I didn’t know how to join these thoughts up and there was still a part of me that did not want to spend another second of my life thinking (again) about all of this stuff.
– Deborah Levy, “Things I Don’t Want to Know”

 

In my mind there are a dozen opening thoughts. I’m not sure where to start. How would one approach a piece on the origins of the Universe?

A good starting point might be to tell you how much I have grown to dislike the fancy functions on my phone. I am considering using a dumb phone. Advantages: this will open up all sorts of possibilities to reconnect with the ways I used to do things. For example, there will be room for my DSLR camera to take center on special occasions, and this will be bulky to carry but engaging to work with. I will think about calling my friends, say, at what I would guess to be a considerate hour, the way I used to (not too early, not too late, trying to avoid dinner), and email will not be all the time and everywhere. There will be containment to a life that can become dominated by the device of all trades, which can do and be everything, taking all the space. I’ve concluded a dumb phone may be the best way to be less trackable and less always available (the latter being a woman’s battle to fight to begin with), which leaves no space at all. I suspect that abandoning my smart phone is a shortcut to the spacious life.

I spend time thinking of space and the space that I take, have and want. There is the physical space we take up in our bodies – lifelong, loved and loathed, inescapable – and the actual and perceived space we have in our minds, and this can be a lot to think about.

In our apartment we usually eat on a rectangular glass table. It never occurred to me its corners would become a problem.  In our early days of sharing the rectangular table, P and I each settled in gently into spaces that felt good (close to each other, me with my back against the wall in a corner-table seat, Pete near the music speakers). The spaces semi-stuck. We have our seats of habit, but when we have friends or family join, we shed our token places and opt for choice. It feels that letting guests pick their own seat is the considerate thing to do, a courtesy we no longer get on airlines without being charged. It is a luxury to move freely.

That night, I was barefoot, grilling fish with guests who were staying for dinner. The fish was charred on the outside, the peppers were roasted. I was hungry, and I think the others were too. It was a windy night and had been a struggle to get the barbecue lit, so the evening had become late. We made a communal effort to bring food to the table, setting platters and bowls on it to eat family-style. There was dishware all over the table and then there was some hovering – Where should we sit? — the energetic equivalent of nails running down a chalkboard. How to make it stop? Quickly, I encouraged people to sit where they’d like and put an end to the discomfort by resting my plate in the space front of me.

I hadn’t appreciated the level of political incorrectness in my choice, and I can now see the distinct advantages of using a circular dining table. For I had placed my plate on a short edge of the rectangle, what some people would call the head of the table. I thought nothing of this seat.

When the dishes were washed and cleared and P was out of earshot, I was made to understand that I had done very specifically wrong. The guest asked in accusations, What was that about? Sitting at the head of the table? What are you trying to prove?

I had disrupted an order that I knew nothing of. Place at the table hadn’t taken on any symbolism for me, or for P, or for our meals together, but this person apparently knew something I didn’t. Suddenly I felt guilty, and I wasn’t quite sure what for (“I will scold myself for not having the courage to take the other path,” writes Jianan Qian, a fiction writer from Shanghai. Do we do this without knowing what the other path is to begin with, or where it goes?).

I close my eyes and try to remember. When did I begin to learn? There are rules to being a woman, and they will demand space, and take it if allowed. It occurred to me I’d somehow broken one of these rules, and the rule had something to do with my body’s ability to threaten the universal order in something as mundane as a choice of seat.

There was a 7-Eleven near the school I went to when I was growing up. When I was in sixth grade, after dismissal my best friend and I would pick up Slurpees and a copy of Seventeen to read on the car ride home. Seventeen promised to tell me what I needed to know to be beautiful, and also told me it was important to want to know to begin with.

When I was thirteen, we moved to a new city, where I had no friends to share Slurpees with. I no longer bought Seventeen. I realized the fun had been just in the friend and not at all in the magazine. Knowing what products I needed to be generally worthy (of what? I think it was everything?) made me feel the opposite of good.

In the conscious choice to protect mind space by ditching beauty mags, I was more free, and this, in turn, did make me feel quite good. So good that there were things going on that I couldn’t hear, like the rule about where I was to sit at a barbecue. If the Neo-Patriarchy’s rules had been verbalized during those years, I was not listening, and I am grateful. Kari Skogland, a Canadian film director, too did not hear. The rules went long unheard: “Ignorance allowed me to believe and invest in myself as if my ambitions […] had no limits.” She was recently nominated for an Emmy Award for her work on “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Now that I am more woman and less girl and the rules have become explicit. They demand space. Biology is their currency: I have been given this female body, and because people can see this, they will ask me to answer for it on terms and in timing that are not mine.

I have discovered there is a form of societally-sanctioned bullying for adults, and it involves asking women of child-bearing age and perceived child-bearing circumstances about plans for children. I cannot understand why this subject isn’t deliberately avoided, a welcomed taboo in line with paystubs and politics. Is it not an embarrassing thing to be the type of person who asks this type of question? But it is not a question at all. There is only one right answer for the people who ask it.

A few weeks ago I was at a large dinner party and a couple showed up with a newborn wrapped in a sling that hung around her mother’s neck. Did I want to hold her? I had been drinking wine, and the baby was small and breakable, so maybe another day, I said. The parents insisted, you must, you must, and so I rocked the sweet baby, warm and dough-like in my arms.

“I’m sorry for the question,” asked an onlooker, in a way that made clear there were no actual apologies involved. “But, you will start soon? Of course you’ll want more than one.”

In a moment I felt like a caged animal, or like a person reading Seventeen who was made to understand she was profoundly unworthy. And I saw the thing to do was to find the space.

“I will start never, probably,” I said, and I smiled widely, because I had found a path to the space that is freedom.

The following day, I had a similar conversation at the doctor’s office. My endocrinologist was running late, and the pregnant woman next to me in the waiting room watched me test my blood sugar.

She understood what I was doing, stroked her belly and said, “I’m sorry.” Her sister was diabetic, she explained, this being the reason the sister hadn’t ever wanted kids.

“So you won’t have them with that genetic burden, I can see,” said the pregnant lady, and while I stopped to think about her ignorance exposed, she continued, “so it is a marvelous thing that you can adopt.”

“I am pregnant with triplets, actually,” I said, and I recalled the freedom of flight from the night before.

She had reason to be dubious of my state, I could see, from the double espresso in my hand. This was me opting out of Seventeen. This was me opting for a dumb phone, the path of space to choose my seat.

 

 

 

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Note: The title is very obviously inspired by, and the post in part informed by, a reading of Deborah Levy’s essay “Things I Don’t Want To Know”