This summer I’ve been fecklessly plodding along with my French language study. My multi-pronged strategy includes learning a poem now and again, and last week I happened across a disturbing little ditty by Jules Supervielle, “Dans La Forêt Sans Heures.” Jules, bless him, is encouraging the birds to seek their nests in the vertical void where a tree has been cut down, for as long as the memory trembles. Or such like.
Well, that just cut a little close to the bone. (No pun intended. Jeez.) My back garden is still in recovery from the side sewer disaster three years ago. Those vertical spaces that are now empty sky do still evoke for me a sense of this isn’t right. But, then, I’m more aware of the light in late summer, when the garden is drying up and the sun is already low in the sky. Not a huge fan of this particular liminal time, summer-ish and not-quite-fall.
Last summer I was thrilled with the garden recovery and my new-to-me greenhouse. I was also adjusting to the news from my darling hematologist that I would need anticoagulants for the rest of my days. And it turns out that requiring a tiny pill twice a day in order to stay alive gives one a whole new sense of the world. I did not expect to have a more ominous, visceral sympathy for civilians in war zones, for instance. Not that I didn’t have sympathy before, but it’s different now when I hear news about, say, Ukraine. Before the Mortal Peril, I had never taken any medication, so the many ripples of meaning with this reality shift startled me.
Generally, I’m not thrilled to be dependent on Big Pharma, but my doctor was perfect as we talked through all of it. Dr. Chen is about half my height and speaks with such a strong accent I frequently have to replay his words in my mind to glean meaning.
At one point I asked—why now? Why, after fifty glorious years of being absolutely medically boring, did this genetic blood clotting disorder suddenly manifest?
His face lit up and he leaned in to touch my knee. “I can tell you!”
“Oh…?”
“It’s because…” and here he spread his arms wide, “…we are getting older!”
Great!
It happens that this doctor’s office is in the vertical space that was once the stained glass dome of the church where I spent ten formative years of my life—a structure that was subsumed by the hospital complex about fifteen years ago.
Construction of that glorious brick building was completed in 1916, and it was designed to accommodate 1,150. But like the churches of so many mainline Protestant congregations, this one, too, had seen a dramatic drop in attendance in the 1960s and ‘70s. By the time I had arrived in the late 1980s, attendance on any given Sunday wavered between fifty and eighty souls. On a red letter day there might be a hundred. Which means that the services seldom drew a crowd large enough to fill the space to even 1% capacity. Our stalwart crew of elderly in that cavernous building seemed quite a meager gathering indeed.
Those Sunday mornings—that was when I learned that absence often seems a palpable thing, and I was occasionally startled and awed to realize that the missing, the dead, were as present as the living.
“You’re sitting in Homer’s spot,” an agitated gentleman once told me.
I slid over in the empty pew to give the dead Homer some breathing room. As it were.
In the summer of 2017, I walked across England, coast to coast. In every bookstore, A Gentleman in Moscow caught my eye—that British cover is something else. And it was given pride of place, everywhere.
I’m not so big on reading with my eyeballs, and, besides, I wasn’t keen on extra weight in my pack, so I did not buy it. But I was attracted.
A few months later my Audible credits were piling up. The algorithm evidently read my mind, and suggested Gentleman. The American cover is not beautiful, I thought. But, oh, well. It’s an audiobook.
In December that year, shortly after being misdiagnosed with costochondritis, I visited my stepmother and stepsister in Colorado Springs. One day, between errands, I was alone in the house with the dirty dishes. My stepmother has a fabulous collection of music—one of our chores that visit was to purge ten million CDs from her home. But I wasn’t in the mood for tunes.
So I brought my laptop into the kitchen, perched it in the dry rack, and fired up Gentleman.
How well I remember
When it came as a visitor on foot And dwelt awhile amongst us A melody in the semblance of a mountain cat
I listened over the next weeks, enthralled—a pleasant distraction from the regular clutching pain in my chest. I finished just a few days before landing in the emergency room.
And that night, tethered to the hospital bed, awake long past my bedtime and too uncomfortable to sleep, I began again, a melody in the semblance of a mountain cat.
I remembered so little from those first two readings—a few key moments that moved me. Later that year, during the crying-every-day period, I listened a third time.
