Humility

Not yet August, but already the temperature has crossed into "unbearable" territory -- especially from nine in the evening until one in the morning, when it seems that all of the heat absorbed during the day by the sun-baked skin of this apartment building seeps into my room and forms thick, brackish puddles around my bed until sunrise.  For the past three nights, this has made sleep pretty much impossible.  I finally broke down and moved my sole fan, cheap white plastic the size and shape of a cereal box, to the foot of my bed, securing it in back with the giant plush Snoopy doll I'd found on the street two years ago.  The strategically-placed stream of cool air helped cut the heat, but within minutes it began to gnaw at my ears, which have always been sensitive to drafts.  I grabbed an old orange bandana and tied it around my head, Amy-Winehouse-cum-Slavic-Grandmother-style, and flopped back into bed.  Dirty feet hanging off the rickety second-hand bed, single sheet twisted and tossed to the side, boys' soccer shorts and a ragged T-shirt from high school, face full of bandana and glistening night cream.  Just another night watching the waning glow of the computer screen attract a cloud of spontaneously-generated summer fruit flies.  

O hai, I go to Harvard and am married to a lawyer.

Twins

Yesterday, I spoke briefly on the phone to my cousin.  In her usual rapid-fire, giggle-punctuated Ukrainian, she wished me a happy birthday and expressed her excitement to see me and my husband in August.  "Husband -- it's so hard to believe I'm even saying that!" she blurted out, then handed the phone back to my mom.

For someone I see all of once in two or three years, I have a very conflicted relationship with my cousin.  We grew up together and were close enough in age to be sibling-like competitors.  She was always a prettier child: cornsilk blond hair, enormous hazel eyes, and the pillowy lips of a Lolita in training.  I was taller and darker-haired, wore glasses, and had a tightly-pressed cupid's bow mouth destined to brush against more pencil ends than boys' lips.  She did gymnastics, which held back her puberty until well after mine, but the minute she quit, voluptuous breasts and hips sprouted from her tiny, taut frame, giving her the proportions of a Barbie doll.  She was also a good artist, more mischievous and imaginative than safe, good girl me.  The only advantage I had was one of familial consensus: my grandmother hated my uncle, my cousin's father, and adored mine.  In her eyes, I was always the favorite granddaughter -- the first, the smartest, the serious and studious one.

After my parents and I had already moved to the States, on our first trip back to Ukraine, I remember lying on my belly next to her and watching her sketch color pencil pictures of beautiful girls performing elaborate gymnastic maneuvers.  She made a game out of it, deeming me the "judge" that had to rate each picture on a one to ten scale, with decimals.  I played along at first, but her standards were much higher than mine.  If she accidentally drew a girl's leg too long, or if a neck came out a centimeter thicker than a toothpick arm, she'd savage the performance: "Oh, look at that cow trying to do the splits!" she'd laugh, scribbling 4.7 at the top of the page in bright red pencil.  I was jealous of her drawing skill and of the astonishing contortions she could perform, right out of those drawings, jutting out her full lips as she kicked one leg back towards her head and pulled the ankle over her shoulder.   But when we came back home and developed our Ukraine photos, I realized that in every single picture with me and her standing together, she was on her tip-toes, craning her neck so she could appear to be my height.  

The last time I was in Ukraine, we went out to a nightclub together, and she tried for the first time in years to have a serious talk with me.  She sat chain-smoking and downing the cheap mix of vodka and fruit juice popularly referred to, in suitably utilitarian Soviet fashion, simply as "drink."  She wasn't doing sports or art anymore, or much of anything, for that matter.  She'd just graduated from the Ukrainian equivalent of undergrad with a degree in pedagogy but lamented that she hated teaching.  Every now and then, she'd take an occasional job as an English tutor, which is where she said she got the money for clothes and makeup and going out.  That, or a "boyfriend" whom no one in the family had ever seen, and to whom she'd mysteriously disappear for hours at a time, returning drunk and flushed and giggling manically.  When we were on our way to the nightclub, given a ride by nameless middle-aged "friends" who owned a car and matching track suits, I caught a glimpse of a wad of dollars in her purse.  But even under the pancake of foundation and tiny sequined top, drunk from cheap liquor bought with dirty money, she was still just as touchingly beautiful, beautiful in all the ways I could never imagine myself being.  Slurring, but still shooting out her nervous staccato, she told me how glad she was that I was there, how much she wished we could have grown up together, how she wished we could talk more about everything....  And then the sparkle in her hazel eyes dimmed, she turned away to light another cigarette, and that was that.  I wanted to tell her I knew and understood everything, that I wasn't judging her.  But I was.  She'd been harsher at it as a kid, knowing well before I did how these kinds of things were measured up, but if my judgment developed later, it also ran deeper, much deeper than hers.  I went home that night and had a quiet, somber conversation with my mom in the kitchen so my grandmother couldn't hear. 

