There’s also the sheer unfeasibility of overhearing as much as one does in a city so dense as New York, without a break—without the truce of silence. Even in elevators you can still hear car sirens. At home, the neighbors are fighting.
I’m fairly confident my compulsion for stockpiling has kept me at a distance from possessing answers to my own questions. I suspend them—the questions, that is—in my writing. I ignore them like I ignore the incessant drip of my leaky faucet; putting on my headphones and turning up the volume. I ignore them like someone who goes to sleep in her bed but hopes to wake up—still in her bed, but in a field with only the clean range of anonymous field in view. As if the field was on another planet where the flora is familiar-ish. Earth-ish. Blades of grass–ish. The breeze, occasional. Where every sound is contained; nothing incoming or fleeing. A sanctuary for my one mode of being that has no name other than it exists as some substratum of myself, from which images emerge and come into sight unannounced. It’s there that the commotion begins. The quietist riot, at first. What’s irrepressible shoots up, and all of a sudden I am life-driven, numb and tingly. Opulent and part velocity. I am on the move and spared another day of panic; of feeling outdistanced. All of a sudden the words are meant. On the loose, but meant. I am individualized. I have my own attention.
How many versions of happiness involve a smile? Are determined by feeling fulfilled? How many versions of happiness require acquisition? My version swears by distraction. By curling up inside the bends of parentheses. I digress, but not idiomatically. I digress intentionally. This piece, for example, is largely composed of interceptions. Starting somewhere, ending elsewhere. Testing the obnoxious reach of my tangents. Likely failing. While I rely, perhaps in excess, on my wad of massed-together nostalgia and unrelated brain waves, my hope is that there is in fact a frame. That conjunctions are accomplice. That awareness isn’t merely a stopgap; that it develops beyond a tally. How a stranger’s laundry line discloses the arrival of a newborn or the week’s absentmindedness: once-white sheets and Tshirts, all flapping in the wind, all tinted pink. And how for some, to-do lists are indiscriminate and often unintelligible. Un-poems:
1. Toothpaste
2. Advil
3. Coriander
4. Shirley … Last name?
5. Dried apricots, feta
6. Dinner with Collier
7. Steel wool
8. Find an alternate
9. Email Jonathan
10. Tell Lucy about Lucy, the cream poodle on West 11th with hip dysplasia
11. Consider Halifax; a yellow lampshade
12. A low heel
13. Return her Hardwick, her sequins
14. Walk to the water
15. Don’t forget the pie!!
16. Coconut milk
17. Tell Mama
18. Tomatoes
It’s true too that in childhood fending off the need to adhere was easier if I devised my own rhythm. Whatever I could drum was a drum. Mixing spoons were mics, though I was too shy to sing louder than a hum. Even today, no matter how simple the tune, I’ll ruin it. The tricky jump of “Happy Birthday” continues to give me trouble.
Power line transmission towers were giants guarding the dry, somewhat planetary, outskirts of what lies just beyond city limits. Dal was a moat on my plate of rice. Salt and pepper shakers were united in holy matrimony. I thought David Bowie was Dracula. And Lou Reed was Frankenstein’s monster. I didn’t really. But I didn’t not, either.
And my grandfather Felix was—for one day in Calcutta—my life-sized doll. I hope it was clothespins we were pinching into his hair. Like little soldiers at attention on his head. I’ve never heard a recording of my voice as a kid, but I’d guess my giggle was full of spit, and just a bit carried away.
That first trip to India is blotchy, untidy. Only floret-sized memories bloom. Because unbeknownst to me, I was familiarizing myself with the lineal estate of where I’m from—with the premium of being a jet-lagged three-year-old who was too occupied by the advent of cousins to remember to close the mosquito net in the bed I shared with my mother and brother whenever I’d sneak out in the early morning and play with a bootleg Mickey Mouse toy. He had green ears. His painted eyes looked strung out. Everything there was the same but different. A good lesson to learn very young.
In my aunt Jennifer’s telling of “Such Fine Parents,” she calls Felix and Dulcie “Mummy and Daddy.” Over the phone, at nearly seventy, she still says Mummy and Daddy. There’s a salvaging property to her tone as though my aunt is recovering her first self: daughterhood. When the world was demarcated by two parents and two sisters and a bird menagerie on the veranda. When the act of wanting was, my mother recounted to me, the burning desire for bell-bottom jeans. Like the ones she’d seen in American Vogue while flipping through the pages, listening to the Supremes.
For Easter this year, Jennifer and my mother are taking the train from Montreal to Toronto to visit Lois, their middle sister. It’s her birthday. Whenever the three Chew sisters are together—three sets of round cheeks cushioning the bottom frame of three pairs of glasses—I imagine them making great riches from speaking in old sayings and chattering about nothing in particular, such as a cardigan that was on sale. I imagine them laughing until the air around them bends. I imagine them sitting on a couch, crossing their legs at their ankles, wearing the slippers they bring with them everywhere.
I imagine them young again too. Having not yet crossed the Atlantic, living in their Elliot Road flat; a short walk from Loreto House, where my mother went to school. I imagine them going to the tailor. Wearing cat-eye glasses. Attempting the absurd: to coordinate three smiles in one photo. I imagine them eating hot cross buns and, later, accompanying Felix to the butcher and begging him to save the doomed fate of two ducks, and returning home with pets that now waddle up the stairs.