{"id":147014,"date":"2020-08-20T09:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T13:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=147014"},"modified":"2020-08-20T09:59:34","modified_gmt":"2020-08-20T13:59:34","slug":"an-inheritance-of-loneliness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/08\/20\/an-inheritance-of-loneliness\/","title":{"rendered":"An Inheritance of Loneliness"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this series, Quarantine Reads, writers present the books getting them through these strange times. <\/em>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Quarantine has made me a lonelier woman, but I\u2019ve always held the inheritance of another woman\u2019s loneliness. When my mother was in her early twenties, she left her mother\u2019s house in Bangalore to move to New York City, where her new husband\u2014my father\u2014 had been living for the previous few years. It was her mother, my grandmother, who arranged the match. My grandmother was thrilled to send my mother to America, even though my mother didn\u2019t want to marry and didn\u2019t idealize coming to America the way her mother did.<\/p>\n

You can be happy anywhere, unhappy anywhere<\/em>, my grandmother told her. The two of them had a mother-daughter relationship like something out of a Jamaica Kincaid novel: loving but contentious, fraught with discipline and warnings about the difficulty of being a woman.<\/p>\n

My mother remembers her early life in New York as a kind of self-quarantine. While my father worked, she spent her days isolated in their tiny studio apartment, going stir-crazy, cooking and cleaning and staring at the clinical white walls. A gossipy relative back home had spooked her into believing she\u2019d be assassinated if she opened the front door in America. Occasionally, she spoke to the women holed up in the neighboring apartments. But most of her downtime, my mother spent sleeping. She slept purposefully and often, trying to reenter her old life in her dreams: the long walks with college girlfriends to the pani pur<\/em>i truck, the yipping of a neighbor\u2019s Pomeranian, the pulse of life as an unmarried woman, alive with vagary and freedom. My mother resented her mother for marrying her off. They spoke once a month, on an international call, during which they\u2019d argue about fate. And then my mother would hang up, miss her mother, and sleep away some more of her time.<\/p>\n

Experiences like my mother\u2019s are commonplace for many women. They\u2019re often fictionalized and folded into novels about immigrant experiences, novels many readers from immigrant communities have grown tired of. Can\u2019t we tell stories other than the one about coming to America and assimilating? And yet, those narratives have a pull for me\u2014they contain the stories about women\u2019s loneliness that have always absorbed me.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s Lucy<\/em> over and over. It\u2019s the novel I turn to when I crave the order of a book I have loved before. First published in 1990, Lucy <\/em>is about a young woman who leaves her home in the West Indies to work as an au pair for Mariah and Lewis, a well-to-do white couple in the United States. At first glance, Lucy <\/em>seemed to me like the kind of novel I am built to love: I had always wanted to be a woman rising, and so I liked stories about women rising. Lucy<\/em>\u2019s premise suggests a narrative about social ascendance\u2014a young, wage-earning woman, a modern governess type who pulls herself up by her bootstraps. It seems, on the surface, to promise to be another immigrant bildungsroman, charting the arc of a young woman\u2019s maturation into a society where things like bootstraps <\/em>are celebrated.<\/p>\n

But Lucy doesn\u2019t care about ascendance or assimilation. Kincaid doesn\u2019t concern herself with a woman becoming, but rather with a woman being. How does a person get to be that way? <\/em>Lucy wonders, over and over again. What she wants to be\u2014all she wants to be\u2014is alone. She wants to isolate herself before society seizes the chance to isolate her. Solitude is an act of self-preservation, whereas loneliness can be an act of violence, and so every choice Lucy makes is in pursuit of solitude. She chooses to leave her island behind. She chooses to leave her mother behind, a mother who, for all the ferocity of her love, raised her daughter with the same patriarchal hand that had raised her.<\/p>\n

