In Which We Wait For A Warm Place

Satiated

by DAYNA EVANS

There is a guy who I'd had a recurring interest in for a few years. I will make no effort to describe what he looks like, partially because I don't want to reveal who he is and mostly because describing people's physical features is not my strong suit. (He's got a head? And stuff?) He and I had a brief thing that didn't even involve sex but swiftly turned into the realization that we communicate more like brother and sister than people who have a mutual sexual desire.

A few months ago, this past paramour of mine said something to me over the Internet that I am pretty sure I have thought about nearly every day since. ("Thought about" is an understatement and "nearly every day" is a lie. I have decimated, pulverized, and obliterated this statement so hard that I think of it in Latin now, the dead language.) In response to something I'd said about, I don't know, a frittata or a perfectly-toasted English muffin, he said: "Is food all you ever think about?" Bam. There it was — the combination of words that had the ultimate debilitating effect on me. This is the type of insult (one may argue that this isn't even an insult) that turns me from a person generally unconcerned with getting ready for "bikini season" to a hypersensitive psychopath who starts inventing names for newly-discovered pockets of fat. "Have you seen my knees? They look like fried eggs, but like, without the white part." "My neck is loose. Loose like the skin of a turtle if you took off its shell." This guy, who was relatively insignificant to me at that point in my life, had found one of the few ways to make me feel insecure: he insinuated that I have a negative relationship with food.

I was on a train traveling from Paris to Grenoble and I was doing my normal train activity of listening to R. Kelly on oversize headphones while furiously scribbling notes. The only thing more boring than my travel journals, of which I have too many, is if you tried to read a journal with no words in it.

On this particular train ride, I was recounting every detail of the days that I'd just spent in Paris with two friends.

Today I slept in late. I was really tired. I wanted to go do some touristy things. I'd seen all this stuff before, but I went anyway. The Eiffel Tower is really cool.

I tend to avoid introspection, emotion, and depth in my travel journals because I only write in them as a way to itemize my journeys for posterity. You know, for when the Internet breaks. Handwritten truths are important to preserve.

At 1300 hours, I looked at my watch and took note of the fact that it was 1300 hours.

heading to marseilleI had another hour and a half on the train and about four more opportunities to repeat R. Kelly's entire discography before attempting to join a Baptist church choir, so I didn't stop writing. I talked about Notre Dame ("Tourists are wack.") and how the Louvre was closed ("Bummer. Wanted to see that headless naked sculpture.") and how I don't remember the Champs Élysées being on a mild incline ("My legs hurt. I need a nap.") I was just making sure to get it all down.

I started to write about a patisserie that I'd stopped in to grab a snack. I had seen the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe; I had strolled along the Seine and acted faux-pious outside of Notre Dame. I had written about all of these idyllic snapshots with the emotion of a fried egg without the white part. But what followed to describe one pain au chocolat took up three full pages of unbridled passion that made me write so quickly that I had to stop myself once or twice to question my own reality. I used words like "nestled" and "ooze" and "MLB Hall of Fame." I apologized to my imaginary reader for being hyperbolic and then apologized to the world in general for having allowed myself to reach such depths of delusion. I began to feel guilty. Did I really just celebrate the existence of a pastry that, when biting down on it, you could feel the butter seep out of its insides in a pool around your molars and gullet? Was it necessary to explain the relative flakiness of each layer, all of which served as "bodyguards" for the velvety dollop of chocolate nestled (told you) within the pastry's center? I was worse than I thought.

My older brother is a dick. I'm allowed to say that in writing because it's widely understood that all older brothers exhibit some variant of malevolence toward their younger siblings at one point or another. It's natural. It is the brother who does not act this way that is terrible — he's always doing creepy shit like buying his 13-year-old sister Bacardi Breezers or getting choked up at the sight of her in a prom dress: "She's grown up so fast!"

In high school (and middle school and grade school and life), my brother and I were distinctly different. He wore light-wash jeans with t-shirts promoting meaningless words on them like "TREAD" or "Let's meet at my parents' log cabin this weekend," and I shopped at thrift stores for the newest elderly-woman styles. I was into ska (don't tell anyone) and he listened to nu-metal (tell everyone). And like I said, he was a dick. Regardless, I looked up to him because he was older and I thought he was the coolest person I knew.

