Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  Today it rained for much of the afternoon. It got dark fast, let go a hard, final downpour, and now the streets are clear and sharp-smelling. The light, these long last days of summer, is low enough to jewel and yellow, blur, and now, if I tilt my head, rainbow all the drops hanging from the phone line. It’s that the colors weight the drops, slick them with fire and sea-greens in shifts.

  I read for sustenance (more than my own lemon-beaded raindrops on the high-wire can give) Proust on asparagus:. . . tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form . . .

  I walk through this rain thinking, at one time I would point this all out to you in person, hold these drops on the wire against those astral stalks, iridesce the water, roll a pearly drop toward you, fray and sift asparagal light. But now you live in another city and you, in another country, and you (who have not yet even made an appearance here) and I no longer speak of such things.

  But I want the shine to live. And before I know it, I am offering, tilting into the light and bringing forth . . . something: fine beads aloft, an abacus of pearls, say. I’m sowing some new green, but it’s for you, Reader, whom I both know and do not know, who both exist and do not exist, who constitute an elsewhere far, further than I can imagine, years, maybe centuries away.

  Whose elsewhere is a balm and a comfort.

  “Try Our Delicious Pizza”

  There on the postcard was my husband’s name, carried along on a soft-looking jet stream, sharing the airspace with other bright-colored mechanical bits—probably called “connexions” or “connectorz” because ad-folks know to mess with the language to better appeal to kids. There in the day’s mail was his short, balanced name, spelled out with puzzlelike red/yellow/blue parts sailing along, pulled by a friendly, white, airbrushed current. Someone at the Science Center got their lists mixed up and thought he was a child. (Often, he does look like a curious, alert kid—and he was a very sweet boy, as I hear it.) In one of my favorite pictures of him, he’s around five, playing a recorder, and wearing a wrinkly, striped shirt. There’s sheet music on a stand which the others are following, but I’m sure he’s just playing by ear. It’s that his name on the card is so bright, tender, alert—if it called him, its timbre would be full of harmonies he’d have known even then, and was probably using to embellish the simple song.

  It’s hard to retain such joyful playing.

  When the card arrived the other day, I felt, more than anything, sadness wing in.

  And on the Long Island Railroad last month, it came forth like this: the conductor handed my son a gold Souvenir Ticket and punched it ceremoniously, and my son took the ticket, smiling, knowing he was too old for such things (and he is, he’s twelve now and taller than I am) but still, he was perfectly gracious. There it was, in my son’s hands: the full understanding that others mean well but won’t always see you accurately, and what you give in return for their effort is kindness.

  The sadness always surprises, hits sidelong, and then files right in. Perhaps there’s a groove constructed by years, a worn place ready to receive it. So when an occasion calls it forth, and after the initial shock of arrival, the sadness knows just where to settle.

  I don’t go in search of it. Why does it find me?

  And I don’t entertain it for long when it comes; I don’t want to be sad, but unbidden, it muscles in—by way of train cars stopped in the station, brimming with coal—B&O and Burlington Northern, the basic, everyday, raw-ingredient lines. I’m not inclined to fix on plaintive train whistles, or rusting small towns built too close to the tracks; I’m not even bent on recollecting Scenes of My Life in the Midwest Age Twenty (sensitive, angsty, ISO edgy landscapes, weedy tracks, soulful connections). Rather, it’s the way a coal train shrinks as I Amtrak by, en route from Baltimore to New York. As if it’s holding just a pinch of black dust, a harmless, loamy soil. I had a miniature train set as a kid (from Germany, I’m sure, the parts were lovely, precise and clockworkish), each car the size of a jelly bean, and I could hook them up in different formations and tap the whole line into motion—gently or they’d topple over. For this I needed a smooth kitchen floor. In her time, I read, the little Czarina also had tiny trains, but with ruby headlights and sapphire windows, for amusement during long afternoons, where, on some inlaid table she, too, I imagined, set journeys going with a tap of her royal hand. (With such trains, one conjures a world by humming softly and staring into the distance, past the cars and deep into the table’s pattern—or the floor’s green and white linoleum—so there emerges an imagined friend and a story: an exile’s in process, the dark’s all around and the cold, she gets up from her seat, holding her lap dog and . . . etc.). I thought I could inoculate myself against the sadness, even then, by calling it up, turning it over in a light of my own making. Such quiet one needs to hear the smallest wheels turn! How difficult that is to come by now. And my real train-in-the-depot, with its coal fresh-blasted from the ruined mountains of West Virginia, supplier of energy for the capital’s grid—well, it returns very quickly to full size, and the wrecked towns and poisoned lakes are hitched to it, and that changes considerably how I feel about festive lights ringing the mall, the White House ablaze and the monuments glowing all night, every night of the year.

