Grad School
You write your thesis on intersectionality in the work of female poets of the Harlem Renaissance. You write your thesis on the role of the male gaze in 1960s feminist confessional poetry. You write your thesis on how to fuck strangers in dark bedrooms and then run the next day until you pass out from the heat and lie in bed watching Say Yes to the Dress to be distracted by people who say things like “Yes, I want a denim wedding. All denim.” You write your thesis on how to get a shit TA job at a state school where ten feet from your desk and while you talk to yet another student about comma splices, the office assistant yells, “If I could just have The Rock between my legs for one minute, I could die a happy woman.” You write your thesis on how to get unexpectedly pregnant and courthouse marry the first PhD student who says “You are extraordinary” but doesn’t know your middle name or eye color. You write your thesis on how to sit on the iron fire escape of your apartment at 2 AM in July with an infant who won’t stop crying while you read Theodore Dreiser on your phone because someone with tenure has deemed him still relevant. You write your thesis on how to fuck away postpartum depression with the stay-at-home-dads you meet at coffee shops where parents tweet the supposedly clever things their small children say. You write your thesis on how to tell the no-wooden-toys-no-vaccination moms at your daughter’s daycare that you work part-time at Arby’s because teaching 160 first-year college students doesn’t pay all the bills. You write your thesis on all the apparently joyless objects you Marie Kondo-ed and want back: the stacks of books, the vintage typewriters, the communist poster art. You write your thesis on the intricacies and hellscape of post-divorce/with-a-toddler Midwestern Tinder. You write your thesis on reading Ali Smith’s Winter when it actually is winter, and you’re watching a super moon while your daughter sleeps on your arm and you convince yourself the pins and needles feeling is more pleasure than pain. Snow knits itself over everything, and you wake your daughter by layering a snowsuit over her pajamas and going out to stand together in the white and the quiet where the sphere of the moon and your daughter’s eyes wide open looking up tell you every single thing you need to know.
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The Graphic Canon
The actress is wearing a white sweater that pulls across her back, and she’s no longer young. She waits at an outdoor table for her daughter who flew from Lima to LA overnight and likely hasn’t slept and will berate her for things like chewing ice or mispronouncing Kamala (“It’s Kaw-mu-la, mom, Jesus, how many times?”).
A man next to her clears his throat repeatedly, and she wants to reach around and slap him on the back to dislodge whatever is responsible but instead holds her hands in fists around the knife and fork on the tabletop.
The fact she’d once been beautiful is all anyone says about her anymore, as if she aged away from beauty with some cruel, conspicuous intent. “You Won’t Even Recognize Them!” reads the web site headline above a picture of her walking in the parking lot behind the bookstore in Brentwood, a picture in which she could be anyone’s grandmother visiting from one of the cold states: North Dakota or Michigan. It was what happened to the body; they all knew it, and yet.
Like every other brunch place in Santa Monica, this one has artisan donuts and a wall of succulents. Some of the bobbing succulent arms tap the top of her head when she leans back. Each plant has a tiny wooden name card underneath with letters that look burned in: Burro’s Tail, Hens and Chicks, Crown of Thorns. She’d once played a botanist in a movie in which the botanist is almost killed in several jungles but escapes and comes home to marry another scientist who of course participated in saving her. It was like that in most of her movies: she was initially tough but ultimately needy.
She’d been a child who collected plant parts and animal bones and hid them from her mother who prioritized cleanliness. As a teenager, she’d scratched patterns in her upper arms and covered them with sleeves and convinced herself she was unique, though she can’t remember anyone telling her that. In 1970, she carried a small tin of the animal teeth in the satin pocket of her suitcase in some man’s car all the way across mountains and deserts to the coast.
Then she’d gotten into cocaine, which was more fun but less precise, and there was nothing she liked more than driving up hills around Echo Park and making her car go a little bit airborne at the crest. One of her husbands had died in her car, but it was a long time ago. The child they had, their daughter, had been moody for a decade, had hated her at close range and then from a distance, from Japan and then China and now Peru where she taught wealthy teenagers how to speak English idiomatically. Her daughter came to LA each summer for a few days, and other than that, they communicated infrequently and mainly by email. Parenting was the most disorienting thing that had ever happened to her and the thing at which she is sure she is the worst.
Her own parents had lived most of their lives in a Dutch Colonial in Omaha, Nebraska. Her mother collected silver spoons by mail from places she would never visit, and California was just the thought of oranges and ocean to them. Now, the actress had the spoons rolled into a patterned silk bag in a drawer in her kitchen.
The coughing man scoots his metal chair back over the concrete, turns to the actress, and gives her the blessing hands. What to do with that, she wonders, but she gives him a small nod, and then he is walking away, across the street and into a store that sells driftwood mobiles and pastel weavings and stones on leather strings.
There was one house where she’d lived for several years in the canyon after first moving to LA. Pomegranates dropped at her feet. Horses whinnied through the mornings. Snakes left their skins in the shade of succulents. Bury me there, she wants to yell, but she’s decades from dying. Instead, she holds her coffee with two hands and lets a bee stay on her sandaled foot where it has landed. She leans down to watch it, the slight twitching of its striped body as it angles from her big toe to her arch.
All of the horns seem to be honking at once for a moment, and a man in robes on the corner yells about the future. What of the fish we are killing, he yells. What will we do with our dead and dying? What will we do with the old? She’s right there, being old, so it’s awkward. Everyone aged, and it was no great tragedy, she knew that. Still, there were little associated terrors every day.
The sun hits her face, and she lowers her sunglasses. To have wanted something, gotten it beyond the wanting, and come out on the other side. What to do with it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
She checks the time on her phone and focuses on how to hold her face so as not to be accused later by her daughter of judging. She wants to be good at this finally. She does.
When the bee stings her foot, she smooths her expression so it looks how she might look if a director told her, “Look beatific, look peaceful.” She sees her daughter rounding the corner, and she keeps her face just like that. She doesn’t even move.