We fought constantly. I used to get a lot of admonition from my mom for having a really sharp tongue, and I admit, I have said some things to the both of them that would make even Jesus drop his "I'll love you no matter what" shtick. My brother, on the other hand, didn't share the same evil verboseness. He was a lot bigger and could simply put me in a "sleeper hold," which, for years, was a wrestling move that I legitimately thought he had invented. But sometimes he didn't even have to attempt strangling me to sleep to stop me from slinging vitriol. All he had to do was call me fat. And he did, often.

I can't remember when I became aware of my body and the various parts that I was expected to feel insecure about. Amazingly, it seemed that my brother already knew about them well before I had my first sobbing fit over my weight. He was openly critical of the way I looked because fat comments crippled me. I wasn't obsessed with clothes or makeup, and I knew he couldn't slander my intelligence, so telling me I was fat or had "rolls" was the only way he could guarantee my surrender. This was made worse when he would mock me in front of his friends. We were only one academic year apart so I was further humiliated to know that upperclassmen were enjoying jokes made at my expense about the size and shape of my body. I couldn't fight back — I felt too ashamed.

But it wasn't just shame, it was confusion. We were from the same gene pool; how could weight be so different for me than it was for him? Our eating habits and interest in food at that point in life were exactly the same. When my mom would make dinner — four pounds of pasta, eight loaves of garlic bread, and two apple crumbles (one in the freezer for later) — my brother and I would eat the same amount. It had never occurred to me that he ate that much because he was a "growing boy" and it was encouraged; a metric ton of pasta puttanesca was supposed to turn him into a man, according to no scientific source at all. I just loved food because all the women in my family did. Eating was associated with positive experiences — parties, holidays, vacations — in which we'd all get a chance to be together.

In the Italian-American bubble, this notion is unwavering in its importance. I am convinced that when my metabolism inevitably slows to a halt, making me gain the years of weight I've been staving off with light exercise (ultimate Frisbee), my grandmom will still tell me at Christmas that I'm not eating enough — and I'll listen. But outside the bubble, things are different.

"In a competitive eating contest, what food could you eat the most of to guarantee you'd win?" I had asked my friend this question roughly once a month for the entirety of our friendship, yet I still expected a new response each time.

"Green grapes, easily," she said.

"That's boring. And they'd expand. Or you'd feel really sick."

"Nope. It's green grapes. Always green grapes. Or toast." She didn't even look up from her laptop. "What would you eat?"

"I could eat four servings of ravioli without even trying and I could probably eat nine Mack and Manco's pizzas. I don't know, maybe scuppelles? Or another kind of doughnut?"

"Yeah, scuppelles. Those are so good. I think you could do it."

I find myself in conversations like these all the time. Someone could bring up that one Saturday last summer when we saw a giant gorilla walking down Flatbush destroying everything in its sight — even that American Apparel that I always think is a movie theater — and I'd respond: "Can you believe he stormed right past the Jamaican bakery without even grabbing a plantain tart?" My appendix could burst, forcing me into unrelenting agony that may lead to death, and I'd wonder if the hospital (or morgue) would have rum raisin ice cream for my convalescence (or funeral).

There are many people who believe they are content with their lives, as they do not want for anything. These people are wrong because they have not had my mom's lasagna. If food could be granted sainthood, my confirmation name would be "Mom's Lasagna." In my family, the offer for a second helping does not have a question mark at the end because it seriously isn't your decision. The offer is presented more as a mild threat. This was life inside the bubble — dominated by taste and satiation.

Imagine my surprise when I began to meet people who thought of eating as a scientific procedure that would provide their bodies with energy three times a day. First there were the waspy friends — a family party for them was a colossal bummer for me. Green bean casserole, a sleeve of Ritz crackers, and four stale Oreos to go around? Really? And no one would even eat, they'd just get sloshed on rosé wine and Yuengling.