Once in the States, Lucy ignores the stack of letters her mother sends her, all the notes of love and punishment and longing. She comes to love her employer, Mariah, like a mother figure, and the two form a bond despite the chasm of their class difference. \u201cThe right thing always happens to her,\u201d Lucy says of Mariah. \u201cThe thing she always wants to happen, happens.\u201d After Mariah\u2019s marriage breaks apart, Lucy stands by her. But the gap between them widens, and eventually Lucy saves up enough funds to leave her proxy mother, too. With the money she\u2019s made as an au pair, Lucy and a friend move into an apartment together and split the rent. There, her solitude found at last, she finally writes back to her mother. She intentionally signs off with the wrong return address, severing their correspondence forever. But even in her apartment, with its tiny rooms and its barred bathroom window, Lucy isn\u2019t free of her mother. Her mother\u2019s voice lives inside her\u2014it\u2019s Lucy\u2019s voice, too. Lucy is made up of two women: herself and her mother. \u201cI was not like my mother,\u201d she says, \u201cI was my mother.\u201d No one who contains multitudes is ever quite alone.<\/p>\n

As I sit, alone, through quarantine, it\u2019s my fourth time rereading Lucy<\/em>, but I still remember my first. I was in college, and my professor introduced each novel we studied with a chalkboard quote culled from another novel. For Lucy, <\/em>that quote came from George Eliot\u2019s Middlemarch. <\/em>Eliot writes, and I have never forgotten:<\/p>\n

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow, and the squirrel\u2019s heartbeat, and we would die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence.\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The quote arrives at a point in Middlemarch<\/em> when the heroine has just married. She\u2019s crying on her honeymoon. Her new husband, of whom she wanted to be an equal, has relegated her to the position of an assistant. The heroine\u2019s pain is visceral\u2014the claustrophobic friction of a marriage, the realization that a man is what he always was\u2014but it\u2019s also ordinary, and Eliot\u2019s shrewd narrator knows that readers don\u2019t sympathize with ordinary pains. To sympathize with the ordinary would be impractical; it would mean feeling too much.<\/p>\n

In solitude, Lucy sees the world with that keen vision and feeling. The ordinary moves her; she sees it down to a depth that others don\u2019t. Some of those depths are painful: I think of a moment when Mariah asks Lucy if she\u2019s seen daffodils before. To Mariah, the flowers are just pretty spring flowers. But Lucy can\u2019t appreciate them. To her, daffodils mean growing up on an island that was also a colony. They mean the time at Queen Victoria\u2019s Girls School, when she was made to memorize an old British poem celebrating daffodils. They mean being made to recite that poem aloud, the sound of imperialism ringing out from her own mouth.<\/p>\n

And then some of those ordinary depths are beautiful: on a trip to the lake with Mariah and Lewis, before the family parts, Lucy meets a boy who piques her interest. They talk and later hide away behind a hedge of wild roses. The boy is ordinary and kisses Lucy all over with his \u201cordinary mouth.\u201d Still, Lucy enjoys their intimacy more than with any man before him. His kisses aren\u2019t just kisses, but metrics of how much Lucy misses home, of how long it\u2019s been since she\u2019s been touched and kissed.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was not happy,\u201d Lucy admits at the end of the novel, in the solitude of her bedroom, having successfully left behind all the women and men she loved. \u201cBut that seemed too much to ask for.\u201d<\/p>\n

These past few months, I\u2019ve done the journey so many of these women have in reverse. I\u2019ve left my life in New York City and returned to my mother\u2019s house. It\u2019s the same house in which I grew up, an hour south of the city, where my mother and father moved after packing up their studio in Queens, one daughter then little, one daughter on the way. I spend my days sleeping away the hours in my childhood bedroom or going stir-crazy to the sounds of the squirrel\u2019s heartbeat and the grass growing, the washer thrumming and the slow thuds of the boxes that pile up outside our front door. Sometimes I hear the sound of a woman grieving under my sheets. And then my mother knocks. \u201cWhy are you crying?\u201d she demands. And I want to tell her that I\u2019m unhappy, but that seems too much to ask for. Instead I ask her, as she turns to leave\u2014Aren\u2019t you lonely?<\/em> And she just shrugs, an expert where I\u2019m only an amateur. \u201cI was lonely like this before,\u201d she says. \u201cOnly difference now is that the world is lonely with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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