  And how can a thing that’s a deathblow to sadness, itself also be a sadness? Once a perfectly balanced, strong, city poplar was busy greening and swelling its buds, ruffling its leaves, over a strung-out woman in a parking lot. It was a bright weekday afternoon and though she was stuffing baggies and needles deep into a hole in the passenger seat, the light through the trees was so gentle, so ancient it made her look like a peasant planting, bent at the waist, with thick legs and hiked skirt; it was a light that buffed the chipped curb, the crass dumpster, so that the illegality of her task seemed mild and familiar. As I walked past, I thought her form beautiful as she inclined to her paraphernalia. For a moment she was part of the finery of spring. And when I heard a low cooing from the back seat, I actually looked for a contented baby (rush basket, lace-blanket, waking into the lemony frosting of sunlight) but saw instead a man pointing at me. Moving his mouth, hunched like a puffed bird, he jabbed his finger and started to yell, then covered his face and told me to get the hell away. And I wasn’t frightened, but saddened by the way the greening, bright leaves got erased, just winched out of sight, and a delivery truck intercepted, and everything overrode the blossoming tree.

  It’s not that this sadness is more profound, more thoroughgoing than anyone else’s, or that it resembles misery or afflicts in the way of a devastation. I’m not arguing its superior potency or measuring the relative force of impact. It’s that the sadness induces a particular sensation—say, of watching the vast sea / far horizon from an oceanliner while feeling the circumscribed cabin behind you. And here, it’s important to note again—this sadness surprises; it’s hosted very specifically in some forms and not others.

  So for example, absolutely here: in someone who hasn’t much to do on a Saturday and so inscribes the day with errands, not wholly unimportant ones, but certainly not pressing. Who draws the errands out, pushing the cart down each aisle, slowly. Whose browsing is full of drummed-up intent, who thinks about birthdays months in advance and adds gifts-to-buy to her shopping list, to justify staying out longer. When a card alone would suffice, or even a call with apologies for lateness.

  The sadness comes not in airport leave-takings, not even when teary, divorced parents pass kids between them, or off to the grandparents, those hostage negotiators. But the arrivals: yes, then. Kids running into-the-arms-of: yes. The abundant scooping up of a child. Of having been scooped, and, by extension, all the current searches for scooping we undertake,
each in our way. The absolute presence the moment of scooping convenes—I am here/this is perfect—until, into that breaks the thought: so brief is our time held aloft, before we are set down again.

  It’s not to be found on the interstate itself, 5 a.m., dark and empty except for a few long distance truckers and me, en route to the airport—but up there, in the fully fenced pedestrian bridge over the interstate: that zinged right in. Why? No one was on it, having ended a nightshift, or heading toward a lousy, minimum wage job. No one stood baleful and peering out, fingers hooked through chain-links, awaiting (habit of inmates and bored kids at recess, abbreviation of full-body longing.) The bridge just seemed tired of having to hold. And the fencing a fragile afterthought: better cage it just in case. Just in case what? Then came the scenarios, all desperate, all terrible, abraded by morning’s empurpled rise. I drove under, thinking such things. That I must not have been alone in my feeling triggered the sadness.

  Apples: the fate of certain ones. The other day, a grocery clerk was unpacking Braeburns from Washington State, gorgeous fruits with shiny yellow and red spin-art skins—and he dropped one. Then picked it up and tossed it in a box at his feet. That’s all it took. Especially the thunk. To grow, to be picked, to travel so far—to end up discarded in the store, that very last port before purchase. I don’t know why this moment of sadness couldn’t be fixed by adjusting perspective (toward the bright side: see all the apples that did make it safely!) It didn’t allow for misperception (maybe that’s the wipe-and-restock pile), nor did it support much hopeful conjecture (don’t worry lady, those go to the homeless shelter). All the efforts of sun, rain, tilling; all the stacking and storing and driving; all the picking by hand, and after a long day, all the heads on bare mattresses, wrists aching, necks sore, pesticides swallowed, crap wages in pockets—made for a particular density of sadness, just the size of a perfect Braeburn.

