Rough Likeness: Essays Read Online Free

was an enormous yellow, or red, or sometimes, best of all, coral rose in a crystal vase, a rose my grandmother had picked earlier than morning. Thus day by day my sympathies increased /and thus the range of visible things /grew dear to me: already I began /to love the sun was years away, but in this way, the fitting room/dining room (my grandmother and great aunt were tailors to the wealthy) collected light, and the light spread across the wooden work-and-dining table—brown-padded to protect its diningness from ferocious pinking shears and razors and dusty marking chalk. I’d pass the (visible and dear) black-and-white patterned couch where the customers sat and waited for fittings, the always-chilly black tile of the sewing room floor (where one could easily see the dropped silver pins and magnet them up at the end of the day, if given the task), and make my way out to the porch where we ate summer breakfasts. The jalousied glass blinds were already opened, early, by my aunt, the slats turned with big, flat keys, the bamboo shades were rolled up, the table set with thin slices of crumbly yeast cake, juice in small glasses, bacon on plates, the paper read and refolded. The greeting good morning, not formal exactly, but a form to be followed, consistent, and yes, spent lavishly on a child. And expected to be banked and spent in return (I was not to say “hi” in the morning.) The newspaper coupons clipped, the napkins stacked in the wooden flip-top box. Hot pink packets of Sweet’N Low (garish, unlikely) loose on a tray and then, years later, in a Lucite container (also wrong, but bought for them at a school fair for Christmas). The walk through the house after coming downstairs, from kitchen, through fitting/dining room to porch, contained the barest shifts of atmosphere—the way crossing a border makes a trip into a journey. Makes it undertaken . Thus I learned to travel in a very small space. I learned distance contained. Walking to breakfast, I slowed like a train, maneuvering onto a new set of tracks. I navigated by way of hem-markers and mirrors. I moved between a line of black and gold Singers, each with its filigree treadle, and racks of hanging gowns to be pressed. I walked and checked the bags of scraps for anything new—a scandalous fur collar, bone buttons, “good things.” We had the phrases “your good coat” and “take off your good shoes if you’re playing outside.” The things of a day were hued and graded, and moved from house dresses to everyday pocketbooks (in seasonal bone, black or white) and finally onto good coats. For kids, the progression went play- school-dress clothes . Later there were evening clothes. Much later, the customers’ hand-me-down gowns, refitted for my sister and me, in case of an affair.

    Here with me now are those who know that to set down words is to give to all things a partial face. Who consider the partial not merely insufficient or wanting—because to indulge such a notion would mean no work at all would get done, nothing at all would be made. For Whitman, so seemingly at ease with abundance, the anxiety of sitting down to it, the question of finding a shape for, a precision, was indeed a weight and a trial. Of a bloody night-battle, one of the war’s last, at Chancellorsville, MD, in May 1863, he writes:
    Who paint the scene, the sudden partial panic of the afternoon, at dusk? Who paint the irrepressible advance of the second division of the Third corps . . . ? Who show what moves there in the shadows, fluid and firm . . . Of scenes like these, I say, who writes—whoe’er can write the story? Of many a score—aye, thousands, north and south, of unwrit heroes, unknown heroisms, incredible, impromptu, first-class desperations—who tells?
     
    Who? Well, he tells—with all the terrible partiality he can countenance—what he sees, all he knows to be lost, too fast gone and unsung:
    C.H.L., 145th, Pennsylvania, lies in bed six with jaundice and erysipelas;