Perhaps I’m still too young to have ideas occur to me. Perhaps I learn and then forget. I’ve Googled many times what poison ivy looks like and I still can’t identify it. Perhaps I’m still unready to conceive of a life entirely my own because I’m preoccupied with the quality of blue in pictures of my parents before I was born. At twenty-nine—that cusp, almost craning, turgid age—I so badly miss hearing, of all things, my father fill the dishwasher, precisely, just as he’s always done. Or how he still yells into the phone when he’s speaking long-distance, to an uncle in India. How expressions of deep love in Bengali somehow boom throughout the house like disagreements might in English.
And what about life’s near-invisible blips: those private ones like an email from my mother at 9:04 on a Thursday morning. “Just saying hi,” she writes. I know she sent it from her computer, in her study, sitting at her desk of papers where, I imagine, in order to press the ENTER key, she has to brush aside the corner of a loose page—maybe her class schedule or minutes from a meeting. My mother’s papers are overgrown. A jungle. My mother’s Just saying hi is meant and sent with every atom of her mother brain, body, heart. She misses me. A mother’s lowercase hi is catastrophic. It’s the apple grabbed from the bottom of a pyramid display. I hadn’t meant to be hungover on a Thursday morning, and yet. The culpability that accompanies daughterhood—while it might fade over the years—never fully lets up. I’d estimate even, it reestablishes itself. A whole planet of worry that’s working in collusion with that part of my gut trained to fear the absolute worst when someone leaves a voicemail or when a friend texts “K.”
When I search the word miserable in my inbox, most of the results are from friends who’ve had colds. Who were writing to say, “I can’t make it tonight.” Miserable, in these cases, connotes the purely physical. A runny nose and fever, a sinus infection. The morning after a bad bout of food poisoning. Miserable meaning a weakened state.
Then of course there is the quality of being a deplorable person. It comes up in my inbox with regards to men. Miserable men. In one email, I mention to a male friend how a movie I’d recently seen is centered on miserable men. I go on to complain that there aren’t enough movies about miserable women, but I’m careful to distinguish how miserable women are fundamentally different from unlikable women. In the email I sound superior, as if I’m trying to impress this male friend, who I’ve now come to realize is perhaps one of the most miserable men I’ve ever met. I’ve since decided that miserable men, unlike miserable women, are, in fact, unlikable too.
In 2009, one friend uses miserable while Gchatting with me. It’s a Monday and she’s recapping her Friday night. My friend describes how she spent the night overcome with jealousy, having thought she saw her girlfriend flirting with another woman. My friend tells me how she felt “miserable and then crazy for feeling miserable.” This, I’ve decided, is an excellent use of the word. Feeling miserable is, by nature, a spiraling condition. Almost antigravity despite its Eeyore gloom. It’s a looping state with that touch of screwball. Miserable, I’ve decided, might be the most good-humored way to characterize being in a bad mood.
My father, however, uses the word miserable differently than anyone else. In an email from long ago, he worries, for instance, that my brother is making a “miserable salary.” Or that the bathroom in the apartment I’ve applied to live in is “just miserable.” When he writes, It’s your decision, he means, What are you thinking?
In 2012, he keeps me informed about my mother’s sister’s cancer treatment. The chemo she’s undergoing leaves her feeling, he says, miserable. When your mother’s big sister feels miserable—the aunt who’s made and custom-decorated all the birthday cakes for all the cousins, dyeing shredded coconut and piping buttercream roses—there’s really nothing to be felt, because your entire body becomes a wound. In the hospital, in bed, not wearing eyeliner or her glasses, she probably looked lost.
It’s clear to me when my father says miserable, he means it in a way that makes me wonder if I learned it, all those years ago when I was buckled into my OshKosh overalls, from him. If you’ve ever had a sad parent, then you’ve grown up learning how to perceive sadness when it’s being expertly concealed from you. When it occurs merely in how someone needs to conjure spare strength for basic tasks like pushing his arm through his winter coat sleeve or needing to sit at a slight remove from those other parents huddled close on the park’s bleachers during a match. You’ve not so much witnessed sadness but sleuthed it. You’ve absorbed it, and, without understanding what it is, you might even mimic it. You’ve acquired a capacity for providing conciliatory silence. So silent even that one day on the way to work, my father, who every day dropped me off at day care before heading to the office, completely forgot I was sitting in the backseat. When he pulled into his parking spot and turned off the car, I said, “Baba, no day care today?” He turned around and gasped.
When I consider the context, there is a measure of charm to this piece of my childhood. Miz-uh-rull sounds less like an adjective and more like a collective noun. Like a miz-uh-rull of stalled Slinkys. Of wet basset hounds. Of empty seats, front row. Of stale restaurant rolls. Of introverts at orientation. Like a miz-uh-rull of Knicks fans. Or a miz-uh-rull of tossed Christmas trees on the sidewalk, well into January. A miz-uh-rull of—they can’t help it—tuba players. A miz-uh-rull of tents in the rain. Dogs during fireworks. Delayed passengers at the gate. A miz-uh-rull of self-help books in the “Free, Please Take” pile. A miz-uh-rull of tangled necklaces. A miz-uh-rull of boarded-up storefronts by the beach. A miz-uh-rull of friends at a party listening to Whitney—she gets us moving, she’s voltaic, a flash storm in D major—only to abruptly and quite mutually all feel the wrench of Wow, she’s really gone. All of a sudden, you’re a miz-uh-rull of friends listening to Whitney Houston.