the absurd: to coordinate three smiles in one photo. I imagine them eating hot cross buns and, later, accompanying Felix to the butcher and begging him to save the doomed fate of two ducks, and returning home with pets that now waddle up the stairs.

  I’ve long perceived sisterhood as a secret inlet. A relationship whose shape is uniquely undisclosed. As though the world shrinks into a nucleus formed of borrowed clothes and ordained fights, matching prepubescent limbs and terrible haircuts; one sister’s nose invariably more aquiline than the others’. One sister noticeably more dawdling than the others—picking flowers, not combing her hair. Getting sick on her birthday.

  Does the discrete viability of sisterhood rise since birth, sharing a heart like you might share speech patterns? Like a tin-can telephone, but for the voice in your head. As if you have an innate fluency for sharing the blanket so that everyone’s toes are covered. In childhood, having a sister, especially if she was older, meant sharing a wall with—it’s possible—some likeness of your near-future self. Movies, books, the March sisters, all of it, devised a rubric that engrossed me because sisterhood amounted to what I envied: not having to learn how to join. You were already part of something. You could be a crowd. You could troop places. You could be recruited the way a pop song recruits you. You could link arms. Your crowd was loud. You could be the quiet one couched inside the crowd, nodding off to the sound of sisters sneaking in one last burst of energy before bed. You could develop a dramatic flair for fighting. A penchant for doing nothing except to sit in the company of a girl and her mirror; a girl and her closet; a girl and the leeching shame of a mistake she believes makes her undeserving of anything.

  You could witness coming-of-age as it revealed itself between a sister and your parents. You could have someone magically absorb whatever terror was compassing your week by lending you her jacket. By saying, “Keep it.” You could have an adjunct mother who braided your hair differently from how your mother braided your hair. You could admire the manner in which your sister establishes herself outside the home; how it was possible to escape the madness that closes in on you from being a daughter with gratitude, but also a daughter who is desperate to slide the ribbon out from her hair and race toward heartbreak; pacifying that initial lacking with, it turns out, even more lacking.

  While this isn’t the case with all sisters, with some, when they reunite even for a short visit, the whole world is suddenly younger. An atmosphere of holiday is established: someone suggests a snack right before dinner, and newly received wisdom substantiates an old argument. Everyone drops the possessive “my,” and grown women start talking about Mom and Dad this, Mom and Dad that. When sisters walk side by side, they move slow and talk speedy, and seem somehow capable of time travel. Or perhaps sisterhood is, plainly, a version of time travel.

  No matter where I am, when the Chew sisters are together, like Easter weekend in Toronto, I am emotionally solvent. I feel a sense of alcove. I think of the painter Amrita Sher-Gil’s Three Girls, a print my mother framed and gave to Jennifer and Lois many years ago. Like the Bruegel, I know it well. Three girls in salwar kurtas—orange, mint, red—form a corner. As though painted by candlelight, it has an orblike quality. Solemn, no one is smiling. I’m fond of the Sher-Gil because I know it spoke to my mother’s earliest framework. How her context since birth has been “the youngest of three.” The last one to experience her firsts.

  When your mother is the baby of her family—when that expression’s been used to lovingly characterize her rank—she shrinks before you, covering her eyes when the MGM lion roars. Socks sliding down her ankles and bunching on the brim of her loafers. She’s focused on a mosquito bite; scratching it until it welts and bleeds. Her voice is higher. It might crack when she asks questions about the fit of things. How the cherry liqueur gets inside the chocolate and if it’s possible to sit on clouds.

  My mother has another Sher-Gil print hanging at hers, in the living room above the large Chinese chest we’ve owned for as long as I can remember. Carved into the dark wood is a panorama of flowers, a pavilion, a bridge, some people and pines. Too much story whittled into its wood for me to have ever endowed my own. I used to dig dust from its grooves and smell the metal tang of brass on my fingers after playing with its latch. My mother stores blankets inside the chest. Or old clothes she never wears. Or stuff belonging to my father. I once fished from its contents a pilled Cardinals baseball tee and a paper-thin, plaid shirt with snap buttons. Both were his from the seventies when he was a student at Washington University. I know this because of a picture I found that I keep in a folder of other photos. In the picture, my father’s hair is long and his glasses are tinted. He’s skinny but looks strong. Like he hasn’t yet become the father I know who dwells. Who, when arguing, espouses his point by taking a deep breath and saying, “Look, in the final analysis…”

