to my knees. Not because of an enchantment with idealism. It stirred me like poetry, ratifying my sense of a tenuous existence, of having grown up largely unperceived. Esse est percipi . It transported me back to my mother’s bathroom countertop, my little-girl thighs sticking to the cold yellow tile. Rows of wicker baskets brimming with compacts, lipsticks, curling pins. The smell of hairspray. I watched my mother lean into the mirror, rail thin and powdery, her frantic eyes chasing after a vanishing girl. Looking too long. Longing.
“Mom?”
Her mascara-coated eyelashes made short black streaks on the glass.
If my mother saw me, it was through her reflection, her
projection. I was fractured, as if by a prism, or a multi-fold mirror, and the parts of me that failed to match her self-image were cut away from view, unseen. I tried my best to become like her, to garner the light of her gaze, with dress, with song.
When I first started taking voice lessons in New York City, my mother sometimes accompanied me. We’d order the French onion soup at O’Neals’ Balloon. Then we’d stroll along the Lincoln Center streets, and I’d sing to her.
“ Ah fors’e lui che l’anima ”—my favorite aria from La Traviata , it often felt like my best chance for connection with my mother. From the time I was fifteen until the time I left for college, my singing of its lines—“ A quell l’a mor, quell l’a mor ch’e palpito, del l’universo, del l’universo intero ”—could render my mother focused and attentive, her eyes huge, her lips quivering. Her heart unburied.
The last lines, the song’s climax, became my deepest regret. My mother’s attentions would flicker, and I would again be prone to the intermittencies, the inconsistencies, that marked my childhood and destabilized me. My prized creations—a lopsided pot of colored clay, a woven lanyard bracelet, pages of schoolwork marked “excellent”—celebrated, then discarded in the trash. A birthday one year filled with fanfare, the next, nearly forgotten. A question, unanswered. Unheard.
As I left home for college—I went to Columbia, planning to continue with my voice lessons on Sixty-sixth Street—I wavered uncertainly, a chalk mark on the verge of being erased. Along with singing, philosophy became my way to cast myself, to hurtle myself into the world. What are the elements essential for identity, for personhood, for perception and existence? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I met Bill in the law library on a damp April evening during my junior year. He was a first year law student. We talked and talked—first in the library, then at a pub, then on Columbia’s main steps—Bill’s eyes holding me securely in his gaze all the while. When we parted that night at the huge iron doorway to my building, I loved him already. His eyelids crinkled around his soft blue eyes and his cheeks dimpled when he smiled at me through the grated window. My belly fluttered as I weaved up the six flights of stairs to my dorm room, and fell, joyously, into sleep.
That summer, swimming together in a lake, Bill lifted me up with his strong forearms and swished me around, weightless. We made up silly rhymes about New York Mets baseball players—Jesse Orosco, Dwight Goodin, Gary Carter—and I sang him snippets of songs from The Fantasticks in between dives that I took from off his broad shoulders. Toweled and warmed by the sun, we sat with
our legs still dangling in the water and passed a container of coffee ice cream back and forth. Bill’s tee shirt smelled like the corn plant that flowered in his apartment, and I nestled my face into his shoulder. When he swept me up in a hug, I could hardly breathe for the strength he brought, his arms braced tight around me.
Over the next twelve years, we’d move to northern California, I’d pursue my PhD, we’d marry, have a baby. Bill’s steady eyes held me, even now. But I
“Mom?”
Her mascara-coated eyelashes made short black streaks on the glass.
If my mother saw me, it was through her reflection, her
projection. I was fractured, as if by a prism, or a multi-fold mirror, and the parts of me that failed to match her self-image were cut away from view, unseen. I tried my best to become like her, to garner the light of her gaze, with dress, with song.
When I first started taking voice lessons in New York City, my mother sometimes accompanied me. We’d order the French onion soup at O’Neals’ Balloon. Then we’d stroll along the Lincoln Center streets, and I’d sing to her.
“ Ah fors’e lui che l’anima ”—my favorite aria from La Traviata , it often felt like my best chance for connection with my mother. From the time I was fifteen until the time I left for college, my singing of its lines—“ A quell l’a mor, quell l’a mor ch’e palpito, del l’universo, del l’universo intero ”—could render my mother focused and attentive, her eyes huge, her lips quivering. Her heart unburied.
The last lines, the song’s climax, became my deepest regret. My mother’s attentions would flicker, and I would again be prone to the intermittencies, the inconsistencies, that marked my childhood and destabilized me. My prized creations—a lopsided pot of colored clay, a woven lanyard bracelet, pages of schoolwork marked “excellent”—celebrated, then discarded in the trash. A birthday one year filled with fanfare, the next, nearly forgotten. A question, unanswered. Unheard.
As I left home for college—I went to Columbia, planning to continue with my voice lessons on Sixty-sixth Street—I wavered uncertainly, a chalk mark on the verge of being erased. Along with singing, philosophy became my way to cast myself, to hurtle myself into the world. What are the elements essential for identity, for personhood, for perception and existence? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
I met Bill in the law library on a damp April evening during my junior year. He was a first year law student. We talked and talked—first in the library, then at a pub, then on Columbia’s main steps—Bill’s eyes holding me securely in his gaze all the while. When we parted that night at the huge iron doorway to my building, I loved him already. His eyelids crinkled around his soft blue eyes and his cheeks dimpled when he smiled at me through the grated window. My belly fluttered as I weaved up the six flights of stairs to my dorm room, and fell, joyously, into sleep.
That summer, swimming together in a lake, Bill lifted me up with his strong forearms and swished me around, weightless. We made up silly rhymes about New York Mets baseball players—Jesse Orosco, Dwight Goodin, Gary Carter—and I sang him snippets of songs from The Fantasticks in between dives that I took from off his broad shoulders. Toweled and warmed by the sun, we sat with
our legs still dangling in the water and passed a container of coffee ice cream back and forth. Bill’s tee shirt smelled like the corn plant that flowered in his apartment, and I nestled my face into his shoulder. When he swept me up in a hug, I could hardly breathe for the strength he brought, his arms braced tight around me.
Over the next twelve years, we’d move to northern California, I’d pursue my PhD, we’d marry, have a baby. Bill’s steady eyes held me, even now. But I
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