Rough Likeness: Essays by Lia Purpura Read Free Book Online

apparition, to affix the scene to a recognizable mood. No ensemble of clues plotted the meeting of a St. & a Dr., a Rd. & an Ave. to orient by. The street just would not, would not mean route-to-store , or close-to-home . It offered no eau-d’library-nearing (white roof the top note, crowns of maple the finish), no whiff of farmers’-market-upcoming, no low-grade-parking anxiety-flicker. No overture, prelude, or preface rounding toward anywhere stepped forth. I was driving—first principle, sure—but it could have been anywhere: Baltimore, Barcelona. No last-year-at-this-time specimen (that yellow moon slung low over IHOP) (now Enterprise Rent-a-Car) turned into a wist- or a joy- or a hurtful past moment.
    As I said, I might as easily have been flying, all movement unfelt, the speed of the moment so wholly contained, the distance covered, unrecognizable. The street’s singular elements were perfectly nameable—that echt yellow stripe, those newly-dribbled tar snakes filling cracks, curbs darkened with rain, fickle puddles, passing cars launching watery stars out of low spots to firmaments elsewhere—yes, the things of the street were nameable, but helped not at all to locate me, as when, from a plane, looking out, looking down, certain of an actual neighborhood below, the internal eye conjures up joggers pushing triangle prams, bike bells aflame in low sun—though the whole of the landscape remains a big chunky patchwork and nothing on a human scale asserts.
    I knew the street to be “residential.” It leafed over with well-tended trees, curbs dipped politely at corners, I could read all that, yes. Those clues registered. And so did the need to go slowly—but only as reflex, a synaptic response. I had not the sense of a specific school zone directing the downshift, or that, say, a tumbly, yellow-haired kid in favor of darting lived near.
    So where was I now?
    And also, who , is the question.
    Here, into the picture (I’m slowing this down, considerably), came an old woman shuffling, assiduously not looking both ways as she crossed the street. The crossing was a big, concentrated-upon project—an endeavor which must have, earlier, as she dressed for the day, required planning and determination, the gathering of moxie , as someone’s grandmother would’ve said. Or she herself would’ve said. And at this she’d laugh quietly: “moxie” applied to crossing a street! How silly the way age reduces us—a trip to the drugstore, across the street, planned! My question would be hers, too: Who am I now? To those college kids in the new apartments—part of a tribe ? (she tries out “The Olds.”) Daft? — yes, a little-seeming, I’m sure . Harmless? — oh, all the harm done in a lifetime, now done with, and time-softened, sort of . Now ( she thinks), I’m the person who cannot believe she was once one of them, that eye-of-the-storm, centrally pumping heart one makes of oneself when young, all confusion and terror and beauty at that age.
    This congeries of moments wasn’t long lasting. Was startling, though. Microdramatic. I was trying to find my way back, or dig into the moment, there on the street. It was the sensation of trying to raise a stuck window, knowing the stubbornness to be weather, the resistance to be moisture, and that, with the right blow applied, it would move. I felt, too, the thought’s construction shift, to a new shade of doubt—an insistent, keen, little stab: it would have to move, right? The moment’s flat, solid resistance would give, would not behave for much longer like a colony of coral, with endless, internal, spawning lives?
    For the duration of the moment, trying to locate myself on that street, trying to tack along it, I was as a foreigner. I was en route, and in a strange station, bars of the ticket window striping the clerk’s lips (straining to read them), the quick clerk reciting time/track/tariff, the echoey loudspeaker announcing my train (its delay? its departure? the