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My father’s beliefs were so rigid that once, when my parents came to visit me at Barnard, I suggested we walk down Fifth Avenue to look at the shopwindows and he refused. He was almost viscerally offended by the idea of frivolously spending money, and of accumulating wealth. To this day, almost everything he’s earned goes back to impoverished relatives and charities in India. Also, waste was a crime. My father had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, when the English starved Kolkata. Growing up, I’d be anxious about inviting my American friends to the house for my birthday parties, because my parents would always comment on all the unconsumed food they’d throw away. When I was a child, almost every purchase my parents made was deliberated over. We arrived in Kingston with a few suitcases, a couple of pots and pans. I don’t want to exaggerate, but there was a frugal, bare-bones quality to my upbringing, and a feeling that we were just passing through.
cool
Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under me, lays me down on the back seat, and covers me with my yellow blanket.
She leans forward and whispers, “You want some coffee?”
My father turns and looks at her. He gazes at the hair falling long and loose over her chest. After this trip she will always wear it short, and she’ll stop sharing a bed with him, sleeping instead on a mattress on the floor of my room. My father is so tired that he is slow to answer.
“Coffee it is, then,” whispers Mom.
<3 the prolepsis really hits me
Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower of Babel had gathered there. Then came a sudden hush—Hazrat Derrida was about to appear. Puffing on his pipe, carrying a heavy bag, he made his way toward the desk in the middle of the stage. Derrida Sahib was wearing a great many layers, and as he approached the desk he began removing them one by one, hanging them on the back of the chair. He peeled off a raincoat, a jacket, a cardigan, a vest, a jersey, until his muscular torso was clothed in only a light sweater. The act seemed pregnant with meaning—a gesture toward the task before him, the layers of meaning that must be stripped away in the course of the seminar. Then Derrida took his seat, drew his papers from his bag, and lay them down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “I assure you that what will be said over these weeks will be nothing other than the sum of the words of fictional people brought to life for a moment, and that their words will not bring us face-to-face with the possible. It is the impossible, instead, that we must confront. We will try to bring about something else, something ‘other,’ through an indefinable course that will be the source of our discussion—its goal—but that will forever remain outside its bounds. We will touch the impossible.”
why do i love this
I’ve kept one for decades—it’s the font of all my writing. I recently taught a class on the diary at Barnard, where we read real ones by Pavese, Woolf, Sontag, André Gide, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, as well as work by Joyce, Ernaux, and others. These days people are more excited about digressive, almost unpresentable writing, the kind that exists in some private, intimate dimension, but for a long time, there was a sense of a literary hierarchy, with the novel at the top and any record of real-time experience, especially women’s experience, at the bottom—you know, “There she goes, pouring her heart out again.” That mode, which involves carving out a space in which no one is watching or listening, is how I’ve always operated. I remember that during an event for Interpreter of Maladies in London—this was before it won the Pulitzer, but it was a pretty big crowd—someone asked me, “Who do you write for?” And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, “I write for myself.” There was total silence.
lol
In my late thirties, when for a short period I lived in Moscow, I sometimes wondered if there were too many words in the English language. Longing and desire, for instance: was it really necessary to have both? Couldn’t a single, flexible word suffice? Maybe want would work. Not need; that was different.
Having plenty of words at our disposal wasn’t doing Jack and myself much good, in any case. We were at an impasse—my word for it now, though back then I might’ve called it a checkpoint. Jack would’ve have named it a choice-point, I imagine. At any rate, although neither of us was skittish about talking, we couldn’t seem to find common verbal ground, and our conversations had grown increasingly fraught. My husband wanted a kid; I wanted to want one, which wasn’t the same thing. You like adventures, Jack kept saying. You’re a curious person; you’ve always been open to new experiences. Yes, I kept responding, but this isn’t an adventure we’re talking about. We can bail out of an adventure if it’s not right; we can’t do that with a kid. What do you mean by right? Jack kept asking, and though I tried, I couldn’t give him or myself a clear answer. Right as in natural? As in obvious? As in doable?
