Read Online American Innovations: Stories by Rivka Galchen - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Rivka Galchen
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like so many other mornings, I got out of bed.
In the bathroom, I washed my face with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too gesamtkunstwerk -ily. Instead, only in close patches. Only enough to rest reasonably assured that nothing too grotesque has overnight arrived on or departed from my face, and that I have scrubbed away all the applied scrub. It’s important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there’s anything especially wrong with me—just the usual.
However, in the hallway downstairs there’s a mirror you see yourself in even when you don’t intentionally look.
That mirror claimed there was a substantial lump on the right side of my lower back. An anatomically anomalous and yet familiar-seeming lump.
I would have just looked away but it was like seeing a burn victim or a really beautiful person: I couldn’t unstare. My hand moved to the mass. The mass liked being touched. I lifted my shirt. I would say what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn’t need support. It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private. What I saw was really textbook. Save for its location, there on my back. As if to hide from me. Or as if to discreetly maintain an unacknowledged child. Though the discreetness would work only in a world in which we meet one another exclusively head-on, or possibly in three-quarters profile. Because in profile the anatomy really could not be denied.
I pulled my shirt back down. It was fitted but, thankfully, long.
Was this an inheritance?
I made myself sunny-side-up eggs. The newspaper informed me that a young volunteer worker at a large-cat reserve had been killed by a lion. Her parents said their daughter had been doing what she loved, there at the reserve; she had never been happier; protocol had been followed; it was a rare and tragic accident and not the result of carelessness; the parents did not blame the reserve; they listed the large-cat sanctuary as one of the charities to which mourners might elect to donate in lieu of flowers. I’m not saying I didn’t feel disfigured and humiliated. But I know such things are mainly a matter of mind.
* * *
Like the girl pounced on and accidentally killed by the large cat, I also was attempting to do something I loved. I was studying Library Sciences. I had always loved libraries. No one looks at you there, and you can look at everyone, so people probably are looking at you, just like you’re looking at them, but it’s all nice and quiet, and everyone can stay inside his or her headspace. But I hadn’t really known what library sciences was, and it turned out to be highly nonoverlapping with what I had deduced from the blurred, squinting assessment I had made of it from a distance with as little information—“information” being a word and concept I both dislike and distrust—as possible. Then it turned out I wasn’t even really in a Library Sciences program, I was in a Library and Information Sciences program, the core of which focused on “Humans becoming informed via intermediation between inquirers and instrumented records.” I was learning computer skills, basically. I was becoming trained as a searcher of databases. I was taking a metadata course on Indexing and Cataloging and another course on Knowledge Management.
That first day of my supernumeraryness I went to the school library for a timed assignment, done from my pale blue laminated tin carrel. It was a set of twenty query transformations. Query transformations are just what they sound like. A human has a curiosity—something simple, like, What are the seasons like in Mongolia? or less simple, like, How was gender represented in the literature of Heian Japan?—and ideally, the library information
In the bathroom, I washed my face with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too gesamtkunstwerk -ily. Instead, only in close patches. Only enough to rest reasonably assured that nothing too grotesque has overnight arrived on or departed from my face, and that I have scrubbed away all the applied scrub. It’s important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there’s anything especially wrong with me—just the usual.
However, in the hallway downstairs there’s a mirror you see yourself in even when you don’t intentionally look.
That mirror claimed there was a substantial lump on the right side of my lower back. An anatomically anomalous and yet familiar-seeming lump.
I would have just looked away but it was like seeing a burn victim or a really beautiful person: I couldn’t unstare. My hand moved to the mass. The mass liked being touched. I lifted my shirt. I would say what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn’t need support. It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private. What I saw was really textbook. Save for its location, there on my back. As if to hide from me. Or as if to discreetly maintain an unacknowledged child. Though the discreetness would work only in a world in which we meet one another exclusively head-on, or possibly in three-quarters profile. Because in profile the anatomy really could not be denied.
I pulled my shirt back down. It was fitted but, thankfully, long.
Was this an inheritance?
I made myself sunny-side-up eggs. The newspaper informed me that a young volunteer worker at a large-cat reserve had been killed by a lion. Her parents said their daughter had been doing what she loved, there at the reserve; she had never been happier; protocol had been followed; it was a rare and tragic accident and not the result of carelessness; the parents did not blame the reserve; they listed the large-cat sanctuary as one of the charities to which mourners might elect to donate in lieu of flowers. I’m not saying I didn’t feel disfigured and humiliated. But I know such things are mainly a matter of mind.
* * *
Like the girl pounced on and accidentally killed by the large cat, I also was attempting to do something I loved. I was studying Library Sciences. I had always loved libraries. No one looks at you there, and you can look at everyone, so people probably are looking at you, just like you’re looking at them, but it’s all nice and quiet, and everyone can stay inside his or her headspace. But I hadn’t really known what library sciences was, and it turned out to be highly nonoverlapping with what I had deduced from the blurred, squinting assessment I had made of it from a distance with as little information—“information” being a word and concept I both dislike and distrust—as possible. Then it turned out I wasn’t even really in a Library Sciences program, I was in a Library and Information Sciences program, the core of which focused on “Humans becoming informed via intermediation between inquirers and instrumented records.” I was learning computer skills, basically. I was becoming trained as a searcher of databases. I was taking a metadata course on Indexing and Cataloging and another course on Knowledge Management.
That first day of my supernumeraryness I went to the school library for a timed assignment, done from my pale blue laminated tin carrel. It was a set of twenty query transformations. Query transformations are just what they sound like. A human has a curiosity—something simple, like, What are the seasons like in Mongolia? or less simple, like, How was gender represented in the literature of Heian Japan?—and ideally, the library information
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