My parents are there now, and the last I heard from my mom over the phone was, "She looks good.  Normal."  Most of me was contented with that description -- the part of me married to a terrific man, attending the best school in the world, and on the fast track to happiness and success.  But there's a secret part of me that still sees sketches of gymnasts marked with red ratings, and that part knows that it's largely a matter of circumstance.  If the situation were reversed, it knows I'd be the one straining every muscle, craning and clawing desperately, and pulling every dirty trick in the book just to gain an extra inch.

The mirror and the lamp -- The crate and the barrel

In the past few weeks, I'd been trying to think up some devil-may-care adventure to have on this birthday, as some sort of last hurrah to youthful indiscretion.  But the other day in Russian, we were examining the subtle difference between the verbs "настроиться," "расстроиться," and "перестроиться."  The elegantly cropped-haired, dame d'un certain âge professor scribbled the root, which relates literally to tuning a stringed instrument, on the board.  Then she waved a hand covered in chalk dust and egg-sized gemstones and purred in her deep, throaty Russian: "You know, it's like with children.  They'll get worked up [настроятся] about something and then when it doesn't happen, they'll be disappointed [расстроятся].  Adults are different; we just shrug and say, I'll get over it [перестроюсь]."  In my mind, a little melody played out: cheerful whistling at first, then discordant piano keys clashing, and finally mellowing into the velvety, imperious sound of a champagne glass struck with a fork.  I blushed and reconsidered my birthday options.

So today, instead of taking the cheap Chinatown bus to New York City and spending the day trying to look purposeful as I wandered the length of Manhattan, I went out and bought three thousand dollars worth of furniture for my new apartment.  Not only have I never paid that much money for furniture, I've never paid that much money for anything, ever, in my entire life.  The experience was surreal and vaguely numbing, making me understand why it becomes so easy for the rich (or not-so-rich and thus hopelessly in debt) to spend increasingly absurd amounts of cash on increasingly useless things.  There gets to be a point -- I'd put mine at the 500 dollar mark -- where you feel a giddy watershed effect and the digits lose all meaning.  All that becomes important is the fact that things are attainable, that you can point to them and say "yes" and "I'll take it," and suddenly a piece of the world gets carved off the slab and handed to you, gutted and gift-wrapped.

Probably my favorite fairy tale character ever has always been Aladdin, and not just because of the feature film and subsequent, spun-off Saturday morning cartoon.  Even before I watched the Disney version, I'd had an illustrated Ukrainian children's book that contained, among other stories, Aladdin and Ali Baba.  Much like every deprived Soviet child, I was a secret aesthete at heart, yearning for beauty in a world of gray Stalin-era cinderblock housing, and my nascent orientalism instantly made me latch onto these characters and fuse them together into one.  The "Persian" stories offered immense luxury and ornamentation; instead of reading the text, I'd stare at the pictures of Aladdin reaching up to pick the scintillating forbidden fruit from a magical ruby-encrusted pomegranate tree, or the one of Ali Baba opening the treasure chest and raking his long, sinewy fingers across a heap of ducats and countless tangled ropes of pearls.  Only one thing really troubled me: why was Aladdin "The Diamond in the Rough?"  The story never said, and Disney certainly didn't make it any more clear.  I never bought the flimsy "pure of heart and gentle of spirit" veneer that Walt & Co. tacked on and still couldn't figure out why Aladdin was special, why he could get the lamp when no one else could.  It was only recently, reading Kierkegaard, that I thought about it again.

