Speaking to Men at Parties

“The thing you love most when you are thirteen is the thing you love forever,” Adi says. He has his leg crossed over his lap, hand on his knee in a scholarly position.

“You’re bound to it,” I add, leaning forward. “You can’t put it down.” I am drunk and twenty years old and my voice aches—I have been shouting for most of the night, but the music isn’t really that loud. I tilt my body toward the group to understand them, a hand around my ear in what feels like a theatrical gesture. The boy Adi and I are chatting with is soft-spoken mumbling-drunk, with dark eyes that scrunch up beautifully when he smiles. “Say again?” I repeat over and over. He stands up to grab a beer off the table between us, jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and Adi and I look at each other with our eyebrows raised. I giggle and he glares back—we are always passing sly glances back and forth like handwritten notes between school desks.

The boy’s name is Alan and he is disarmingly handsome, the kind of man I would have avoided in high school out of shame and fear. I am fascinated by beautiful men, their ease of movement, the carelessness of their limbs. I watch them and think of Margaret Atwood: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss…My love for them is visual: that is the part I would like to possess.” A desire that stems from a sense of possession; I would like to inhabit them, to take up space and know that everyone around me feels grateful. To be a beautiful white man and never know fear—how simple and glorious.

 

There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death. In another world, I fall in love with this boy who shares my taste in music and laughs generously at my less-than-clever drunken commentary. In another world, things are easier. In this world, we dance and sing Talking Heads to each other across the kitchen as we spin in circles: I guess that this must be the place. In another world, I do not go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, watching my reflection careen across the glass. In another world, I do not make myself sick with want and worry at every turn.

Alan sits back down beside Adi and we talk about California. Whenever I meet someone who’s left California for New York, they can never shut up about being from California and how much they miss it, as if they hadn’t chosen to leave. Alan tells us that in California he met Paul McCartney once, and I clutch my hand to my collarbone in a mockery of a swoon because that is what I loved when I was thirteen, what I am bound to forever, the thing I cannot put down. There will always be a part of me that starts at the mention of The Beatles, that blip of recognition when you come across your own name in an unexpected place.

“I know this sounds corny,” he says, “but I swear to God he just made the whole room brighter.”

The enthusiasm in Alan’s voice strikes me. He tells me he saw Arctic Monkeys seven times in one year because he was in love with Alex Turner and again I am envious of him, this time because I never allowed myself to notice any women as a teenager. I instead fixated on male celebrities and characters, as if I could convince myself that I loved them the way I was supposed to love them. I want to know, suddenly, if he went to those concerts because he knew he wanted to see the lead singer, or if he had convinced himself it was because he just really liked their music. But I do not ask. Instead I stare at the mole on his right hip, made visible by his low-slung trousers. The mole is largish, about the size of a dime, and raised slightly. I try to imagine myself putting my mouth on it, on this bit of flesh which has so captured my attention, and am immediately repulsed.

This is where it always stops, the insurmountable stutter of my fantasies. This is the part I find difficult to explain even to myself, the way I can simultaneously want and so clearly not want. I picture the thoughts in my mind as a strip of film: reversed, softened, made grand by my drunkenness, mimicking how things are always beautiful onscreen. I can desire this boy as if from afar rather than with the blistering intensity I feel when a girl sits too close to me on a stranger’s bed at another party as she speaks to someone else, the air soft with smoke, my insides folding in on themselves. The universe is reduced to the point at which our hips are touching and I cringe at the clichés this meaningless contact inspires in me.

I think about Paul McCartney, his boyish features still apparent in old age: wide, down-turned eyes and full cheeks and always that charming smile. My favorite Beatle fluctuated between him and George, whose quiet demeanor intrigued me; I have always been inclined toward the fantasy of quiet men. I would watch videos of early performances for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from George’s legs, how dreadfully slender they were in his dark slacks as he stood off to the side of the stage. Ringo was about as attractive to me as a post (though darling) and John looked far too much like my father, so my desire, or what I thought was desire, had to be cast onto Paul and George. This was how I amused myself throughout most of my early adolescence: poring over photographs and watching footage from decades earlier of a half-dead, long-fractured band. Maybe The Beatles were easy to love because the group had already run its course—I could discover new information but nothing new would actually happen, and there was a comfort in this impassable distance. I cannot say that if, in another world, I would have been reduced to tears like all the girls in A Hard Day’s Night, wordlessly mouthing George-George-George as the crowd around me fell into hysterics, or if the illusion would have been ruined by seeing them in the flesh.

I think about the sightless stare of a Roman bust in a museum, terrifying and opalescent, made lovelier by the fact that I cannot touch it. In another world, I step past the line on the floor of the gallery and run my fingertips over the marble despite the docent’s protests. In another world, I tell Alan the truth: I will never be happy with what I have or what I am.

