“Also,” I said, “there’s no way the Germans would have bags of cyanide on the grocery store shelves.” Anything in Germany that might remind a person of WWII has been either eradicated from view or memorialized by a huge stone monument. Hitler killed himself with cyanide. There’s no way the Germans would put an unmarked (i.e., unmemorialized) bag of cyanide on the grocery shelves, not least because we’d bought the aprikosenkerne at the Kaiser’s grocery store that was located less than a kilometer from the Wannsee Conference house.
I’m sorry, but tell me the Germans had not thought about this.
It made me wish, however, that we’d come up with a list of ways we might die in Germany that would permit us to laugh at each other’s funerals. I had a boyfriend with dark-humored brothers who generated such lists. When my boyfriend moved to Japan to study the Japanese sword, he gave his brothers permission to laugh at his funeral if he (a) died eating blowfish or (b) accidentally hari-kari-ed himself with his own weapon.
Surely the unintentional cyanide overdose of a half-Jew in Wannsee would qualify as grounds for laughing.
Meanwhile, my husband was upstairs trying to work. I called up the staircase.
“Are you dead yet?”
He said he felt nauseous.
“Me too,” I said cheerfully. “I’m so tired right now I’m sick!” It was true. We were still not over our jet lag.
Later he came downstairs for lunch and complained of a headache.
“We haven’t been drinking much water,” I said. “You’re probably dehydrated!”
It’s kind of him to tolerate my optimism. Who knows what will happen when we’re older, when he’s really dying of cancer or something. Or if we’re in a car accident. I imagined myself after a car accident reasoning with his decapitated body. You’ll be fine, you’re just dehydrated! The Hunzas grow new heads by the dozens! What it comes down to is this: I just need him to believe me that he’s not going to die. I need to win this fight more than any of the others I’ve won, so that I can prove to us both that I’m right.
Today I stopped at an antiques store that I’ve passed many times but have never visited. A sign outside advertised HAND STICHED QUILTS. Three quilts hung from a clothesline; none of them looked antique. The wooden boat building industry in my town has a name for this new-old crafts pursuit. Boats based on old designs and built with new methods are called “Spirit of Tradition” boats. So maybe these were Spirit of Tradition quilts. In the spirit of tradition—honoring ye olde days—these quilts were “stiched,” not stitched.
The quilts should have been a warning sign: this was not my kind of antique store. Flanking the door were architectural ruins—the bases of giant pillars—already repurposed as planters. This store catered to people who pay others to find the promise in junk. I do not think less of these people; I just cannot afford to be one of them. I often buy things because they are cheap and because I hope they will jar my imagination at a later date and become a smart investment. They will prove useful for something. Those cast-iron boot removers, for example, that were once bolted to a barn wall, and into which a farmer once stuck his boot heel and levered out his foot. They’ve spent ten years on top of my woodstove; their use has not yet revealed itself to me. I trust in time that it will.
I went inside the antiques store. Indeed, the prices were too high. My desires recalibrate in such situations; I am open to liking whatever is simply within my price range. I found a box of old postcards, the long rectangular ones with the twin, side-by-side exposures, usually of national monuments or state parks. When I asked the prices, the man said offhandedly, as though these items were of little consequence to him, “Oh those, I just put those out. I haven’t had a chance to price them yet.”
But approximately, I asked him. I wanted to know if it would be worth my time to paw.
“Anywhere from $5 to $200, depending on the postcard,” he said.
I picked five postcards. The four Maine postcards were too expensive. The fifth—a waterfall in Minnesota, an unremarkable image of a place that meant nothing to me—was five dollars. I bought it.
I gave the man my credit card. He scrutinized my name. “The writer?” he asked. He said he liked my work, but I doubt he’d read any of it. He knew my name because his real trade was people. Antiques interested him because they were the former possessions of people. Our subsequent conversation confirmed my suspicion. I told him I was sad because I was soon returning to New York. He said, “Yes, all of the New Yorkers leave in August.” He sounded wistful. Most locals, by the end of a summer tourist season, do not respond wistfully to its conclusion.
