From the top of the escalator, all of Filene’s was spread out below you, like some historical tapestry. Then you were in it. As far as the eye could see, shoppers were fighting over cashmere sweater sets, infants’ party dresses, and pleated chinos, with a primal hostility that seemed to threaten the very bourgeois values embodied by those garments. A heap of thermal long underwear resembled a pile of souls torn from their bodies. Women were clawing through the piled souls, periodically holding one up in the air so it hung there all limp and abandoned.
It turned out that Ralph had really specific and detailed thoughts about women’s clothes. “You could buy that and start carrying a straw bag,” he said of some kind of a tunic.
I found a bright red fitted leather jacket with a hood, marked down 75 percent, in what looked like my size, and fought my way over to a mirror that had only two women jockeying for position in front of it. Standing behind them, I tried to see how I looked in the jacket. It wasn’t clear to me what good this did, since I had read in a scientific study that the majority of girls and young women didn’t perceive themselves accurately when they looked in the mirror. In the end I bought a shapeless ankle-length black cloak that could cover anything. It reminded me of Gogol’s overcoat.
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The whole week was depressing. I spent nine hours of it shivering, wrapped in the Gogolian coat, through a nine-hour documentary about the Holocaust. At some point I thought I had grown a lump in my thigh, but it turned out to be a tangerine—it had fallen through a hole in the pocket and ended up trapped in the lining.
I am wishing for extreme efficiency of all your enzymatic pathways, excellent regulation of cytokine works, and high endorphins, my mother wrote in an email posted at two in the morning, to make me feel better about midterms.
It would be an act of immense kindness on your part if you called Aunt Berna in Izmir, she fell and hurt her foot. I will get so many brownie points. You can call after 1 p.m. but not much after cause it is her cocktail hour and will not make sense. My mother was finishing a grant application, which she was going to drive to the Upper West Side to make the deadline.
Angela was on a special midterm study schedule that involved having a really loud alarm clock going off every twenty minutes. She didn’t go to bed until four-thirty, and even then the alarms kept going, she just slept through them. I dreamed that for every “quantity” that you thought, you had to “wake up” to a certain extent. “Waking up” meant something different in the dream.
The rain was constant, and almost horizontal, because of the wind. The umbrella became a sort of visual joke. The libraries started giving out plastic bags that said A WET BOOK IS NOT A DEAD DUCK on the side. These bags were supposed to encourage you not to throw out wet books.
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Only one typographer in all of Paris could decipher Balzac’s revised galley proofs.
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I wrote a research paper about the Turkish suffix -mi?. I learned from a book about comparative linguistics that it was called the inferential or evidential tense, and that similar structures existed in the languages of Estonia and Tibet. The Turkish inferential tense, I read, was used in various forms associated with oral transmission and hearsay: fairy tales, epics, jokes, and gossip. I recognized that this was true, but had never consciously grouped those forms together or tried to articulate what they had in common. In fact it was really hard to articulate what they had in common, even though it was easy to follow the rule.
One of the most common uses of the Turkish inferential, the book said, was in speaking to children. This, too, I remembered: “What seems to have happened to the doll?” The inferential tense allowed the speaker to assume the wonder and ignorance that children live in—that state when every piece of knowledge is basically hearsay.
There were things about -mi? that I liked: it had a kind of built-in bewilderment, it was automatically funny. At the same time, it was a curse, condemning you to the awareness that everything you said was potentially encroaching on someone else’s experience, that your own subjectivity was booby-trapped and set you up to have conflicting stories with others. It compromised and transformed everything you said. It actually changed what verb tense you used. And you couldn’t escape. There was no way to go through life, in Turkish or any other language, making only factual statements about direct observations. You were forced to use -mi?, just by the human condition—just by existing in relation to other people.
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Over Thanksgiving, I went to New Orleans to visit my father. Things between us felt easier and more relaxed than they had in years. It seemed to me that this was partly because I was coming not from my mother’s house but from Boston.
My stepmother, who was also Turkish but really adaptable to different environments, had made a turducken. My half-brother, who was five, still wasn’t over Halloween. It was all he wanted to talk about. “What if they say ‘trick-or-treat’ and you say ‘trick’ and then your whole house flies away because it’s a balloon?” he asked. We all thought it over.
“Well,” my father said finally. “Then I suppose you’d have to join the ranks of the homeless.”
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It was snowing when I got back to Boston. I didn’t have a hat or gloves. The previous winter, I had had gloves. I couldn’t remember what had happened to them. They were different from the gloves of two years ago.
In the train station, people were drinking coffee and reading newspapers. I felt glad to see that life was going on—actual life, where people were working and staying awake and trying to accomplish things, which was the point of coffee. There was a poem with that mood by Pasternak: “Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, artist.” It sounded better in Russian, because the word for “artist” had three syllables, it was an amphibrach, like “spaghetti,” or “appendix.” Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, gorilla, I thought as I went down the elevator to the subway platform.
I was somehow especially moved by Boston on this arrival, by its particular atmosphere. Riding to Cambridge on the T, I kept mentally arranging and rearranging the names of the Boston transit stations.
Eliot, Holyoke, Copley Square,
Symphony, Wollaston, Hoosac Pier,
Marblehead, Maverick, Fenway Park,
Haymarket, Mattapan, Codman Yard,
Wonderland, Providence, Beacon Hill,
Watertown, Reservoir, Mystic Mall.
Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else ever visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.
When I got to the dorm, someone was being carried off on a stretcher. It was Hannah. “Hey, Selin!” she called, waving. “Isn’t this funny?”
“Please lie down,” a paramedic said.