ON BOA CONSTRICTORS, TOWELS, AND MARCEL PROUST

ON BOA CONSTRICTORS, TOWELS, AND PROUST

Look at the time! The sun’s up and I’m not! Good God, and my to-do list is longer than a boa constrictor—at least I think they’re pretty long—but I should Google it, because then I’d know how long boa constrictors are—not that I really care, but still, now that I’ve wondered about it—and  knowledge is power—

No no no, step away from the computer. Some kinds of knowledge are just a waste of time. Anyway, I promise we can look up length of boa constrictors tonight or on the weekend, but right now GET A MOVE ON! You have to shower and—wait, why am I always yelling at myself these days? Do I really need that much scolding? No, you really need to shower. Why? Because, remember? You need to wash your hair for the job interview. Do I? I kind of like this scrappy, sticky-uppy look. Maybe a bath instead. 

A BATH? Are you CRAZY? You don’t even have time to fill the tub! 

But if I did fill it—which means I’d be late for the interview, which I don’t even care if I’m late for because I don’t want that job—I could add two cups of Epsom salts and just lie back and relaaaax…and okay, sorry, that’s what I’m going to do. I can hurry later, make up for lost time. 

Oh, speaking of lost time, I’m now reading Marcel Proust. 

 You know, In Search of Lost Time?

What do you mean, why?

Well, yes, I agree, he is slow. Not mentally,  of course, his mind is faster than a gazelle—at least I think gazelles are pretty fast—but I could Google, are gazelles faster than Marcel Proust’s mind? I’m not sure that’s the kind of thing a person can Google, because no one knows anything about Marcel Proust’s mind. But anyway, all the world agrees he’s slow; if you liked reading about how tragically he suffered when his mother didn’t come upstairs and kiss him goodnight, you’ll want to like reading about it just as much forty pages later. And you will! That’s the magic—or part of it.

Another part of the magic is that I find—probably because of reading Proust—that I just damn well would rather take a bath than a shower, because I’m IN NO HURRY and it takes twenty minutes for a person’s body to absorb the magnesium in Epsom salts. And I ask Marcel, and he gives me that enigmatic smile, from the obsidian depth of his eyes, and says, “Oui, mon petit choufleur, that’s what I would do.”

Have I been in this bath twenty minutes yet? It feels more like an hour, but maybe it was only ten or twelve minutes. I should have brought a clock in with me. However, I’m certain I’m chock-a-block full of magnesium now, because I feel very slow—slow but not sluggish. Slow the way the sun sometimes creeps over a hilltop to cast its first shy rays on an opposite hill, or the way a spill of oil oozes its rainbow hues across a water puddle, in no hurry, quivering slightly in a kiss of wind… 

God, I bet that employer who probably won’t hire me is already waiting. I really should have…except, no, I really shouldn’t have. Because, look. Here I am, all pink, stepping over the tub rail like a heron, setting a toe on the bathmat, and so gracefully completing the maneuver that I hardly made a ripple in the bathwater I just left. I reach for the towel…

My new towel! The towel I bought just yesterday, having bought no other new towels in my rememberable lifetime—and only having bought this one because, during a mad dash into Ross to find a cheap blouse that would help me get the job I even then knew I didn’t want, there were the towels, piles and piles of them, every color imaginable (if one can only imagine, say, five colors, not counting white) and actually much cheaper than I’d guessed towels would be. So I had paused, in that mad dash, to contemplate. I want to buy a towel, I had thought as my heart pounded slowly with the realization that I actually could. Was this the beginning, the first timid sign that I’ve been going too fast?

Blue is nice, I mused. Not that blue matches anything else in my bathroom, but I wasn’t concerned with interior décor; I was concerned with the color blue. And there were three, side by side—one a dark navy I wouldn’t consider, and the other two almost the same as each other. Yet so different! And now my mad dash was completely forgotten. My eyes glazed back and forth between the blues: what was it? One was simply what a child would describe as ‘light blue’—nice enough, but somehow not nice enough for me. The other—my hand already reached it down from the pile—was the subtle blue of a June morning, infused with a very slight touch of gold, the blue of certain birds whose gold-blue wings flash at you in passing, too fast for you to define their exact hue. 

So now, standing all wet-warm and rose-pink, I lifted the towel and slid it off the rack, feeling as I did so the texture I had noticed in the store: soft like the hands of a loving mother, or a gentle lover, hands that wanted no greater pleasure than to blot away every clinging drop of moisture on my body with a pressure almost humorously gentle, touch touch touch, in no hurry, all the time in the world, because we don’t want to be rough on our precious skin, tender as a tiny velvety blossom…

See, I had forgotten about me! I mean, for a long time. How long, this strange forgetting which could only come from not caring? And with the same slow attention I rehung my new blue towel, spreading it out so it would dry evenly, smoothing with my fingertips the few wrinkles that wanted to gather along the rod. 