When I look back at my journal from those early days of my illness, I feel a dull ache, verklempt, knowing the loss that was to come, which I could not see at the time.
Just prior to my diagnosis, I did not write about the clutching pain in my chest, but every day I struggled to get organized for the new year, confused by my profound fatigue. In retrospect, I am surprised that I was able to return to the book that I now associate with so much upheaval and confusion and loss.
Rostov was my Virgil in those circles of Hell. Aside from fatigue, in those early days my primary symptom was a feeling of constraint. So Rostov detained in The Metropol, choosing to master his circumstances so that he is not mastered by them—of course he would be a comfort.
In the last months of last year, just as I was beginning to feel well again, I began to worry if my affection for Gentleman might be concerning. Is this perseveration? An obsession? Am I unhinged?
Before we said our final goodbye early last December, the therapist who walked with me through the most grim period of my life, unpacking survivor’s guilt and PTSD, wrote:
…I also wanted to say that you will listen to A Gentleman in Moscow as many times as you need to hear the story. He touches something in you. He inspires you. He soothes you. He speaks to something in you that is determined to make meaning regardless of your circumstances. Let’s face it, he is a wise and lovely noble man, and we don’t know enough men like him!
Determined to make meaning, a melody in the semblance of a mountain cat.
With every return to The Metropol, my reading shifted. I began to hear with different ears. I had internalized the story, yes, and then with the return of my physical strength and the resolution of my crippling memory issues, I began to see elements of the structure with a more critical eye. Not flaws, per se, but I was more aware, for instance, of the narrator’s absolutely ghastly accent when he read the passages in French.
With each reading, too, my attention and affection shifted to Rostov in his later years, as if I were aging with him, maturing into the person whose relation to time and place is shifted. A person plotting.
And I knew, this last time, that while Rostov would always be available to me, I did not need him. I felt a quiet sadness about this, like saying goodbye to a dear friend who is moving just far enough away to make connection inconvenient.
I once heard a theologian tell Bill Moyers that religious language is ordinary language that we use in extraordinary ways. Even at twenty, I knew this was not quite right. I believe that religious language, sacred text, is ordinary language that uses us in extraordinary ways.
And while this novel is not sacred text, there is and was something beautiful and holy in my connection to the book. I experienced a reciprocity in these readings, a deep connection.
This intimacy, all intimacy, is a rare and profound gift.
When my older son was very small, he liked to “be” someone different each day. He had assigned costume status to various outfits: baseball player, cowboy, fire fighter, astronaut, pilot. Halloween was just another ordinary day, but with candy.
(His younger brother approached Halloween, and life in general, with more glee. When he was about seven, he famously approached the pumpkin-carving with a cheerful, “Okay, Jack! Time for your lobotomy!”)
My firstborn seemed to have been born tracking Lynn Dell Cohen’s vibe:
This deciding every night about who he was going to be the next day—well. It was sometimes a lot of pressure for someone who has only been on the planet a few years.
We have a legendary photograph of the E-man at four, sitting on his bed with all his different outfits laid out. Of course his distress was real, but he was wearing a caricature, over-the-top sad face. Like a mime. A big tear on his cheek. He couldn’t decide.
That may or may not have been the morning after he had panicked one night, going downtown with his worries. He was not only anxious about the next day, but he hurled himself wildly into the future. His lament began something like this, slowly escalating:
“I don’t know who I’m going to be tomorrow, I don’t know where I’m going to go to college, I don’t know where I’m going to live when I grow up, I don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up….”
And I’m probably missing a few here. But I distinctly remember the crescendo toward the grand finale:
“I don’t even know who I’m going to marry!”
Now that is some serious existential quandary right there.
I totally get that.
I was in divinity school when I learned, a week after my twenty-fourth birthday, that I was pregnant with that guy. I’d hardly had any time to be an adult in the world before my future became framed by “mother.” In two years, I’ll be the mother of a child learning to walk. In five years, the mother of a pre-schooler. Et cetera. And even while I forged my own identity, the presence of my son, and then sons, was the central feature of my adulthood.
So when my younger fella graduated from college last May, I began to wonder. Who do I want to be?