  When I put on the plaid shirt, at home in my own apartment, pulling my arm through each sleeve, I smell the Chinese storage chest that sits under the Sher-Gil in my mother’s upper duplex on Coolbrook Avenue in Montreal. Its bitter camphor odor is the first
smell I understood as combative. More than merely attributive, it repelled moths. Those papery phantom pests I used to fear but now don’t mind. Ladybugs, on the other hand …

  It’s possible too that the shirt smells like my father in his twenties. The notion of him. He’s on a walk with a friend, somewhere near St. Louis, posing for a picture alongside a creek; finding his balance on slippery rocks. Maybe he was tossing smooth pebbles as if making use of what’s bottled up. Anticipating the plop. Maybe my father had a great arm and could throw far. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen him throw anything, not even a ball. I’ve known him to be hunched over things: papers, his phone, toweling dry our dog, deliberating between pounds of chicken at the grocery store, sitting on the foot of his bed and staring off course between putting on socks, or sitting across from his record player with his head bowed, listening to Sonny Rollins, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Dave Brubeck’s airy stalling tactics.

  On vacations, my father will retreat to where the view is less crowded, as if in defiance of all tourists, everywhere. He’ll lean his body on a guardrail at a museum and look down at all the foot traffic instead of at the paintings. He’ll later describe to me the stout carriage of one security guard; how her Not having it attitude was more compelling than any of the art.

  The shirt smells like my Baba before he was a father. Before he had a baby boy who’d shake his diapered bum to the Bronski Beat. And soon after: me. His daughter whom he calls “the girl,” to whom he’s passed on a reflex for absence. The shirt smells like what I can only describe as a stretch. Those years when you are responsible only for yourself and develop, as a result, a potent sense of anonymity, despite combing the days for purpose. When, briefly, nothing is catastrophic though everything feels precisely gut-poignant, and falling asleep comes easy, and you’re still not sure where to look when smiling. And isn’t that nice?

  It smells like those years, between 1973 and 1977, when my father, for a period, was living with his roommate Bruce, painting houses in the summer and working at a jazz club where, one night he manned the lights for Gerry Mulligan and, another time, Charles Mingus. The shirt smells like paint drying and the sound of Mingus’s hard bop, and while it smells like none of those things, it does. In remembering to forget—which is altogether different from forgetting—I’ve picked up other tendencies. Like unlearning in general, but also, I’ve trained my ears to sniff out trails. I’ve trained my nose to interpret sounds. Smells conjure scenes from movies, for example. Basically, and for what it’s worth—not much!—I’m proficient at having my attention drawn away. I’ve adjusted my senses to life’s incoherence. The sweet whiff of gasoline is Tippi Hedren clutching her cheeks as cars explode and birds circle on high; is Angela Bassett walking away while the white BMW burns.

  There was a period in college when the sound of photocopiers in my library’s basement was, I’m uncertain why: blue. Perhaps their ceaselessness reminded me of waves. Paralleling the surf and sway, and roll, on loop. Paper shooting out the tray like lapping ocean water foaming on the beach.

  Putty brown is, forever, Faye Dunaway’s edged enunciation of “Ecumenical Liberation Army,” because isn’t that whole movie various shades of putty brown? The smell of clementine peels on my fingertips at Christmas is Nat King Cole’s confiding baritone. Sarah Vaughan singing “Lullaby of Birdland” feels like the touch of worn cotton; a rotation of old T-shirts my mother wears when she’s cooking, listening to jazz compilations, snapping her fingers as Vaughan’s voice elegantly ladles the words “weepy old willow.”

  And when I hear Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”—that pendulous elegy, sad but sleuthing, like a gloomy gumshoe’s anthem—I smell my father’s plaid shirt. Its collar has since lost its stiff. One button snaps with less snap! It hangs in my closet in Brooklyn, sharing a hanger with two other shirts—an indignity I should fix.

  There are so many photos I’ve never seen and questions I do not ask, because seeing them and asking them, I worry, precipitates an end. The difference between collection and memorial has, in recent years, become less clear to me. My instinct to write things down often feels like obituary. And with my parents, a gratuitous gamble with time.

  Will I regret not soliciting details about their trip to Nicaragua? The red dress. That straw hat. Yes and no. There are, as ever, the tokens that provide a layout of my parents’ thinking; how they’ve never ceased to interrogate the world and how narrative, as a practice, oils their rationale.

  I grew up in a house of stories. The good fortune of having parents who moved away young from their parents—from their initial understanding of the world—but never completely. Who speak in layers and have held, each in his and her way, a belief that symbolism can gel life’s experiences. Can inspire material or an event to get passed down.

