Too Much and Not the Mood Read online

  “Madam,” the driver said again. “Museum.”

  I slowly came to and felt my mascara unstick between my lashes.

  “Museum, madam.”

  “Museum?” I asked.

  “Heart museum.”

  Oh no, I thought. He’d brought me to a museum in the middle of the night. I looked out and saw nothing.

  The driver pointed up ahead. “Heart museum.”

  This couldn’t be right. “No, no.” I shook my head. “Hospital. Heart hospital.”

  “Heart museum,” he repeated.

  A museum? At night? I lifted my chin, suggesting we should drive up the road some more.

  The driver was now smiling as we inched closer. As the rickshaw pulled up to the front, I peered out and saw what looked like a very fancy hospital. That’s how I remember it at least.

  “Heart museum, madam,” he said once more.

  I nodded, thanked and paid the driver, and walked toward the entrance. It had become chilly and I was grateful to have brought the shawl with me. Quietly moved by the rickshaw driver’s construal of this large, looming building, I climbed the stairs. Even though this was a hospital and in visiting family I was only doing my daughterly duty, his characterization of “Heart Museum” recuperated in me what I was so longing for: a sense of arrival. The words “Heart Museum,” like a figurative place; a vault where memories shimmer, fall dark, are cut loose, and unexpectedly flare up when you most need them to. The words “Heart Museum,” like an experiment; twitchy, sad, parceled, soulful, like Arthur Russell. The words “Heart Museum”: a meaning archive; a parent’s medicine cabinet with expired sunscreen and old Band-Aids; the contents of a care package; a hideout for mind and spirit; mausoleum-like. The words “Heart Museum,” like the essence of a word from another language for which English has no word. Because is there anything better, more truthful and sublime than what cannot be communicated? The marvelous, hard-to-spell-out convenience of what’s indefinite.

  2

  Part of a Greater Pattern

  THE dead squirrel was, without a doubt, going to make me very late for school. Stupid squirrel, I thought while brushing my teeth, staring at its fig-shaped body floating facedown in our swimming pool. As a kid I was—in my way—quick to wind up. To set off. Something primitive and stormy would kindle in my chest, and I would become possessed by shivers of short temper; an eleven-year-old who hated being late, whose grumbling irascibility my mother never claimed. “You didn’t get that from me,” she’d stress. Which was, in her way, a manner of getting wound up at my father.

  Staring at the dead squirrel’s body from my bedroom, which overlooked our backyard, I imagined our pool festering with rabies. Miasmic ripples forming a paisley pattern around its furry corpse. “Stupid squirrel,” I might have even said out loud.

  Having shared a room with my brother until I was eight, this bedroom all to myself was my first encounter with privacy. While its green shag carpet was hideous, it encouraged—as ugly, funny, and unfair things do—my incurable taste for the make-believe. Stories flickered as I’d lie down, press my cheek against its itchy surface, rake my fingers through the carpet’s deep pile, thumbing its loops and sharpening, with one eye open and one eye closed, my focus. Entire worlds existed in that green shag carpet, like I devised entire worlds in the mazelike depths of movie cornfields, for instance, or in secret gardens, in pictures of missing children whose lives I guiltily romanticized, or behind ominously big doors where rich people lived on the Boulevard near Montreal’s Mount Royal, in mansions so tall they muddled my spatial awareness and seemed to taper on top like spires.

  Because it was our family’s first house with two floors and a basement, it was also my first backyard. My first rhododendron, which blossomed fat and white, blushing pink right before the petals molted. My first lilac bush too. The flowers’ sweet, heady smell would last on my fingers long after I’d cut the stems and carried around the cone-shaped whorls, sometimes doing laps of our block, pretending the lilacs had been given to me by some imaginary admirer. So dreamlike was this admirer that true-to-life details of who he might be weren’t of consequence. He was unrealized. A feeling. Many feelings, actually. A shimmering buildup of Boy. The sort of montage-person we conjure as kids, scraped from that corner in our imagination devoted to believing a character on TV—in my case, Gus Pike from Road to Avonlea—and the guy at the video store were maybe the same person.