The man dropped names of local summer people, some of whom I’d heard of, none of whom I knew. He told me about a thirty-years-dead real estate agent who was, as he put it, “a one-woman zoning committee.” (He also described her as a “prissy little woman.”) She had ideas about where each type of person (writer, artist, WASP, Irish Catholic) should live. I mentioned a snooty family in our town called the Winfrieds. (I’d been inside their house once because I knew their caretaker.) I told a story about Mrs. Winfried and how she’d snubbed my neighbor, a local woman who’d cleaned Mrs. Winfried’s house when she was a teenager.
“Ah,” he said. “You mean Mrs. Winston.”
He talked about how sweetly offensive these people could be without even knowing it. How they assume you’re one of them, just because you’ve made it to the party, so to speak. “They’re always talking about ‘us white people,’ in front of me,” he said, “without even realizing that I’m passing.”
Was he talking about passing as a summer person? Passing as a straight person? Passing as a straight summer person? Then he mentioned “passing” a second time. He referred to having longer, curlier hair, and much more of a beard. “And even then they didn’t know I was passing!” he said.
Now I was really confused. To my eye, this guy was white. I suspected, too, that he wanted me to ask him, “Wait, aren’t you white?”
I decided not to ask him.
As I was leaving, I saw a pair of pottery cups and saucers by a now defunct, once influential pottery studio. The old barn and workshop still existed in a town twelve miles from mine; my friend and I had snooped around the property a few weeks ago. The sign remained, and the studio appeared operational, full of dusty wheels and botched pots lining the windowsills, even though the place had been shut down for years. There were rumors (my friend had read somewhere) that you could tour the workshop and the barn. But we found no people and no signs. After trying all the doors, we left.
I told the man at the antiques store that I wanted to buy the two cups and saucers. He said, “They’re a very good price.”
Compared to the rest of his offerings, this was true.
“Do you know about that pottery?” he said.
I told him that I knew a little bit about it.
“And the woman who founded it,” he said, “she really was a remarkable woman.”
“She really was,” I agreed. I had no idea about this woman. I knew exactly not one thing about her. I’m sure hers was an interesting story, because these stories always are. This stretch of the coast attracts artists, lifestyle eccentrics, self-exilers.
I don’t know why I pretended I knew as much as he did when I knew nothing. I don’t know why I refused his offer. No doubt he’d met this woman, or knew her son, or could have provided excellent gossip about her odd habits, communicated through her old cleaning lady, whose daughter was now his cleaning lady, or some such connection. But I was late to get home. I figured I’d Google her later and learn for myself what made her so remarkable. I did this. I failed to learn much. Her name was Angelica Baker. The most informative was a piece written by the antiques dealer I’d just been talking to, but the article was more concerned with a modernist pavilion razed by a banker with traditional tastes. I clicked around and discovered that the antiques dealer kept a blog. (He’d written an article called “The Trouble with the Footmen: Servant P
roblems in Old Bar Harbor.”) I realized how much we had in common. He’s obsessed with mansions and wealth—his is the adult version of my kid obsession with Greenwich real estate—but he’s also struck mute by a simple white cape. I own a simple white cape that’s two hundred years old. Antique capes are modernist in their way, two or three cubes and rectangles stuttering across a field. The sight of one relaxes my whole body. On his blog he’d posted a picture of a white cape under a quote from Coco Chanel, “Elegance is refusal.” Was it a mark of elegance, my refusal to ask him about his background, my refusal to let him tell me a good story about a potter? Regardless, now I was far more curious about him. I vowed to stop by his antiques store more often next summer. I thought we’d get along.