  Sometimes the sadness sidles up, then reroutes. The atmosphere in the coffee place was nice. I was enjoying some free time while traveling, in the company of a good friend I rarely see. We were just settling in to talk when I looked up and saw on the wall behind him three awful bent spoons, badly fastened with Phillips-head screws to a messed-up piece of wood, meant to be used as a set of hooks—for what? dishtowels?—for $19.99! The handwritten price tag dangling on its little string flipped me out. I tried to consider: “it’s someone’s attempt, it’s the best they can do, maybe this is a rehab project and the store’s a supporter providing free space for people getting back on their feet. . . .” The clumsiness was almost sad. Sad at the edges and for a split second, but there was no sense at all of craft, no eye for proportion, no care for materials. The longer I looked, the angrier I got. Twenty bucks! It took someone two minutes to screw together this mockery of “country” which means, in real life, things sheened from use, rubbed with hands, breath and sweat, not shining with bottled, lacquery crap.

  And it’s not a deflation, either, this sadness. Here’s deflation: I could hardly remember my original creek, the one in my head, after seeing the real thing. Once a singular, clear image in mind, it was retrofitted by the smaller, actual one my friend showed me when I finally visited him after so many years. My creek, the one I imagined for him, was farther from town with a hill beyond it that looked out over the first knowledge of the West I stored up (with much help from Laura Ingalls Wilder.) There was a warmth and a fatness to my creek. It swelled easily in rain, was silvery-quick but not too fast, and you could jump it with a good, running start. As my creek rippled on, a warmth blew through the tall grass and up a small hill. And there, where the light sweetly scented the grass, my friend would sit, and I imagined, his wooden chair was weathered dove-brown and each year sunk more comfortably into itself. But at his creek, there’s no hill at all, not even a little swelling rise—just a few bends and he takes his own flimsy lawn chair along. And a beer at the end of the week. This creek offered no chance to gaze past it and refine one’s longing. No tall grasses with frogs singing to deepen the oncoming dark. There’s no actual loss here; I can always compose my original creek. It just takes a little longer now to call up. The sadness I’m talking about is way more forward, resourceful, inventive—ambitious in its identification of a site: there she is, the sadness says to itself, on her stomach on the lawn, idly considering a blade of grass . . . I’ll give her a minute, then let it rip: these once-bright greens, browning and dulling, these tender roots drying; a slow, stumbling bee near collapsing; scent of fall, torn bird’s nest nearby . . . knowing her, that’s all it’ll take.

  This next is awful—awful-ridiculous, but it has all the identifying characteristics of the sadness under review: that unexpected, swift arrival, and way of empatroning me. At the end of the far aisle at Party City (stay with me here), as I was leaving with my dozen birthday balloons—there was the Camp Rock Scrap Book and Journal. God-in-the-details and eternities-in-wildflowers, I swear this sadness was of the wrecking ball variety. Page 1: “Think of a person who has supported you and your dream to be a star. Write a letter to that person.” I considered buying the book for further study, but a talismanic fear arose—I cannot have this in my house—and I resisted. So I stayed and read more. I couldn’t help it. It went on and on with songwriting hints, inspirational sayings. The sadness was instant. It came in the shape of a soft, chubby girl, sitting alone (empty house, kitchen table), filling it all out, too shy to speak much, with a “pretty face” and “what a voice!” Sadness, that some kid with her stash of dreams would set about this task so dutifully. That she’d follow the steps with diligence and believe there’s a way, and Hey, I don’t know the way, kid! I kept thinking, and Let me tell you a secret: nobody does. That some adult was so well-meaning, so hoping to be helpful, so convinced of the wisdom of “writing it down as the first step in making it happen. . . .”

  As if writing it down will make anything happen.

  And here comes the woman who, outside Party City, stands in the median and begs at the stop light, holding a sign I can’t read at all. The words are too many, too small and bunched up.