It’s… kind of a lot. To think about. When you’re paying a mortgage, and you’ve never given a rat’s ass about a “career,” which is how many of us are taught to identify ourselves. My honorary daughter works in a law firm in downtown Seattle and mused yesterday that “differences between men and women’s business attire is unfair in literally every way.” And “business attire” is 100% the reason I was never going to be able to “be” a business woman. Or work in any kind of cubicle. It is not the costume I prefer for the theatre of my everyday life.
And then there’s been the recovery from Mortal Peril, which involved a lot of wondering about the next world and do I even belong here with the living?
So in the last weeks, as we approached the Day of the Dead, I have been remembering my boys and their Halloween adventures, but also looking back to realize that although I was not hospitalized until January, it is clear from my journal entries and photographs that I was already ill at this time two years ago. Which is also a lot.
November 2017: my older son and I hiked up to this glorious view, a trail that begins just a few minutes from where he lived and worked in White Salmon, along the Columbia River. This is the day, struggling to climb the hill, that I began to wonder whether something was wrong.
Halloween was mostly stressful for me when the boys were small, but my favorite memory is my big boy, at four, in his ghoul costume, a white pillowcase with holes cut for the arms and a fabric mask. We bundled up with his newborn brother and walked through the Proctor District, where shopkeepers, bless them, handed out Tootsie Rolls, which, in my mind, should not be allowed.
As we approached each shop, my earnest boy would lift the mask to reassure the adult with the loot. “Don’t be scared! It’s just a little boy under here!”
The pressing in of the season of death with resonances of the enormity of the future, the enormity of our mortality—this is the right time to reassure each other. Don’t be scared.
Last week my friend Barbara picked up passes for us at the library, and then we hit the Washington State History Museum—free-fer-nothin’, as my dad used to say—to check out the LBD exhibit.
I took a photo of this 1970 charmer because it had been owned by Jan Seferian, a local soprano.
Everything about the exhibit is top notch. We spent a pleasant hour exploring the exhibit, reading, talking, learning. And then we enjoyed some crepes for lunch across the street, and then we wandered through the farmers market. The perfect way to spend a rainy Thursday morning.
I had to hustle straight to work to set up for a dress rehearsal for our biggest concert of the year, a collage. Running up and down the stairs until almost midnight, schlepping equipment, taping infinity cables, all of it, meant that I had nary a moment to think about dresses, black or otherwise, let alone the social history of the LBD.
So it wasn’t until the next morning, putting on my own concert hall “uniform,” that I remembered the running joke I have with my friend Gwynne. Years ago I had told her that as soon as I had another job and was not required to wear black, I would wear only colors until my dying day and would immediately purge my wardrobe of every single item of black clothing….
“…and you’ll give them all to me!”
Of course I will.
I have been keenly aware that I am required to be invisible in my work, until something goes wrong, at which point I must be available to fix it immediately. Although, naturally, the preference would be that nothing ever goes wrong.
I had not connected the black clothing to the invisibility aspect quite so immediately before our museum visit, when I read about the mourning clothes of the Civil War period, which signaled that the wearer was outside the active, lively social structure. She was, in other words, made invisible.
A topic deserving of more time and thought than I have this morning as I rustle up the energy to get back on campus for another concert.
But the exhibit put me in mind of a piece I wrote a year ago toward the end of the spring semester that I can no longer even remember. So I offer here a flashback to Herr Wunderschlange and the Little Black Dress, which includes an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir.
11 May 2018
My friend Lissa came over yesterday to meet Carl, our new housemate, a demure and gentlemanly Maine Coon mix. But he was evidently too shy to greet visitors. So Lissa and I sat and quietly and caught up with all our news, hoping that Carl might make an appearance. He did not.
At one point in our conversation, Lissa glanced up to see my laundry hanging to dry, tipped her head to the side, and asked, “Why do you have all those black clothes hanging there?”
“What would you like to wear? Black, black, or black?”
Lissa remembered the movie, but not the scene.
Then I clarified, about the laundry. “There’s a blue dress there.”
“DARK NAVY,” she said, also laughing.
Black, black, or black?
Since the Mortal Peril, an unprovoked pulmonary embolism, I have gained a few pounds, just enough that I can’t comfortably wear many of my favorite things. But, in the last few weeks especially, I’ve had terrific good luck finding several excellent pieces to add to my work uniform collection of concert hall blacks.
