A Certain Age

She decided to write a story. It would cure her, she thought, or if not that, at least it would be a real thing to produce and leave as a legacy. She could try to have a child, she supposed, but you really can’t control what they turn out to be. At least, with a story, she had control over its contents even if she couldn’t control its ultimate influence on every reader. And in that way, it served her purpose.

The thing about deciding to really write is that you either tell everyone about it or you don’t tell a soul. If you do tell people, they might harangue you for updates and will almost certainly think you’re pretentious. If you don’t, they may wonder how you’re using your time.

(the actual beauty of the thing is that one shouldn’t care)

(does the writing of a story transform a person like the having of a child might anyway?)

She had always been obsessed with reading. She collected information, she reveled in language, she was deeply curious, and she studied humanity. She was literally a humanities student at university.

She had a beautiful rattan chair she sat on as she drank her multiple cups of Darjeeling to prepare to write. It had an old fashioned feel, which she loved because it reminded her of older homes in India, or Thailand, or Vietnam. Ideally, you’d have a lazily rotating ceiling fan or the smell of frangipani from a neatly placed courtyard waft in, but the mild whiff of Dettol from the floor cleaner and the lingering fragrance of her tuberose-based Diptique was what existed. Mind you, the Diptique was called Do Son, and inspired by Vietnam, which in turn inspired her to buy it.

(Nice, mixing the prosaic Dettol with the poetic perfume)

It wasn’t even the most comfortable chair in the house, but if you haven’t put a finger on it already, she allowed for atmosphere over comfort at times. She had decided she would write while seated in this chair, though that was the limit. She wouldn’t have a writing uniform like a certain elucubrating Jo March.

So many of her ideas were obviously tied to her own life that Barthes would do cartwheels in his grave. She had developed a dread of people becoming very angry, or worse still, passive aggressive and suspicious, if they discovered she had based a character or even a tiny trait on them. You need to know that as with any woman of any fight and substance, she did have enemies. Confrontation became tedious over the past few years. She thought herself a warrior who had left it all out on the field and was now better off on the sidelines.

(yet she repeated Audre Lorde’s words to herself so often. If I didn’t define myself for myself…revolution is not a one-time event...)

It was a certain age, she started, four hours and six months after this decision. So much hemming, ever so much hawing. Honestly, she had now run out of excuses to dither. Other writers will understand, she knew.

It was a certain age, and women were beginning to glow.

(she was rather proud of this first sentence - first sentences are so important. Best of times, worst of times, clocks striking thirteen, Mrs. Dalloway, Meursault with his dead maman, and of course the wonderfully apt ‘all this happened more or less’)

It was a certain age, and women were beginning to glow. Glow was a good word because you could be flashing, or blazing, or softly gleaming, or loud, or quiet, or crackling, or hissing, or attractive, or frightening, or radiating, or igniting, or smoldering, or combusting, but you were steady, and there was heat and life.

She would pick four characters, she decided.

It occurred to her that her mother had always wanted her to write. The funny thing is this wasn’t going to be the sort of story her mother would like.

(daughters often disappoint)

Back to it. The characters are Molly, Kala, Rosa, and Gitanjali.

Let’s start with Molly. Molly has a child, whom she loves deeply, as do all mothers.

(do they? the world sure wants to hammer that one in. You’re glowing my dear!)

No, he was a little joy ever so often, and had just the right mix of features that might end up looking handsome when he was older, and he was already drawn to flowers and crayons instead of screens, so all in all, Molly did feel happy about deciding she wouldn’t abort. She was a different person after the birth, but didn’t the idea of aging gracefully involve transformation?

(she recalls Rebecca Solnit describing something as an anguished butterfly, transforming. How do you do all that and be graceful?)

(if she misquoted someone here and there, or sounded esoteric, she wasn’t going to care)

One of the characters should probably be obsessed with a particular artist, she thought. Let’s say, Baldessari, yes, that would make it intriguing. Prominent, but still odd enough, and relatively recently mort and maybe in public memory. Hopper might have been perfect, but he was oft-used, so she wouldn’t, even though that would have been a nice little nod to the solitude seeking aspect of a character.

(oh dear, was it pretentious to fling in some French where it wasn’t absolument necessaire? How could it be pretentious if it came naturally? It’s so hard to care about things like this all the fucking time)

So, Molly. Baldessari-obsessed Molly would discover that she could glow. Softly at first, but menacingly too, blindingly; you couldn’t see her face, like in a Baldessari piece. What makes Molly do it though?