After the waspy friends of my youth came the self-conscious girls of college. Beer was off-limits because it made them feel bloated and heavy; bagels were only okay on Sundays with a level-nine hangover — otherwise it was egg whites on wheat toast; and worst of all, ice cream didn't exist, which was the number two reason why going to college in New York was one of my worst ideas. The first time I heard the word "fro-yo," I thought that someone still living in their parents' basement had invented a style of yo-yoing that involved yo-yoing with your right hand while eating a FrozFruit (preferably strawberry-flavored because those are dope) with your left. When I found out that "fro-yo" was the literal representation of the death of ice cream, I nearly dropped out of college to work on a farm. With cows. To make ice cream.

Surviving wasps and college girls was nightmarish but nothing could have prepared me for the crisis I underwent when the world was introduced, for better or for worse, to the word "foodie." I was a foodie, right? I had, on several occasions, eaten an entire package of Garibaldi biscuits — my favorite British import — without even processing the fact that this wasn't culturally encouraged. For years I saw no issue with my family's pre-dinner ritual of eating a dozen or so of my mom's homemade scuppelles, an Italian raisin donut twisted into a pretzel-ish shape and coated with granulated sugar. We ate them before dinner, before even appetizers were served.

The first Thanksgiving that I brought one of my waspy friends home, I was notified by the sheer horror on her face that this wasn't standard fare. By her third Thanksgiving with us, however, she had bought into the delusion and could eat more of them than even I could. Surely, if foodie meant what I thought it meant — one who eats food — I had found the title that embodied my lifestyle.

When I was told in due time that a foodie wasn't the same as a vaguely Epicurean glutton, my life had befallen another crisis of conscience. I had no idea what Royal Galilee Osetra Caviar with l'oeuf chou-fleur, Persian cucumber, meiwa kumquats, red ribbon sorrel, and tellicherry pepper melba was. (This is an actual menu item at Per Se.) I only knew that if it was delicious, I wanted it. All of a sudden I was staring at the bottom of a jar of Nutella, wondering why my basic affection for things that taste good was beginning to feel somewhat illegitimate and in some ways, contemptible.

I moved to America when I was eight and my best friend loves to remind me that everyone in our entire grade school thought I was a weirdo, particularly her. Let the record show that the reasons I was considered freakish were 1. I was too nice and 2. I had a British accent. Children severely lack good judgment — those two things alone would get me a date with a character on Gossip Girl now, or at least that guy in my junior-year creative writing class that I lusted after endlessly. There was never any mention of the terrifying boy-short haircut my mother had given me days before my first day of school or my inability to understand what a nickel was.

Regardless, my friend was able to get over my abnormal niceness once I had lost my accent, and we became inseparable in 7th grade. Please note that she took over three years to come around. We were the Big Bird and Snuffleupagus of middle school: she was tall, blond, and thin. I was short, squat, and brunette, though I didn't have eyelashes so long that they were like curtains for my eyeballs. My eyelashes were normal.

As is the natural progression of all middle-school friendships, when her dad asked us if we'd like to go on a road trip to Branson, Missouri, we immediately said yes. Middle school was terrible so even a two-week road trip to the depths of hell would have seemed like a fun prospect during those times.

At a rest stop in Tennessee, we were starving and decided our only option was to suck it up and go to Chick-fil-A for lunch. We let her dad go ahead so that we could finish watching the end of Coyote Ugly, a favorite of ours then and now. (We had a TV in the car for some inexplicable reason.)

After ordering, we begrudgingly took seats next to her dad, who, within two hours of the trip had become our least favorite person in the entire world. He had yet to notice our attempts at completely ignoring his presence, so without heed, he began his signature yammering.

"Boy, oh boy. This trip has been fun so far. Right, girls? Gosh, seeing Graceland? That was a dream of mine. What a sight!"

"Yep," we muttered in unison.

"I cannot wait to get to Branson! You ladies will absolutely love it."

No answer.

"Well, anyway. Let's eat this grub and then hit the road again."

Exaggerated silence, petulant stares.

