The light disappears only when I put the rosary in my pocket. Rather than feel sad, I am pleased. For things are predictable, remaining where I leave them, unmoving, waiting for me to return to them. And warmth does return . . . the moment I once again hold a bead toward the sky. It is this consistency—much more consistent than people—that reassures me, that offers comfort, always drawing me back.
Beauty is in allowing a thing to fulfill its potential: infusing the cardboard ghost with hoarfrost or a rosary bead with sunlight. Beauty is in hearing, in tasting, in sensing the inner life, the secret seed of a thing. The Beauty of Things is a religion; I am resolute in my belief.
We return to the States, settling in Glen Rock, where I discover that Miss C., my eighth-grade teacher, is one particular person who offers no comfort. Her handkerchief perches stiffly in the pocket of her tweed jacket. I picture her pressing handkerchiefs with a humorless, iron-like hand, the same humorlessness with which she reads my essays.
On the day of our final papers, for example, Miss C. requests that we each write a three-paragraph essay, with at least six sentences in each. I develop the first two paragraphs, as instructed. When I reach the third, however, I know only one sentence belongs, will fit. Confidently, I write what I’m certain is a sentence that completes the essay with clarity, with perfection. But in front of the class, after praising other students’ papers, Miss C. turns to mine, claiming you can’t have only one sentence in a paragraph. It isn’t acceptable, she says.
Why not? I want to know.
But I’m too timid to ask.
Instead I learn that, compared to things, Miss C. is unknowable. I don’t understand why she wants me to write an ordinary essay like other students. She is unpredictable, too. One moment she praises students; the next, she is fearsome with me. She is just like my mother, who bakes cookies, only later to call my beloved rosary “silly.” Such contradictions confirm that things are more reliable. People like Miss C. are opaque, whereas the world of handkerchiefs, of beads, is transparent, is like ghosts, like glass.
How easily I step from one world into the other and back again as if I’m living two lives. In one, I pray to the secret life of things; in the other, I play games and attend school. How effortless to cross thresholds, invisible borders between worlds. It’s perfectly natural, say, to warm my fingers on rosary beads one moment and the next to eat a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the cafeteria.
In this way the world isn’t less real. It’s more. For it’s confabulated with other realities, ones that are intoxicating, primary-color bright and kinetic. Not static. Not dying. Not lifeless. Not weighted with sorrow or despair. Neither inconsistent nor dogmatic.
I’m transported, with one glance, into the reality of a seemingly monadic dime store marble, a sliver of white in transparent glass. One moment this white is frozen in its glass cocoon; the next, the tips of my fingers feel moisture from its cloudy molecules. Now free, it twists and spins, elements spewing from its core. Snow melts to oleander petals. Frost seeps ghostlike into the atmosphere, white-ing the Milky Way. Waves drizzle foam, lacy as crinolines. Beams from the moon bathe my feet. I taste the vanilla of swan feathers, of pearls. Next I gaze through quartz, enveloped in polleny sunlight. Or I see animals roam a savannah inside tigereye marbles. My tongue against glass, I lick lemon spumoni, lime agates, iridescent gumballs, wet red polish, mango crystals, a blueberry freeze, amethyst ice, the luster of mint. My marbles are planets in motion, even when they’re at rest.
The more I understand the soul of things, the more I know I influence things as much as they influence me. A marble, for example, initially contains, in its purest form, one certain aspect. Then, by peering beneath the surface, it’s as if my very senses violently cause a thing not necessarily to act differently, but to fulfill all its realities, be more of itself, down to its tiniest quark: a marble yields the earth; a bead yields a sun; a cardboard ghost yields a heartbeat. A marble, then, isn’t only a chunk of glass. A marble has scent and taste that’s beyond—deeper than—a cool, glassy skin.
At the same time I, myself, appropriate the essence of each of these things. This confluence of energy flows between these familiar, intimate, unambiguous things—and me.
How, I wonder at times, can a thing, able to be conjured into a deeper self, be considered unambiguous? It’s because all I need to do is blink or swallow, stretch my limbs or place an object in a pocket, for it to revert to its ordinary, simpler self. A marble is also still a marble. It never loses its essence, its natural, basic core.
