There are days when I can’t push through my frustrations unless I write to Barbara Loden’s Wanda. To that last shot when the camera freezes on the wilt of her face. She is all at once unused but oh, so used up. Or very used to. Why is it that when a woman is occupied by the voice in her head, or the wear of her day, or the landscape that passes through her eyes like windows on a train, the world assumes she is up for grabs? A vacant stare does not mean vacancy. It’s the inverse of invitation, and yet.
Other times, the art becomes a condition—incredibly fitting. At first glance, my friend Sarah is a Cy Twombly; her favorite painter. She speaks in scratches, keeps dead flowers for weeks. Her thoughts are erratic, sarcastic, rascally. Her lips dark amaranth. Ordinarily, her makeup appears out of focus and, as a matter of course, slightly marked up. Rose-ish. Soft with contempt, as if she’d rather her blush stain than blush. Mid-consideration, Sarah will pause, shake her head, and smudge two ideas. To punctuate what she believes to be true, she’ll raise her index finger as if penciling the air with her talon nail. In her wake, the room drips. Like Cy, there is a touch of the unfinished with Sarah: what’s fraying could be trimmings. Like Cy, where crayon on canvas is so much more than “scrawl”—twenty-one feet of it that requires two hydraulic lifts to install—there are times when my friendship with Sarah invites remove. Stand too close, for too long, and the lines muddy. At any rate, isn’t it lovely to, once in a while, feel small in the presence of your friend? Awed. Fortunate to experience nearness that calls upon space.
Because there is trust too, in feeling small. The letting-in that comes from letting go. Gazing up at the taut tract of cables on a suspension bridge and never worrying Will this hold? Or shooting up an elevator, seventy-four stories high, without feeling much until the doors slide open and you encounter a south-facing view and the precarious pull of a pane of glass.
Nudging my mother’s eldest sister for details while she tells me a story about my grandparents. This too gauges smallness. The muscle that builds from yielding to my aunt Jennifer’s decades, to the scalloped edges of her memory, reacquaints me to my most atomic self: where I come from. Even when I was nothing, I was arriving.
This Christmas, Jennifer recorded a story about her parents for all the grandchildren on my mom’s side to keep forever. She titled it “Such Fine Parents.” The insistence of “Such” is not merely avowal, but love distinguished. She typed out the story and printed copies. She punched holes in each page and placed them one by one in red folders. I received mine in the mail and hurried to read it, only to be slowed down by tears every few sentences. The pull of ancestry. How without stint I could love someone I will never meet: my maternal grandmother. She died when my mother was fourteen years old. I was born sixteen years later, to the day.
Reading about my grandfather Felix, courting my grandmother Dulcie, how he’d ride his Harley-Davidson—“sold off by the departing foreign troops,” Jennifer noted—from Calcutta to the French-colonized Chandannagar, where Dulcie was teaching at St. Joseph’s Convent, was like reading my past, the fiction of those years before I was born, before my mother and her two sisters were born, and have it beam bright and, more critically, become document. I’ve heard the stories. I’ve read my mother’s words too, about Felix’s furniture business, about Dulcie’s fondness for dancing despite being considered a prudish young woman, but for some reason now—as it can only happen in time—my aunt Jennifer’s telling of it flickered on the page. Like the Hooghly River’s “silvering” moonlight that accompanied Dulcie and Felix on their walks before they were husband and wife, never holding hands but prolonging their time spent together on the way back to the convent by “slowing their steps,” my aunt wrote, “as the gates to the school loomed large.” Romance’s silhouette as it’s been recounted to me, the stalling tactics of courtship between Felix and Dulcie, resides in my circuitry.
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.