"Say, Dayna, it sure is nice to have you out here with us." He took a bite of his chicken sandwich and frowned. "This fast food nonsense is terrible for you." He took another bite. "But the good thing is that my kids and I can eat it no problem and we won't gain a thing. We've got such fast metabolism in our family!"

I flashed a look of Where is this going? toward my friend.

"I bet it's not the same for you, right? You eat one of these and gain five, six pounds! That's the difference. You probably have to really watch what you eat, don't you?"

That was over ten years ago but it could have been fucking yesterday. My friend did all she could to change the subject and make him shut up. She knew how hurt I was, but there wasn't much she could say to take his words back. I had suddenly become painfully aware of what I ate and how much. In my family, you ate what you wanted until you were full. There was never any question of "Will this make me gain weight?" because we didn't think weight determined character. But for the first time in my young life, this question had been raised, and it's taken years for me to finally stop answering it.

grenoble

On the day before I was set to leave for Spain, I was miserable. I had spent that morning trying to make the most of Marseille, a city that must pay off the postcard industry because it looks nothing like those blue-sky beach scenes suggest. I could send you a box full of gasoline and rotting trash, hand-delivered by a dude who will leer at your ass shamelessly, and that would paint a more accurate picture. I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible so I voluntarily got to the train station an hour early, preferring the sight of people running around with suitcases to douchebags strutting around on manmade beaches. At the station, I got into a fight with one of the attendants at the information booth. He berated me in French and I attempted to slam a glass swinging door in his face. And when I got on my train to Lyon, I spent the first hour and a half thinking that I had gotten on the wrong one. It was a disaster of Bridget Jones proportions.

The rest of the day went as follows: I arrived in Lyon's city center that looked like the Mall of America, wanted to die. Took tram to the old city, regained desire to live. Asked for directions to hostel, was told to "climb the mountain," considered murder. Saw mountain I was supposed to climb, thought of 127 Hours, nearly decided to sleep on the street. Ascended mountain with 50-pound hiking backpack, arrived at hostel, talked to woman with hemp necklace, asked for European power converter to charge phone, no dice. Took tram back to Mall of America, purchased converter, returned to mountain, crawled up mountain, realized converter I already had actually wasn't broken, saw life flash before my eyes. Washed myself in prison shower with no hot water, dressed still wet. Returned to hostel room, collapsed, hoped to be returned to maker. Said "Jesus?" out loud. No answer.

This day, had it been anywhere but France, would have really sucked. Basically, it did suck. I sincerely wish that no one ever has to climb a mountain twice, and I perpetually question the sanity of those who do. But as I lay on my hostel bed at six o'clock that evening, I felt all right. I knew that the best part of my day was still to come, so I got up, pulled myself together, and even said bon soir to the hemp necklace lady as I walked out the door and down the mountain.

Lyon is astounding. When you aren't being punched in the face by the presence of fourteen H&Ms and a Carrefour, it is a magical place to visit. The old city is so pleasant that "Little Town" from Beauty and the Beast was on constant loop in my head while I walked around. My dismay from earlier was starting to fade and I let France just do what France is good at: make my heart flutter. And the greatest part? It was dinnertime.

Dining alone, despite the lonesome-husbandless-woman implications, is one of life's greatest joys. You can spend time with your own thoughts, eat slowly and thoroughly, and what's most important is that you can order as many menu items as you want and no one is there to remind you of your family's history of high cholesterol.

I ended up exactly where I had dreamed to be on my last night in France: at a traditional Lyonnaise bouchon. Bouchons stand against a lot of what French cuisine lauds; they aren't about fussy, delicate meals — they serve traditional Lyonnaise fare made from hearty ingredients, often times including the scraps of an animal that a Parisian restaurant might toss.

I was seated at a long communal table that had a few solo diners and one couple. What followed was one of the most satisfying meals of my life. My hair was still wet from the hostel prison shower, and my clothes were an unappealing mix of three-week-unwashed hoodie and so-dirty-they're-gray jeans, but this only enhanced my experience because I felt like I was at home. Everyone in the restaurant seemed to know one another, and the kitchen was openly visible. The sous-chef meticulously chopped up an entire leg of ham, causing my waitress to startle me when she asked what I'd like to drink.