A marble never loses its “marbleness.”
Unlike these knowable things, however, it is people who hide behind masks. People are afraid to reveal themselves or show their various properties or dimensions. You never know what to expect, for you can’t observe or contain all of any particular person. How could I have known, for example, that Miss C. would fail to see the significance of my one-sentence paragraph, of each carefully selected word?
For words, too, when written on paper alchemize into tangible objects, more reliable, more magical, more potent than people. The first word I fall in love with is “ventriloquist,” twisting the letters around my tongue. In this word I understand that the ghost speaks for me just as I speak for it—that I am the light around the bead as much as I discover its own warmth within. Words are spoken with ears, noses, fingertips. By unmasking words, syllables and letters appear. Words reveal meanings of things I savor, a constant source of intrigue and afterthought. I mull a word for hours as if I hold it, too, up to the light to inhale all its facets.
But because of this, in my same English class, I am unable to learn dictionary definitions for vocabulary tests. The word “marble,” for example, is defined as “a hard ball used in children’s games.” Nowhere does it mention iridescent gumballs, the luster of mint.
I never tell anyone about the hidden life of things. Not that I’m ashamed. Nor do I think people will laugh at me or doubt my certainty that a rosary bead transfigures into “sun.” Rather, it would be as if a magician revealed the tricks of the trade. It just isn’t done. But because of my silence, because I’m unable to learn vocabulary words and write six-sentence paragraphs, I am sent off to summer school. I’m urged to try harder, spend more time on my studies.
I slouch at my summer-school desk one dull day after another. With all my mistakes, all my incorrect definitions and unsatisfactory essays, the eraser on my pencil shrinks. It dwindles toward a nub. I mourn the loss of each pink particle, almost as tiny as dust. So rather than pay attention to the teacher, I focus on saving them. I gently brush the rubber bits across my paper, careful they don’t gust onto the floor. My palm hovers at the edge of the desk ready to catch them, like crumbs. When only a few pink polka dots remain on the paper, I press a moist fingertip against them until they adhere. I open my plastic change purse. I brush my hand. The motes emigrate to live with nickels and dimes.
Or I hold the eraser beneath my nose. I lick it. And soon . . . soon I am barefoot on a trail in the Malaysian archipelago among towering rubber trees with glossy leaves. The air is burgundy and hot. Halved coconuts catch latex dripping from bark. But watching the incisions—liquid rubber weeping from them—it’s as if my arms and legs, my own limbs, feel the cuts. Just as when I sensed the ghost’s papery heartbeat, I now equally understand the quiddity of rubber. Soon, I myself no longer exist, as if I perished in a plane crash or was lost at the bottom of the sea. I am rubber.
The skin on my arms and legs remains sore for days. My fingers smell of pink acid, a hint of smoke, a trace of bark. I still feel each particle as if it, alone, holds me to the skin of the earth. Or as if each pink seed will blossom into all that’s pink in the world: pigs and petunias, bubble gum and lipstick, nail polish and cats’ noses, ballet slippers and dogs’ tongues. Pellucid dawns. Pink tastes like sugar, satin ribbons, sapphires. Like tender wounds. All that is lush with pleasure, frail with pain. Pink, I say to myself, the long vowel sound lingering, i
nviting me into the word—the world of pink—before the quick consonant at the end snaps shut, holding me forever.
I understand that living a life of things has repercussions. I’m so consumed, not only do I fail high school essays and vocabulary tests, I also fail the SATs, barely getting accepted into college. Even college classes hold little interest. I’m much more content, say, observing imbrications on a pinecone, wondering how the bracts feel overlapping in their ornamental pattern. No, I know how they feel, each bract hugged and loved by its neighbor.
At a funeral for a friend killed in a car crash, I begin, now in my twenties, to question whether I should relinquish my hold on things, at least a little. I sense, during the service, the warm mahogany of the casket. I am awash in red roses, white carnations, yellow lilies, the perfume and aftershave of mourners pressed together in pews. People weep. Tears runnel through makeup, staining silk dresses.
