Rough Likeness: Essays

by Lia Purpura

  I find a rubbery, fishbone skeleton. It’s a cartoonish form with a triangle head, center spine and three requisite ribs intersecting. It’s ready to choke a mean cartoon cat. It fits in my hand. How it came loose from a whole is not clear. If it broke from a key chain, its eye isn’t ripped and there’s no telling grommet; if it fell from a necklace, there’s no silver link. Decoration, fishing gear, useless cereal box prize—I can’t tell, but into my pocket it goes.

  Stubby pencil with hospital logo, bottle cap, and wet envelope come. Then I see—I’m pretty sure—what will be the last thing. There’s a lot of traffic today for some reason. My experiment’s running along Linn Street between Market and Jefferson. And here I am, at the corner of Jefferson, my planned destination. A woman sees me eyeing the thing and together we laugh at its clear incongruence, right there in the street and so out of season, at how I’m timing my move because the traffic won’t stop, and probably, too, because the sun’s finally out and the town’s finally warming after a very long winter. All this makes the present moment shine, the white golf tee shine on the wet, slushy cobbles and the tether between us, the woman and me, firm up. I let all the cars pass. I dart out for the tee and she applauds as she crosses.

  My path is complete now, here at the corner. But crossing with my pocket of loot, I wonder, right off, what to do if I find more stuff. If something comes, will I stop and reach down? Will extending the rules invite disappointment, the little deflations of staying too long, of trying to rekindle? Will overriding the experiment’s frame wreck the objects’ odd preciousness, stain the control, dilute the results? These questions are part of the experiment, too. If the experiment’s over and the boundaries marked off—does that mean it ends? If I am not there, won’t things still appear? I consider the notion of unclaimed surprises. Will anyone else’s eye wander as mine does, and after the pleasures of finding and taking, wonder now what and what’s next? I cross the street. In my pockets, all the stuff jangles.

  I think there’s more to it. I’m certain there is.

  And though I didn’t know it then, the experiment really wasn’t over.

  Months later, at my last dinner party, I gave away all the stuff I found to ten friends. Before they arrived, I laid the things out on my bed and considered which would best suit each person. The objects found their recipients easily. To Brooke, the split hooves of milkweed spilling their down; weird lanyard to Jeremy; rubber fish to Ryan who also was puzzled by its origin. And one by one, as the things left my hands, I saw it: the experiment was still in motion! When the coins first came, they suggested “series.” Then “series” broadened. Parameters firmed: allow everything, take it all in. Then, when the time came to leave, things came to mean “remember me.”

  I have to believe the experiment’s end is disguised, even now, as “giving away.” I have to believe orange fish/feather/ lanyard, the experiment itself is under way still, and that I, at my starting point on the cobbled street was no starting point at all. And that night, my room, emptied of stuff was not at all empty.

  Silence Experiment

  It takes only a moment to decide.

  I let the phone ring and ring and don’t answer. And now I’m in it.

  My breathing is loud. Drinking coffee is loud. Keeping silent is a thing I’m doing with the whole of my body and I hear things anew. I take deeper breaths, the better to expel more air, because voice isn’t here to help me sigh, to shape a thought with sound.

  Ice breaks loose and slides roughly down the big skylight, and I startle, but let no brisk exhalation escape. Will someone I absolutely must talk to come by? Will I scribble comments on my yellow pad in response, or just stay away? Outside, everything is icing over. A guy scrapes his windshield, no gloves at all. With no words at all, I’m thinking that I’d last not three minutes like that before freezing up. It’s windy and the trees are swaying stiffly. My breath catches when they bend lower than it seems they can bear. If they snapped, how loud would it be? And ice pelting the skylight, is it lovely, is it lonely to eat uninterrupted by even the possibility of talk? I have terms to abide, rules to attend as I consider these things.

  I’m reading an article in the paper about Roger Staubach and realize I don’t know how to pronounce his name. I try an “au” then an “ow” in my head. I clear my throat after a jalapeño and hear my voice, way back there, against bone. Without my voice, something else rests, too. Even listening feels loud, especially the radio report about tin masks made for WWI soldiers whose faces were burned off or ruined in combat. Soldiers had not yet evolved instincts for trench warfare and when they stuck their heads up and looked out they got blasted. Mirrors were banned in hospitals. Suicide was rampant. I conjure the sound of knuckles-on-tin-cheek. The disbelieving rap in air. The writer being interviewed, Caroline Alexander, has done an article about the masks for Smithsonian Magazine. Her voice is hard, righteous, assured. When asked about new prosthetic technologies, she refuses the shift in conversation, suggests that perhaps it would be better not to make war in the first place. She lets the words sit. She won’t fill the quiet. An extra beat slips past the interviewer, into which the author’s corrective tone seeps and stills. I very much admire her ferocity. I very much admire the effect of the silence.

