Gustave Caillebotte, Woman at a Dressing Table, 1873. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

My grandmother collected perfume bottles, a seeming whimsy for a woman of such plainness and ferocity. I have three of them, given to me when she was still alive. They lived in a drawer and then later, in a decorative moment, on the bookshelf, where I have since placed them higher and higher out of reach, as my daughter has attempted to climb up to play with them, a slow-moving game between us, until now they are so high up as to be out of view. I tend not to be sentimental about objects, but I at least don’t want them to break, this being all I possess from my grandmother, anything else guarded by her surviving daughter, who, having remained unmarried, still lives alone in the house in which she was born, that being the way in my family. The bottles are candy-colored glass—blue and purple twins with matching Bakelite flowers as the stoppers, and another newer, smaller one, with complementary hand-painted purple flowers with bluish-green stems and yellow pistils at the centers, and with a gold atomizer. They are not valuable—objects in my family become antiques only through accruing dust in the house they’ve inhabited, on mantles and in glass. I can still see the menagerie that resided on the heavy wooden dresser in my grandmother’s bedroom, which was covered with plastic and underneath it a lace doily. On top of the doily, viewable through the plastic, were black-and-white photographs: portraits of relatives, baby photos, and photographs of her late husband, who died when she was still a young woman with a young child, leaving her a widow until her death in her nineties, half-paralyzed from a stroke but still ruling the world from her dining room table, waving her grabber at her grown children, gleefully threatening to hit them with it for whatever crime committed, usually (her word) stupidity. The table itself was covered always with at least a cheap cloth-backed vinyl or plastic decorative tablecloth of garish pattern, frayed or cracking at the edges, and for holidays, a nicer, solid-colored linen cloth on top. Underneath was the heavy mahogany table, like all the furniture in my grandmother’s house, the immovable furniture of generations. My grandmother’s collection of perfume bottles crowded next to her jewelry, which was minimal and rotely worn, including not only her heavy wedding band, which my sister keeps asking for, but also her silver watch, which my grandmother must have had to wear to keep time while working the linens counter at Marshall Field’s all those decades after becoming a widow, having had to close up her husband’s butcher shop and store where she had previously presided behind the register, the calves widening from girlish into matronly, all those varicose vein decades, after suddenly becoming a single mother with a young child to raise, her older grown sons, the twins, away in the Navy, later returning in order to gather around their mother, one staying unmarried and in that house until his untimely death, the other moving away, but not too far, that other being my father, who accrued his own museum, having lived for his own decades in the state of the widower, although his savings account was never the subject of existential dread, he having been the one who made all the money in his marital life, my mother at home with the children, as was the way. She was a saint, an angel, both my uncle, my grandmother’s son, and my father, my grandmother’s other son, said about both their mother and my mother, respectively, at their funerals, one having died of an astonishing old age, and the other, at a sudden and tragic middle age. I didn’t recognize who they were talking about. All I recognized was the empty monologue of Catholicism, which serves to erase by anointing the woman at home, who only exists in service to others but not to herself. Does she even exist, I often have wondered, to herself? Writing this I have no idea why my grandmother collected perfume bottles, were they gifts that her sons brought home from overseas, and they began to unthinkingly accumulate, over birthdays and Christmases? My grandmother cut her ridged nails with the kitchen scissors, she never wore makeup, let alone perfume. I have no idea what my grandmother, or my aunt, or my mother, thought about at night in their empty houses, in the solitude of caretakers. I have no idea if they were unhappy, whether they thought of their girlhood, or when the children were young, whether they had regrets, and if they could, what would they confess? I have no idea because I never asked, and they would never have said. It would have been an impossibility. Their inner monologue would have been closed to me. Read More

Hervé Guibert, Les lettres de Mathieu, 1984, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the Estate of Hervé Guibert, Paris, and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York.

CONTRACTING

It was the fall three years ago, massively pregnant, bouncing on an exercise ball to try to stimulate contractions, trying to not stroke out while watching the presidential debates, the one where he loomed menacingly over her like a horrible phantom, when I received an email. Would I be interested in writing a short book, a study, about a novel of my choice, for Columbia University Press? I thought I could write it fast in those early months. It took me almost two years before I could even begin thinking through it. Now, I set myself a deadline, amid the deadline of my body. One month before I find out my news, whether or not I will choose to terminate this pregnancy, whether this pregnancy will decide to end itself, whether it will continue, I will finally write this study of Hervé Guibert.

LIKE A DEAD MAN

It is always in the midst of a medical emergency or crisis of the body when I resume work on it. Perhaps it is when I feel the most isolated that I feel relief returning to the pages of Guibert—the complaint of illness, which is always an experience of isolation. No one can ever really know the experience of your body, an experience worsened by the alienation of medical bureaucracy. The summer before last, I contract shingles, exhausted after having finished a book in a month in order to finally satisfy my contract to my previous publisher and make enough money to pay health insurance and cover rent that summer. Of course, I think immediately to this mirroring with Guibert, like a bodily possession. Guibert, always the unreliable narrator, initially tells us he left his previous doctor, Dr. Nacier, for his gossipy indiscretion as to the celebrities he treated, but really, he tells us, it is because, when diagnosing him with shingles in 1987, he also mentioned that they were seeing a resurgence of this particular variety of chicken pox in seropositive patients, which Dr. Chandi later confirmed, seeing the shingles as diagnostic, even when the narrator was still refusing to be tested, putting in drawers over the years the lab requisitions, either in his name or an assumed one. What is the purpose of knowing, he tells us, the knowledge of which could drive someone like him to suicide? This is repeated, circled around, negated, throughout—Guibert’s desire to know or not to know whether or not he was seropositive, and then, once he knew, what that knowledge felt like to experience within the body. Which was, at that time, the knowledge that he was going to die.

I didn’t know how to decode the strange symptomry over the past months—headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, the excruciating shoulder blade and rib pain on the left side, along with a painful left breast, scaly, blistered, itchy, a feeling of glass shards within it when Leo sucks. I am up at night weeping, always weeping at night so as not to disturb the child, panicked that I have inflammatory breast cancer, the fastest-growing and most malignant form. I consult with one of those call-a-docs on my shitty marketplace insurance and upload for him a photo of my sad, rashy breast, like the saddest sext ever to have existed. After speaking to me for all of a minute on the phone, the male doctor confidently diagnoses a staph infection and prescribes antibiotics, which do nothing. Finally, I beg my ob-gyn to see me, despite her now not taking my shitty, yet still inordinately expensive, insurance. Shingles, my doctor says immediately, when I take off my bra. She is arrogant in a way that I always trust from women of authority. She bikes to Manhattan from Brooklyn every day, her sleek bicycle is next to her desk, I imagine her strong thighs wrapped in bike shorts underneath her medical coat. I don’t have the correct anatomy for shingles, she says to me, since I’m breastfeeding, ideally the rash would be on the torso, but she is certain she is right. I don’t have the peau d’orange—she pronounces it with a French accent, the skin like an orange peel. She’s only ever seen one case of it in her twenty-five years of practice.

That summer, it is as if I am afflicted with leprosy and on an island. As I’m trying to write these notes Leo comes in naked, having peed on her practice potty, and climbs into bed, pulls down my white nightgown and nurses. I bicker with John that he should take her, I’m supposed to rest. I mean, I am supposed to rest, but instead I have just begun a secret book. I kick everyone out of bed so that I can heal. Sickness is one of the only times I can attempt to demand my solitude. Perhaps a book is also a solitude, so I can try to be alone. A quote from Kafka in my notes: “I need solitude for my writing, not ‘like a hermit’—that wouldn’t be enough—but like a dead man.” Read More