Says Alan of Alex Turner: “I don’t think I even realized who he was, the first time—he walked right past me, in those fucking Chelsea boots, and I was just so turned on,” and I laugh because it’s always those fucking Chelsea boots. The Beatles wore them, too.

I tell Alan that I’ve been in the same room as David Byrne, white-haired and gracious, those darkly intense eyes gentle with crow’s feet and laugh lines, and Alan concedes that this is indeed “very, very cool.” In high school, I would have recorded such a statement from a hot boy in my journal. Now it just seems obvious. It was a screening of a documentary about competitive color guard that David Byrne had produced, with a Q&A afterwards. My friend was a huge fan of Talking Heads and I came along because I was a huge fan of her; I barely paid attention to the the Q’s that David A’ed because I was swept up in the thrill of watching someone I love watch something she loves. Her sardonic voice was made sweet as she described her enjoyment of the evening, tucking herself into a red raincoat ill-suited to the frigid March weather. Now whenever I listen to Talking Heads’ bizarre, frenetic music, I think of her with a twinge in my chest not unlike heartburn. People sometimes ask me about her, mention her to me in passing: didn’t you know—? weren’t you—? I smile, tight-lipped, and nod. In another world, I tell Alan that I buy the shampoo she used because I miss the smell of her dark hair as it wafted toward me, head on my shoulder.

“Stop, don’t talk about it,” I say to Adi when he mentions her. “If I talk about it, I’ll cry.” I’ve been saying this for the past few months, begging friends to help me maintain the illusion that I wasn’t deeply hurt by her decision to return to Texas. The less we say about it the better.

We talk about how it would be nice to leave New York, but none of us stay away for very long. We all have our reasons. Mine is a sense of obligation to my younger self, the anxious, dirty-haired creature who collected postcards from Manhattan and watched The Beatles with a thumb-sucking compulsion and dreamt of someday ending up in a different body in a different place. She needs me to remain in this city, for at least a little longer, regardless of the people who come and go and the women I watch and want and the men I may or may not speak to at parties.

Most people have left the party by the time Adi and I declare mutiny and claim the aux cord for ourselves. Alan stretches as he makes room for me on the couch. His grey sweatshirt again rides up across his belly and I think about Saint Sebastian: his long, muscled torso, the agony and eroticism of his death as it is depicted in art. How I should like to be an arrow and glance off the flesh of some beautiful thing before falling, unbroken, to the ground. I think about Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of Saint Sebastienne as a martyred pregnant woman, the same sketch repeated over and over in a monotonous procession of bodies, smudged and headless: the grotesquerie of gestation. How awful is the practice of becoming alive.

Weeks later in Boston, my friend Laura and I discuss the dreams we’ve been having since we were little girls, nightmares in which we are pregnant despite never having had sex and everyone tells us we should be grateful to be so immaculate. But Laura is Jewish and I was never baptized and neither of us believe in anything beyond the miracle of blood and tubing that is the body itself. The nightmares persist as a reminder of what that body may be capable of, both within and without ourselves.

Hours past midnight, Adi and I walk to my apartment from the party. “Do you wish you were straight?” I ask him. He shrugs. I say, “I do, sometimes. I think it would be easier. Don’t you think it would be easier?” I hope he knows I mean easier just in the simple act of existence: would it be easier to be alive? Would I hate myself for something else if not this?

Adi doesn’t answer, but his gaze is warm behind his glasses, his jaw set in the near-pout he wears when he considers something seriously. He is a dear friend, one of the first I made at college, and one of the first people I heard utter the word “lesbian” with a gravity that implied strength and meaning rather than disdain. I lean into his shoulder and we stand like that, quiet, until Adi’s Lyft arrives.

A month and some weeks later, I stand in the living room of another apartment, once again speaking loudly over the music to an acquaintance. The theme of the party is blue, as in Maggie Nelson’s seventh book, as in Derek Jarman’s final film, as in Nina Simone’s debut album Hey, blue, there is a song for you. My acquaintance’s eyelids are a bright teal, in lovely contrast to her copper hair that falls into her face as she leans in to hear me. I feel a touch at the back of my neck and I turn around and it is Alan once again, tucking the tag back into the collar of my shirt. This is an urge I have to resist when I glimpse a misplaced tag or loose thread on a passing stranger, the same compulsion that makes me check the locks on the front door nightly before bed, a desire for security through control. Alan has not shied away from this impulse to put things in their proper place. His face, cast in cobalt, grins back at me when I turn.