  The trees move without talking. Not that they were chatty before, but such a conjecture leads to all kinds of what-ifs. Their bent-to-near-snapping leads and leads. What do you say to a tree in peril? In my way I am answering: tension in the back confirming, ache in the neck abiding. According to the plan, I’m not going to speak all weekend.

  And, yes, I am bored at times. Boredom is a state in which hope is secretly being negotiated. I keep that phrase on my bulletin board. A friend of mine advocates boredom for kids, so they might learn to rely on their inner resources. I think it’s good to support certain states-of-being, fragile ones like boredom, in danger of being solved or eliminated. Similarly, I fear for aimlessness, restraint, reverie. On my watch list are the sidelong glance, the middle distance, chatting with strangers, frisson, navigating a body by scent, wandering. Anyway, I don’t want to stop the experiment now. Phone calls come that can wait, though there’s the call from a friend checking to see if I’ve lost power since the storm picked up and inviting me to his warm house for dinner—and for the night if I want. I do want. But I don’t take the call.

  By midnight I feel I can’t breathe all that well. So I force myself to sleep. And who knows what I say then.

  It’s the next day—though the experiment makes a kind of continual present. As does the ice, silvering, encasing. I’m wondering what my first word will be. Should I choose, then, to say LOVE, and set that in motion, to send my love a little telegram by way of my voice, by way of a clear stage from which he might feel it, many states and thousands of miles away? What’s the one word I will choose to mark and measure the end of my silence? Should I let it surprise me, that first chancy word by which I buy back my voice? I’m of two minds: draw around the event something like a veil, and stage and perform the word—or let it slip out, like a secret under pressure, tired of holding back a force. It might be something like “excuse me” after bumping someone in the tight aisles of the co-op, or “ah” or “um” as I gather my wits to answer a simple question. Or it will be a barely audible sigh, floating a vowel out, “O,” for which, now, still, this morning, my breath alone serves richly. In my head, I try on various collisions with Big Expectations.

  The snow blowers are a deep bass distraction, and when they still for a moment, regaining their strength, the thick voices of men at work fill in the silence. The sound rises and falls as the machines are crashed into banks of hard snow and the snow draws up into chutes then explodes in an arc like water from an uncrimped garden hose, hose I liked to stand on and fuss with, quietly hidden around the side of the house as my grandmother watered her extravagant roses. In that way, by silencing the running water, I could make her speak: “What?” and “Huh?” and eventually “Hey, someone’s up
to something.” In the garage, made for hiding, post-trickiness, would be the oil-soaked concrete, scent of lime, fertilizer and grass seed, rakes and hoes with worn wooden handles, beach pails and shovels, fringed canvas umbrella, inflatable seahorse, garden chairs whose scratchy weave marked thighs with red lines.

  It’s a little past noon when I say it: “Hi.” And then “No” in response to my housemate’s offer of coffee. Two small, clear words. No rallying gems. No symbols or portents. Up in my room, I repeat the words to myself to feel the effect more privately: “Hi.” “No.” My nose and throat engage and some empty passages fill up with reverb. The words sound good. Younger and rested. More necessary. Relieved of something and freshened.

  Coda

  I found pearls. I found a diary. I found a black thong and blue condoms in a purse. I found five T-bones still wrapped and frozen. A set of house keys with an address tag nearly led to my first big crime. I found a packet of private stash pictures. I found a thesis red-slashed on each page. I found a cold jay with its heart still beating. I found a phone, an iPod, a joystick. I found tinned caviar perfectly chilled. I found a wallet stuffed with euros, a man’s shoe, a Swiss army knife, plane tickets to Prague. I found an old mercury thermometer unbroken, and it confirmed a balmy thirty-five degrees. My name appeared in the cobbles’ damp pockmarks. I plucked a single blade of grass, very fresh, very green, from a crack in the sidewalk: the first blade of the year, and I found it—amazing!

  What loot! Such a cache and a trove!

  Tell me then—are these better finds? Are they somehow more than coin/feather/lanyard? Wilder things confer on me—what? Lend the experiment undercurrent, scent of an unnamed district /arrondissement/ sector, and make the very stones underfoot remarkable? There’s a rhythm, I know, a drive to this list. This list, though, doesn’t it blast my quieter point about discovery—it’s ongoingness, the surprise of that? Doesn’t all this excitement override thoughts about beginnings and endings—that they’re wobbly and unfixed and slip past their boundaries? Is it not enough to know that a street with its stuff, its overlooked prizes, curves and bends, makes its way to my eye, my hands for one very rich season, then passes into the hands of others?