"Agh! A half carafe of house white, please." Full disclosure: I was speaking in French — pathetic and clumsy French.

"Of course." She shuffled back behind the bar and I looked around at everyone's plate. Creams, meats, hunks of fresh baguette, brown sauces, dark green mounds of vegetables, potatoes so brown, soft, and buttery that you could stuff them in your pillowcase at night to encourage sweeter, gentler dreams.

Once my wine arrived, I ordered a three-course meal. Saucisson brioché servi chaud avec lentilles vertes was my first course. To translate into what my stomach remembers, this was a wide slice of sourdough bread, toasted, with a hole cut in the middle. The hole was plugged up with a thick slice of sausage heavier than a baseball. An array of greens on the side was dressed with oil and vinegar, which slid around my plate, eagerly being absorbed by my toast. I ate slowly, and when the toast was gone, I reached for the basket of fresh baguette slices to make sure there was no meat sauce left behind.

My second course was une quenelle de brochet Artisanale en sauce Homardine. This dish was better than some boyfriends that I've had. A soufflé of creamed pike, bound by an egg, butter, and black pepper base; housed in three layers of delicate pastry; sitting in a sauce made from cream and lobster; while a bed of sautéed spinach and garlic sat beneath it all, like "Hey, surprise!" I was practically hysterical when I realized that I had finished eating. I contemplated asking if I could order another, but some sane voice inside me said that I needed to get my cholesterol checked. For the first time in my life, dessert was inconsequential. It was some sort of chocolate-cherry thing with fresh cream but come on, who fucking cares? I had just eaten sausage nestled in toast and soufflé sitting in lobster sauce. Dessert really had to sit that one out.

Leaving the bouchon to climb a mountain was near impossible for me to do. Everything that mattered about food and comfort existed inside those four walls. I was tempted to ask if I could sleep there instead of at the prison hostel on top of the mountain that was starting to seem like Shutter Island in my mind. A Shutter Island without Leonardo DiCaprio in well-tailored 50s attire.

When I got to the top for the third time that day, hemp necklace lady wasn't there. There was a crowd of travelers in the common area drinking beers and socializing, some Americans and Brits. I walked languidly passed them and straight into my room to discover that not one girl who was boarding there was currently home. Though it was unusual for a hostel, for once I had the room to myself. I repacked my bag, set an alarm, checked my e-mail, and got into bed — all before nine o'clock; I suppose mountain-climbing is actually quite exhausting. When I turned off the light and closed my eyes, I basked in the knowledge that a little wine, bread, and meat, when eaten thoughtfully in a warm place with warm people, would guarantee me a long and burdenless rest.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New Jersey. She tumbls here. You can find her twitter here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about blending in.

In Which We Do Not Belong Here

Blending In

by DAYNA EVANS

A friend once told me to “Do you” when I was having a crisis at a coffee shop. That friend, despite my sincerest intentions, is still alive today.

When I didn’t know who the rapper A$AP Rocky was, a friend ridiculed me on gchat by using italics and sideways frown faces.

I wrote this five-page entry in my journal one night and I wrote it with a pink felt-tip pen under the covers like I was hiding something from my parents. I wrote about how depressed and alone I feel sometimes.

My laptop fell from my bed one morning when I was downstairs and my parents both asked, “Did something just break in your room?” I don’t know, I shrugged, I guess. When I came upstairs and saw that it was my laptop on the ground, my left arm twitched and I picked it up, cradling it like it was a crying infant.

I frequently block people on gchat. There is truth in the sentiment that some friends are closer when they are farther away.

I was on OkCupid for a while. This guy told me I looked like a hard-partying Rashida Jones. I was shallow enough to take that as a compliment so I went out with him.

I still order hardcover books from Amazon. I know that gives a few people some laughs.

I didn’t spend last Christmas at home because I was in Thailand with three women that I’m very close with. On Christmas Eve, we made homemade raviolis and banana pudding and ate mirthfully around a fancy, solid, wooden table. I called my family, even my dad, and was full up with warmth and only a mild hint of uncertainty about what I was doing. Next year it’ll be the same again, I thought.

