Fake Adulthood

It will be your nineteenth birthday tomorrow, and you’ve never felt so young. You start to wonder if everyone feels this way as they grow up, or if this is just another thing which sets you apart. You miss being young. Then you realize how ridiculous that thought is. Because you are young. You are really, really young.

You can’t even drink yet – legally. You think about the night last fall when you tried to pass as older, with your falsified I.D, but were caught because you looked so young – because you are so young. And that’s not even you projecting, that’s the outright, honest-to-goodness reason you were caught.

I saw the girl with the scarf buying PBR’s. There’s no way she’s any older than eighteen.

You immediately regret having bought so many. Only one of the four you’re charged with buying had even been yours. One for you; one for the boy with whom you had danced; two for the boy who would eventually hear more of your secret thoughts than most other people ever had, even though you weren’t and still aren’t sure why he was the one you entrusted them to.

You sit at the bar and fill out the required paperwork. The alcohol which is still coursing through your body makes it difficult to think straight, to answer the questions directed at you. It’s too difficult to focus, to not get distracted by the disjointed conversations occurring all around you.

Katherine with a “K”, not a “C”.

Do I really have to stay inside? Can I at least go outside and tell my boyfriend that it’s okay if he wants to leave?

I can’t stop crying, it’s not my fault, I’m trying, I’m trying. I’m sorry.

I didn’t even want to come out tonight, I wish I hadn’t.

You finish the paperwork, but of course you aren’t yet free. All of your friends are though. And they’ve all already left. And why shouldn’t they have? Nothing is still going on, unless you’re one of the unlucky ones to have been caught. As you are. You sit down on the ledge next to the fire place with a sigh.

Everyone who’s still inside is going to have to come to the station.

You sigh again. You don’t even have anyone to be angry with; this is so clearly and indisputably your fault. You allow your hands to be handcuffed behind your back, with your purse awkwardly hanging on your wrist. You look down as you are led to the patrol car. You aren’t drunk enough to escape your own self-consciousness. Because you are self-conscious, as much you pretend that you aren’t. And that applies to everything, not just to this.

You arrive at the station, and your handcuffs are switched to just one hand, and connected to a metal loop on a bench. You pull your knees into your chest, and suddenly you can’t control your laughter.

What’s so funny!?

It’s just, like wow, this doesn’t seem real, you know? Like, I just got arrested, we all just got arrested. Is this even real life?

Believe me, I don’t want to be here anymore than you kids do.

I think I’ll write a story about this.

All of you creative types at this school.

The officer shakes his head and sighs.

I’m really sorry you kids have to go through this.

It’s not like we can really complain, like this is clearly our fault.

The officer begins to call out the names of you and your temporary peers from the stack of confiscated I.D.’s. You hear your name.

That’s me.

Do you have any noticeable scars or tattoos?

I have a treble clef behind my ear, and-

You pause, to breathe, in an attempt to suppress your nearly irrepressible laughter.

-          An inverted cross on my hip.

Really!?

Yep.

You’re the man.

Thanks.

Your small group begins to be split up, as you are all led away at different times to be fingerprinted and have your mug shots taken. You realize with a slight pang that you will never be able to escape this; New York State will always know your face, your fingerprints, and your eighteen-year-old mistakes. You realize that you will never be able to be a teacher, a cop, or a politician, not that that’s something you even ever really wanted. You ask the officer to print your mug shot out for you, because, well, why not? You’re told that they don’t do that, even if you beg. You ask if you can see it anyway. The second officer enters as the screen is turned towards your scrutinizing eye. He laughs and shakes his head.

Teenage girls. You need to make sure you look good?

Well, of course!! And since I can’t have a copy for myself, it’s really the least you can do.

You realize how slightly manic you look, how messy your hair is. It is four in the morning after all, and you haven’t been able to even properly sleep off your drunk. But altogether, it’s not that bad. You’re glad that this is the image the state will have of you, and resolve that you won’t give them the chance to take another. One mug shot is enough.

You are told that taxis have been arranged to take all of you back to campus. You’re handed a green slip of paper, with your court date and all of the appropriate information. You’re told that if you miss court, for any reason, it’s grounds for a warrant to be released for your arrest. You make sure to mentally take note of the date, while also vowing not to lose the slip of paper either. Today, you wish you had kept that vow to yourself. A byproduct of a different eighteen-year-old mistake.

Today is the day for you to look back on your eighteen-year-old mistakes. It’s your last day of a year of fake and feigned adulthood, of failures, of constantly questioning yourself, of falling in and out of lust and what you think could be love, but definitely isn’t, of worrying that you’re making the wrong long-term decisions in the grand scheme of your life, or something.