Today I went to a Virginia Woolf reading. For some reason this reading was held at a law school. At the front desk I was asked by an old woman holding a hand-written sign that said VIRGINIA WOOLF, as though she was a chauffeur picking up Virginia Woolf at the airport, if I were going to the Virginia Woolf reading. I confirmed. She said, “I guessed that about you.” I got offended. Why I didn’t know. When I entered the library where the reading was being held I knew. I am of that age now where I am looking for the next age I will be. How will I dress? How will I act? Here were women in their last ages; they wore kimono blouses and ethnic scarves and had buzzed, asymmetrical hair. I felt like I was in a late-80s women’s studies class. I’d once admired women who looked like this; what had changed? I said to myself, They’re only dressing for women like themselves. I often claim that I dress for other women. But this crowd felt more insular and hermetic. There was a formula to belonging.
Since I am older but not yet old, I try not to judge even while, to protect myself, I’m totally judging. So trying not to judge, I surveyed these women and thought: Maybe when you get older you want to be part of a visually defined group. Maybe it is easier to be recognized and acknowledged as part of a group because to be acknowledged individually becomes harder over time. I’ve noticed that I have to look harder at older women in the face to see their faces. I stare and I stare and then suddenly—there they are. I have to look harder at my own face to see myself in it. My face was signifying me so well for a while; now, again, it is failing. When I look in the mirror I literally feel like I’m boring down through a surface that doesn’t catch the light, that isn’t quickly bouncing back a discernible message. I am starting to fail on the streets to communicate with my face because pedestrians don’t have that kind of time. They are in a hurry. Recently I started wearing a bone around my neck. It’s a seal vertebra I found on a beach that’s for sale; I hope, if a seal spirit sees fit to deliver unto me a massive windfall, that the beach will someday be mine. The bone makes pedestrians stare, not at me, but at it. This seems a good first step. Who is that woman wearing the bone? Who wears a large bone around her neck? This woman does. Please take the time to look at her.
Today I sat next to an eighty-nine-year-old man at dinner named Mr. Pym. He seems, like Dick Cavett, to have known all of the most interesting human beings of the twentieth century. He was not a name-dropper so much as a man who didn’t, by virtue of his lifestyle, know a single unfamous person save his own mother (who was, he thrice repeated in his Georgian accent, “a wonderful woman”; he was haunted, daily, he said, by the unkind words he’d said to her as a boy). When asked by an architect (seated to my other side) if he’d lived his life joyfully or angrily, Mr. Pym replied, “I should have been more angry.” He was too nice, he said, and primarily defined himself as an avoider of conflicts. He was too nice, even, to fire people, he said; “I just wait for them to die.” But then he confessed that he’d considered hiring a murderer from Russia to kill an employee who was making his life hell. “It would only have cost about $3,000,” he said.
For such a conflict-avoiding man, he revealed, through his stories, a fairly consistent aggressive streak. He was, he said, the only person whose advice the writer Mary McCarthy had ever taken. (McCarthy was not a person, apparently, to whom one gave advice.) He’d visited her house in Maine while doing a photo essay on her town and its buildings. (This was the same town with the white house ordinance where Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, and Elizabeth Hardwick lived.) McCarthy’s house was hidden by a pair of trees. He said to her neighbor, “If I had some overalls and a chain saw, I’d take these trees down myself.” His remark was reported to McCarthy. “He’s right,” she apparently said. The trees came down. Later Mr. Pym mentioned going to the theater with the poet Marianne Moore. Over dinner, this man told Moore about his mother’s house down south (also, it seemed, his house). He hated this house. He wanted to get rid of his mother’s house and move a house from a hundred miles away to the spot her house currently occupied. His own mother would be displaced while this house swapping occurred. He asked Moore what he should do. Live with the terrible house? Or destroy it, make his mother homeless, and truck in, from a distance, the house he desired?
Moore apparently replied, “Mr. Pym, sometimes one must be ruthless.”
