The whole concept of the “Boston Tea Party” used to confuse me as a child. I always thought of us Americans as a simple coffee-drinking folk. Tea just seems a whole lot more complicated.
It’s a weird pet peeve, I understand, but it’s one that gets to me all the same: people studying in cafes. It’s not that I have anything against keeping busy over a cup of coffee, it’s the dirty looks they shoot at everyone else who is there to socialize.
Because, if you can’t have a conversation with friends at the local cafe, then where can you have it? The bus station?
I am super excited because in a coming weeks a new coffeeshop, an off-shoot of a successful Korean brand, is opening up in my neighborhood.
The best part? The SAT-studiers of the world have not yet had a chance to claim it and hold it hostage from the people who just want to go out for a cup of coffee.
Every week I kind of slow down the car down as I drive past it and peek inside, wondering if the lights being turned on are a signal of their grand opening or just of the shop’s continued construction.
And it’s literally right across the street from my neighborhood Starbucks, the only other coffeeshop in town.
I imagine a big showdown taking place on the day of the grand opening, not between two competing brands, but between two competing customers: the ones looking for a quiet space to work versus the ones looking for a place to hang out (which are few and far between in my town). I imagine it might look like something out of an old-school western–gunslinger versus the new sheriff in town. Except instead of bullets, chocolate-covered almonds and biscotti will be exchanged.
Mmm. Chocolate covered almonds and really bitter coffee. That sounds amazing right about now.
My hope is that the grand opening will end up in a truce of sorts. Ye over-achievers of the world can take the Starbucks, make into the den of silence and concentration you desire.
Heck, I’ll even join you when it’s not the weekend and I’m feeling a tad bit more motivated. My word-count for NaNo has been suffering greatly, to say the least. Probably because I hang out at Starbucks to socialize and not to write.
But leave Cafe Benne to us obnoxious loud folk. Please?
Stepping onto a train means that, for a little while at least, you are exactly nowhere. Because in-between spaces are exactly those spaces that cannot exist.
When you get on the train, most people don’t speak. It’s part of the contract of entering nowhere: no voices are allowed. The silence hangs heavy in the stagnant air, but you get comfortable, accustomed to its heady warmth. Those who do violate this unspoken law are the ones who are stared at, the ones who elicit the others’ ire.
How dare they trespass onto the solitude of our thoughts with their senseless noisiness? How dare they break the stillness of the moving train, transport us out of nowhere and back into somewhere with every articulated word?
It’s irrational, a part of you knows, to be irritated with someone for speaking loudly on a train. But it’s not a very big part.
It’s eight o’clock in the evening and you’re heading home from work, from school, from anywhere at all, to a small-town somewhere in the suburbs or to just another part of the city that the train tracks thread together.
You try with all your strength to keep at least one eye open at all times. It’s getting dark outside, and the blackness of the night that holds the train hostage infects your brain. “One eye open,” you tell yourself, though maybe not in so many words. But then both eyes close on their own accord, and you’re already half-asleep by the time Somewhere Station comes along.
All at once you wake up, and scurry into the noise and movement of the outside. Welcome to Somewhere, USA. The day is finally done.
Late-night transit is so easy to romanticize–the image of the Night Bus in Harry Potter, or the train that weaves across the water in Spirited Away. The cat bus in My Neighbor Totoro.
But I think more than just the space of the train or the bus or however it is you’re getting to somewhere, what is easiest to romanticize is the journey itself, the holding your breath to get to wherever it is you want to be. It’s the one red thread that connects a beginning to a tangible end. Harry returns to the wizarding world, Chihiro meets the good witch, the two sisters find each other again. And I return home. One red thread pulling us back to where we need to be.
I had gone on a walk and had dragged my mom along with me because I wanted the company and because if I spent another second inside the house I was going to scream. Cabin fever, I assumed, was a season-specific illness. But I’ve gotten hit with an early bout in mid-October. This does not bode well for the winter.
When life gives you lemons, say “no thank you.”
So there we were, walking along the main street of my town when a pair of men approaches us, each carrying a lemon and a stick in hand. And they ask, “Are you **insert religious affiliation here**?” To which, of course, I responded, “No thank you.”
That’s an appropriate response, I would say. No?
Because I had not heard what they were telling us, and my mind had sort of fixated on the lemon one of the men–he couldn’t have been older than a teenager, to be honest–was waving around as he spoke. So, no thank you. It was kind of you to offer me your lemon, but I don’t want it.