Another friend told me the one essential quality of being a writer is always talking about how you should be writing.

I try to keep below 10 e-mails in my e-mail inbox.

When I quit my job to move back to my parents house in New Jersey, I decided that I’d catch up on the all the stuff that I’d missed out on while being a full-time person. I took up Mad Men after I’d finished reading all the books I got for Christmas. But then I remembered what I meant by catching up was I was supposed to catch up on writing, music, decency, contentment. So I watched more Mad Men. I’m more than halfway through season three.

I have imperceptible nervous habits. I had this weird scab on my scalp for two months and I’d pick at it at work when I was writing all day and hope that no one noticed. It probably wasn’t imperceptible. In fact, I think it was highly perceptible.

I get frequent headaches from looking at my screen too much. But then I’ll spend several hours away from my screen reading a book or The New Yorker and the headaches come back.

I’ve e-mailed every single person I’ve met since I quit my job. I also wrote hundreds of letters and mailed them. I mailed my best friend, Maria, a pair of sweatpants that I own that she’s always really loved. She had just broken up with her boyfriend. I thought she probably needed them more than me. But then again, is it wrong to assume that anyone, ever, needs sweatpants?

I wear sweatpants with increasing frequency. So, I guess, I kind of do. 

I haven’t been writing at all.

This Thanksgiving, it wasn’t yet the same again. I was still far away, just in a different faraway place, but it was getting closer to what was real as I spent the holiday with Maria and her family. I made Italian doughnuts and we drank wine. It was a small affair with only me, another friend, three sisters, and two parents, but it need not have been any bigger. Maria tried on a pair of my jeans and noted, “Your hips are bigger than mine.” I learned later that her dad appreciated my sense of humor at the dinner table, and I felt like I was really a part of their family.

I go running a lot. I run on a treadmill because it’s cold outside. I run on a treadmill because I can watch Netflix on my stepdad’s iPad and that keeps me going the extra 5 minutes that listening to shitty trap music through my headphones wouldn’t. When I lived in L.A., I ran outside, which, like, whatever.

I went to 7 art museums in a month. I didn’t cry in any of them. I saw a cast of The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin that I hadn’t seen since I was a senior in high school and I tried to remember what it was like to be a senior in high school looking at The Gates of Hell. I know that I was definitely smarter then and I was wearing a sweater I bought at Retrospect, a thrift store that used to be on South Street in Philly. It had small rows of colorful flowers all around it. Retrospect is closed now, which I guess in a lot of ways is ironic or obvious or sad.

I am reading a book that I hate. I can’t stop reading it, though, because I’m really stubborn.

My friend told me I was good at blending in, which made me a better writer. I went to a party with very accomplished people and felt very noticeable, but not in the way that Joan is on Mad Men. The way that is like, “Who is that and who invited her? Is she a substitute teacher at an elementary school?”

I have a Moleskine daily calendar that I write in with felt-tip pens. So do you. (I’m just guessing.) (But I’m right.)

Someone wrote an entire blog post about why iTunes 11.0.1 sucks. I didn’t even read it, I just skimmed the funny memes they’d used to color the story.

Last week, I went through my inbox and printed out every .doc that my friends had sent me over the past few months — screenplays, short stories, memoirs. I printed them out and got in bed in my sweatpants and read through them with my laptop shut down. I couldn’t pay attention, though, my parents were watching Downton Abbey quite loudly.

But then when my parents weren’t home, I tried again. I sent back some very sincere feedback.

Everything you do, ever, is an indictment against yourself. That’s why I mailed Maria those sweatpants. I thought that was the closest I’d get to authenticity. It’s one of those things that you do because you are feeling like a good person, but I think I blew it because the whole point is to not tell anyone you did it. No good deed is truly selfless and all that.

I am supposed to move back to New York soon. I’m very concerned.

