Recently I went hiking with a woman whose daughter is friends with my daughter. This woman is beautiful but haplessly so. She cannot dress herself; she has no clue about hair. She told me about an old woman, a famous heiress, that she’d worked for when she was in her twenties. The old heiress advised her to use her looks to get ahead while she still had them. She told her there was no shame in doing this, and that she, the heiress, was bored by women who thought they should handicap their best assets on the principle that doing so would be unfair, or that the spoils they achieved would be less valuable.
My friend said, “I had no idea how to do what she was talking about. I had no idea how to use my looks to get anywhere.” This might sound insincere; it isn’t. She really doesn’t know how. Funnily, her daughter, who is eight, already knows how to use her looks as the heiress recommended her mother do. The mother could take lessons from her eight-year-old daughter. So who can say where this knowledge comes from?
I have the knowledge, but to what degree I put this knowledge to use is debatable (i.e., I have a debate about it with myself). My parents like to tell of the time I came home from high school and announced that I wanted to dye my blonde hair black so that people would take my mind, my brilliant teenaged mind, more seriously. My desire was hollow. Or rather my desire was other than it seemed. I desired to be a teenaged girl who could destroy her most compelling teen asset. But I was never her.
Today I wrote a long e-mail to my London friend. Sometimes I spend more time writing e-mails to this friend than I do writing what I’m supposed to be writing. I justify this time expense by viewing these e-mails as a substitute for my otherwise nonexistent epistolary record. Regularly I’ll put my friend’s name into the search bar and read what I wrote to her a year ago. I’ll be reminded of a good meal I’d forgotten about, or that last August I was kind of blue. My friend from London is an excellent e-mailer—she’s inquisitive and hilarious; she uses ALL CAPS when she’s trying to make a POINT. She comes from an Australian family of rain people. She forwards me her mother’s vacation-planning e-mails as proof of her bloodline’s savantism. Her mother, prior to a family vacation, will research a rental property and draft for her sons and daughters an account of the house and its recreations worthy of a presidential advance team. For example:
PRAWNING
Best done in a boat. However can wade out from northwest side of bridge. Must have a good light and it must be on a moon free night. There are 2 prawn nets in shed. The prawns swim out on the outgoing tide—i.e., I think best just after the tide turns—check this at Tackle World.
We share evidence. We exchange phone photos of our outfits. She sent me pictures of her wedding dress, which she’d borrowed from the ’80s singer Sade. We explained ourselves to each other. Our histories. When did we lose our virginity, and to whom? Why did my first husband and I divorce? What happened to the guy she married in the Sade dress, through whom she got her UK passport?
Our e-mails have proven to be an important archival exercise because I’m starting to forget important life events. The reason I’m forgetting is because it’s been a while since I’ve articulated my life history to anyone. The depth and range of the intel I was meant to provide to my London friend—this I hadn’t done since I’d met my second husband. It was fun to do it again but it was also hard. Especially over e-mail, or especially in writing, and especially when you are a writer. It was hard to tell the truth, is what I’m saying. I tried to tell it, but I was aware of how each sentence had a million conditional offshoots. Like if you were to diagram a sentence for meaning, rather than grammar, that’s what each sentence might have resembled. I was trying to be charismatic, and in doing so I probably didn’t tell the truthiest truths. I never made stuff up. But I did strive to be entertaining. Such embellishments do not constitute lies. They constitute your personality. But your personality can seem like a store front for lie vending if what you’ve said threatens to find a wider audience.
I once arranged to meet a friend at a bar. He was supposed to interview me for a magazine—we were meant to have a “conversation” between writers—but our endeavor was doomed from the start. The bar I chose turned out to be much louder and scarier than I’d recalled. It opened at eight a.m. By four-thirty p.m. the clientele were drawing shivs over the jukebox queue. We ordered drinks and tried to make the best of it, but his tape recorder wouldn’t turn on. Instead we used my phone to record our conversation. We talked about books and writing for about five minutes before sliding into the sloppy, erratic rhythm of our surroundings. We talked about the things you talk about when you’re drinking bad vodka. We remarked, with some amazement, that neither of us found any of our young students attractive, and never had. Weren’t professors supposed to want to sleep with their students? What was wrong with us? We discussed one disastrous man’s disastrous love life. We discussed alcoholics we knew. When we were leaving, I realized I’d forgotten to shut off my phone after the brief books discussion concluded, and that our entire conversation had been recorded. Meanwhile, the file was due to one of the magazine’s interns the next day for transcription. I panicked. Probably this intern wouldn’t do anything with the file, but who knew? He or she could forward it to someone, and soon we’d be reading on the Internet damning shit about people attributed to us. Nothing I said on that recording differed from what I believed; I stood by all of it. But the way I’d articulated certain truths—there was falseness involved. There was a persona involved, one that I used with this friend, and that I used with other friends, too, but I did not use it with everyone. My friend and I considered pretending that the recording had failed, that there was no interview, sorry. Then, at home, I figured out how to split the file. It necessitated erasing the parts I supposedly no longer wanted. Suddenly, however, I was loath to lose them. It reminded me of the newspaper sections I never care to read until I am kneeling by the woodstove, balling them up to start a fire.