But we’re coming to the end of the semester, lots of events, so by Saturday I was running out of clean clothes. That morning I had been rummaging through my closet and pulled out a dress I’d forgotten. And while I do tend to forget many things these days, (possibly because of the post-mortal-peril anti-coagulants?), my wardrobe is so small, I don’t typically lose track of items.
The last time I’d worn that dress was when I met a fella for coffee after a concert last winter.
The week prior, I had signed up with an online dating site. For two reasons.
First. My pals set me up on a blind date, and I was a disaster, in a fugue state of nerves. I realized I needed practice.
Also. With the boys out of the house, one day I would think to myself, “This must be what it feels like to be 20-something and single! Except solvent and happy!” And I would feel delighted, fulfilled, and I would glory in my future and freedom. The very next day I would think, “Fuck. All of my best work is done, and there’s nothing left but DEATH.”
Obviously, I needed to get out more.
So. My son had met his darling girlfriend on what I call some variation on MediocreCupid—which, I’m delighted to report, my spellcheck recognizes—and I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Right out of the starting gate, a polite German man messaged me. I asked what it was like growing up before the wall came down. We both shared a certain dismay at the idea that Angela Merkel was now the hope for democracy in the free world. We discussed Hermann Hesse.
And then we exchanged phone numbers and decided to meet.
Pretty standard.
(Except, perhaps, the Hesse part.)
The coffee was brief because I’d gotten lost on the way to the shop, in a nearby town where there seems to be no there there. He had his young daughters that weekend and needed to scurry home to help with homework. We took our coffee and had a stroll.
We had a polite and frank conversation about where we were in our lives and what we were looking for.
I’d had a long work week, six days, and then this whirlwind meeting. I was tired. But when I returned home from this middle-of-nowhere coffee shop, I sent a thank you text.
He replied, “I find you very sexy.”
Huh.
I turned this over in my mind a moment, and then opted to tell him the truth:
“Gosh. I haven’t heard that for a while. Thank you.”
There was only the briefest pause before my phone pinged again:
“I had an erection when we were talking.”
I was chopping an onion, making dinner, when the erection popped up on the screen. I felt a peculiar, particular ripple of fear and amusement and disbelief as I turned this over in my mind. We had crossed into new territory.
Before I had a chance to reply:
“In fact, I still do!”
After a good think, I washed my hands to type back, “Oh, I’m so sorry!”
He was helping his daughter with homework!
Boundaries, people.
Angela Merkel! Angela Merkel! How did we get to erections from Angela Merkel!
Confession: I let the conversation proceed a little farther than I would have if I’d had my wits about me. But I was surprised, and, frankly, a little curious.
I had been made aware, as it were, that there are people in the world who are able to have sex without intimacy, who are able to approach their bodies, other bodies, in a way that I do not fully understand. As a plaything. As things. Once, shortly after splitting with my husband, a married man volunteered to “get freaky” with me. I asked what his wife would think of that arrangement, and, evidently, they… have an arrangement. So I knew that people did this, disengaged their hearts.
Not my jam.
So when Herr Wunderschlange texted, “Please tell me you’re not into vanilla sex,” I was not entirely unprepared. I mean, I have a problem with the pejorative aspect of the term “vanilla.” And I had an idea what he meant. I asked him what he meant, anyway. It soon became clear that he was inviting me into his little sex dungeon for a spanking good time. Or, perhaps, a good, spanking time.
First thinking thoughts: I signed up for AdequateCupid to get out of the house. Why would I want to spend my weekends at his place out in the middle of nowhere?
More thinking-thoughts: The holidays! How would I schedule this sexy time? “Boys, I’ll be out for a few hours, then we’ll make peppermint bark when I get back.”
Generally, I try not to be uncharitable. It doesn’t feel good. But the whole scenario seemed hilarious. And that is likely not the reaction he’d hoped to elicit.
The next morning I woke with a screaming headache and knew I had to break the news. I was not going to be able to go downtown with this scenario. As it were.
I never heard from him again.
In the next several weeks, before the Mortal Peril put an end to this nutty experiment, I had a variety of confusing and curious exchanges with several men and a few more coffee dates. And I enjoyed reporting on these interactions to my little circle of pals on Facebook.
After the Herr Wunderschlange incident, one of my former students delighted me with: “Welcome to the glorious hellscape of online dating.”
GLORIOUS HELLSCAPE.
Indeed.
