alexandra alger

What a Plunge!

Serendipitous events: I went to a Q&A with author Michael Cunningham (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) not long before my daughter began reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, not long before I found a copy of Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998)—an homage to Virginia Woolf—at the lodge where I am now staying in Jackson, Wyoming.

So it seemed like fate: I was meant to reread The Hours.

This was a novel that everyone read and raved about, as I recall—it was The Goldfinch of 1998-99. But all I really remembered was that Virginia Woolf was a character. I’d forgotten why she was a character; I’d forgotten everything, in fact. Until I started reading, and I began to remember. One of the main characters is Cunningham’s version of Clarissa Dalloway, who, in the first chapter, is going off to buy flowers for a party. Later Woolf herself sits down to write the famous first line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she’d get the flowers herself.”

It’s one of few first lines I have never forgotten in all the years since reading Mrs. Dalloway in high school. It’s so simple, and at the same time so distinctive and yes, unforgettable.

In a very funny article Cunningham wrote in the New York Times in 2003 after The Hours was turned into a movie (remember Nicole Kidman with the fake honker, playing Woolf? And then winning the Oscar?), he describes talks about Mrs. Dalloway this way: “Woolf’s novel takes place in one day, during which Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old London society hostess, shops, sees the man she might have married but did not, takes a nap, and gives a rather dull party. However, because it is an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary person as rendered by a genius, by the book’s end we understand that Mrs. Dalloway not only stands with the heroes of world literature but, by extension, that every one of us might stand so, if only a brilliant writer would look at us with sufficient depth and penetration.”

Cunningham makes me think I should be going back to his source of inspiration, but I’m happy to have The Hours in front of me. When his Clarissa centers herself in the moment, in her life, it seems like just right thing to be reading, as the spring we’re all longing for teeters on the edge of being.

“Outside the narrow kitchen window the city sails and rumbles. Lovers argue; cashiers ring up; young men and women shop for new clothes as the woman standing under the Washington Square Arch sings iiiii and you snip the end off a rose and put it in a vase full of hot water. You try to hold the moment, just here, in the kitchen with the flowers. You try to inhabit it, to love it, because it is yours….”

Resolutions!

I’ve read that 40% of Americans make New Year’s resolutions. That’s it? Fewer than half of us? I admit I’m not as formal about resolution-making as I once was. As a kid U made a list of resolutions every year. I have absolutely no recollection of what those resolutions were, year after year, or how actively I set about meeting them, or if I meet any of them. They were probably boringly benign, like “Get better at ballet,” or “Write Grammy more often”—the kind of stuff that would withstand an accidental parental reading. I wouldn’t be fool enough to put in writing anything I desperately hoped for, like “Get a boyfriend,” the one wish that would consume my adolescence.(I was finally able to check that off the mental list when I was seventeen).

But writing something down can be powerful, and I’ve realized that years of not making formal resolutions have left me in a state of severe disorganization. In the interest of clearing my head for the important stuff (like being able to concentrate on becoming a better writer) I have to clear out the clutter that’s taken over every surface in my immediate vicinity. Piles of papers—clippings, financial statements, manuscript pages, old bills that need filing. It’s a morass I have been avoiding for… umm…years? I can hardly bear to acknowledge how long these piles have been accumulating! I have to get rid of them—asap! I can’t possibly take all year, or even all month.

Resolution #1: Read and file papers on chest of drawers. (Yes, it’s gotten so bad I have a pile next to my jewelry box.) Alternatively: Read and throw out papers on bureau.

Resolution #2: Throw away or do something with the stacks of papers, binders and books on the floor of my office. I’m super bored at the idea of going through them—but I’ve got to do it!

And then there’s the issue of the clothes clogging my side of the closet. Button-downs that seemed so useful at first and now look kind of dorky. (I think my shoulders are too rounded, or something). Sleeveless summer blouses that are too…sleeveless. The dress I bought online that is too revealing and I never got around to returning. (Originally I thought it might not be too revealing. Then I realized I couldn’t possibly wear it ANYWHERE unless I went into the escort business.) What’s the rule of thumb: Throw away anything you haven’t worn in two years? I’m paralyzed by the thought I will then have very few clothes—which is irrational, since I wear tend to wear the same jeans and t-shirts over and over again.

