Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  “Battleship gray” is also a problem; consider the monstrous snout of a ship, fastened with rivets the size of plates, unyielding and lithic—does a sky intend to communicate this? To bear down, to invade? Can’t we come up with something other than a destroyer’s brutal, flat gray to signal a presence that hovers over with steady nerves and conviction? In Farsi, my friend offered Ghamangeez, “a saddening sky,” and his wife refined it: “a sky that brings on sadness.”

  Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.

  It’s quick, gunmetal is, and efficient. I’ll give it that. It speeds the scene. So you can get on to something else. It’s a term that makes you feel part of a team. A baton you hold firmly and pass down the line. The way a party icebreaker works: let me introduce you to X. Now you’re friends. Now the two of you can have coffee together. Then you introduce. To one of your friends. They go for a drink (you know where). Now so many of us have something in common. We’re cozy. We know what the other means when we say....

  Skies change, thankfully, and grays complicate—unfurl, turn smoky, egressive, specular. A few hours later, the sky in Cape May has taken a turn that stymies. It stumps me. Car base coats, the flat ones, rally to help. Giorgio Morandi knew, and applied to the bottles and humble plates in his paintings a range of opacities, the soft, cool creams of unspeckled eggs, of froths and dunes. Of dusty, white Neccos (whose flavor is cinnamon, and surprisingly spicy, almost fireball hot, but muted and sweeter, so the shock spreads more evenly over the tongue, with no ping, no ache, nothing tornadic.) This sky is more oatmeal, ashed incense, clamshell. It’s the color of shit in its calcified state, though this likeness is not much in use, alas, our palette’s not very broadly accepting, and shit is not aesthetically easy; it won’t stay domed. Won’t stay chapeled, as it is when left alone to dry into earthy, roadside temples. Fat white gulls and snowy egrets disappear against this sky, which makes its color more erasure than presence. Ghosted. Palimpsistic.

  Birds can’t sink into gunmetal skies.

  “Gunmetal,” on the comportment family tree, is close to “steely.” Steely eyes. Steely wills. Ramrod posture. (And ramrods, of course, pack down charge in muzzle loading guns; thus a body fit to load munitions, push explosives, shoulder them in, so straight and stiff, it must have been trained. To fight, to serve and never to yield, its motto might be. A body like that. A sky like that. Mission-bound. Singleminded.)

  “Gunmetal,” deployed, delivers a payload of routine. And routine is a much sought-after commodity. I get that. The best of us succumb at times. About McDonald’s, for instance, the Cape May guidebook confirms, “You can’t live on gourmet food alone. So it’s comforting to have Mickey D’s right here! There are few things in life more reliable or comforting than a Happy Meal. There is something to be said about knowing EXACTLY what you’re getting EVERY TIME. No worrying if your steak is going to be cooked enough, or if the clams are bad. The only thing to worry about at McDonald’s is whether to get your meal small, medium or large.” “Gunmetal” as Happy Meal. It’s compact, the phrase “gunmetal sky,” as reliable a delivery system as any Big Mac, withtwoallbeefpattiesspecialsaucelettucecheesepicklesonionsonasesameseedbun. (How cleverly that little jingle—I can still hear the tune—indicates both precision and overabundance.) And though I won’t go on with this point, research shows there are 380 seeds on each sesame-seed bun, “give or take a few.”

  So when I say the word to myself, for a sky’s particular depth and hue, “gunmetal,” which precisely means “dark gray with blue or purple tinge” (but you knew that, didn’t you), a third, nictitating lid comes down and though I see the sky—more accurately, the real seeing stops. The little path meandering out, where I went hunting all this time for other colors the sky might be, fuzzes up. It bombs the path, “gunmetal” does. I’m trying to locate it in my body (say at the spot where clavicle and shoulder meet, where the rifle kicked hard and knocked a week-long bruise into place) so I can say the word “gunmetal” and mean it. But I don’t feel it. I just join with. I fall in. I get phalanxed with the staters. Heads of Statement all start talking. All agreeing, nodding, yessing. Settling. I feel I’ve been given one of those ovoid bumper stickers, alerting all to my vacation spot—that mysterious “OBX” (Outer Banks Crossing, I learned at a stoplight, eye level with an SUV’s bumper). Or in Cape May it’s “Exit Zero.” Very in-clubbish. The longer I stay in a place, the more okay the decals seem. I’m hustled in with the locals and after a while—we’ve been coming here for years—I begin to feel pretty local myself. Happy to be readable. Glad to be part of.