I am unable to mourn, to weep. As much as I wonder why, I am equally consumed with the idea that things don’t betray you in this way, don’t die.
Or do they?
I am seized by two contradictory notions: that things don’t die; that they do. I am suddenly bereft when I realize I haven’t seen my rosary for over a decade. During which move did I lose it? Or were the beads, at some unremembered time, inadvertently crushed? Might I have even thrown away the rosary, my affections aglow with some new object of desire? Oh, the effusiveness of color in marbles, the destiny of red and yellow on beach balls, the surrender of book covers waiting to be opened, the eagerness of Jujubes yearning to be devoured! I feel craven by my own deceit. That I am unfaithful. That I might have discarded the rosary after falling in love with an ivory button. How could I not have noticed—in my all-too-human way—that I, too, failed to be consistent, not always tender toward the feelings and needs of things?
Sitting in the pew in this church at this funeral, I grieve. Only now, I fully understand that, over the years, handkerchiefs shred. Ribbons unravel to lint. Ravenous moths fray feather collections. I, alone, am responsible for the loss, these deaths. Yet I never stopped to pay attention as my attention so willingly drifted from this sequin to that burnt sienna crayon . . . years of bijoux, bangles, bracelets. How sorrowfully I neglected my duties, even as I am solely in charge of their care.
But even if I maintain constant vigilance over my things, what will happen to them when I die? What will happen to my objects when I’m gone? Who will care for them, these things allowing themselves to be lovingly explored by me in all their dimensions? These things, all my things, are almost mortal themselves in the way they have been with me during my most intense experiences. They, in fact, have been my most intense experiences. I have held them, caressed them, licked them, examined them, inhaled them, heard them, savored them.
The church service ends. I find myself outside on the sidewalk, alone, here where I’m now living in Galveston, Texas. The day is sunny, hot, blue. The pallbearers slide the casket into the hearse. The door closes long before I know how to say good-bye to a human friend.
I seek therapy following the funeral, in the midst of these anxieties and contemplations. I need to understand my newly realized confusion about things—as much as I must learn to accept the everyday world of people to be as reliable, as enticing, as soulful as—well—real as objects, as things.
Instead, during hour-long therapy sessions with Dr. Gripon, I eye a bamboo tissue box on the coffee table. I begin, after a few sessions, to surreptitiously peel off slivers of wood. I slide them between my fingers. How delicate, this chartreuse aroma of hollow woody stems swaying in an Asian breeze.
It is this airy, fluty sound of bamboo I hear more than I’m able to distinguish Dr. Gripon’s voice when he asks how I feel, when he tries to define what’s wrong. Besides, unsure of my own voice, I’m unable to answer. How, after all, can I say I feel like a rosary bead, a hankie, a bamboo twig? It’s as if I never learned the words of human feelings. I know how a marble feels; I can feel like a marble.
But how do I feel like me?
I stop therapy after three years even though I still don’t know the right words to say to him. I’m unable to describe what’s wrong. Nevertheless, at our last session, I want to give him a going-away present. Maybe he’ll finally understand who I am if I give him my marble with the white swirl.
As I hand it to him, however, I drop it. It rolls under his desk. While I meant for this moment to be plush with meaning—presenting him the marble as if it’s a new world for him to explore—instead I’m on my hands and knees poking around dust balls and bits of paper. I now consider whether I’d have felt more comfortable sitting here—partially obscured by his desk—inhaling powdery dust. Its grit provides texture to my own transparent-feeling skin. He chuckles as I search for the marble, asking what’s going on, what have I dropped, what am I doing?
I finally retrieve the marble, but I’m too mortified to show it to him, let alone give him this present. Despite his name, I realize I’m unable to “grip on.” To him. To what he considers real. He’ll never understand the marble. Things. Me.
I return home, placing the marble on a bed of gauze in an antique ORIENTAL TOOTH PASTE jar, which I found at an excavation site in Galveston. It’s as if the marble, feverish in its swoon after inhaling the fumes of Dr. Gripon’s office, is contaminated. It rests, quarantined, quietly recovering from its brush with reality.