My father used to say, “When things get too rushed and you start to feel panicked, you need to deal with it right then. Take some deep breaths and just slow down until that panic’s gone—’cause you can’t live with it.” 

Not that he was going to live anyway. 

Oh my father, is that what you did? When you knew you were going to die and leave your wife and daughters as astonished and forsaken as three trees standing up to their branches in floodwater? When you felt the final greedy filaments of death stealing down into your most personal marrow, rushing you, rushing you, when you weren’t even halfway ready, did you take some deep breaths and just slow down till that panic was gone? Maybe we should have talked about it, you and I; maybe we should have done that together, taken some deep breaths—looked into each other’s eyes—maybe a little smile—asking each other if the panic was gone yet. 

I couldn’t have, though, because already I was rushing. Already I was thinking, my God, take the absolute first job I see advertised, because it’s all going to be on me, now. I was frying burgers at Hungry Hanks before you were buried, so anxious was I to step into my new responsibility, and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last six months, until last week, when I quit because a girl I worked with spilled a huge swath of hot oil down her front, screaming, and oh my God, I thought, I can’t do this, it’s too dangerous. 

But shouldn’t I have been mourning? Isn’t that really more important than a scrawny paycheck? No one’s going to let us starve; the world’s not like that now. I may have thought—erroneously—that if I just jumped in and got right at it, the whole business of death, the whole business of losing you and missing you, would float away on the current. It almost did, too; that is the down-side of jumping in and getting right at it. These things that are so incredibly important for us humans—things like mourning our fathers—can be forgotten in the confusion of daily details, of paychecks or hot oil, of alarm clocks, of taking a quick shower instead of a long soak.

You also said, once, “If you can’t slow down any other way, try reading Marcel Proust.” (You were doing so at the time, quietly smiling and very occasionally chuckling.) I knew where the double volume of almost four thousand pages was, because certainly no one else had touched it since, so the other day I simply marched in and grabbed it, thinking, “Okay, I’ve heard this guy is so slow you fear you’ll die of old age before he gets through with one sentence,” which in a way was what I wished would happen, because I knew the current was getting too strong for me to swim in.

.…and then I started to get him, Proust, to rest on him every night like a down pillow…and then I started to look around me, all around, as if I’d never seen my own bedroom before or even my own hand…and then I started to look at myself, not at as in a mirror, but more into, seeing clearly the way grief had become inextricably intertwined with all my veins and muscles and even the tiniest nerve dendrons…and then I started thinking, shouldn’t I be taking care of this? Isn’t my inattention allowing some kind of permanent destruction, even if I can’t see it? Grief doesn’t tolerate being unacknowledged, shoved off into a dark closet for later; it wants to be honored, feared, embraced—and it wants it NOW.

I’m not trying to say that’s why I bought a new towel…or is it? Certainly something caused me to slow down, on my rush to the cheap blouse section, and stand mesmerized before those banks of neatly folded and soothingly-colored towels and think, in a slow but extremely focused way, I want to buy a towel. 

I do already have a towel. I’ve had it for perhaps ten years, and I couldn’t say where it came from; perhaps a guest left it behind. It used to be pink, but for a long time it’s been the grey of anything that gets washed too often with jeans. The edges are frayed, and several long strings dangle from it. In a few places the nap is worn right off so you can almost see through it. And that was good enough for me.

Of course, Marcel lived in a world—fin de siècle Paris—of ridiculous luxury, and though he hasn’t yet mentioned towels, it’s still probable that because of him I picked my own off the rod, stared at it, and thought, “No, this is not good enough for me.” I suddenly began to see myself as incredibly worthy—and I want to stress that this was exactly the part of mourning I had pushed into the darkest corner of the closet: I am nothing less than my father’s daughter—your daughter. What a magnificent thing to be! You thought so, anyway, and I should honor your opinion. You were a most intelligent and discerning man, and in your discernment, one of the things you valued most was me, your baby. Your little girl. Your high school grad. Your young woman. Your friend. How could I possibly be unworthy?

I must learn to face my own worthiness. There’s really no escape; if I try, the truth is going to catch up with me eventually. It wasn’t enough that I bought the towel, or that I hung it up with tender care after using it more thoughtfully than many people have ever in their life used a mere object. I imagine you changing my diaper with that kind of tenderness, undismayed by the repugnant things that came out of me, because the goodness you saw in me was what was important. The worthiness. 

And if I’m to own my worthiness, I’m just going to have to slow myself WAY down, forgive myself on a daily basis, not take a flunky job out of desperation, not think I have to dry myself on a nonabsorbent rag. I have certain rights: the right to a decent towel, an employer who values me, the time (hours, days, weeks) to read Marcel Proust. The right to wander over to the computer when I damn well feel like it and Google the length of boa constrictors (as you would have done), because now that I’ve brought it up, I really do care, and it turns out they are six to ten feet long, occasionally reaching sixteen feet, especially if they are females—and aren’t you glad we took the time to ask?