  Like my brother’s middle name: Sandino. It was winter 1984. My mother was six months pregnant when they visited Nicaragua. In pictures, she is growing out her perm and three months shy of becoming a mother for the first time. She was then, I wonder, a boiled-down combination of cluelessness and fear, prospect, pleasure, thick doubt, and spells of demoralizing blues. Though, knowing my mother’s removedness, it’s possible she wasn’t anything too specific.

  Far more than me, my mother is in touch—or at ease—with flows and overflow, particularly, and contends coolly, unusually so, with spats. For someone so angry about the state of things, fist up and ready to fight the fight, protesting and holding up banners or hanging them from her balcony, making calls on behalf of, hosting conference speakers at her home, showing up in solidarity, unionizing the teachers at her college, my mother does seem, on average, unbothered. There have been times when her disposition is equivalent to that of an email’s auto-response away message: a calmly prompt, matter-of-fact no-show. She’s there, but not exactly. My mother has proven that a person can be supportive yet remain unreachable, and how the combination has its virtues.

  Despite my interest, there are moments from my parents’ past that do not belong to me. The straw hat was, feasibly, nothing more than something silly you buy on vacation when you’re young and in love, unburdened but married because marriage was made for the ill-prepared. And anyhow, strong winds blow away straw hats, or they collapse and splinter on the flight home. I’ve never seen a straw hat survive the state in which it was bought. Straws hats, in my experience, are whim-things. Unsubstantial.

  There are nights when I go to bed a little foolish and pretend the world is a disco ball and that the stars are simply reflected dots. That none of this is too dire and how the impossibility of knowing everything is an advantage. Most children grow up and plan to, at some stage, sit with a parent, a pad of paper, a voice recorder, and listen. Most children, despite good intentions, never make it happen.

  Perhaps we’re waiting for our porch. We defer, defer, defer, and make excuses until we’ve won life’s ultimate lottery: the porch. The kind that wraps around. There’s something neutral about the conditions of its build: inside’s privacy, but outside, it’s an extension that stipulates the promise of delay. Imagine if our foreheads had porches jutting out from them? Maybe our brains would experience some reprieve.

  On porches, conversation flows freely because silences, while weighty, aren’t strained. The faint interruption of a neighbor’s car pulling up the driveway or leaves rustling, or the benefits of a view in August, kink the air pressure that might exist between two people. A breeze jangles wind chimes and gently jolts us from ourselves. It’s harder to speak selfishly on a porch. Even when it’s hot, no one overheats. Picking a fight on a porch means you’ve missed the point entirely.

  So, until then—until the porch or some semblance of it—we put off the pad of paper, the voice recorder. We are self-centered. We are out with friends, yet curious why. We are running late. Mentioning things in passing. Not picking up our phones. Lying on our stomachs. We are ambitious, only kind of. Obsessed to the point of—not boredom—but reprise. We are incapable of writing a letter of co
ndolence. We are vulnerable when it suits us. Taking aim when wearied. Clumsily articulate when expressing intense feelings, like subtitles in a foreign film. We are in the midst of, or have just inched past, our stretch. We read a book that alters us but never talk to our parents about the books that change our fabric, so instead, the weather. The rain. The snow in April.

  We are waking up to freckles dotting a person’s back, and leveling that we might be in love—not with this person, but with freckles and downy morning light, because unfamiliar contours before nine a.m. have a way. With someone new, even freckles become spotless. They are a surface blurred and time deferred. Everything begins simply enough.

  A friend who is in a play on Broadway recently sent me a picture of her dressing room. On her table are flowers, a patchwork of notes taped to her mirror, a tiny vile of dandelion fluff, a photograph of her aura—purples, some navy. For months now, we’ve been getting our auras photographed at this shop called Magic Jewelry on Centre Street that sells semiprecious stones and healing crystals. For twenty dollars—an extravagance I can’t afford but can, so in that minute I spend it—we place our palms on metal sensors, have our photo taken with a Kirlian-type camera, and then sit and listen as an employee at Magic Jewelry—who sometimes speaks to us in the first-person plural—interprets the psychedelic colors of our aura. Reds and oranges mean one thing—that we’ve been working too hard, we’ve been told—and cooler colors signify that we’re withdrawn and overthinking, daydreaming and negligent of more earthly forces. Habitually, the both of us are purple. Absent and worn-out. Entombed in thought. A distinguishing quality of the women I love, meaning, none of us are bothered by how infrequently we see one another. We have an arrangement that was never formally arranged. A consideration for turning down invitations. We are happy for the person who is indulging in her space, and how she might merely be spending the weekend unescorted by anything except her work, which could also mean: she is in no rush to complete much. She is tinkering. She is gathering all the materials necessary for repotting a plant but not doing it. She is turning off the lights and climbing into her head because that’s usually the move.