Today I am not going to a yard sale. I have not been to a yard sale all summer, even though I am fanatical about yard sales. I am also very gifted when it comes to yard sales. I can case the tables of junk and instantly locate the four items that don’t immediately appear interesting—a pitcher, a raincoat, a jigger—but are. Seconds are all I require. It’s like what happens when I go to an art colony and I sweep the dining hall and identify the attraction threats. My body responds to people and objects erotically, and within a micro-span of time. When my friend, who suffered from strange food allergies, visited a holistic healer, she was asked to bring samples of the food she normally ate. The healer would pick up her jar of peanut butter, or her bag of jasmine rice, and hold it against my friend’s body, and pronounce, “The body likes this,” or “The body doesn’t like this.”
My body works this way.
But this summer I have sworn off yard sales. I see the handwritten placards—9AM—NO EARLY BIRDS—nailed to the electrical poles. I feel the rise in my pulse like a libido spike, and I say to myself: No. I am going to have a healing summer, one absent unnecessary stresses. Yard sales are stressful. I feel like the character with the superpowers who, after she uses these powers to stop a villain, collapses in a heap.
Also, yard sales are sites of potential confrontation. One year there was a yard sale at a house that was always perfectly painted and the lawn perfectly mown, but no one ever lived there, not even during the hottest weeks of August. Then a sign announced there would be a yard sale at this house and I knew: it would be a good one.
I was right. It was one of the best yard sales I’ve ever been to; the competition, as it can be in Maine, was intense. I had to double my usual speed of identification, because stuff was disappearing fast. I found an iron bed within two minutes of arriving. It could have come from an infirmary, or a Victorian orphanage. It was narrow and long, custom-sized for a serpent. The odd proportions and level of disrepair (not terrible) announced to me: this is the item you must stand next to, and thereby risk losing all other good items.
I am usually the first person to cede to another—the more advantageous place in the checkout line, the last scone—I do this because I enjoy making other people happy. I enjoy the friendly exchanges that result from this kind of giving. But sometimes I give away things I want for myself. I do this because I hate social awkwardness and then afterward I hate myself for being such a coward.
This time, however, and maybe it was because we were at a yard sale, and because the rules of yard sales are understood and respected by everyone in Maine—I got here first, piss off—I did not budge. I said, “I’m sorry.” I wasn’t sorry that I wasn’t giving her the bed. I was sorry that she wasn’t married to a man who better understood the rules.
The story of this bed has become legion among our friends. Or rather, my “cutthroat” behavior has become legion. I put “cutthroat” in quotes because my friends are not criticizing me. They enjoy teasing me about my refusal to give away the bed. It was so out of character, my failure to cede the bed to a couple who would use it year-round rather than just during the summer, a couple who probably makes a fraction of the money my husband and I make. All these factors rendered the story even more delicious for my friends to tell and retell.
But my failure to give, in this instance, wasn’t a failure of generosity. It wasn’t a “cutthroat” desire to beat someone, or a crazy quasi-erotic need for an object. The truth was that I wouldn’t respect myself if I gave the woman this bed. I wouldn’t respect myself for being incapable of saying, “I really want this bed, I won it fair and square, and I am not going to give it to you out of guilt.” (I basically said this by saying, “I’m sorry.”) If I’d given the bed to the woman, I’d have done so passive-aggressively. I’d have done so to make her feel bad for making me do something I didn’t want to do, and that, by the laws of Maine yard sales, I didn’t need to do. But if I’d given her the bed, she wouldn’t have felt bad, not for a moment. And I would have felt like an idiot for giving up a bed to make a point that nobody got, not even me.
Today my husband and I went on a date to the Wannsee Conference house. The Conference house is on the opposite side of the German lake from where we’re living, and is a villa much like ours, save for the fact that in its dining room on January 20, 1942, Eichmann, Heydrich, Müller, and other notable Nazis gathered to draw up their official Jewish extermination plan, euphemistically referred to in the conference minutes as the “Final Solution.” (I have since learned a bit more about the history of our villa. During the war, following its seizure from a prominent Jewish banking family, our villa became the home of Hitler’s “economic guru,” a man named Walther Funk, whose work for the Third Reich earned him the name “the Banker of Gold Teeth,” a moniker referring to the practice of extracting gold teeth from concentration camp inmates so that they could be sent to the Deutsche Reichsbank—of which he was president—and melted into bullion. So the similarities between our villa and the villa across the lake, one can assume, extend beyond architecture and waterfront proximity. Though I have no doubt that the topic of extermination was, on numerous occasions, also discussed in the dining room of our villa, these remarks were unofficial enough that no museum is warranted to memorialize them.)