 

Already I can feel the sense of infatuation ebbing away as I greet him, repeat my name, raise my arms around him in a clumsy approximation of an embrace. Names are important, and it bothers me on a primal level when people forget them. Alan is still handsome with his watery-drunk smile and half-lidded eyes. The man asleep, like the man in quietude, was another adolescent fixation of mine: a feral animal tranquilized to be observed more safely.

The apartment is so small and so full of bodies that we can hardly do more than shuffle in time with the music. While waiting for the bathroom, I get into an argument with a man about Kate Bush, and how would he understand the anguish conveyed in her warbling falsetto, anyway? I don’t know what’s good for me I don’t know what’s good for me.

 

I spend the next two years moving farther away from my body. I try to date casually and discover that I am perhaps incurably afraid of intimacy. I become catatonic in the presence of my own desire, though I spend a summer trying to convince myself that it’s the heat and humidity rather than the rush of blood in my ears that makes me nauseous every time someone tries to touch me. I sit across from a man on the subway and stare at the soft curve of his jaw as he tilts his chin downward; his dark eyes rove across the pages of a book whose title I can’t quite make out. In another world, it is the 1950s in the United States of America and I am engaged to this beautiful man whom I will never love and this is better, somehow. It’s a mid-century sitcom marriage where we sleep in separate beds and only ever kiss on the cheek. I am miserable, but it’s better than being miserable in reality because in this dream I have what feels like a justifiable reason to be miserable. My life is unfulfilled, uninspired. I see East of Eden at the cinema and masturbate to the thought of James Dean the same way I did as a teenager, silently rocking back and forth in a chair, disgusted by the idea of actually touching myself. In this world I never figure out that I’m a lesbian because I could barely figure that out in 2016 with contemporary resources. It’s easier anyway, following an assigned path, filling a prescription month after month at the pharmacy—doctor’s orders. In another world, my sadness has sharp contours, clear edges that I can press into my skin. It is not amorphous and it does not expand to fit every space I inhabit.

I try to describe some of this world to Laura in a taxi, drunk and newly twenty-two on the hottest night of last summer. “Do you ever wish that’s how it was?” Laura tells me she doesn’t—she’s tired, and she turns away from me to look out the window as we arrive at my apartment. “It’s almost light out,” I say to change the subject, waving a hand in the direction of the sky.

I am glad that I didn’t tell her the extent of my dreams, the tragic details that lull me to sleep. It is so perversely appealing to me, this fantasy of a loveless, sexless, meaningless existence in which I am freed from any expectations of self-possession or choice. In another world, no one asks me what I want to do with my life because they do not assume that I will ever do anything. I know this way of thinking is self-indulgent and wildly privileged, and that Laura’s reaction to my modest proposal was appropriate: a snort that went from surprised to scornful, a firm “No.” And yet I greet sleep that morning with dreams of pin curls and bathroom tiles scrubbed clean and never being touched by my beautiful imaginary husband, asleep beside me in his bed across the room.

 

Adi and I watch A Hard Day’s Night and he touches my arm when he notices I’m crying and we can pretend, briefly, that we knew each other when we were thirteen. Laura tells me that she is a lesbian, too, and this more than anything makes me feel like I may someday be able to overcome my shame because Laura is someone who did know me when we were thirteen. Through my love for her I may be able to forgive myself the trespass of being who I am. She tells me she sometimes still dreams of having children, but since realizing she is a lesbian she is no longer so afraid of the possibility.

I see David Byrne again and this time he sings. I wonder what it’s like for him to play those songs from another time when his band all lived together in the same room, cutting each other’s hair, muddling through waves new and old only to end up estranged forty years later—no talking, just head. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dogged by other people’s hopes of a reunion from the day The Beatles broke up until that night at the Dakota, and I wonder if it bothered them to know that the best thing they ever did was be part of something beyond themselves. In another world, rooftops are only for concerts, never for leaping. In another world, I am not afraid of heights or the way my body moves through time and space, toward the ground or toward another body.

 

 

 

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Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

The reader approaching middle age

I’m turning 40 in a few months and trying not to think too much of it, but I am getting my bearings a bit.

Yesterday Elisa Gabbert tweeted, “I think I liked magazines more as a kid because the writing was by people older and wiser than me, with different generational interests. Now it’s just, like, writing by my friends, or people who could be? I’m supposed to pay for this? Lol”

I had a good laugh at this. It made me think that a good move at this age might be to start reading the NYTimes for Kids (which I already do) or Teen Vogue or AARP.

This would be the publication equivalent to Kevin Kelly’s advice, “When you are young, have friends who are older; when you are old, have friends who are younger.”

I do feel kind of lucky right now, to be in the middle: I have my kids and their friends for youth spies and for an elder perspective, I ride bikes twice a week with a 75-year-old who is still mad that Dylan went electric.