I’m sure Mr. Pym, this too-nice man, was often ruthless. I think a lot of self-defined nice people are ruthless. I do not consider this a cynical stance. I consider it a realistic understanding of the word “nice.” If a nice person is famous or successful—and plenty are—that person is not so nice that they are above heeding the logic of status improvement. Right now I am reading a nonfiction book in which a certain poet is portrayed (within the normal range of such things) as ambitious and calculating. I was frankly relieved to discover she was ambitious and calculating because, a few months earlier, I’d read her memoir. She’d presented herself as an angel, a guileless art angel. Her passive approach seemed to implicitly criticize people who had to actually try to succeed. She’d just made art alone in her crappy loft. Fame had found her.
But fame hadn’t. Fame doesn’t. Recently a writer I know expressed irritation with another quite famous writer’s claim that she’d just been a mother, and she’d just sat at her kitchen table writing stories while her kids napped, and that she had no ambition at all. “That’s bullshit,” this irritated writer said. “So an editor decided to randomly phone this housewife and ask her for some stories?”
I’m messily conflating ambition and not-niceness here. To some, to me, I guess, there’s a connection. To be ambitious—to exert one’s self-interested desires beyond the scope of one’s own head—could be seen as impolite. As not nice. I have always been nice; I have been told by others how nice I am. The one person who does not think I’m nice is me. This is because I am ambitious and competitive, and so I must be not nice to someone in order for my otherwise niceness to feel authentic. I am not nice to myself by believing I must pay more than others, and sometimes for others. When I go out to lunch with a person, I must always pay the entire check; splitting isn’t allowed, and I will never permit another person to pay for me. I sometimes think my sense that I must pay comes from growing up in Maine. The five purely beautiful summer days per year are mortgaged hard against months and months of mud and ice and damp. The Maine weather instills in one’s psyche a seasonal rhythm of payment. Of the cost of joy coming due.
Today I sought advice from the therapist at my daughter’s school. My daughter and I are victims of a co-produced play that begins and middles and ends with screaming, tears, accusations of heartlessness and disaffection, faked injuries, faked heartbreak that hides real heartbreak. There’s an oxymoronic quality to the unremitting pitch of our relationship; it’s a screeching flat line. Finally I could no longer take this relationship. I am not saying that I am not the crazy person here. I am saying I am the adult. I can throw up my hands and claim powerlessness. As the adult, this powerlessness has serious power.
So I contacted the Feelings Doctor. The Feelings Doctor works at my daughter’s school. We made an appointment, just the doctor and me. Before our meeting, I mapped out what I planned to say to her. I wanted to be efficient. I wanted to provide an accurate history, but mostly I wanted to
get down to business. Establishing background exhausts me. I don’t tend to do it. I start talking and the listener can fill in the blanks as he or she chooses. My husband calls me No Context Woman. “ ‘The journey is the goal’ is not the goal” is my motto. The goal is the goal. Let’s start with the end.
To this end, I had a probably bad idea: I could send the Feelings Doctor an essay I’d written about my daughter and our traumatic history together. I thought the Feelings Doctor might get a very good sense, an arguably more thoughtful and comprehensive sense, of this history by reading an essay.
But then I realized how insane this might make me appear to be. A mother contacts a Feelings Doctor to speak about her troubled relationship with her small daughter. Instead she sends the doctor her own writing, turning the therapy session into an opportunity for the therapist to respond to her artistic representation of the problem, rather than the problem itself. How could I appear as anything other than a narcissist, or a writer greedy for more readers, or a mother so self-involved that she pretends to care about her daughter when, in fact, she’s using the appointment as a sneaky means of gaining an intimate tête-à-tête about her own work with a stranger?
I decided against sending the Feelings Doctor my essay; I regret now that I didn’t. I arrived early for the appointment, and good thing, too. I busted the Feelings Doctor lacing up her escape sneakers; she’d forgotten we were supposed to meet. (I seem to have this effect on therapists.) She asked me some questions and didn’t really listen to the answers. She said, “Children these days have so much attention paid to them that they can’t handle a moment of neglect.” I corrected her; in fact, our situation was slightly more complicated. To state it uncomplicatedly, and thus probably inaccurately, I resented my daughter’s need of me and thus punished her by neglecting her.
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