But there’s the question of sentimental value. What to do with that dress I wore at my sister’s wedding sixteen years ago but haven’t worn since? Wouldn’t it be a sort of betrayal to give it away? How about the red linen skirt that was part of my going-away outfit after my own marriage, twenty years ago?

The wheels are turning, rational arguments coming to the fore. It’s not like I’m throwing away my wedding dress—my modest New Year’s goals do not hide marital disarray. (Now that’s an interesting premise for a story, isn’t it? Under what circumstances—other than divorce—would a woman toss her wedding dress?)

Resolution #3: Throw out clothes not worn for two years. (Or most of them.)

I feel better already. Tomorrow I’ll get down to it. This month for sure. I mean it.

A Deep, Painful Gratitude

Amid the outrage (justified in my view) in the Ferguson case, I am consumed by another death: that of a 16-year-old neighbor. The young man, brilliant and sensitive, took his own life on a Sunday night a few weeks ago. I know his parents, lovely and loving people. Their son I mainly knew as a kid on the block. I watched his growing up through glimpses on the street, on the way to and from school (he went to a nearby school, not far from the one my children attended). At last glimpse, he’d grown tall and looked very much a young man on the verge of adulthood. Off and on over the years I’d hoped he and my daughter might meet; incredibly, they share a birthday. But somehow they never did meet. Now they never will.

I had coffee with his mother just two days before that Sunday. I think back longingly to that sunny morning. We chatted about our kids, the way parents do, each expecting to have many such conversations in the coming years. Each thinking of the future in the brightest terms. When I saw his mother again she cried and hugged me and said the very thing that I was thinking: If only we could go back to that Friday morning. If only we could reset time. if only we could go back, and stop him.

I dreamed of this boy the other night. He was accompanying me somewhere. I didn’t know him in life, but now I’m dreaming about him. My unconscious mind has a lot to go over. I knew another boy who killed himself at the same age. This boy I knew. And I still mourn him, six years later.

Yesterday I paged through Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking to read once again her account of losing her husband when he suffered a sudden heart attack. It’s a powerful book; Didion helps me understand profound grief (horribly she would later suffer the loss of her only child to a baffling illness). The magical thinking of the title refers to her conviction that he would come back. She knew he was dead, and yet she was at the same time sure that he would find a way. She just wanted him back, so badly.

These are dark times now for these parents on my block. I wish I knew a way to bring comfort. There may not be any, for a while. Staying in touch, being a community, that would be something. Didion had a friend who brought her congee from Chinatown; it was the only thing she could keep down. Congee. I wonder if should try to find some.

For now, they are with family, in a different part of the country. Hopefully that’s a good thing. I’ll be with family, too, on Thanksgiving. This year, I feel a deep and pain-tinged gratitude for all that I have.

I’m Primed

At a ripe old age, I’m learning a foreign language, one that young women are naturally conversant in: the language of cosmetics.

I have absolutely no natural talent for this. My idea of makeup is lipstick, a swipe of mascara and a few dabs of a foundation to hide the blotches around my nose. But who am I kidding? Most days I’m the best I can do is slather Olay cream on my madly dry skin.

So this is my state of ignorance when I accompany my daughter, Vanessa, to Sephora.

What is she shopping for? Under-eye primer.

Under-eye primer. The words mean nothing to me. Turns out it’s a cream you put on before under-eye concealer.

“You wear under-eye concealer?” I ask. She’s all of sixteen, but she appears to believe she has circles under her eyes.

But back to the primer. It turns out that faces are like walls. The prime kinda does the same thing.

When you’ve entered middle age without knowing what primer for the face is, the news is not exactly earth-shaking. Still, in the spirit of the moment, I bought primer “lash builder primer,” by Clinique. “Conditioning undercoat boosts benefits of Clinique mascara, extends wear.” I have to say it sounded kind of great. Mascara never seems to last on my lashes; that’s partly why I rarely bother with it.

I can now smugly report that my mascara, combined with primer, lasts a full evening. Oh, baby! I actually had trouble getting the stuff off.

Naturally, I’m not getting too carried away. I know a woman does not need makeup to look and feel good about herself. I Girls shouldn’t feel they need it; but many do. it’s part of meeting cultural expectations. I’m part of a generation that said, f*** that, but this generation is different. They seem to find makeup empowering. I dunno, some girls definitely overdo it, and end up looking like 30-year-olds, but I figure there are more important things to make a stink about—like equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work. We have a ways to go there.

And while we’re getting there, I may need a good eyebrow pencil.