  As for experiment #2, the words, the “Hi” and the “No”—how my housemate, a visiting philosopher from Italy, hoped for better ones. She wanted the experiment refined and improved. For me to have undertaken it on a sunny day, to have kept the silence rolling for a week. She wanted to see me negotiate harder. And of course the experiment could have been revved, but what happened that weekend moved by degrees. It was about small adjustments and deepening time. Silence in its most animate form. It included sensations, their span from icy, darkened moments to those blowing and flying, cracking and pelting—time and sensation slipping from worn, gray sky to frayed hose, the gray weave below the green casing revealed, the precise pressure I had to apply, all my weight on one foot making sure the hose crossed the concrete path, so I might properly clamp off the water, stop the brown, threaded o-mouth from gushing—or spraying, if my grandmother was using the nozzle to mist her roses somewhere in the long, hot core of summer.

  Surely there is a calibration for all this. Surely such moments are worth noting, small as they are, moving forth and retracing, mildly roving. Surely nothing more amped—stop the noise, kill the hype—need happen to make one certain of existing. Existing precisely, existing acutely—as, say, after a fast when eating commences, the tongue rides slowly the slick curve of a green olive, singular morsel, whose skin resists just a little, then gives, and there comes a burst of briny, sharp pleasure. Then the paring away of brisk scraps from rough pit. Rolling the pit. Holding it, shifting—all those tender and ordered attentions.

  Then comes a cool sip.

  Ice against teeth. Sweat on the glass.

  A breath. Conversation.

  Abundance dosed out so as not to confound with its rush of riches.

  NOTES

  The Lustres: Works quoted include Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (Jim Felstiner); Specimen Days (Walt Whitman); “The Prelude” (William Wordsworth); A Scrap of Time (Ida Fink); “A Sketch of the Past” (Virginia Woolf).

  “Poetry Is a Satisfying of the Desire for Resemblence” (Theme & Variations): The title quotes from Wallace Stevens’ essay “Three Academic Pieces.” Other works quoted include: The Aeneid (tr. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey); “Canto 81” (Ezra Pound); “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (Wallace Stevens).

  Against “Gunmetal”: I thank Jim Holmes, master gunsmith, for his guidance on firearms.

  Street Scene: “petals on a wet, black bough . . .” is from “In a Station of the Metro” (Ezra Pound).

  Being of Two Minds: Quoted material is from “On Transience” (Sigmund Freud), and Middlemarch (George Eliot).

  There Are Things Awry Here: Quoted material is from The Mayor of Casterbridge (Thomas Hardy).

  Advice: quoted material is from Heraclitus: Fragments (tr. Brooks Haxton).

  Shit’s Beautiful: The line “Afflicted by, and in communion with, a force both fierce and unseen—a force that both chastened and exalted her” is from the essay “When Madness Is in the Wings” by Michelle Nicole Lee, orginally appearing in The New York Times.

  LIA PURPURA is the author of six collections of essays, poems, and translations. On Looking (essays) was a Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other awards include National Endowment for the Arts and Fulbright Fellowships, three Pushcart Prizes, work in Best American Essays, the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction, and The Ohio State University Press and The Beatrice Hawley Award in poetry. Recent work has appeared in Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, Orion, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. She is Writer in Residence at Loyola University in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program.

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  1 “Merely”: I think this means to gently show, say, me, that knots have actual origins, are phenomena of growth and not primarily lyrical owls, dragons, volcanoes hiding in paneling, shifting and motile in those moments before sleep. It also reveals (see #2) the utility value of knowing one’s materials.

  2 Here’s one of those things a person would learn very early on; you don’t just set up a log and—bam—split it.

  3 “This just isn’t working” must have come forth, maybe wordlessly, as when one has been laboring for a very long time, and suddenly a shift in consciousness occurs and clears the way for a new approach.

  4 Here he must have noted resistance, paused, raised, swung again, and again, until ash in all its peculiarities was known.

  5 “This thing is so freaking hard”—but wordlessly again. Or Shit, this son of a bitch piece.... Here, once, occurred the moment of stopping, wiping a brow and looking closely at what was causing the trouble, as I might look behind me after tripping on an uneven sidewalk to see what occasioned the stumble.

  6 Moment of choosing to stay with, to see when, to see if. . . .

  © 2011 by Lia Purpura

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

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  Lib
rary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Purpura, Lia.

  Rough likeness : essays / Lia Purpura.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-936-74734-4

  I. Title.