Everything changes, always, but I’m enjoying this age at the moment.

Inuk artist Elisapie puts a beautiful spin on Blondie's 'Heart of Glass'

Some people cover songs, but Inuk singer Elisapie definitely made this one her own. Enjoy her soulful Inuktitut take on Blondie's "Heart of Glass," "Uummati Attanarsimat." (Nag on the Lake)

She writes:

This song, everytime I hear it, takes me straight back to being 5/6 yrs old.

— Read the rest

Rumpus Original Fiction: The Litany of Invisible Things

Sleepless, you have started thinking of the little shop at the end of Dhamijah Street. For five hundred dollars, its slender wall-propped mirror reveals—what do they say the wizened shop owner calls it?—your “onye ndu.” The being (or beings) with whom you are guaranteed a lifetime of happiness. You have started thinking of this little shop even though you and your husband of eight years promised never to enter it: You do not need magic to understand what your hearts already reveal.

 

 

Sleepless, you think, too, of Ebenezer, who (until last year) lived in the adjacent apartment. He played full-volume porn at 2 a.m. and never picked up after his teeth-flashing pitbull, dried clumps of feces lining the path from his front door to the building elevator. One evening, long before his departure, Ebenezer returned from the wine bar down the block, staggering as usual, his words slurred but oddly gleeful. With some effort, you discerned the jubilance of his syllables: “She exists! She exists!” You knew then that he had made a pit stop enroute home. Strange to think, even now, that he had glimpsed another’s face in the shop’s burnished silver. A soul that was his. It should have proven the mirror’s fraudulence, but no, barely a year afterward, Ebenezer’s finger sported a glittering oversized diamond. You and your husband were soon kept awake, not by sultry post-midnight moans, but by the patter of tiny feet, the sound of shattering ceramic, his cursing, his wife’s too, but that light and playful sort of cursing, the kind that says, “My darlings, you can break every mirror, steal the coins from our wallets, even set us ablaze, and we would still love you forever.” When they moved away last year, the duo and their dog and their three rugrats, a silence took over their late-night reverberations. It is this silence that keeps you up and turns your thoughts toward that little shop at the end of Dhamijah Street, even as your husband snores beside you.

You have always overwritten the moonlight’s quiet with a hierarchy of forthcoming melodies: first the wailing, day and night, of your flesh-and-blood, yours, yours, then the twisting of gums to sound out Mama–Mama before Dada being non-negotiable—then their slow and measured reading from large-font picture books, the world discovered in nouns: rainbow, fish, sun, sky, love. The sound of love discovered in you: the stifling of tears after a bad day at school, your fingers wiping salt off their cheeks; the laughter following a sixth-grade Spelling Bee contest, not because they won, but because they did it at all, braved a march onto that podium, faced those strangers with a tall back and said, Throw your fiercest words at me; the patter-patter-patter of their aching heart thanks to that boy in eighth-grade Geometry, and the flutter in yours when you watched your husband hold them close, watched him whisper, “Let the patter lead you to love. ‘I like you’ is only three words and three seconds. It’s how your mother became mine.”

 

 

The sound of love: you and him. Once upon a time.

The sound of life: the silence at the doctor’s office after “male infertility.” That night, instead of drowning his sorrows in your ears—like you two had promised you always would—he chose a bar—Ebenezer’s, funnily enough—and a bottle without end. He passed out in one of those alleyways that makes you think of bat-wielding strangers and lit cigarettes and evil intentions. Gargled on his own vomit, and who knows where he would be now but for that Good Samaritan, some passing nervous teen on a bike who called 911 even though it was past her curfew, and she surely got in trouble, like you imagined your own angel would someday, imagined your letting them know that you were disappointed but also so very proud, and even if they hugged you all quivering or stormed up the stairs and violently slammed their door, the loudness of their existence was all you would ever need.

After the hospital discharge, he apologized.

“Don’t,” you said.

He apologizes still.

Daily.

You know he means it. You hear it in the hiss of the oil when you return from work, the scent of your favorite chicken curry welcoming you. You hear it in his clatter of fork against plate—timid, slow-moving—as he asks about your day, seeking even the littlest moment of yours that he can make his. You hear it in the rustling sheets when the lights dim, and he snuggles his back against your chest because he likes when you hold him, your dear husband, likes how your arms tangle around his midriff until the snores start. But then it’s 2 a.m. and he is gone; you are not. There is laughter in your head, a chorus. After all this time, you can’t tell if it belongs to Ebenezer’s rugrats or to yours, the ones that don’t exist, except up here in your head—and perhaps in that mirror that you can’t stop thinking of. In that mirror, do their faces show? You know so little about how it works. Maybe they even speak.