  Yes, I have my glasses on.

  As if I don’t already know what it says. As if the story changes substantially from sign to sign, from begging spot to begging spot, or offers any real variation on “Homeless Please Help.” It’s that the sign’s impossible to read, and, in that way, useless in making her more real. It’s just one more reason things aren’t working. There she is, trying, and not knowing why even this is failing.

  The unhappy family I once lived next to should have made me sad, but didn’t. Because the parents and kids recycled a very small repertoire of arguments, and the tone never changed, nor did the duration or pitch. Because their yelling and meanness became merely annoying as I settled in to make dinner, listening to the radio, with a glass of wine, stilled at the center of my life where light lavished its golds on spilled salt, drops of oil, papery garlic skins, and I was given to see such lavishing before dusk came on fully and it was time to clear the scraps away and call everyone to eat. The yelling so contradicted their rowhouse’s pastelly façade and cascading flowerboxes, that whenever I passed it, my eye had to work to reject the bright prettiness, and that wasn’t sad, just tiring.

  But in National Geographic, a series of photos of vast rooms full of jewel-colored birds, tagged and ordered by size and kind, that had crashed into buildings, thrown off course by excessive lights at night: yes. The imposition of light as sadness, and the dark as defenseless—whoever thought darkness would need defending, assumed realm of the scary, haven of self-sufficient night creatures, shy, tender-skinned, but flying and crawling, diving and burrowing, rec- and procreating like crazy in private by way of their special radar.

  And briefly now (the illustrations are coming in very fast): hard candies. In a cut-glass bowl. The bowl positioned just-so, near the door. Always a-brim which might look like many guests are expected. I hate hard candies, but I take one, and then a few more, just to keep hope’s
economy moving.

  “Hand Picked With Care” on the blue Chiquita banana sticker. That I hadn’t considered care was involved, that someone might gently, might delicately pick, that maybe care’s real, not a value enhancer.

  And “Rhinestone Cowboy”: the song. (Yes, really.) It came out in 1975, but today on the radio, I heard for the first time the actual words—“and offers coming over the phone” which of course the singing cowboy wants, he hit the big time, but which also mean (super-obvious modulation to minor) a lonely life on the road. The sudden clarity right there in the supermarket, because back then, in fifth grade, I heard it as “And old-folks going over the foam.” Which I thought was a metaphor for the end of life, and at the time the suggestion of such an easeful ending, the notion of being carried so frothily away made me very wordlessly sad.

  And yet, how strangely good to know this sadness maintains itself over decades.

  That it concentrates moments. That it refines them.

  How generous sadness is. How capacious.

  Mostly, though, how startling—so that just when one’s settled into a moment, say on a train to visit one’s parents, book out, orange peeled, coffee balanced and cooling, there it is, a swift visitation: coal trains in the station offering the sundered, ruined hearts of mountains. Brief five o’clock light. A frayed cuff on a seatmate. Snowy egrets in a marsh the train passes. Some birds stilled in rushes, others fishing in mud. The mud rainbowed with oil.

  One spends the ride containing it all.

  Augury

  That hanging bird in the maple tree: someone might come and cut it down. Or it might stay and dissolve to bone, blowing through seasons, snared in a mess of fishing line. It must have happened just days ago, the bright body’s still heavy and pulls the line tight. If taken down, the absence would mean another’s discomfort. And the space where it swings, once open again, a measure of someone’s breaking point—a thing too awful to see. Which is very close to what I feel, rounding the bend down by the lake, finding the goldfinch invisibly strung. Caught plunging up, as goldfinches will, bobbing and looping in jittery arcs when alive. How a very wrong thing inverts the world’s laws, stills flight and proposes air can hold weight. How weirdly suggestive is hanging and swaying: this should be fruit, the form’s ends are tapered, the center’s a swell of vesicles, ripening. Wind should make of it windfall soon. But the coming upon, the space called come-upon, with its soft breeze and footpath, torches the idea of harvest, of gleaning. Detonates “just taking a walk.” A bird pinned in air is a measure of wrongness. Walking can’t counter it. Redirecting attention towards kids won’t erase it. Even if moving quickly past—no progress instills; the sight can’t be siphoned from the scene. The bird’s presence impinges, like bait.