Molly had been having panic attacks in supermarkets for about four years now. It took her hours to buy basic items because she could not bring herself to buy plastic packaged things.

(seriously though, it limits a regular consumer in any regular place if you put that principle in place)

This time, a man in the deli had wrapped her container in cling wrap film. She had written three reminders to herself to pack the reusable container even though it made her bag bulky, imagining some sea creature somewhere would live because of this. She knew the burden should be on polluting companies and government regulators - mostly in countries with white people in them. She had stopped flying so much, and started composting, but no amount of browning banana peels would take her individual guilt away. The glow helped.

Next up, Kala, who like her name, was artsy and skilled. It’s not “Kay-lah,” it’s Kala, oh no, people would have to look it up. She loved the ceramics of De Waal, bought fabrics wherever she went, and had them made up into gaudy, fun smocks for herself.

(would someone who wore fun smocks like the restrained ceramics of De Waal? These and other discords)

Kala read one hundred and twenty books that past year and was most awfully erudite. She didn’t want children for a host of reasons, not that the decision hadn’t plagued her for every day of her life since the age of 27. Most thoughtfully and analytically, and with feeling and careful parsing, she had decided it was not something she would do.

(likely more consideration than was ever put to having a child, she thought, with a detached frustration as she typed this sentence out)

The world wouldn’t let up. Strangers asked her about her reproductive plans - shock, horror, and dismay on their faces when she would bluntly say it was her choice not to have any children. People sometimes assumed she hated children or that she was too full of it. Didn’t she crave the joy of children, the joyless wretch that she obviously was without them?

(don’t you love those sad attempts to bring people down or defend one way of life? There’s some delight in seeing how transparent they are)

It’s not for me, said Kala, this life where I am stepped on. Where people make me feel small and presume, and assume, and insult. And then one day as she was doing her daily yoga (it’s like medicine, they say!), she felt it. The glow.

Rosa, dear Rosa. Her parents named her after the famous one on a bus, but there is so much more to Rosa Parks than a bus. This Rosa was incendiary too. She would bear no insult, no aggression, just like her namesake. Okay, well, also literally.

Rosa had tumbled into a career hiring people for supposedly brilliant companies. The best and the brightest, the dewiest, the glowiest! She knew much about human nature as a result. Left alone to do it right, she would have wanted to change the nature of work itself. There was no point in that sort of career unless you try to dismantle discrimination and make people’s lives better. One day, she found out she had been discriminated against too. She roiled in flames of fury and indignation, at first metaphorically, and then quite realistically. Her bedsheets were charred when she woke up one morning - the glow in her was strong.

Should she add more details, like the music Rosa listened to or what she wore? People love knowing what women wear, don’t they? Too much would spoil the effect. If there was an effect!

Gitanjali is next. It was a collection of poems written by Rabindranath Tagore, so did that mean this character is Bengali, or at the least, Indian? No, it doesn’t have to.

Her hormones always caused so many issues. It was a travesty that there was not enough attention to female medical needs. Never enough research, Gitanjali thought, as she looked at herself in the mirror despondently. But that wasn’t reason enough unto itself to kindle the glow. It was more that her third start-up failed to raise any money. It had nothing to do with her business plan, her ability, or the product in development, but everything to do with the bunch of white men in the room who decided whom to give money to.

She tired of this story arc, all the story arcs really, because they were all the same person and all the same thing and all the same shit and just a circle of never-ending dullness and subjugation to remember. It was all getting rather too despairing but thankfully she had started re-reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark recently. So, from the edges, came Gitanjali’s glow, lighting her up like a beacon, she wrote.

She wanted this to be published because it felt urgent, so she checked it for typos like the careful woman she was and sat back to see what would happen in this, a certain age. Not every story has to be too tidy, so there didn’t need to be anything else neatly tied to the rattan chair. What had tidiness ever gotten women like her but more errands to run and lesser paid jobs?

(dare she follow up? was it enough? what exactly did the glow bring to the women beyond a bit of sustenance? could she add one more character who was perhaps severely distraught by the coronavirus, or another who worked three jobs and couldn’t pay the bills, or another who dealt with racial abuse all the time, or another who kept getting called by her husband’s last name though she never changed hers? could she embellish further with pretty sounding stuff like the museum details or the Diptique bit earlier? nobody would publish this. It was all too female, and hesitant. All these parentheses would be judged harshly and maybe that harshness would be warranted. impostor syndrome in women is real.)

She closed her laptop, white harsh light sinking into the darkness of the room as the screen closed in on her words. And then, she realized, there was a glow in the room.