  At luminous moments I have wanted to say, “How blessed I have been”—but can’t. My problem is accepting a gift so weirdly, singularly bestowed: why me? why not them? I’m better with gratitude that’s more diffuse: late afternoon in the middle of my life, cooking dinner, the window open, sun releasing the scent of pine floors into a solitude still and light-scoured. I’m more at home with moments beflecked with goodness, than I am with the handed-down-from-on-high kind. Things like plumbing and clean hot water, hard, tart apples and well-sharpened knives best set my gratitude in motion. “Gunmetal” would make a follower of me; using it, I’d have to say a thing I’ve been taught to say. Believe a thing about the sky I’ve been given to believe. As I’d have to take “blessed” to mean: I have been chosen, marked, held right in the center of some kind, crosshaired sight. Which is nice. But doesn’t the universe also fix on falling sparrows, lend its attention to spectacular disaster, train its very steady eye on accidents, suffering, diminishment—and not intercept, help out, bless them?

  I want such a sky to quiet me (not “strike me dumb”—that’s a rod drawn up, enforcing awe, and one is “smote”). And I want, in that quiet, to search out my terms. And what I decide on, I want to be more than a firearm’s alloy. Harder to come by. Stronger. Chromatic. I want to turn to oyster and mouse, tide-pool and tin, and then tank those and reconfigure if the gray they offer is not worthy, if associations gained are not surprising, of a distance previously unreachable, and intimately roomy. Freshening and new.

  Or let’s not play Name That Color at all: goodbye to Keystone, Gauntlet, Cloak, Summit, Uncertain, Vast, and Repose (from the neighborhood paint store’s line of gray offerings) and take up geography and spatial relations—how far, in what way, for how long did the sky lift away from sea, hunch in close, or variegate.

  Or activate good old “gray” as a suffix, but hitch it to actions like torque-, welter-, and brim- . Coruscate-, grizzle-, rave-, solder-, convulse-.

  Or consider that which disappears into the sky—bottle-nosed dolphins that leap-because-they-can, their play, research shows, both useless and necessary—in other words, restorative. Dolphins leap because muscles want flexing, because the air at Cape May in June, is warmer than water and the change is pleasing, the shift between elements tickles them. In fact, I just learned, dolphins mate up to eight times a day—even when not in heat.

  To disappear into an endless, dolphin sky.

  To sift and sift and sift words—and not find. And in the face of not-finding, to not-rely-on. To turn away usual corollaries. To maybe just sit before such a gray sky and give up, until strength returns and possibilities rise. Or maybe just watching is enough. To unburden in that way. To unwind. Take it out of your pocket, your holster, that sky. Lay down your gunmetal. It’s the sky buy-back program. The sky amnesty plan. Turn it in, buddy. Hand it over, right now, while you can, and you won’t be charged with theft.

  And now you’re free to find your own term.

  Street Scene

  At least I can’t identify a particular state of mind—nostalgia, say, thieving from elsewhere, or a stricter, plain yearning at work on the scene. Rather, just sort of blankly did I enter the car, start the engine (those three Hondaic chuffs before catching), and drive it into the sky.

  Or (and this direction is also possible) I submerged it. Or hit a misty wall of rain from a fugitive jungle. Steered into a cloud on the lam.<
br />
  I was on a familiar street, but I had to assume this—an epistemologically unsound move. My watch showed I’d been on the road for just minutes—a fact that helped not at all to tack down the street which had blown, which was currently falling and shushing, like a sheet of paper, unreachably far under vast, inherited furniture.

