Is this beautiful?
Every morning my grandmother makes me oatmeal, puts it in a little bowl, and calls my name to come down and get it from her. The oatmeal is thick and creamy, with soft chunks of apple, and surely made with full-fat milk and spoonfuls of sugar the fine texture and color of driven snow.
I normally don’t eat breakfast, certainly not as early as she prepares it for me. She’ll be 92 on either April 30th or May 1st, she has different dates on different documents. I carry the thin porcelain bowl, which she nestles in a tea towel to make sure I don’t burn my hands, upstairs, place it down to let it cool.
A few hours later, she calls my name again. She can’t hear very well, so there’s no conversation to be had between floors; she’s summoning me. I go. She’s prepared κρέμα, which she’s made for me ever since I can remember. It’s made with farina, sugar, milk, topped with cinnamon. I thank her and take it upstairs.
The bowls cool while I work. Sometimes I take a spoonful or two. Sometimes I eat the entire bowl, one or the other. Sometimes, I hate to say, I empty their contents into the garbage.
Recently I have started thinking of my behavior in a more simple langauge. This is because I had been, have been, feeling very lost. My lostness, the nature of being lost, seemed to replace everything that I was before. I never felt that there had been much of me to lose, tenuous and slippery as I’d always been, but locked in my dark room I began groping around me, unable to see anything for what it was. If my hands were not dirty, they were bloody. If they were not bloody, they were dirty.
I’ve been staying at home, in my family home, for a little bit of time. There are many reasons for this, but it is rarely far from my mind that there may not be many years left for me to spend time with my grandmother, as well as our beloved little dog, who will be ten years old this May, though he looks and acts like a puppy. My bedroom is filled with childish things, floral bedsheets and pink stuffed animals and Margaret Keane paintings, with their big, cloying eyes. It’s comforting to me, in the way that I had a lover who smelled sometimes in the mornings like sour milk, or like a bowl filled past the brim with soft, rising dough, like something a baby might’ve spat up, and I loved to smell him.
I wouldn’t say that I’m a lazy girl, although I would say that I subscribe, if nothing else, to Occam’s razor. After an unhappy and rather sterile season of darkness, I realized that, if I was to see again, I would have to make it easy for myself. And I would have to make it hard for myself to sabotage my own vision, wont as I was to blot it out with the spilled ink of my fear, writing out word after word after word, each one on top of the other until nothing at all could be ascertained.
The dog likes to sleep burrowed under the covers, until his head is near my waist. He curls himself into a ball and pushes me until I’m up against the edge of the bed. Sometimes I stay up at night, worried that he’ll suffocate, but when I force his head up toward mine, out from under the blanket and into the cool air, he becomes angry with me, and returns to his previous position, completely ensconced.
I am jealous of the animal that knows what it wants, and fights for it.
I have no faith in my intuition or my instincts, but I do have faith in my attunement to beauty. I told someone on the phone that I was sick of myself, that I was tired of acting against my own values. As soon as I said the words, I thought to myself, but you have none.
Is it foolish that a crumb on the kitchen countertop or a stray piece of paper on the floor offends me more than my own folly? That I would, and do, spend my days straightening out my closet and folding and refolding my clothes, rather than take real action to make my life better than it is, or, if not to improve my life, then to, at the very least, propel it forward?
Yet as I become older the urge does seem to be sinking inward. My skin seems drier and thinner than it used to be, my undereyes more purplish. Sometimes I wonder if my ugly actions have made me ugly, not as a punishment from some higher power for my sins, but rather the natural result of my lack of intention or understanding of myself, as if those things could be and were the causative bacteria of my disease, which gnaws at me consumptively.
If nothing else, a disease is information, and I have to be grateful for that: I take data where I can get it, so rarely is it available to me, or so it seems.
I throw a dinner party for my friends, and take what feels like an obscene amount of pleasure in arranging and rearranging pieces of dried fruit, cheese, jam on a cutting board. Ladling soup into bowls and slicing up cucumbers, red onion, tomatoes, and peppers for a salad. Placing the wine glasses carefully on one table, then another, in one formation, before settling on a different one. Choosing which music to play, which no one hears anyway, because we are all talking, and the speaker isn’t loud enough.
The entire night I watch others, hardly thinking of myself. Before everyone arrived I glanced at myself in the mirror and was unhappy. I can’t help but pick at the scabs on my arms and face, and I wonder if others can tell that I’ve covered up blood with cheap drugstore concealer. I dyed my hair a few days ago, and my grandmother tells me every time she sees me that it’s too dark. I am wearing my mother’s camel-colored cashmere sweater and wonder if it doesn’t match with my skin tone, which is paler than hers. My high-waisted jeans emphasize my belly, and my lipstick rubs off too quickly.
Yet I don’t think of any of that, not once, when I have made a beautiful table for people who I think are beautiful, and make me beautiful by the grace of the contagious nature of things.
Is beauty a virtue? I’m hardly one to speak on virtue, but what I can say is that now, when I’m unsure of what to think, feel, or do, I weigh each option with the question, Is this beautiful?
I love the poetry of this. More beauty, yes, I can get behind that. Sometimes it feels like the only thing left.
Lazy girls unite