Those few seconds in the bar were a revelation. Ever since I can remember, it’s been customary that I arrive somewhere, anywhere—a party, a new school, an interview—with a tagline or tributary anecdote, like a note that I’ve tied around my neck with yarn. “Where are you from? What does your name mean?” Those two questions have been asked of me so many times that I respond with a singsong cadence, as if rattling off my address when I order Thai over the phone.
My preparedness with new encounters has always been in the service of others, so much so that I wouldn’t even call it preparedness; it was just how things would always be. But after that night when Sarah spoke up, everything changed. I recognize the dramatic nature of pinpointing change to a single seemingly insignificant event, but I’ve also come to realize that some shifts should never be backtracked, because the only person you’ll end up devaluing is yourself. Since that evening, a newfound and speedy confidence sprang up in me like a cartoon flower in bloom. I am now awake to the undermining agency and the chain reaction of everyday reticence such questions imposed on me. Thanks, Sarah. Love you.
I now too recognize the absurdity of people who can’t be bothered to pronounce my name properly but are willing to straightaway request I tell them where I’m from. Their othering of me depends, it seems, on their capacity to other. It’s usually those same people who roll their eyes when I say I was born in Canada, who reiterate “Where?” as in “Where where?” like I haven’t heard them the first time. A life of this farce is sure to sand down anyone’s sense of self. And maybe that’s the point, to bolster one’s power and belittle someone else’s: mine.
After years of my pleading, my mother finally gave me her yellow-gold D ring that was passed down to her from her mother. Daisy, Dulcie, Dolores, and now Durga. The ring’s band is thinning so I don’t wear it often, but when I do, I feel the clout of family. Few things yield such command. I’m from somewhere! And these women had something to do with it! The weight of those two facts is, as I grow older, increasingly humbling. With that lineage comes the consideration that if I have a kid, I should perhaps give him or her a D name. But what? Should it be Indian? How many Indian D names do I know? These are the sorts of thoughts that slide through my mind in the morning when I’ve been in a long-term relationship, when I’ve considered my future, seriously and unseriously. These are also the sorts of thoughts that cross my mind when I’m out at a bar and a stranger asks my name and where I’m from. And as I impatiently play with the ring on my finger, I wonder, Do I really want this kind of dim encounter for my kid? But then I feel the embossed gold lettering, the most capital D I’ve ever seen. D as in Durga, Dolores, Dulcie, and Daisy. I’m from somewhere! I’ll be reminded. And these women had so much to do with it. I am an accumulation of them and myself, and have a newfound vitality born from no longer accepting that I am an accumulation of my misheard name, no longer inured to self-evasion, to ceding my totality.
9
Since Living Alone
1.
I LEARNED last summer that if you place a banana and an unripe avocado inside a paper bag, the avocado will—as if spooned to sleep by the crescent-laid banana—ripen overnight. By morning, that sickly shade of green had turned near-neon and velvety, and I, having done nothing but paired the two fruits, experienced a false sense of accomplishment similar to returning a library book or listening to a voicemail.
There is, it’s worth noting, a restorative innocence to waking up and discovering that something has changed overnight. Like winter’s first snowfall: that thin dusting that coats car rooftops and summer stuff like park swings and leftover patches of grass. Or, those two books that mysteriously fell off my shelf in the night, fainting to the floor with a cushioned thump! I place them back where they belong, pausing to stare at their bindings, which I’ve memorized, if for no other reason than when you live alone, the droop of plant leaves, a black sock poking out of my blue dresser, or an avocado that ripened overnight—all this stuff provides a rare, brief harmony: the consolidation of my things, all mine, in a space fit for staring off as I skirmish with a sentence on my screen or wait for water to boil. The only person who might interrupt my thoughts is me.
2.
“When you travel,” writes Elizabeth Hardwick in Sleepless Nights, “your first discovery is that you do not exist.” This sentence, which I read in late September as I shuffled and flopped from my couch to my bed and then back to my couch again, chasing patches of shade as the sun cast a geometry of light on my walls, this sentence surfaced on the page like a secret I’d been hurtling toward all summer but, until now, was nothing more than a half-formed figment. (I’ve come to hope for these patterns that build in increments, eventually sweetening into an idea I’ve long been blueprinting in my mind; I’ve come to understand them as a huge chunk of what writing involves.)
While reading Hardwick, I noted that since moving into my one-bedroom apartment in late April I had traveled little, declining invitations upstate or weekends on Long Island or in Pennsylvania. I chose instead to stay put. To seek the opposite of not existing and acclimatize myself, it turns out, to myself. Even writing those words now feels like a radical act because a large part of who I am has always hinged on someone else. I am a daughter, a daughter of divorce, but with my own stubborn and cautious interpretation of what that means. A child that never quite reveled in the traditions of childhood, a younger sister and her eventuating appetite for the sentimental, for the Beastie Boys, for asking “What did you eat for lunch?” when what I meant to say was “I love you.”
I was also someone’s girlfriend and, subsequently, the emotional commerce of being someone’s ex-girlfriend, or the person whom you write emails to at two in the morning, or the person you might expect to dislike, or the person who finds herself stuck between a plant and a kissing couple at a stranger’s party.
I was a roommate to three people and a cat, a roommate to one person and two cats, a roommate to someone turned sister, forever.
I was the loyal friend but also the girl who never answers her phone but who will text back immediately: sorry. everything ok?
I was the witness at your wedding, who took a tequila shot with you before City Hall in a bar full of midafternoon men with bellies. They all swiveled right, in unison, as we walked out. You in silver-plate heels and me in black linen overalls.