In my own life in Washington, too, things felt murky. From the start of my relationship with Jack a decade earlier, I’d had certain wishes: for plenty of breathing room, a reliable measure of playfulness, a loose-reined sense of security. Though I’d figured marriage would fulfill these desires, it seemed increasingly irrelevant to them. But was that in fact so? My chronic restlessness, a sense of looming entrapment—to what were they due, really? To Jack’s frequent comings and goings, his preoccupations with work? To the frequently tedious nature of my freelance assignments? Or to my ambivalence about the kid question?
Jack was waiting, I knew, for things to come clear to me, after which he assumed I’d say yes to parenthood. Inwardly I chafed under his patience. It allowed him to believe he had the upper hand—one of us, at least, knew what was best…. Still, I told myself, we were happy enough. Despite the tensions, there was a more-than-decent measure of goodwill and tenderness between us. No point lobbing more words at something that evidently resisted being voiced, at least for the time being.
Here is the puzzle: Have you ever accused yourself of one of the lesser moral flaws or questionable values which, if you were a character in a novel or a movie, would put you on the side of the people you don’t like? I confess to a soft spot for the humorless, heartless wife in Woody Allen’s Interiors. The movie invites us to despise her lonely passion, her addiction to beautiful objects to the detriment of what matters. We agree, don’t we, that what must matter is human warmth and sympathy and not the excellence of artifact?
yo!!
I think of all the ways
the women in my family have died,
the slow disease of genetics and childbirth
here in the curve of my cheekbone.
The doctor speaks as if this bloodwork
were routine, and I smile to make it false,
make this procedure only a safe precaution.
I’m told to focus on the opposite wall,
on the poster of a record-breaking runner
whose breath I imagine leaving
in heavy strides toward a finish line.
But what I want is to forget
that a body is capable of losing.
The first time I saw the dying,
[...]
Back home in bed, at the moment when Dan reflexively reaches out for her nearest breast, Alyssa has to stop herself from saying something like: “Better make sure we reach the quota!” It’s not like he’d be offended—he’d probably think it was funny—but she is hyper-aware now of the habits of their shared life in a way she had never been. Perhaps this new anxiety is all to do with the engagement, a natural reaction to the prospect of spending the rest of one’s life with the same person. That must be it. But that night, when he is thrusting inside her, she experiences a strange dissociative sensation, as if the body being enthusiastically penetrated in the bed no longer belongs to her in any meaningful way. As if her mind is walling itself off from some physical threat.
It only gets worse over the next few days. Every time he initiates sex, her whole body tenses up and then retreats. He doesn’t seem to notice, or at least he doesn’t say anything. She starts making excuses whenever sex is on the horizon—cramps; a headache; she’s too tired—and she sees it hurts his feelings, this sudden pulling away from their physical life. But it is she who worries the most about getting hurt. Not just feelings, either. She has developed an inexplicable fear that while they’re fucking he will try to crush her with the weight of his body, so when they do have sex now, she maneuvers until she’s either on top or on her side. She imagines his big, capable hands around her neck, crushing her windpipe like a soda can. It’s one of his party tricks, crushing and twisting the empty can until it transforms into a neat, squat sphere.
i find this story tedious in some ways [not for literary reasons, i think i just dislike the boyfriend character on a personal level] but this does resonate sadly
A happy idea takes root: it’s not too late to take it all back. She could tell him she’s been on some bad medication that’s been fucking with her moods, and then promise to throw away the pills so that things can get back to normal. They could even laugh about it, once enough time has elapsed. It is almost unbearably tempting to do this, knowing the words would summon his broad smile, his instant forgiveness, and that afterward they could go drink rosé and eat paella in the shadow of a medieval bell tower, and maybe, later on, dance in a dimly lit square by a fountain. The vision is so powerful and beautiful she almost succumbs to it.
But then she thinks again about his hands, their strength and size, about what it has felt like these last few weeks to have his body pressed against hers—the rush of panicked nausea; the irresistible urge to run as far as she can—and she knows she has to go. The fight-or-flight response is already uncoiling like a snake in her brain. She can feel her neck going red and beads of sweat forming behind her ears.