  The backyard was also my first acquaintance with a wood-paneled fence. Well actually my first acquaintance with those slits between the panels—my aperture—where I could spy our neighbors doing boring things like water the grass or race inside to grab a ringing telephone. No matter how dull whatever I observed was, a fairly hectic and illicit surge would course through me. The devotional quality of someone going about his or her day, of having to stand on her tiptoes to secure the corner of a bleach-stained towel on her clothesline or pace and pause, pace and pause, while talking on his cordless phone, was an intimacy I’d never deemed intimate until it belonged to a stranger who had no idea I was bearing witness. The thrill of a quick look provided me with pure, almost hysterical voltage.

  The inground pool came with the house and was, as my father had predicted, his burden for us to enjoy. Our first summer there, the pool company who drained and refilled it with a hose fished out two or three bras they’d found at the bottom of the deep end. It was rumored the bras belonged to our neighbor’s teenage daughters, who would go skinny-dipping once the previous owner—an older woman named Madame Dorée, whom I’ve resolved must have looked like Anne Bancroft with less sting or Maria Callas with less agony—was fast asleep. The found bras, which I never saw but pictured elementally, presuming they were neon pink or lacy and black, like filigree culled from our pool’s gross winter grime, were the height of teenage girl trouble. Right in our backyard! The proximity both scandalized and, of course, intrigued me.

  Older girls, like babysitters or a friend’s sister in high school, were pedestaled beings with perfect jean jackets. They were white girls mostly. Close-talkers with side-swept bangs who never appeared too wowed by anything, because they had yet to and might never encounter what it means to be denied. I coveted their casual nature, believing their incuriosity was a sign of self-possession; of not harboring some secret longing to be seen. Seen alone, not in comparison or as other, or through the bewildering construction of compliments that seemed to only further other.

  What I noticed first was their hands. These older girls had chipped nail polish like shrinking enamel continents on each finger, in colors like baby blue or black. They wore big sweaters, which they’d pull over their hands and rip open holes like harnesses for their thumbs. On those thick digits I’d spot their silver thumb rings that seemed fastened on the way flange nuts thread onto screws.

  Even their bad skin conveyed a type of beauty that desperately drew me in because it wasn’t beauty alone. It was notional. What I perceived as built-in unhindered-ness. Like ripping and ruining one’s clothes at one’s pleasure. Drawing with ballpoint pen on the rubber sidewall of one’s Converse—a truly satisfying motion, actually. It was things done just because. It was disinterest. Inconceivable amounts of it. How exquisite I thought it would be to not care.

  These older girls were impulsive. They dyed their hair on a Monday night. They threw parties when parents were home. As I remember, a good amount of these white girls wanted to become marine biologists. Their copies of Sarah McLachlan CDs or Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope were well loved and scratched, skipping in unison to the grinding bump bump bump on “I Get Lonely.”

  These older girls’ mannerisms were big and loud, and slumped too, as though they’d portioned a limited quantity of enthusiasm per week. They could exert influence—I’ll never know how—by merely arriving to school with wet hair that would air-dry by second period. In comparison, these older white girls made the rest of us appear like we were waiting in perpetuity. For what? It didn’t matter. The rest
of us were girls-postponed.

  In groups, their attention was coaxed elsewhere. Fatigued by whatever buzz was proximate, they observed in its place someone in the periphery, like that boy on his skateboard whose cheeks would get flush on autumn days—blotchy like deli meat. If you ever passed him in the hall, he smelled like an unwashed fitted sheet. At lunch, he vaulted off and grinded on curbs, rarely speaking to anyone and wearing a seemingly empty knapsack that looked like a deflated pool toy strapped to his back. While nobody knew much about him, there was an older girl who was likely intent on holding his hand and meeting his dog—now old and slow, but who still followed him from the pantry to the fridge to his basement bedroom because this dog and this boy had been buddies for years. This older girl was hoping to sit on the edge of this boy’s unmade bed, expecting tenderness only to receive none, and gaze at the reproach of his dresser’s vista: loose change, the glint of empty gum packets, a picture of him from camp with a girl from Ottawa she didn’t recognize, a stereo, CDs, weed crumbs, the bald head of his deodorant stick missing its lid. She’d spy his copy of 1984 and desperately wish they were in the same English class.

