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LJ Idol, Week 10: You're So Vain
Dec. 3rd, 2008 11:36 amWhen I was five years old, my mother dressed me up in a yellow frock and photographed me in front of our avocado plant by the terrace doors for my private school applications. Schools, she said, wanted to see that I was a pretty and well-behaved girl.
When I mentioned this to my mother when I was thirty, she said it never happened. Not, that she did not recall, just that she was certain there was no such photographic requirement on those applications and no such garment.
But I remember the dress. And my white socks with lace cuffs, and my patent leather mary janes which had been fitted with an orthopedic insert so as to encourage me not to turn out my left foot when I walked. I remember the camera, the cartridge film, the pack of flash bulbs you had to stick in the top, and the sweet smell of plastic burning when one of the ten went pop!
But mostly, I know it all happened because my mother says with such a surety that it did not.
I'm an only child, and conventional wisdom says we're strange animals: selfish and self-obsessed, immature, petulant. Frankly, I find all that a little annoying, but I see where it comes from. We have to be so covetous and live with so much personal certitude, because we have no one with which to compare notes. We live lives in which our parents can glibly deny our history and where no brother or sister is there to say I remember too.
I know I am lucky my only loss is a yellow dress and instructions on being a good girl.
But this stuff must have happened all the time when I was growing up, about small things, and I just don't remember most of it. I suspect it's why I cleaved, from the very beginning, so desperately to the stories my parents did offer me, and to the stories I found and stole and kept and hoarded for myself.
When I was six I lay across the arm of the sofa with my arms out so I could fly like Superman. At eight, I banged on my father's old radio with a plastic hammer so that I could fix it, just like Greg on The Brady Bunch. That year, I also hid in the back of a wardrobe at an inn in East Hampton, touching furs and praying to be tumbled out of the thing backwards into the snow.
Eventually my whole life became about stories, and eventually all those stories started rewriting my past.
So at eight in dirty clothes I awkwardly stalked a neighbor girl. And at eleven, I lost my brother by the sea. At thirteen, I kissed and fucked the world back into being, while at seventeen I walked out to hunt with mastiffs and fell in love with my best friend. I became a betrayer and a murderer and a spy. I was a penitent, a mourner, a whore and a soldier. I was a priestess. I baked bread, I made wine, and I talked to the whistling beasts under the water.
These were all my stories, and they were all true, and they always will be, even if I feel like I won't ever, ever, ever be able to explain it to you well enough for you to actually get that I am not mad or pompous or lonely, so much as I am permeable and hopeful and lost (albeit in a terribly directed fashion) in the mists.
We will things into the world. Not just as individuals, but as families, as friends, as cultures and nations. We make things that are not real, true. And those things have to live somewhere, and so they do in books and movies and television shows and stories you wrote with your best friend and never showed to anyone, not ever, except you really wanted to, because oh, your pretty demons deserved a bigger home!
Somehow, it turns out I've tiny hands that can move exactly like those of men who have never existed, except in storybook and sin. I am a mimic in hopes that if you like you, you'll like me. And I am an amplifier, a liar's truths, for reasons I simply don't know, can't grasp and rarely feel free to explain.
This is what was bought me with a yellow dress my mother says I never even wore or touched or saw: lives I was never supposed to have known, much less lived and been whispered to by in the shimmering dark, spinning about on this little rock that, coincidentally, apparently, orbits an unavoidably yellow star.
When I mentioned this to my mother when I was thirty, she said it never happened. Not, that she did not recall, just that she was certain there was no such photographic requirement on those applications and no such garment.
But I remember the dress. And my white socks with lace cuffs, and my patent leather mary janes which had been fitted with an orthopedic insert so as to encourage me not to turn out my left foot when I walked. I remember the camera, the cartridge film, the pack of flash bulbs you had to stick in the top, and the sweet smell of plastic burning when one of the ten went pop!
But mostly, I know it all happened because my mother says with such a surety that it did not.
I'm an only child, and conventional wisdom says we're strange animals: selfish and self-obsessed, immature, petulant. Frankly, I find all that a little annoying, but I see where it comes from. We have to be so covetous and live with so much personal certitude, because we have no one with which to compare notes. We live lives in which our parents can glibly deny our history and where no brother or sister is there to say I remember too.
I know I am lucky my only loss is a yellow dress and instructions on being a good girl.
But this stuff must have happened all the time when I was growing up, about small things, and I just don't remember most of it. I suspect it's why I cleaved, from the very beginning, so desperately to the stories my parents did offer me, and to the stories I found and stole and kept and hoarded for myself.
When I was six I lay across the arm of the sofa with my arms out so I could fly like Superman. At eight, I banged on my father's old radio with a plastic hammer so that I could fix it, just like Greg on The Brady Bunch. That year, I also hid in the back of a wardrobe at an inn in East Hampton, touching furs and praying to be tumbled out of the thing backwards into the snow.
Eventually my whole life became about stories, and eventually all those stories started rewriting my past.
So at eight in dirty clothes I awkwardly stalked a neighbor girl. And at eleven, I lost my brother by the sea. At thirteen, I kissed and fucked the world back into being, while at seventeen I walked out to hunt with mastiffs and fell in love with my best friend. I became a betrayer and a murderer and a spy. I was a penitent, a mourner, a whore and a soldier. I was a priestess. I baked bread, I made wine, and I talked to the whistling beasts under the water.
These were all my stories, and they were all true, and they always will be, even if I feel like I won't ever, ever, ever be able to explain it to you well enough for you to actually get that I am not mad or pompous or lonely, so much as I am permeable and hopeful and lost (albeit in a terribly directed fashion) in the mists.
We will things into the world. Not just as individuals, but as families, as friends, as cultures and nations. We make things that are not real, true. And those things have to live somewhere, and so they do in books and movies and television shows and stories you wrote with your best friend and never showed to anyone, not ever, except you really wanted to, because oh, your pretty demons deserved a bigger home!
Somehow, it turns out I've tiny hands that can move exactly like those of men who have never existed, except in storybook and sin. I am a mimic in hopes that if you like you, you'll like me. And I am an amplifier, a liar's truths, for reasons I simply don't know, can't grasp and rarely feel free to explain.
This is what was bought me with a yellow dress my mother says I never even wore or touched or saw: lives I was never supposed to have known, much less lived and been whispered to by in the shimmering dark, spinning about on this little rock that, coincidentally, apparently, orbits an unavoidably yellow star.