  The street slipped a groove like a kid’s jostled train set; the street behaved like a charcoal-sketch track laid lightly down and easily smudged. Puddles settled in dips and depressions. From a distance they were blackened blots, and then, as I neared, they silvered over. They behaved as expected, dependably tilting the sky one way, then another, rippling, wavering it. This puddle series was arranged with some logic: if splashed by tires (or the foot of a distracted college student), the puddles recommitted to new, nearby watery communities, mercury-style. The solid, central yellow line divided the street neatly; it was a nice painted line, not one of those newfangled, rubbery strips set down with a waggle where the road crew faltered, got ahead of themselves, or behind in their gluing. (How I’ve wanted to pry and reroll those strips, stash them in my sewing box along with coils of binding and red measuring tape! And here I comforted myself: at least I recognized the yellow thought, and pictured my blue sewing box, and home.)

  But the street itself slipped free. There was no alembic click of light and shadow. A lyrical moment, highly quotable and good for rainy occasions like this—petals on a wet black bough—did not appear as an apparition, to affix the scene to a recognizable mood. No ensemble of clues plotted the meeting of a St. & a Dr., a Rd. & an Ave. to orient by. The street just would not, would not mean route-to-store, or close-to-home. It offered no eau-d’library-nearing (white roof the top note, crowns of maple the finish), no whiff of farmers’-market-upcoming, no low-grade-parking anxiety-flicker. No overture, prelude, or preface rounding toward anywhere stepped forth. I was driving—first principle, sure—but it could have been anywhere: Baltimore, Barcelona. No last-year-at-this-time specimen (that yellow moon slung low over IHOP) (now Enterprise Rent-a-Car) turned into a wist- or a joy- or a hurtful past moment.

  As I said, I might as easily have been flying, all movement unfelt, the speed of the moment so wholly contained, the distance covered, unrecognizable. The street’s singular elements were perfectly nameable—that echt yellow stripe, those newly-dribbled tar snakes filling cracks, curbs darkened with rain, fickle puddles, passing cars launching watery stars out of low spots to firmaments elsewhere—yes, the things of the street were nameable, but helped not at all to locate me, as when, from a plane, looking out, looking down, certain of an actual neighborhood below, the internal eye conjures up joggers pushing triangle prams, bike bells aflame in low sun—though the whole of the landscape remains a big chunky patchwork and nothing on a human scale asserts.

  I knew the street to be “residential.” It leafed over with well-tended trees, curbs dipped politely at corners, I could read all that, yes. Those clues registered. And so did the need to go slowly—but only as reflex, a synaptic response. I had not the sense of a specific school zone directing the downshift, or that, say, a tumbly, yellow-haired kid in favor of darting lived near.

  So where was I now?

  And also, who, is the question.

  Here, into the picture (I’m slowing this down, considerably), came an old woman shuffling, assiduously not looking both ways as she crossed the street. The crossing was a big, concentrated-upon project—an endeavor which must have, earlier, as she dressed for the day, required planning and determination, the gathering of moxie, as someone’s grandmother would’ve said. Or she herself would’ve said. And at this she’d laugh quietly: “moxie” applied to crossing a street! How silly the way age reduces us—a trip to the drugstore, across the street, planned! My question would be hers, too: Who am I now? To those college kids in the new apartments—part of a tribe? (she tries out “The Olds.”) Daft?—yes, a little-seeming, I’m sure. Harmless?—oh, all the harm done in a lifetime, now done with, and time-softened, sort of. Now (she thinks), I’m the person who cannot believe she was once one of them, that eye-of-the-storm, centrally pumping heart one makes of oneself when young, all confusion and terror and beauty at that age.

  This congeries of moments wasn’t long lasting. Was startling, though. Microdramatic. I was trying to find my way back, or dig into the moment, there on the street. It was the sensation of trying to raise a stuck window, knowing the stubbornness to be weather, the resistance to be moisture, and that, with the right blow applied, it would move. I felt, too, the thought’s construction shift, to a new shade of doubt—an insistent, keen, little stab: it would have to move, right? The moment’s flat, solid resistance would give, would not behave for much longer like a colony of coral, with endless, internal, spawning lives?