People always say that nineteen is meaningless, but you’re not sure if you agree. While it’s not as obviously meaningful as eighteen or twenty-one, it is meaningful in its own special way. For one thing, it symbolizes that the messiest year of your life is about to be over, that you survived your first year of fake adulthood without (too many) visible scars. There will only be two more years of this, this feigned and fake adulthood. Maybe more if you go to graduate school. But you don’t think you want to. You’re already sick of fake adulthood, already itching and ready to grow into real adulthood, real responsibility, and all of the realness that will go along with that. You hope it won’t hurt too much. But you know that it will.

John Gardner

     My mother’s first husband – although not exactly – was John Gardner. Yes, that John Gardner. The literary rebel of the late twentieth century, and the author of The Sunlight Dialogues, On Becoming a Novelist, and – the one everyone knows – Grendel. He was not exactly her first husband because he died on Wednesday, September 14, 1982. Their wedding date was September 17, 1982.

     In my ill-advised youth, I often imagined how different my life would have been had I been the daughter of the late, great, John Gardner, romanticizing it and imagining perfection. It probably would have been terrible. He had an artist’s temperament: he was often intoxicated, often unfaithful, and often abusive, both emotionally and physically. My mother had not been happy with him.

     My mother had met him at a conference for aspiring writers when she was a young, naïve thirty-year old woman. As you’ve probably gathered, my mother was drawn to his artistic temperament because it was something which she also cultivated in her own life; although she never met with nearly the level of success which he did. Due to this relationship, my mother has seen both sides of what being a writer is about: the constant struggle towards publication which she experienced, and the constant struggle for acceptance which he faced within the writer’s community after becoming successful. I still remember, and always will, her reaction to my announcement of a comparable path: She shook her head and covered her eyes. I’m still not sure whether she hid laughter or tears.

Ice Cream

When I was much younger, my grandparents lived in the small town of Susquehanna, which was about twenty minutes away from Binghamton, the decaying metropolis where I grew up. It was always a difficult trip to make, because my grandmother had developed dementia when I was a toddler, and she had forgotten my name, my father’s name, and had likely forgotten her own as well. Their house had a very unique sense of having been left behind, somewhere in the past, and it felt like stepping into a different reality every time we visited.

Still, I loved going on these day trips, not least of all because we would always stop at a small, family-run ice cream shop on the way out of town – a thank you to my mother and I for putting up with my father’s difficult family as much as we did.

The ice cream at this shop was mediocre at best, but the good thing about it was that they had straws in the shape of glasses. I’m not sure why, but in my childhood I had a strange fascination with people who wore glasses. I think I was following the old axiom that people who wore glasses were more intelligent, or something along those lines, and I always wanted to seem more intelligent. Due to this, I always ordered some type of unnaturally colored drink which came with transparent, plastic glasses which I could attempt to mold to my face. They never fit, and I always looked extremely silly, but I can’t remember being happier with anything.

By the time I began to get a little older, I would still always beg to stop here whenever we were in Susquehanna, although our visits became much rarer and nearly non-existent after my grandmother’s death and my grandfather’s move out of the area.

The visits were pretty much over by the time I was about seven, so ice cream glasses are always something which I associate with my very early childhood. Although now that I’ve grown up a bit and wear glasses for more legitimate reasons, they’re not as much of a necessity in my search to feel intelligent. I’ve also grown up enough to realize that your intelligence is not necessarily aligned with how weak or strong your eyesight is.

While this memory is directly related to my grandmother’s decline, it also, in an almost poetic way, directly relates to my early growth. When one world ends, another always begins. This is true of societies, lives, even eyesight and the need for glasses – whether they are used to drink milkshakes or used to magnify letters and words.

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If you would listen to me

For just a minute and actually hear

The things I have to say

They’d outnumber your silly little non-problems

Because baby, going grocery shopping

Doesn’t make you an adult

And pretending to read The Bell Jar

Doesn’t make you smart.

Complaining about your family

Doesn’t make you cultured

And drinking till you can’t think

Doesn’t make people care.

Only addressing your problems when you’re shitfaced

Just makes you look pathetic

And listening through the floorboards

Doesn’t make this a relationship

Only getting ten hours a week isn’t the end of the world –

At least you’re not on food stamps.

Attacking people you don’t like

(who don’t even notice or care about you)

With over the top vitriol

Doesn’t make you cooler

And it doesn’t make anyone like you more

Listening to chillwave

Won’t make you popular

And spending all your money on clothes

Doesn’t mean you dress well

 Your undercut doesn’t give you street cred

And neither does your spraypaint

If you have talents,

You’re wasting them

Get out there and

FUCKING care.

On "Being a Feminist" (Sorry if this reads like a rant)

The other day (well not really the other day, but for the sake of the essay I’ll say the other day) a friend of mine asked me if, and if yes why, I consider myself a feminist. I was so caught off guard that I said the first thing that came to mind: “Feminism is the radical notion that women are people”, a phrase pilfered from some bumper sticker somewhere.

