My Name Is Emily Astor And I Know How To Read
The next great American novel, said my grandfather, will be written by a woman. I don’t disagree. My cousin (whose name escapes me, meaning she must be a second-cousin, or a friend of a cousin, or a friend of a second-cousin) once whispered to me across a dinner table, and she convinced me that anything that even resembles the slightest bit of good can be traced back to a woman. Even the greatest of men would not have been great if it weren’t for the women that brought them up, she said. I don’t disagree. I like women, mostly. I am one, after all. Some women are more likable than others, but I suppose the same principle applies to men as well.
When I was younger I dreamed of writing the next great American novel, but I quickly came to the conclusion that I could never be a great writer if I didn’t become a great reader first. So, I set out to be a great reader. My intentions were pure, if not somewhat misplaced, because after several attempts at becoming the next great American reader, I shortly realized that I don’t enjoy reading. Not books, at least. My initial menu was comprehensive, a seven-course meal ranging from Homer to Hemingway, and that doesn’t even begin to include the hors d’oeuvres. But after my third plate of overweening rhetoric and enigmatic contemplation, I stopped reading books and started reading people instead.
The first person I read was Susan Sherman, whose fingers were reminiscent of blimps, all ten of them. The Hindenburg disaster was a scrape on the knee in comparison to the disaster that was Susan Sherman. She couldn’t run — blimp fingers belong on blimp bodies — but she certainly did seem to be in a hurry, constantly. I was only in the 8th grade at the time and couldn’t see beyond the obvious, so it was a light read, initially. Her cheeks were red like Christmas ornaments when she couldn’t recall the name of her favorite actors and actress, and her blimp fingers inhaled and exhaled with her lungs as her eyes rolled back into her head, as if to search specifically through the crevices of her brain for a scrap of useless information to regurgitate.
She was a genuine cinephile, old Mrs. Sherman. I think she lost herself in films because she didn’t have anywhere else to go to seek refuge from the relentless barrage of mediocrity and monotony that consumed her day-to-day existence. In films, she was everything she couldn’t be. She was strong, confident, beautiful. Passionate. Rebellious. Interesting. And somehow, she ended up being all of these things to me. That’s what happens when you read the same person for too long. You begin to understand them. I was young, and didn’t know the dangers of understanding a person, if only from a distance, so I read and I read and I read until I couldn’t possibly read any more. I painted a thousand portraits of Susan Sherman, transcribed a thousand pages for each of her blimp fingers, and they progressively grew in beauty and mercy. The pages, not the fingers.
By the end of the novel, Susan Sherman was integrity personified. She was humble, and resilient in the face of trial. Her eyes sparkled, no longer did they spend time in the back of her head perusing the filing cabinets of triviality that had been the focal point of her past. I don’t know if I changed, or if she changed. Maybe we both changed. But she was the first person I read, and that was when I knew that I would never write the next great American novel.
I can’t be a writer and a reader, because I can only be in one head at once. If I am writing, I am in my head. When I am reading, I am in another’s. Grandfather said that a man spread thin will be blown about by the wind. Grandfather said a lot of things, most of them weren’t true…but that particular phrase has stuck with me.
One time I read Mark Foster from biology class. Mark wore a different watch for every day of the week, but was always late. He had a different sweater for each day of the week too, but always wore the same one. It was forest green, and complimented his olive skin and dark hair nicely. His hair fell awkwardly across his face. He never seemed to mind though. He was just as lost as Susan Sherman, but instead of turning to cinema he turned to prescription drugs. I don’t know how or where he got them — I never read that far, partly because I never got the chance.
Mark smiled a lot, too much. I’ve learned that the people who smile the most are often the same people who carry the heaviest burdens. Every time Mark smiled, I felt a pain in my side. I would do anything to wipe the grin off his face, not because I didn’t want him to be happy but because I knew he wasn’t. He played the piano beautifully, never in public. I happened to stumble upon him in the auditorium one evening after everyone had gone their separate ways. He only played two chords, repeatedly, over and over, and the simplicity of his sonata only highlighted the fact that he had lost the desire to do anything except pretend to be something he wasn’t.
What I read in Mark was a dream that had lost in a duel with reality, and he had buried it deep in his veins with the same drugs that buried him deep in the earth. I miss Mark. I miss those two chords, swelling and receding like a fragile sailboat on a storm tossed sea, only miles away from the coast but so lost in the grip of the rain and the clouds whose master had abandoned ship and found a bed at the bottom of the ocean floor. Mark was a hard read, a Tolstoy among Grishams, perhaps.
After Mark, I stopped reading for a few years. I filled my time with frivolous hobbies and pastimes because reading was too emotionally draining and solitude too beguiling. I tried to grow an avocado plant in a recycled plastic soda bottle and ended up with a bottle full of dirt and a salad lacking in healthy monounsaturated fats. I purchased a yoga mat which is currently being put to good use as an unsightly rug at the foot of my twin bed. I enrolled in an online Italian course, but still ate DiGiorno’s pizzas at least twice a week. No number of distractions, no matter how mind-numbing or monotonous, could satisfy my innate desire to read. Yet, I pushed the urge to the back of my wilderness mind and in my plastic hell I created a pocket of paradise that was comfortable at best and trite at worst. The absence of true joy fostered an environment in which true pain was absent, and I was content.
Then Grandfather bid “ci vediamo” to the world, and to the wire-framed glasses on the end table, and to me. I spent more than a few hours on the cold hardwood floor in his room, perusing the last edition of the Wall Street Journal he had ever read. The family had cleaned out his remaining belongings, with the exception of the newspaper and his wire-framed glasses, at my request.
I stared at those glasses for what seemed like an eternity, or perhaps a fortnight (a lesser used hyperbole meant to indicate that I stared at the glasses for a long time). I wished with every fiber of my soul to see what he had seen, to know what he had known. All I saw was my own reflection, my own ruddy complexion and unkempt hair, my own overworked eyes and underfed lips. All I was was my own reflection. And I began to read.
This time was not like the others. I thought I was reading, but without meaning to I was writing. I was writing myself to life. It wasn’t the first time I had seen my reflection, of course — but it was the first time I had seen myself the way he did. I was writing him reading me. I saw things I had never imagined. I saw Susan Sherman, yes, and Mark Foster, yes, and hundreds more. But behind all of these identities I had hid amongst for the majority of my life was a little girl named Emily Astor.
She was, for lack of a better word, holy. Innocent, but not ignorant. She sat on a cloud of freshly cut grass, draped in light, her fingers gently massaging the rich soil underneath her in search of anything new, or anything familiar, or anything at all. She was just a child, but when the wind exhaled and tossed her hair about her face I saw the most marvelous future buried in the darks of her eyes. I saw her for who she was, and what she would one day become — or, rather, I saw her the way that Grandfather saw her. The way that Grandfather saw me.
I still have those wire-framed glasses, which rest lightly atop a worn edition of the Wall Street Journal. I still have the same ruddy complexion and unkempt hair as I did when I first met myself, and I still have something buried in the darks of my eyes that won’t let me forget what I saw that day. I saw potential. I saw it in Susan. I saw it in Mark. And after years of searching, I finally saw it in myself. Maybe I’m the next great American novel. Maybe we all are, in the eyes of the ones who know us best.
My name is Emily Astor, and I know how to read.
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