  These older girls created landmarks out of picnic tables. Or wherever they’d congregate at recess to smoke. Adjacent places. Adjacent to where they were meant to be standing. Like just beyond the bus stop. Like in the parking lot next to the pizza place. Under an awning. Under an overpass. Behind the rink. It wasn’t solely that everywhere they went people followed, but that these older girls knew to show up mid-throng. When there would be cigarettes to bum, a boy’s sweatshirt to borrow on a windy day, someone else’s fries to stave off eating at all. Someone else’s Cherry Coke. These older girls would steal one sip because there was always, somehow, a straw bent in their direction. They had a knack for arriving just in time to: know all the words. When the song was well into its chorus or nearing Left Eye’s verse.

  These older girls seemed satisfied by suggesting someone scoot over. They’d often plop themselves on a lap, or lean their weight into another white girl’s body with the kind of collapse that courts attention. These older girls’ comfort with one another was physical, though I’d mistaken it all those years ago as psychic. They knew nothing, or so it seemed, about the prickling and pining so innate to me; about deeply honed unease. These older white girls petted each other.

  They’d roost, and still do, in the bedroom where all the coats are piled during parties, lounging and talking with impish flair because beer spumes festive around sequins. Because wearing heels indoors on wood floors sounds like the holidays. Because secrets stumble out like small talk when you are beautiful and everyone is listening. Because catching your reflection in a host’s full-length mirror is a rare come-on. And because participating, for these older girls, meant, and maybe still means, reorienting a party’s habitat—means loafing on a bed of coats.

  I was, back then, a decade or so away from clocking my brownness, from taking notice of its veiled prominence in my life. I wasn’t so much blind to it, but uninvolved in it. Emotionless about it. I was a brown daughter too inclined by whiteness to appreciate that being a daughter extends beyond the home. That it’s a furtherance. That my parents were handsome, strong, willing. Adaptable. Selfless. Brilliant. Beautiful. I was too busy troubling myself with what I thought was pretty.

  So I cloistered my brownness. I wasn’t yet ready to scrutinize my weird, even toxic, relationship to the exclusionary appeal of these older white girls. To their ubiquity. To their immunity. I was coaxed by my stewed and crummy and, invisible to me, feeling of inferiority. In turn, I praised these girls for the faintest reasons. I was convinced they’d never be caught sucking in their stomachs. That even the tiny grooves of their anatomy could transmit persona: a dimple or belly button shaped like a comma. Meaning: She always had more to say.

  I held that their overall manner was epitomized by how impossibly cool they looked when doing plain things. Like pulling something, anything—it didn’t matter what—from their back pockets, or casually hoisting their butts onto a kitchen counter midconversation. Their thighs didn’t seem to pancake like mine when I’d sit down; their knees weren’t shapeless either. I call mine potato knees. Inherited from the women on my mother’s side, they’re spud-cut and a little lumpy. Inelegant.

  In winter, these older girls carried out the tiring ritual of unscrambling themselves from their layers with remarkable grace. Delivering their long necks from circuits of wool scarf was, as ever, a site to behold. Like when an off-duty ballet dancer steps on the subway and everyone’s head turns, influencing us to readjust our posture and perhaps reconsider our whole lives. Just like that, these older girls preoccupied me.

  They were the prospect of fourteen. That summit age I arbitrarily picked, resolving it stood for what I now wonder might be a vacant pursuit: some cooked-up idea of having made it without divining what this unspeakable “it” marks or means. Or more humiliatingly, what it proves. When I turned fourteen, my sixteenth birthday newly assumed fourteen’s folklore. Then eighteen. Followed by twenty-four. And so on, and so on. Recently, I’ve heaped extra faith into thirty-three’s double springs; conceiving in its future roundness the calm of an absorbed, less wobbly world where I’ve developed a better sense of humor and experience with less acuity, the blow of life’s ups and downs. Come thirty-three, I’ll certainly valorize thirty-six. I’ll reason it’ll supply me with securities I have yet to fathom and eccentricities that permit me to slip out of my sensible mind. That I believe some big, whopping sign might one day parachute down and alert me to my arrival, is, I realize, foolish. Yet, here I am at twenty-nine, liberally investing notions of sureness into tomorrow’s birthdays just as I did with those older girls.