So, the next day, while your dear husband is at work, you call in sick and make your way to the little shop at the end of Dhamijah Street. You wait sweltering in line for hours, ignoring the patrolling hawkers selling strawberry yogurts, paperbacks, umbrellas, love trinkets. Once inside, you push the creased notes into the shop owner’s liver-spotted hands. You let her position you this way and that until you’re standing at the perfect angle. You expect to see yourself staring back—and maybe there would even be immeasurable relief in that; maybe the mirror is just a mirror, no answers to be found—but the glass is already steaming, distorting. From its mist, a blurred shape forms. It is not them. It is your husband, unspeaking, his pixelated smile uncertain. Is there any surprise? The universe crafted him for you. The universe knows that he can be enough. Still. Listen to your heart, how it sinks at this revelation.

When you return home, the door is unlocked. He is clad in his sea-green apron, sprinkling diced peppers onto a pan of fried eggs. He kisses you on the forehead. Enquires about your day despite a knowing in his eyes. Trembling, you fall into him, your face against the jalapeno fragrance of his chest, and you tell him that you want a divorce.

 

 

***
Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

“Targeted for retribution”: Trump’s brag badly backfires as judge orders him to sit for deposition

Federal judge rules that ex-FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page can depose Trump and FBI Director Chris Wray

Trump’s Killing Spree: The Inside Story of His Race to Execute Every Prisoner He Could

In the final six months of the Trump presidency, the federal government executed 13 people. In January 2021, the same month he incited an insurrection at the Capitol, Trump oversaw three executions in just four days. There’s really no other way to put it: Trump was eager for the state to kill people on his watch. Two Rolling Stone reporters detail the unprecedented stretch of executions:

It was Sessions’ successor, Barr, who took the concrete step in July 2019 of ordering the Federal Bureau of Prisons to resume executions. 

Barr wrote proudly of the decision in his book One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, published about a year after the Trump presidency ended, devoting a whole chapter — “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” — to the blitz of federal executions. Not a shocking move from a man who, while George H.W. Bush’s attorney general in the early 1990s, praised the death penalty in a series of official recommendations, claiming that it works as a deterrent, “permanently incapacitate[s] extremely violent offenders,” and “serves the important societal goal of just retribution.” (Without a hint of irony, he added, “It reaffirms society’s moral outrage at the wanton destruction of innocent human life.”)

Trump, of course, was not so keen to engage with the subject intellectually. The sum total of his discussions of the death penalty with his top law-enforcement officer, Barr says, was a single, offhand conversation. After an unrelated White House meeting, Barr was preparing to leave the Oval Office when, he says, he gave Trump a “heads-up” that “we would be resuming the death penalty.” Trump — apparently unaware of his own AG’s longstanding philosophy on capital punishment — asked Barr if he personally supported the death penalty and why.

Trump’s lack of interest in the details had grave repercussions for the people whose fates were in his hands. According to multiple sources inside the administration, Trump completely disregarded the advice of the Office of the Pardon Attorney, an administrative body designed to administer impartial pleas for clemency in death-penalty cases and other, lower-level offenses. And Barr says he does not recall discussing any of the 13 inmates who were eventually killed with the president who sent them to the death chamber. 

That means Trump never talked with Barr about Lisa Montgomery, a deeply mentally ill and traumatized person who became the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953. Or Wesley Ira Purkey, whose execution was delayed a day by a judge who ruled that his advancing Alzheimer’s disease had left Purkey unaware of why he was being executed. (The Supreme Court reversed that ruling the next day.) Or Daniel Lewis Lee, Dustin Lee Honken, Lezmond Charles Mitchell, Keith Dwayne Nelson, William Emmett LeCroy Jr., Christopher Andre Vialva, Orlando Cordia Hall, Alfred Bourgeois, Corey Johnson, and Dustin John Higgs.

And it means Trump never spoke with Barr about Brandon Bernard.

“Ray’s Hand” Illuminates Half of the Iconic Eames Partnership

If you’re a fan of Design Milk, you likely love the Eameses as much as we do or you’ve at the least heard of their brand. It’s nearly impossible to be part of the world of modern design and not know of the prolific husband and wife team – Charles and Ray – responsible for co-founding the Eames Office. As creators of so many iconic designs, they and their influence have been celebrated for decades.

Now, The Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity has launched an exhibit – Ray’s Hand – that focuses solely on Ray, her talents, and the gender roles she worked against that were typical of the era. The exhibit opened on December 15, 2022 to mark what would have been her 110th birthday. Luckily for all of us, it’s free for everyone to explore and enjoy online.