To get to the Conference house my husband and I biked past rowing clubs and yacht clubs and minischlosses, and along the way my mood started to tighten. I could not entirely blame Hitler. This just happens on some days, even when mass murder tourism isn’t on the date docket. We rounded the corner onto the street where the S-Bahn is located, and the mean beer-and-wurst seller I’ve made it my goal this fall to befriend, and it was as if I’d pedaled into an unpleasant new weather system. I saw my husband biking ahead of me and decided, because I had no better explanation, that he was somehow to blame for the alienation I’d been vaguely sensing all day and that had finally coalesced into the more solid (and paranoid) beginnings of a depression. By plain virtue of the fact that he existed and he loved me, he was at fault. I thought of the recent invitation he’d received to go to Paris, and of the many readings he’s giving in Germany and elsewhere in the upcoming weeks. Here, in this country, at this villa, I am a spouse; literally, this is how I am referred to on the villa itineraries he has received, i.e., “dinner for fellows and spouses.” My spousehood even required documentation. We had to produce a marriage certificate in order to secure my official welcome. (Apparently many people try to pose as the spouses of fellows; the fakes must be ferreted out.)
None of this, until today, had bothered me.
We arrived at the Wannsee Conference house; we parked our bikes. Standing in the beautiful gardens, reading the history of the villa on a placard, I was struck—as most people who visit the villa, at least according to the placard, are struck—by the uncomfortable collision of “idyll and violence.” This made me think of my husband’s and my favorite movie, an Austrian film in which a lakeside summerhouse is invaded by murderers who first toy with the family before killing them one by one, including the child. Years ago, when we were first dating, we rented this movie—from a Maine video store stocked with old blockbusters and about six foreign films—knowing none of the plot in advance. The title was in German, the blurbs and the descriptions were in German. We met this movie cold.
In the gardens, I made mention to my husband that possibly the director of this movie we’d seen so many years ago had been thinking of the uncomfortable collision of idyll and violence prompted by the likes of the Wannsee house. If I’d been a critic in Austria or Germany writing about this movie when it first came out (in 1997), I’m sure I would have thought about idylls and violence, and how, not so long ago, many people were hanging out in lake houses or regular old houses while elsewhere people were definitely not doing that.
What I was not saying but trying to say: We are on a sort-of date at the Wannsee Conference house, but I am struggling not to feel really alone here, and also not to be angry at you for absolutely no reason. This movie is important to my husband and to me. It signals that we had a history of liking things together, and of seeing the world similarly. I needed reminding of that.
But I also wanted confirmation that my inexplicable, unjustifiable resentment of him was explicable and justified. I was fairly committed to this mood I was in; I less wanted to overcome it than I wished to stumble upon an excuse to more fully realize it. So I lay in wait. There was no escaping me. My husband said of my observation about idylls and violence, “That’s not what that movie was about.” Then he told me what the movie was about. This, at least, is how I chose to interpret his response.
I grew indignant. As if I needed anyone to tell me what that movie was about! I recalled another movie we’d watched together in our early days, in which a New Age character says to his non—New Age dinner guest, “That’s funny, you’re telling me about chakras.”
This was my inner chorus as we walked through the Wannsee Conference house and took pictures of anti-Semitic children’s books. That’s funny you’re telling me about chakras. That’s funny you’re telling me about chakras. I also sensed—or wished to sense, in the interests of fully realizing my bad mood—an increasing emotional divide between us. My husband stopped talking to me; he wandered off on his own. This sounds ridiculous, and is ridiculous, but I decided that my husband believed he had a deeper connection to the material and the exhibit because he is half-Jewish and I am (possibly) not Jewish at all.
In my head, I started a fight with my husband. I argued in favor of my possible Jewishness, and thus my right to walk around the museum as his equal. The spelling of my last name was created on Ellis Island, and only the direct descendants of my
great-grandfather have the exact arrangement of letters; phonetically, however, there exist many potential “relatives” in the States, and every one of these potential relatives is Jewish. I am occasionally contacted by members of these phonetically identical families whose names are spelled “Shulawitz” or “Jewelowicz;” they say, “I heard you mentioned on the radio. I thought perhaps we might be related.” Recently I was asked to be on a panel; when I declined, the organizer said, “Could you possibly recommend another female Jewish novelist?”
(Also—this is unrelated yet somehow not—Hitler and I share a birthday. This has always made me suspect that people subsconsciously believe I am somehow complicit in the killing of Jews. It has also made me vigilant with myself. According to the laws of horoscopes, I might be an enthusiastic organizer possessed of incredibly bad ideas. Every instance of group inspiration requires a gut check. What are the possibly really negative long-term ideological ramifications of this Fourth of July parade float? If I were Jewish, I would be relieved of a great deal of probably pointless self-doubt.)
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