  Thing is, those older girls were on to something. They collected boyfriends in neighboring schools as if expanding the real estate of their allure. These older girls were wise to the curve and clout of their bodies in ways I’m still not, netting attention early in life when life was still framed by hallways and lockers, authorized by bells and permission slips, and upset by canceled parties or the turnaround caused by a new cut of jeans. They realized the one component critical for eternalizing yourself as myth, no matter what later letdowns or cruelties might come with adulthood: to never smile in photos unless it was the annual class picture. Pouting and appearing generally disentranced to the flash of disposable cameras was standard practice, but come picture day, their smile was athletically sincere. All at once obliging. I still remember most of their names—both first and last. They pleat my memory with singsong. Like the upbeat tempo of a 1-800 number.

  It was as if I were standing in some figurative doorway with my head resting against the frame, watching these older girls get ready to go out: considering which earrings to wear, how to part their hair and do their makeup. Because observing any woman smudge shiny powder down her brow bone to her cheekbone, or flutter-blink her lashes between strokes of mascara, or delicately part her lips when lining her eyes—those rapidly precise, tidy-messy and pored-over motions—feels closest to catching a glimpse of her acquiring the world with quiet enormity from that faraway planet: her mirror.

  * * *

  It was the neighbor with the skinny-dipping daughters whose maple tree would blanket our pool with giant leaves and clog the filter. A pain in the ass to clean. The filter’s round lid, which leveled with our cement yard, was—as if reminding us of summer’s brief stint—permanently cracked. Backyard things have never appealed to me. Weather-worn white plastic chairs, flimsy-spongy cushions, benches with wrought-iron roses, ivy, and grape clusters that look, however modest, haunted or trapped in time. Cursed, even. Backyards, for me, have either been fiction or totally spooky. There are few things more unnerving than when, in the dead of night, a backyard light motion-detects something but reveals nothing.

  But my father’s gripes with the pool were an extension of other presentiments, perhaps even imperceptible to him. Part of a greater pattern, like how he’d often p
oint out while looking through photo albums that he wasn’t present in any of the pictures because he was, customarily, the one taking them. The swimming pool and the pictures were both, in his way, father cargo. Drummed-into self-erasure carried out by someone whose experience of love seemed pending on another, unresolved lifetime, or raveled by how disorienting it is to find yourself skimming leaves from a pool on a Saturday morning when your daughter—who promised she would help with its upkeep—is instead inside, squinting at a television screen, refusing to wear her glasses that she too promised, for the price of their brand-name frames, she would wear.

  Etched in my memory is the image of my father standing by the pool in his shorts, doing that thing he’s always done: which is, to assess. The engineer in my father cannot escape his obligation to efficiency. Even in fatherhood, he’s moored to logistics. It’s what regulates that congenital disquiet I once thought was unique to writers but that I now see is shared by parents whose lives have been gratifyingly set astray by a gulch of worry and hope that comes with having a kid who one minute adores you and the next is grown and implicating you less and less. Because irrespective of how mundane a task, my father mulls over its mechanics until he’s appraised the timeliest way to, for example, clean the swimming pool, mow the front lawn, and simultaneously prepare supper so as to serve the dal and rice hot—not warm—hot. So as to later enjoy from our kitchen window the pool’s glistening surface at dusk while he scrubs and sets to soak the pots and pans.

  But the look of satisfaction that warmed his face in these moments, that slid his glasses down his nose and ironed free the wrinkles on his forehead, was not mere fulfillment. It was far from it, actually. The meditative appeal of a swimming pool’s evening reflection had little to do with how much work it took to create such calm but how, over time, my father had discovered that prosaic pursuits in a country he now called home eased the regret—that riotous, ill-boding strain of regret—of having never permanently returned home home.