Pulling from the Eame’s Institute’s collection – full of many things, including some that haven’t been seen since the Eames Office closed in 1988 – the exhibition highlights artifacts such as sketches, scraps, and tools that were integral parts of Ray’s creative process. Each item illustrates Ray’s contributions and talents, which can sometimes be seen as obscured. Meanwhile, Charles knew better, often saying “Anything I can do, she [Ray] can do better.” And he meant it. Ray’s Hand helps to shed light on the roadblocks she encountered, some of which women are still railing against today. A few of her many notable contributions to the Eameses’ iconic design portfolio include the House of Cards collection, the Time Life Stool, and the Sea Things Tray.

We had the opportunity to speak with Ray and Charles’ granddaughter, Llisa Demetrios, who is also the Chief Curator of the Eame’s Institute. She recalled, “When I would visit their office and see Ray and Charles working on projects at the office, there was always mutual respect. There is a quote by former Eames Office staffer Jeannine Oppewall in Pat Kirkham’s
book Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century that reads “…(the) method of working within relatively modest limits comes from the Eameses’ philosophy of ‘choose your corner, pick away at it carefully, intensely, and to the best of your ability and that way you might change the world.”

Initially known for her work as a painter, Ray transformed her palette into the Eames’ world of furniture, graphics, film, showrooms, exhibitions, and architecture. “I think this (transformation) is shown in how their designs always evolved from their original hands on learning. The artifacts in this current online exhibit demonstrate Ray’s exploration of solving problems and iterating on the solutions… As they collaborated, they grounded and supported each other’s creative process. I felt when I saw them working on a project at the office that each had 51% of the say in the final vote,” Llisa said insightfully.

Behind the scenes, Ray was also a set decorator, stylist, colorist, material consultant, and host – all roles that were downplayed and misunderstood at the time as small roles given to women. When in fact, Ray was a trailblazer who deserves her share of the spotlight for doing things that are now each their own individual industries.

We couldn’t help but be curious as to whether Ray had a favorite piece, category, or project. Llisa said that there was no favorite as far as she was aware, but that “… in an oral history that our friends at Herman Miller recently shared with us, she talks about her fondness for the plywood screen and for the wire chair with the two-piece “bikini” pad. Her focus was always about identifying, extrapolating, and creating for the need of each situation, in both her personal life and professional life – from a bouquet for a photograph to an exhibit graphic to a toy to a picnic to a furniture prototype.” Life was art and art was life in Ray’s eyes, and that comes through in her design work.

“When I think of Ray, I always think of her hands in motion as she was creating something – writing a note, cutting a shape out in paper with scissors, looking through a magnifying glass, arranging a bouquet, photographing a leaf on the ground, looking up something in a book, arranging seashells on a shelf, or winding up a tin toy. She always took delight and pleasure in nature – which is evident in the way they cultivated an indoor-outdoor lifestyle at their house,” Llisa said of fwhat kept Ray’s interests piqued and her mind full of inspiration. “You see it in her photographs of things like eucalyptus leaves dropped on the pathway, or geraniums in pots lined up outside, or kelp and seaweed washed up on the beach. And I think of her smile when she looked at something that was well-crafted by human hands – like a bundt cake dusted with powdered sugar or a bowl of fresh strawberries or a beautiful bouquet of roses.”

Not even Llisa realized what a design force her grandmother was until one time in college when she took the train into New York City to see Ray give a talk to an auditorium of college students. “I remember how her voice commanded the room. Everyone was listening to her every word. After the talk, we were supposed to go out to dinner – but before we could leave she was swarmed by students, professors, journalists, and old friends and acquaintances. Before that night, I just thought I was going out to dinner with my grandmother, but then I realized that if all these people wanted to hear what she had to say she must be pretty important.”

Ray’s love of functional design even spilled over into her own wardrobe. Llisa shared that Ray designed her own skirts and dresses to include lots of pockets “to hold a few coins, her wallet, a magnifying glass, pens, scissors in a sheath, little notepads, a calendar, safety pins, keys, hair pins, paper clips, a handkerchief with lace edge, grosgrain ribbons, paper color samples, business cards, a Polaroid camera – and even, on occasion, a present like a tiny Steiff bear that she gave me.” Those many pockets provided space to store, investigate, and take advantage of the world around her. “When I was little, I saw a lot of these objects as everyday, well-worn and functional… Today as a curator, I see them also as a set of powerful, well-crafted, often beautiful tools that helped her be effective in her work… Basically, she wore a fashionable toolkit.”

The world of design – and that available toolkit – has changed immeasurably since the heyday of the Eames, and we wonder how Ray would have approached all things digital when coupled with her trusty analogue tools.