Whoever knows that happy moment, whoever has appreciated its delight, and has not also felt the apprehension lest suddenly something might happen, some trifle perhaps, which yet might be sufficient to disturb all! Whoever has held the lamp of Aladdin in his hand and has not also felt the swooning of pleasure, because one needs but to wish? Whoever has held what is inviting in his hand and has not also learned to keep his wrist limber to let go at once, if need be? ["In Vino Veritas"]

Well, it certainly wasn't Aladdin's ability to let go that garnered him the whole "Diamond in the Rough" moniker, just like Ali Baba couldn't help draping his rough, frail body with the treasures in the Forty Thieves' cave.  But maybe it was precisely this weakness that made the lamp and cave call to them, honing in on vacuums of avarice and luring them to a glut of plenty.  Aladdin could wish and wish and Ali Baba could draw from the well of treasures in the cave forever, and neither would ever slake his rapacious thirst.  I think this is the part that Disney glossed with sunny songs and the comedy stylings of Robin Williams: Aladdin is a hero not because he is good, but because he, like most children, is a greedy despot with the power to wish unflinchingly, unhesitantly, always for more.

I realize now that Aladdin was my hero not because I resembled him in the least, but because I'm absolutely his opposite.  I was never a demanding child, and I'm not even close to a demanding adult.  I never knew what to wish for as a kid, and I haven't gotten any better at it now.  For the past two years, I've lived in a cheap, shitty apartment in a cheap, shitty neighborhood, dragged home free or nearly free furniture and thrift store clothes, and been perfectly content with the garbage, the bums, and even waking up to the sound of rustling late at night, turning on the lights, and being greeted by the cheerfully industrious face of the resident mouse.  I've also been in a long-distance relationship for the past two years, and, aside from a few breakdowns, I've been generally complacent about the fact that I get to see the man I love a maximum of once a month.  Hell, right after we got married, I we lived with his two younger brothers in a one-room loft.  My husband worked, I lay on the couch reading Either/Or and watching the kids play video games, we went to Six Flags once.  It's not that I don't want things; I just never want them to be any certain way.  

But the lamp begs to be rubbed, and I've always wondered what it would be like to be the kind of person that could, Xtina-style, rub it the right way.  Today, for the first time ever, I could feel my fingers tingling the way I imagined Aladdin's did while reaching for that ruby pomegranate, or Ali Baba's for the ropes of pearls.  After dropping nine hundred on bedroom trappings alone, I stole away to the food court of the local Asian grocery and ordered myself a huge platter of Korean fried chicken.  To the palpable horror of the decidedly un-Persian-style "oriental" onlookers, I snatched up a breaded wing, shimmering with grease and scalding-hot sticky-sweet garlic sauce, and tore in.  I polished off the meal in minutes and, with rapaciousness satisfied, stomach leaden, and finger-tips singed, I went back to the furniture store and made the rest of my purchases.  And then I went and got a hot fudge and butterscotch sundae.  This is secretly why I never became an Aladdin: I've always been more into the real, not the ruby, pomegranates. 

So, I guess today I've figured out the Aladdin mystery, as well as a little bit about how and why I'm tuned the way I am.  And now I've popped the cork off a bottle of chilled, carbonated French hard cider and am letting myself live in a blissfully drunk cloud for the rest of the day.  As the Russians say, "перестроюсь" -- I'll get over it, but literally, I'll recalibrate, retune, remake myself from the inside out.  Probably not all the way towards the extreme of enjoying the daily dropping of Benjamins, but far enough to exercise some firm demandingness once in awhile.  Now that's a birthday wish I can get behind.

A Report to the Academy

Summer is an especially irritating time in Cambridge.  Aside from the heat and related sewer stench wafting from the colonial-era gutters, all the walkways on campus are cluttered with enormous groups of Japanese tourist.  Last spring's trip to Tokyo -- where even the most important-looking businessman was ready to come to a dead halt in the middle of a busy city street to help the confused White Devil read his map -- made me much more sympathetic to this demographic.  But when you're late to class and attempting to run across Harvard Yard with ten pounds of books strapped to your shoulders, the last thing you want to see is a group of smiling Asians posing on the stairs of the library.  Because, of course, this signifies that any effort on your part to cross between them and their photographer will inevitably ruin the picture they've traveled thousands of miles to have taken, thus ensuring that you'll have to waste at least three minutes idling in front of the Kodak moment or finding longer alternate paths to reach your destination.  