It will take years—and the threat of divorce—before I am the one to understand: understand the words and the world of people. Eventually, after ten more therapists likewise fail to correctly diagnose my condition, I finally find one, Randy Groskind (after I move to Georgia), who does. I present a conch shell to him, one from St. Thomas. He nods when I explain that in its whoosh of breath, I hear words circling the whorls of my own ears. He doesn’t laugh. Nor does he smile. He is perfectly quiet—as still and quiet as a thing—not rudely disturbing the presence of things.
Randy is always Randy. Like his last name, his kindness is large. Unlike other people, he never loses his essential quality, the reliable properties of “Randy Groskind.”
In his silence, in his consistency, I finally find a way to say that when I was a girl my father hurt me. He, my own father, was particularly opaque, unpredictable, unknowable. One moment he was a loving daddy who built me a dollhouse out of construction paper; the next moment he wasn’t a daddy at all.
I tell Randy about dropping the marble in Dr. Gripon’s office. I explain what I have now come to understand about that moment. That, for the first time, it’s as if I saw the marble for what it was—lying alone, helpless, hiding in shadows beneath the desk, as if ashamed, as if it had lost its magic. The white swirl seemed shriveled. The incorporeal essence of the marble dead.
Or maybe I, as a little girl, was the one who lost my own personal magic, only discovering the magic of childhood in things. I was the one who would have been feverish without them. I would have been dull, dark, contaminated, soulless in the heavy folds of loss without my beloved things.
It is then that I say, “But I was really a little girl. Not a marble. Not a thing.”
I don’t believe there’s only one reason why I became this way in the first place. Yes, maybe it was the particular betrayal of parents and teachers. Maybe I suffered chronic metaphysical crises or semantic fugues. Maybe, lacking real religion, I found comfort in totems, artifacts, and talismans. Or maybe the fault is solely mine—a daydreamer, a slothful, lazy person who loves to commune with marbles and beads. I allowed myself to be porous, to become things, to be transported wherever they lead.
Years later, the marble remains in the ORIENTAL TOOTH PASTE jar (“CLEANSING, BEAUTIFYING, PRESERVING THE TEETH AND GUMS ~~ PREPARED BY JEWSBURY & BROWN”), with its gray and white marbleized surface. The rim of the jar is chipped from when my cat once knocked it off my desk. Now I accept such flaws and inconsistencies in things, in people. In me.
Yet on days when the earth seems paused on its axis, or when th
e day moon fails to rise, I remove the marble from its nest. I savor its cool wonder in the palm of my hand.
Prepositioning John Travolta
Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king.
Anne Carson
Perhaps it’s because you recently moved to Texas and can’t figure out if you live in Galveston or on Galveston Island that you begin to confuse prepositions. In any event, the first serious outbreak of this prepositional virus blooms at (during?) the time you find yourself, rumpled and damp, before (against?, beside?) the barrette counter in the “notions” aisle in the un-air-conditioned Woolworth’s. You believe that if you purchase a white silk camellia—a clasp attached to its short stem—and use it to pin up the left side of your hair, away from your face, that you will resemble Stephanie, John Travolta’s love interest, in Saturday Night Fever.
No, you will actually be Stephanie in Saturday Night Fever.
But—what with phrasal prepositions compounding your problem—will you be her in addition to yourself? In spite of your own obvious self? Apart from yourself? Or with the exception of your rumpled and damp self?
Maybe an unhappy marriage, maybe the fact that you gave up a good job on Capitol Hill to move here for (with) your husband, maybe Galveston’s humidity that clings to (upon) your skin like a moist membrane, or maybe simple longing contribute to the prepositional crisis that causes you to stare into (toward) the tarnished, wavy mirror, fasten the fake camellia, and hope for the best.
You tilt your neck to catch a different view of yourself from (in) another mirror, one aisle over in “makeup.” This double, wavy image casts you, you’re convinced, in a more romantic light. A soft-focus-publicity-photo kind of light. Which helps.
Pat Boone Fan Club Page 8