“Every drawer from the Graphics Room spilled over with colorful papers from around the world, pieces of chalk in sawdust, crayons, colored pencils, paints, rubber stamps, silver/gold foils, tissue paper, and marbleized paper,” Llisa shared. The visuals she paints of the Eames Office are eye-bogglingly good. “On the tables, there were scissors, X-acto knives, paint brushes, magnifying glasses, and rulers. She was always working directly within the constraints of the materials and testing out ideas to see what worked best in 3D models.I would love to have seen what Ray would continue to do physically and what she would switch to digitally. In today’s time, I would have liked to hear her voice identifying important issues like sustainability, education, and conservation, and then talk about how to address these challenges that we are facing today.”

“The goal for both she (and Charles) to strive for was to let the design evolve from the learning. They developed a design process to address needs and solve the problems of their day. We’re continually inspired by the fact that so many of those challenges still resonate with those that we face today. Their boundless curiosity and relentless pursuit of solving problems inspired us to include “infinite curiosity” in the name of the institute.”

If only Ray could see the mark she left on designers and the industry, and it should go without saying that she influenced her granddaughter as well. “My grandmother helped shape my outlook on design. I saw from her how design was a powerful tool to assess and solve problems. I learned from Ray and Charles about how an object can become so well designed that you forget that it was ever designed in the first place – like a top or a kite. When an object like a toy has been honed for generations, its form has been slowly perfected over time with trial and error. Also, I like seeing how similar examples of an object might have evolved differently in different parts of the world.”

Ray’s Hand aims to realign how the relationship between Ray and Charles is viewed in regards to their work. In doing so, it demonstrates Ray’s contributions to what we now view as iconic designs. The larger hope is that the exhibition will continue to broaden conversations around giving women their due credit, historically and today.

To experience “Ray’s Hand” for yourself, visit eamesinstitute.org.

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Questioning the Stories We Hold: A Reading List Inspired by Annie Ernaux

I don’t love January for the usual reasons: holiday festivities are over, work resumes, and the weather is gray and cold and depressing. In January the year in front of me feels like a void. Confronted with a blank calendar, my instinct is to fill everything in, to make it mean something, to schedule my life into being busy and full and loud.

I’m trying to cope with my January existential crisis, and the way I cope is to read. Lately, my favorite author is French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. I’d always had a book or two of hers lying around, always meant to read her in earnest, but it took me until this fall to get into her work — and now I’m obsessed. As she explores her memory and its reliability, Ernaux relaxes my melancholy into something closer to curiosity. As Sheila Heti writes in the New York Times: “Most memoirs operate as if the past were right there and can be looked at, like a painting on the wall. But Ms. Ernaux understands that one’s 18-year-old self is a stranger to one’s 70-year-old self.” 

In Happening, Ernaux is haunted by an illegal abortion during her youth. She sets out to transcribe “an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me.” She writes, “I shall try to conjure up each of the sentences engraved in my memory which were either so unbearable or so comforting to me at the time that the mere thought of them today engulfs me in a wave of horror or sweetness.” Ernaux’s works foreground the difficulty of writing about the self, showing memory as just another way to cope with the void: the blank page, the unknown future, the open calendar squares that haunt me. Reading her work exposes the futility of my efforts to force things to mean something just to stave off the blankness of a new year. But there’s a glimpse of hope for me: Ernaux reminds me that sometimes things find their meaning only in hindsight, not in the present. You can relax and return to something later, able to see anew what it was all about. 

This reading list brings together essays that question the stories we hold about ourselves, how we make our lives meaningful. There’s love, sex, heartbreak, returns to childhood, and deep grief that structure how we see ourselves and our lives. These writers, like Ernaux, travel into their own memories and sensations, confronting old versions of themselves and dredging up hidden habits, to see what makes sense. 

Controlled (Noor Qasim, The Drift, 2022)

Of course there’s one thing that makes our lives so meaningful: desire. Noor Qasim’s essay considers the narrative potential of desire — the stories we tell ourselves about it — by placing Annie Ernaux alongside the genre of the millennial sex novel, including books by Sally Rooney, Raven Leilani, and Alyssa Songsiridej. Qasim contrasts Ernaux’s novel Simple Passion, which appeared in 1991, with her recently published journals, Getting Lost, which she kept during the same period. What emerges is a picture of how desire moves us, how it makes our mind work, and how we might start to write about it.