  For the duration of the moment, trying to locate myself on that street, trying to tack along it, I was as a foreigner. I was en route, and in a strange station, bars of the ticket window striping the clerk’s lips (straining to read them), the quick clerk reciting time/track/tariff, the echoey loudspeaker announcing my train (its delay? its departure? the dining car’s closed?) I felt, amid all the commotion . . . what? In such a chaos, listening for that sound-combination meaning my train and my destination (dear friends, in a foreign land always memorize the “from-to” construction and numbers at least to one hundred) suddenly, a fingernail shone promisingly out; it steadied me, there in my car, as it did one real and wintery afternoon years ago in Warzsawa Centralna. I was booking a couchette to Prague (do what with my visa—stamp? save? submit?) when that very same nail, mine own, seemed to offer answers about my journey—if only I could read its whorls and shy ridges, its dents, and the crescent of Polish dirt there collected!

  So what happened?

  I rolled down the window for a breath of air. At least I still knew to regard with pleasure the way the stiff, hand crank activated muscles in my shoulders and back, and sharpened and fixed my attention. The exertion felt good. The wind lifted my hair and found a way to my neck. Shifting into first gear and lurching forth caused a line of cold rain to slip from the roof through the window and onto my thigh. It soaked in and darkened to a tiny Brazil. I eased into second. Things cleared.

  What happened?

  But I’ve already told what happened.

  All along, this has been the story of a moment.

  The cross-sectioning of a moment is the news. That a moment anywhere—here, on a street—does this, is news.

  Later that week, to keep the feel of that moment alive, I studied up on the construction of streets. I liked one particularly precise diagram I found, showing how different materials are layered to provide flexibility and skid resistance. Internal steel beams or meshing help a street withstand cycles of expansion and contraction. All kinds of seasonal flux is planned for. Subterranean drainage systems with rocks and sand control saturation. A formula called the California Bearing Ratio is used to calculate for appropriate loads. One cut-away showed the world of buried telephone cables, gas mains, sewer pipes and other bundled electrical stuff—all the systems collecting-from or delivering-to each nearby house its heat and waste, its light and voices. On top of the street was sketched the outline of a house. Then behind the flat house, a blue wash was meant to stand in for the sky.

  When I looked up, beyond the diagram and expanse of my desk, there in the frame of the window was grass-sky-trees, in no order at all. In no order at all, it went phone line, kicked silver trash can, far steeple. It moved from green coil of hose up to far-off pink cloud.

  I found, given a cross section to study, the eye hovers and slides, lingers on the most satisfying shapes, won’t follow a plan but pulls in, zooms out, sharpens some things, dissolves other things. The eye disarrays the neatest sequence.

  Thus in the frame of my window now: a white truck. And just to the right of it and up the steps, a porch swing with two people and a baby held close. A mailbox, a white post, a set of gray shutters. The baby in a bright red ha
t with a tassel (last week she was born) (the red’s easy to see). A mother and father laughing and singing. And a child, already moving in and out of the scene.

  Being of Two Minds

  Our playing field is completely overgrown. I’m calling it a “playing field” though it was just a bare hillside with rocks we plucked and threw into a sewer grate for a game. But it was not “just,” as in “inconsequential.” I only mean the field was in no way official. And I mean to be neither sentimental nor nostalgic—though to say our field does mark it with an intimacy, I realize. To present a little history here, even if remote and sketchy, to let you know this site is charged and layered up is important, so that I might best grade into the state I am bent on exploring: being of two minds.

  Passing our field, some milkweed fluff blew onto my black T-shirt and I let it stay, thinking fuzzy-edged cloud, spun sugar halo.... The day was so beautiful that I laughed, the sky so absurdly blue, June first, it seemed apologetic, a making-up-for. I laughed, and the laughter was not tinged with sadness of any kind, for the game we played was of a certain time and place. It was meant to be contained, I know this now, and looking back, the game itself was absurdly blue and lit, a respite even, like this day, in which nothing, for once, came up about this all going, me going, everything too soon gone. I crossed the street and saw a parked truck covered in AstroTurf with hundreds of little plastic animals hot-glued on at all angles. As I passed and looked back, I saw, hand-painted in white on the bumper: “Laughter drives the winter from human faces ha ha ha. . . .”

  I was not of two minds at that moment. Instead, I laughed easily, without thought or effort. Whereas two minds come in. They find you. They wrestle and present cases, part waters and curtains. There can be legalese with two minds, and wranglings, and shadows vying with rays. But this was one mind—the freedom from sadness, from missing the game; the bright weather; the truck with its tailgate afterthought; and the day, or moment at least, unbeseiged.