Except, he hadn’t.
“Um. I mean, no. No. No, we’re not **insert religious affiliation here**,” I amended. The problem was that I responded about five seconds too late. The pair was off, out to proselytize the world with lemons.
I’m still not really sure what to make of the experience, and I’m still not really sure if I responded in the correct way. Because even when people are trying to convert me, I’m still concerned with whether or not I’m adhering to the proper etiquette. I don’t want to be impolite, after all.
I have this theory that the two most important expressions that you need to know in any given language are: I don’t know; and, I cannot. After a three-month stint in an intensive Italian course, the only think I can remember is “non so” and “non posso.” And both have served me well. Admittedly, I live in New York and have never ventured into an Italian-speaking country, but I figure that I can respond to any possible question that somebody might throw at me this way.
I can’t. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Now, if only those expressions had come out of my own mouth during this strange exchange. I imagine it would go somewhere along these lines:
“Are you **insert religious affiliation here**?”
“I don’t know.”
See?
I come off strange regardless, or, rather, bogged down with existential angst, questioning the very existence of whomever it is people worship. But certainly even that is preferable to “no thank you.”
I literally can’t take one step out the door without embarrassing myself. Or attracting the absolute strangest situations. How’s your Monday been?
I bought The Miniaturist at the train station because I had missed my train by precisely two minutes. Two minutes during which I was stuck, trapped behind two businesswomen standing side-by-side and a briefcase half my size. I was on the escalators when I heard the “last call” announcement, and no amount of “excuse me”-ing or “please, if I could just”-ing would allow me to make a quick escape. In retrospect, I don’t know that they were businesswomen, but they were wearing dress-suits and had a distinct attitude of “you shall not pass!,” that I can only imagine that some sort of business might be their profession of choice.
It was almost worth missing the train for this. And that’s high praise coming from me.
Forty minutes to kill and a fifty-minute train ride ahead of me, I wandered into Starbucks and bought the obligatory hot chocolate to soothe my nerves. I was a little on-edge (I can’t believe I missed the train by two minutes! my every fiber was screaming). Seven minutes down, thirty-three to go. I wandered back to the space with the enormous timetable over head, just to make sure. Eight minutes. I decided that maybe I could have a peek into Penn Books. Just to browse, of course.
Wrong.
Thirty minutes later, I was on the train short twenty bucks and about two chapters into Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist. Fast-forward another day and it’s all done. The plus side is the insistent outraged voice in the back of my mind stopped screaming about two pages into the novel. It might have been worth missing the train for. And that really is saying something.
I could say that it’s Burton’s voice that I loved best, or the love and attention she plays to the smallest details of the universe that she constructs. I could say that it’s the watery imagery from page-one, that from the first moment you hear about the drowning, you know that what’s coming even before the protagonist Nella does, and all you can do is rip through each page waiting for the seas to rise up and swallow her husband whole. I could say that it’s the relevance, the fact that in three hundred and fifty years and halfway around the world our society still feels the reverberations of a history of oppressiveness.
I could say all these things, and they were certainly part of the reason that made the read so enjoyable, but more than with the sea I fell in love with the frame stories that Burton sets up inside and outside of the historical narrative. Nella is sure the miniaturist is the author of her fate. She specifically uses the language of the author to demonstrate the power the miniaturist has over her, constructing prophetic visions of her future in the form of a doll’s house, even as an author constructs her in miniature as a character who perhaps represents something much larger than herself.
There are other places I could go with this. I want to look at the episode of the drowning more closely, at how eagerly a deviant sexual act is transformed to a deviant sexual identity by the burgeoning middle-class society. At how the culture of oppression reveals itself at its very inception where the confessor and the mercantile sensibility first unite to form a complex systematic web. At how the policing of sexuality in turn creates a marginalized position for women that binds them to the home through marriage, capitalizing on a much older system of marriage where the marrying of an aristocratic couple served as a mechanism of keeping property within the nobility, but where now the aristocratic bride represented a means to transfer legitimacy to the rising class of non-aristocratic rich. The novel is beautiful for its complexity.
The novel is beautiful for making me sit on a train and try to dissect it as I read like a game, the game of taking apart. “Everything man sees he takes for a toy.” And what about me?
badpoetree 