Libellus! (Little Book)

The gendered aspects of conversation

are perhaps a good

jumping-off point

The business nodes of

analytical seminal (meaning semen)

talking-pants

But back to the gender,

I have serious points to make

seriously

I am very serious, too serious to be

taken at all seriously -

go to your corner!

My grandmother was a large woman. I remember her with white curly hair, her large frame draped over an armchair, settled, regal, commanding. Her ankles were swollen and red from years of carying around all that weight, and her feet and toes swelled, plump with water, sometimes purple. Her toenails were yellow and curled, and she wore sandals, probably because other types of shoes didn’t give her appendages enough room. My grandmother’s body was a source of great fascination for me as a child. I wanted an explanation for her size – her bulk seemed to me a sign of a different or special kind of spirit inside – one that took up great space, and that quality was reflected in her girth. She smelled like a combination of her perfume (a pungent floral musk) and urine, incontinence just one of the results of her obesity. Cats, too, I associated with my grandmother. She took in Mittens, my uncle’s cat, also incontinent, and this is perhaps what bound them together. Mittens also left his mark on my grandmother’s smell.

Her body was an assortment of colors and smells not found anywhere else in the sphere of my childhood. She wore bright blue eyeshadow coupled with bright red lipstick. She wore black, stretchy dresses and real pearl necklackes. She wore fancy clip-on earrings with Birkenstocks. She recorded her monthly weight in a little red journal that I was forbidden to look in. I looked.

Early childhood, her house in Seattle – one storey and probably very small, but to me was just enough, large, even – a brown carpet, a white couch, a seventies-era kitchen with linoleum tiling. Grandma’s bedroom at the end of the hallway, a larger-than-life bed occupying most of the floor, blue coverlet which was blue even if it wasn’t blue, because blue was eternally her color.

In that bedroom were Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, dolls whose value Grandma would lecture me about. She told me where they came from, who loved them, how old they were. I always played with them weighted with false nostalgia. I could never love those dolls because the time when they were alive and loved was past. They were corpses. So I didn’t take very much to Raggedy Ann and Andy.

I think that dolls have life spans. Maybe they only have the life we give them, but there is a palpable difference between an active doll and an inactive one. I think everybody can tell.