The Faraway Nearby Read Online Free Page B

she made. She was self-conscious about her size-eleven feet and her height, bemoaning and boasting about the latter in turn. She had a strikingly pretty face, but beauty is as much a way of carrying yourself as physical attributes. She was thin-skinned, prim, unsure of herself, finicky, squeamish, anxious, and fretful, even as a child, in the stories told me.
    Some instinct that comes from being at home in the world was never hers, the protective instinct that attracts you to what encourages you. Instead she was buffeted between principles and fears. She took the ought-to-be for the actual and adhered to what she should like and how things should be. It was as though she traveled by a map of the wrong place, hitting walls, driving into ditches, missing her destination, but never stopping or throwing out the map. And she never stopped being Cinderella, and told her own story largely as a series of things that happened to her rather than things she did.
    The artist Ana Teresa Fernandez recently cast a pair of high-heeled shoes in ice and stood in the gutter of an inner-city street at night until they melted and left her barefoot and free. It was a battle between the warmth of her body and the coldness of the shoes, between her own fierce will and the imprisonment of the Cinderella story. The shoes were astonishingly beautiful, strange, alarming. They were shoes that wanted to kill your feet, shoes too brittle to walk in, shoes of the kind called stiletto, as though you could stab someone with them. In the two-hour video she compressed down to forty minutes or so of ordeal, they slowly disintegrated, like a story falling apart, like a belief wearing out, like a fear melting away.
    When your feet or hands go numb with cold, they don’t feel at all after a while. It’s when they warm again that the pain begins, just as a limb hurts not when the blood flow ceases and it goes to sleep but when it wakes up. Tall, athletic Ana told me that it was when her feet began to thaw that the agony arrived. She endured the pain for the sake of a symbolic conquest of a pernicious story and for the sake of making a work of art that expressed her fierce feminism and brilliant imagination. In “Cinderella,” women deform themselves to try to fit into the shoe; Ana destroyed the shoes, making something beautiful out of the war between flesh and ice, between a fairy tale that didn’t fit and her own intransigent warmth. Not everyone has the will or the warmth.
    Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than that the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it, but if I had to begin the story of my parents anywhere, it would be with my grandmothers, who were both motherless. Some secret of nurture withered a generation or two before I arrived, if it had ever existed before among the poor, marginalized people on the edges of Europe from whom I descend. Both my parents grew up with a deep sense of poverty that was mostly emotional but that they imagined as material long after they clambered into the middle class, and so they were more like a pair of rivalrous older siblings than parents who see their children as extensions of themselves and their hopes. They were stuck in separateness.
    I didn’t realize anything was odd until I was already on my own and found out that not everyone’s parents cut them off financially as soon as the law allowed. I tried to leave home unsuccessfully at fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and did so successfully at seventeen, heading off to another country, as far away as I could go, and once I got there I realized I was more on my own than I had anticipated: I was henceforth entirely responsible for myself, and thus began a few years of poverty. For that odyssey my mother would not let me take any of the decent suitcases in her attic but gave me a huge broken one in which my few clothes and books tumbled like dice in a cup. My