But the worst are the guided tours, obviously led by drama majors better suited to declaiming incendiary snippets from The Vagina Monologues.  What makes these spectacles so bad is that they happen on a semi-hourly basis, and that their scripted speeches never change, subjecting the innocent bystanders of the Harvard community to an endless loop of anecdotes about the Widener family or juicy tidbits about which famous Hollywood starlet stayed in which dorm.  After just two years, I feel fully qualified to give these kinds of tours.  All I need is a crimson hat, a big red sign, and a dignity lobotomy.  

Today, as I was waiting at a crosswalk, I cringed when I heard the telltale carnival-barker shriek coming up behind me.  "Stick together now!  We're about to begin!"  The crowd was composed of twenty-odd Japanese tourists in matching tan jumpsuits, and they all craned their necks at the sight of the Yard's front gate.  I prayed for a green light.  "Okay!  Now!  As some of you may have noticed..."  The light was still red but the traffic had stopped, so I quickly stepped onto the street and hurried across as fast as heels on cobblestones allow. "... the local Cambridgerians are notoooorious jaywalkers!  That's because local Cambridge driving law is unique, in that pedestrians always have the right of way!"  This is what monkeys must feel like in their cages, I thought, still hurrying to put as much distance between myself and the tour as I possibly could.  I'd always thought being considered a "tourist" was a terrible thing, but never in my life have I been more underwhelmed by the prospect of being taken for a "local."   Even after I'd made it to my department, I still couldn't shake the feeling that if I turned around, I'd be met with a blinding flash from a camera and a jumpsuited little girl's excited grin.  "And this is Harvard Yard.  And this is Widener Library.  And this is a Cambridgerian -- look, she's growling!  Probably just ready for lunchtime."

Flaneur-saboteur

I bought a pint of kumquats at Trader Joe's today, to eat on the twenty-minute walk from leafy Brookline to gritty, grimy Allston.  I perched the plastic box at the top of one canvas shopping bag, on a pedestal of Greek yogurt tubs and bottles of blueberry-pomegranate green tea, and slung the bag over my shoulder for easy access.  At crosswalks, my free right hand could dart into the bag and emerge with a handful of the quail-egg-sized orbs, miniature hand-grenades of tartness that burst between my teeth and saturated my parched tongue.  My weapons to make summertime pedestrian shopping bearable.

The last time I'd had kumquats was last spring, in Japan.  Never quite able to figure out the conversion rate from dollars to yen, I remained blissfully unaware of the exorbitant fresh fruit prices there and eagerly traded handfuls of flimsy coins for anything exotic and edible in bulk.  My favorite were roasted chestnuts, which I only figured out how to peel after the second time I bought them, but which still remain a dreamy memory of soft, velvety earthy-sweetness inextricably tied to the neon blur of nighttime Tokyo.  But the kumquats were a close second-favorite: they were sweeter than the ones sold in the States, with a thinner rind and more pulp.  I ate the whole bag in minutes.

Walking down Harvard Avenue with my Trader Joe's groceries, I was reminded of Japan not simply because of the similarity of taste and texture, but for the greedy, furtive way I was gobbling my street snack.  Another thing I didn't realize until it was too late is that the Japanese look down on street-eating, considering it impolite and borderline obscene.  That same sentiment, interestingly, is expressed in a recent report from the President's Council on Bioethics:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat--displays [a] lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. ... Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. ... This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view...

Of course, I giggled when I first read this, originally quoted in an essay that tore the concept of "dignity" a new one.  Finding ice cream cones offensive sounds downright cute in this hedonistic day and age.  But I'm compelled to admit a certain admiration for the logic.  Eating is personal and sensual, an activity to be savored; walking is brisk, goal-oriented, utilitarian.  In normal circumstances, the two should never meet.  So, it should come as no surprise that ice cream cones were invented in New York City, and that the whole phenomenon of "eating on the go" is a totally urban one.  Where else but in our modern Babylon would the spheres of life get so dangerously, deviantly mixed up, like wearing lingerie outdoors or jogging pants to work?  The only surprising thing is that Tokyo is resistant to this progressive trend, the last conservative bastion of the world's great and gluttonous cities (who can imagine Rome without its gelato, Moscow morozhyno-less, or L.A. minus the ubiquitous PinkBerry...?).  Well, even in Tokyo, taboos are made to be broken.  The ice cream I had there was divine -- sesame, sweet potato, and taro flavored -- and the way I found the stand was by backtracking from a departing gaggle of schoolgirls, all laughing and happily, publicly licking at their cones.  

Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess's favorite black dog and say, "If you lick her bottom clean, one day she'll be your bride," and in time the princess herself began looking forward to that day...

(...)

To the children listening, who didn't even know the word "incest," all this seemed perfectly natural, and it wasn't long before they'd forgotten all about it, whereas the part about the black dog obeying the lazy woman and licking the princess's bottom clean left a far more vivid impression, as you could tell by the way they lapped at their ice cream cones, barking between licks, or slobbered on the palms of their hands while they did their homework, which mad their mothers sick... [Yoko Tawada, The Bridegroom Was a Dog]

On a related note, I think I'm going to take a day-trip to New York City for my birthday next week and maybe explore Coney Island.  And I'll be sure to get an ice cream cone.

Reading Nabokov on the 66

After sweating under the unsparing New England summer sun, it's always a relief when the 66 finally turns the corner, cuts through a heat shimmer, and lurches to an awkward halt in front of the crowded bus stop.  I file in with the rest of the crowd, smiling when I see my second-favorite driver, the one with the shaved head and enormous Austro-Hungarian imperial mustache, and take a seat on the cold molded plastic.  Then, before any chatty Mormon missionary can corner me in my vulnerable window seat position, I quickly pull out my trusty Imposing Foreign-Language Novel, which, even more effectively than some spindly iPod headgear, definitely plugs me out of the world.

Descriptive opening paragraph, imperfective aspect.  Now, to the particulars.

A heavy body dropped down on the seat next to me and dug something out of a canvas messenger bag.  I continued to stare straight into the middle crease of the book in my lap, Nabokov's The Gift, but in the gray sidebar of my vision I caught sight of my young, dark-haired neighbor and his reading material of choice: a double-spaced manuscript, computer-printed, with the title "The Voyage" puffed up in bold on the front page.  With a world-weary sigh, my neighbor uncapped a black fountain pen and began marking.  An indomitable smirk nipped at the corners of my lips as I envisioned the scenario from a third-person perspective: the self-important, stony look on the face of my neighbor as he read over his magnum opus, diligently adding descriptive adjectives in preparation for its judgment at the hands of a peer workshop, all while Nabokov spread himself out serenely in my lap and looked on with ironic, hawk-eyed glee.

Perfective aspect, which in English is simply the past tense.  Now, onto the essay.

I can't imagine I'm the only one.  For anyone who's ever maintained an inner monologue, taken a creative writing class, or secretly yearned even for ghostwriting and hackwork in the name of professionally stringing together sentences, reading Nabokov must be utterly insufferable.  Part of it is the endless stream of images so mind-numbingly vivid (the creaky old armoire with a door that sporadically swings open, like a second-rate provincial actor stepping onstage out of turn) that you love him for sharing them and hate him for rubbing in your face the fact that their intrepidness can no longer be yours.  If Nabokov had a Twitter feed, it would read like one of his novels parsed into 200 word segments, each as meticulous, symmetrical, and stunning as the most well-crafted 400-page backbreaker.  But even more painful is the logic, the brutal logic so brashly and coldheartedly laid bare: whatever it is, he has it.  The Gift.  And no matter how carefully you chart out your plot points, diagram your characters, and polish your manuscript, you'll always look like my dear neighbor and seat-mate, poring over "The Voyage" and dreaming of accolades.  Never, ever, ever, so don't even dream.

But.  Later, sprawled on my bed, with a chilled beer and a well-aimed fan working overtime to leech the day's heat out of my bones, I feel more optimistic.  And, for the first time, I savor the full meaning of the ancient anecdote handed down like scripture in my department, the one about when good old Roman Jakobson was head of Harvard Slavic and refused to hire Nabokov to teach literature because, loose quote, "we wouldn't hire an elephant to teach zoology."  Gone are the days of the elephants, I think, not without remorse.  But also gone are the days of the elephants in the room and their despotic zookeepers, to be replaced by myriad, twittering butterflies.  Less likely to knock anyone off their feet, I suppose, and certainly nine-tenths frivolousness wing-beating.  But no less likely to produce hair-raising shivers once in awhile with the right, light, innocent little touch.