I was caught off guard because, in my mind, everyone in the world is, or should be, a feminist. Not all feminists are masculine women who don’t shave their legs, just as not all feminists are feminine women who sleep around. Feminism, in its purist form, is the radical notion that women are people. At the roots of feminism, all we want is for women to receive equal treatment under the law, equal pay for equal work, equal access to medical care, equal respect. “Feminism” didn’t originate as a dirty word, and it’s a shame that it’s been denigrated to this status, in much the same way that “vagina” didn’t originate as a dirty word, although it is apparently considered one in the state of Michigan.

Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of controversy suggesting that giving rights to a disadvantaged group takes away from the rights of the group with the advantage, such as the right of a woman to choose whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term, the right of a couple of the same sex to become married, the right of an unmarried girl or woman to procure birth control, as well as many, many more. To me though, as well as to what appears to be many others, this is completely counter-intuitive. How exactly does my right to live my own life in the manner which I choose – or of anyone else to live their own life in the manner which they choose – in any way affect your right to live your life in the manner which you choose? Rights are rights because they’re natural, they shouldn’t need to be decided upon by the government.

How to Make Curry

Start off by reminiscing for a life you’ve never lived, remember what it was like to be a small brown child sitting at the feet of your newly immigrated mother in the sweltering kitchen of a tiny apartment in Manhattan, smelling the pungent garlic and cumin permeating the air. Be transported back to this world as you begin to chop garlic and find the jar of curry powder and plastic bottle of cumin in your cupboard. Fill a pan with canola oil (since, at age 19, you’re too broke or cheap to be able to afford olive oil) and toss the freshly chopped garlic into the pan. Realize that you can’t find a clean wooden spoon and begin to toss the pan in a gyrating motion to stir the garlic as you simultaneously scan the kitchen for a spoon or spatula. Find a spatula. Shake the plastic cumin container over the garlic until it is covered to your satisfaction, and listen to the dried cumin sizzling in the pan, the garlic close to burning. Fill a spoon (or two) with curry powder, and add that to the garlic, watching the concoction turn from brown to yellow, from the turmeric which must be a component of the jarred powder.

Remember again the life you didn’t live, remember your mother in her thick Mumbai accent, explaining that while the turmeric doesn’t do too much for the flavor, it certainly adds the character of color to your curry. Remember being a small brown child, licking your finger and sticking it into the turmeric when her back was turned, watching your brown skin turn to yellow before sucking the strange-tasting spice off of your finger. Remember your mother catching you, and instead of reprimanding you, sticking a spoon into the garlic and spices in the pan and handing it to you to taste, telling you that the sum was much tastier than any of the individual parts, that that was what made this a curry, and that was what made you a person, and your family a family, and America America and so on.

Realize that in your distraction of getting caught up in false memories you forgot to cut up the tomatoes you plan to use or open the can of chick peas which is to be the major component of your dish. Turn the heat off and forget to move the pan, hope that the heat which remains won’t burn the garlic. Begin to cut up the tomatoes, remember the life you truly lived, when you grew tomatoes and egg plants and potatoes in the small garden behind your giant house. Remember being barefoot and pudgy and small and happy, pressing the dirt down between your toes and screaming when you stepped on and broke a snail, because you could feel the crunch of the shell as it broke. Remember sitting in the kitchen at the feet of your real mother, an older ex-hippie with graying hair past her shoulders as she explained to you how to season and how to mix spices to create a whole new thing out of smaller things. Remember her explaining this to you as a beautiful metaphor on life. Subconsciously wash the top of the can of chick peas before opening it, remembering your mother’s warning from another time about the rats that live in factories and dirty the tops of cans.

Pour the tomatoes and chick peas into the pan, watch the oil slowly turn to liquid as the fresh tomatoes cook down, wonder why anyone ever eats stewed tomatoes, this is just so beautiful and real. Taste a bit of the liquid, remember being the brown child, the white child, the everything anything whatever you want child, tasting the beginnings of a dish you were learning how to make for the first time, the second time, any time. Realize that every time you make any dish it’s still the first time you’ve made it. Add more curry powder, wish that you had cayenne, this will be bland.

Remember even though you don’t being a baby, a fetus even, imbibing the incredibly spicy foods your mother ate. Remember your strength and ability to consume garlic and spice and even ghost chilis, inherited from your mother. Hope that you also inherited her strength and ability to consume heartbreak and pain and to come out even more beautiful and creative and inspiring and inspired. Hope that the tiny brown child you never were and will never meet has the same strength. Hope that every tiny child can learn this from their mother, their father, whoever. Hope that you’ll develop this strength soon, worry that you won’t, pray that you have it already without realizing.