Later that winter, a friend and I were driving back from our annual pilgrimage to IKEA, and she said, “You need to write a book.”
I protested. It’s already been done. What could I add? I didn’t try that experiment long enough to have enough material.
And then I turned to look out the window. In a rare copse near a car dealership, I saw a bird of prey, still and beautiful on a bare branch.
Ploompf. The structure of a book plopped into my head. I turned back to Linda.
“I could do it.”
“I know you could.”
And I did.
For the last five or six months, constructing that narrative has been my focus, weaving these strands, the stories of love and longing and the construction of self—the stories of three generations of women, my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my own.
Herr Wunderschlange was a blip.
So it’s curious that I never wore that dress again and that I feel sick at the thought. Without realizing it, I’d retired the costume from my repertoire, because that is not a role I want to play.
In The Secret Garden, after Martha laughingly asks what Miss Mary would wear, her dour, unsmiling reply is, “Are you blind? They’re all black. And I won’t be laughed at.”
Which is another way of saying, I won’t be made a thing.
Last night when I was awake in the wee hours, I finished Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, A Single Thread. It was recommended by an algorithm. I had Audible credits piling up, and all my library holds are still weeks from becoming available. And the cover is appealing. And I’d spent a good deal of time in 1932 last summer with my grandmother’s love letters.
So. I gave it a whirl.
I did not recognize the author’s name because in the early aughts I was busy with small children and read nothing. I knew Girl with a Pearl Earring had been made into a movie because, well, Colin Firth. But I did not associate the author’s name with her work. (Embarrassing.)
Which is to say: I went in cold. No expectations.
Historical fiction is tricky, something I learned when my children were young, and I read Marguerite de Angeli‘s The Door in the Wall with them. I had seen it at school and in the library when I was a child, but I had not read it. It won the Newbury in 1950 and is well-loved, “a classic.”
I hated it. Viscerally.
In college I had studied medieval literature with a brilliant young professor, and she had awakened me to the foreignness of places in time, to a world that was shaped and viewed so differently from ours, and not only in terms of electricity and modern conveniences. Or religion and reason.
Now, I haven’t re-read it recently, so I am willing to admit that I could be quite wrong, but my memory is that The Door in the Wall seemed like modern people with modern sensibilities wearing charming costumes.
When I was a child, my father read de Angeli’s earlier book, Henner’s Lydia, aloud to me. The rumble of his chest, the scent of his clothes, the illustrations—all real and immediate in my memory. So I felt betrayed by The Door.
At any rate. I learned then that one must approach historical fiction with caution.
Tracy Chevalier has done her research. The details are right. But I did not feel I was in 1932. And that is partly the fault of my grandmother’s letters, but also Barbara Pym. Although it takes place in 1950, Pym’s Excellent Women also features single women, post-war. Different war, similar challenges. Pym so masterfully portrays a sophisticated interior life that is shaped by forces that are alien to our sensibilities.
Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy A Single Thread. I did.
Like Violet, I had a grand walking adventure in England several summers ago. And, like Violet, my reasons for choosing that particular walk were privately complicated.
On that walk, I spent some time in Hexham, where I was especially struck by the embroidered kneelers in the Cathedral.
The patterns are not varied, as the ones in A Single Thread, but the colors are as vibrant.
I was struck by how much they light up the dark space, in just way that Chevalier describes the kneelers in Winchester Cathedral.
The dapper older gentleman in sassy peach-colored trousers was amused by my interest. He couldn’t give me any details when I asked, brushed me off, said something about the guild. It was a moment where you can’t say you don’t understand what someone means because they clearly cannot understand why you would be interested.
I love stories behind stories, and that was the appeal of A Single Thread, that Chevalier shone a light on an aspect of communal life that is at once taken for granted, assumed, and also so obvious that it is hidden, unspoken.
It was also pleasant for me to remember my trip to England, because shortly after I had a health crisis that has become a Great Divide. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, people I met divided their lives into “before” and “after” the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s. Mortal Peril for me functions in that same way, and my life before seems remote, inaccessible.
And the peril naturally made me both more aware of my own mortality and the fact that I survived and escaped the devastation my siblings did not. Which is not the same as surviving a World War that has erased a generation of men, as is the case for the women in The Single Thread. But my own survival changed the way I see the world and read stories.