As Ernaux lived the affair, she was aware of the sort of novel one might write — perhaps one rather similar to the novels of desire examined here. But she chose, instead, to craft a different story of desire, one based in fact, yes, though not in the particularities of her fraught and ultimately commonplace experience. In eschewing the logics of narrative, in refusing to even attempt to pin down the object of her desire and opting instead for something that might resemble a ‘testimony,’ Ernaux abdicates any responsibility to plot and its repetitive motions, freeing herself to focus fully on the phenomenon of desire instead. Getting Lost evokes the experience of desire through the mess of life; Simple Passion pares away context to reveal desire’s shape. And while the journals’ primary interest is as a supplement to the novel that arose from them, they also help to preserve a sort of elemental agony, the anxious movements of a mind that desires, and desires seriously.

Crush Fatigue (Alexandra Molotkow, Real Life Magazine, 2018)

I credit this essay by Alexandra Molotkow for introducing me to psychologist Dorothy Tennov, whose 1979 book Love and Limerence was quite a read. “Limerence” names an obsessive infatuation, and Molotkow examines how this infatuation can both bring us out of ourselves — “Limerence is a program running in the background of your days and nights, arranging your impressions in the shape of your fixation” — and how it also operates as a form of selfishness. We get drawn out of ourselves into the idea of another, but we only know that person through our own mind. Molotkow takes the messiness and ambivalence of a crush seriously, paying attention to how much we want to pay attention to someone.

I was born limerent, and my relationship to limerence itself is ambivalent. Crushes map life over with meaning and joy, and I’d always choose heartbreak over boredom. They can also gain on me like a frightening, unpredictable force that lifts me out of my life and drops me back, months later, with a lot of mess to clean. They feel disruptive and wasteful — a misallocation of emotional energies, a source of outsize pain for stupid reasons — and, though it’s partly the point, they alienate me from myself: crushing involves adopting a set of hypothetical standards against which I’m necessarily lacking.

A Glass Essay (Sarah Chihaya, The Yale Review, 2022)

Sarah Chihaya writes about reading Anne Carson in the wake of a devastating breakup. Every day for one summer in Oxford, she reread Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay” in the same spot every day. Her experience of rereading makes her question her own investment in reading as an academic and as a self-described “professional reader.” The practice of rereading Carson is both comforting and challenging, alienating and unifying all at once: It makes a stretch of time make sense, and Chihaya’s account of her own story reminds us what reading can do when it knits into the fabric of our lives.

After you walk away from a last good-bye, the terrain of everyday life is suddenly overlaid with the haunted geography of an entire relationship. Every space is layered with the fine sediment of recollection. Any time you trip and reach out for balance, your hand might accidentally slip “down // into time” and dredge up something beautiful or awful from those years or months or weeks past.

Aftersun (Kate Raphael, The Overshare, 2022)

I love this Substack newsletter by Berkeley journalism student Kate Raphael, which reflects on the uncanny experience of being in your childhood bedroom, brushing up against the many past versions of yourself. Like Ernaux, Raphael’s access to the past is more complicated, more difficult to reach — until it’s not. She writes “I keep my distance from my younger self; I return home with my guard up,” but after sliding back into her past self, Raphael leans in. She rereads her childhood journals alongside watching the film Aftersun, which is set mostly within a child’s perspective and highlights a fragmented memory. Both the film and Raphael’s experiences foreground what returning to the past can give us, what meanings we can find there.

When I slip back into myself as a kid, when I snap at my parents or fall into an old pattern, I often think I am reverting to someone worse. I expect to react better and understand more now that I’m older, and I find that much of the time, I do not. In so many ways, I am still my younger self—a girl who surprises me by how much she understood, how deeply she felt things, while my current self surprises me by how much she still doesn’t understand.

Minor Resurrections (Elisa Gonzalez, The Point, 2022)

In this essay for The Point, Elisa Gonzalez reflects on the death of her brother alongside artwork depicting resurrections, meditating largely on the biblical story of Lazarus. She considers the difficulty of writing about the dead, the pull the story of resurrection has on us, and the way grief reorders a life. Her attention to the way mourning morphs time takes on a distinctly Ernaux-like quality, Gonzalez reflecting that “Time, I suspect, will never move as it did before, even after I step back into it.”

Being thrown out of time or immured in a fixed point within it is a way of dying with the one who has died, an unwilled and yet welcome journey that brings us nearer to being dead. My brother was shot in the chest three times, and every day I shape a gun out of my hand and press it three times to my chest. This ritual is a way of entering the event that I can never live, though I survive it: his dying, not mine. That I go on living while he does not still surprises me. Yet I now think the living hasn’t been continuous. If I have found any resurrection for sure, it’s mine, not my brother’s: as soon as I said, to another sister, “Stephen is dead,” it was as if I, like Barthes, were one dead—and then I came back to life, changed, like Lazarus always and probably until my final death glancing at that vast distracting orb beyond.

***

Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate at Tufts University. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Cleveland Review of Books, Bon Appétit, and more.

Editor: Krista Stevens

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