This year, when I finally made it home, my aunt made fried calamari for our Christmas Eve dinner. It was salty and soft. My mom, her sisters, her mother, and me all stood around the kitchen island at the end of the night picking at it with our fingers from an aluminum cooking tray, which made our hands greasy and made it hard to keep track of how much we were eating. We were all wearing a variant on a red tone and laughing with our mouths full, unwieldy. I think that’s what it is to feel something.

I follow, like, a hundred art blogs on Tumblr.

I just checked. I follow 8.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New Jersey. She last wrote in these pages about the Illiad. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here.

Images by Aaron Morse.

"White Michael Jordan"  - Eminem (mp3)

"When I Rhyme" - Eminem (mp3)

In Which We Fall At An Inopportune Time

At Iliam

by DAYNA EVANS

There is a room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art that houses ten Cy Twombly drawings in a series called “Fifty Days At Iliam.” Cy Twombly is dead now, which is a shame because he is irrefutably one of the most precious creators to ever have existed.

The room is set off to the corner like a restroom, so you must access it with determination or by accident, perhaps while looking for the restroom. But once you are in, it is just the one room, and in order to exit, you must go back the way you came. This is all weird because it feels like you’re in someone’s bedroom or studio apartment but without all the furniture. Just some art.

The series is a visual representation of the Illiad, which I told my father, is an epic poem by Homer.

“Have you heard of it?” I asked, while I drove, not looking at him.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Have you read it? You know, maybe in high school or whenever?” I asked, this time shifting my eyes slightly to the right. He had his hands in his lap, one cupping the other as if he were holding a dying gull or a pool of water that he didn’t want to spill. His knees were together, slightly turned inwards.

“I don’t think so,” he said, looking ahead at the road. “Maybe a really long time ago.”

“Oh, it’s not that great anyway. You’ll like the drawings more than the poem, I’m sure of it.” This time I turned to look at him briefly, smiling an unsympathetic smile, and then back on the road. The rain was picking up. I turned on my wipers.

“Are you at least excited to go to the museum?” I asked.

“Sure am,” he said. “But maybe we could stop and get me a handful of crackers first. I feel a little carsick.”

I didn’t know of anywhere to pick up only a handful of crackers. I kept driving down the turnpike hoping for a reprieve, a shallow anchor.

+

Off the highway and into the city, I felt a clicking beneath my canvas shoe, the one that rested off the brakes. It felt like something was stuck below the car’s anatomy, dragging along into the city like a noisy and irresponsible stowaway. I pressed my foot into the sound and it stopped. When I lifted my foot to listen again, nothing happened and the sound was gone.

“How did you ever get your driver’s license?” he grunted. “You don’t even use your turning signal!”

We parked in the lot that lays right out in front of the museum like a wet tarmac red carpet. It was $10, I paid the attendant, and when the car was turned off, I looked over at my father and felt something so close to pity, but that really registered as distaste. His face hadn’t changed the entire drive to the city—a full hour of unrestrained frowning, chiseled so deeply and with such genuine conviction that, as I thought about it, I couldn’t remember his face without the downturned lines. He reached down to adjust a shoelace, and then said, “Well?”

“Mm,” I said. “Let’s go.”

+

The very first time that my father was given his court-ordered permission to take my brother and I for the customary weekend visit, a very bad thing happened and I ended up in the hospital. I was four and blonde, still oppressively innocent and cherubic, but smarter than I am even now. I refused to speak until I turned five, a consequence of what my mother tells me was my rigid need to “observe.” Talking got in the way of commitment to perception. I was observing what a mistake everything was.

A cousin, several years older, had flung me through a glass table in a game that I couldn’t win. I cut my elbow badly. In the car to the hospital, I didn’t cry because my dad told me not to.

“It’s all right, sweetheart,” he looked back at me, blonde head now speckled with crusts of my own blood that had dried. “You’ll be fine, angel.” My brother, a year older, rode in the front seat. He stared straight forward and never said a word to me, too afraid that whatever he said would make me talk.

When I was in the hospital room, they drugged me with baby drugs and stitched me up with four stitches to stop the blood. It was a rich, unforgiving, mottled red.

My mother wanted to kill him.

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Cy Twombly met Robert Rauschenberg when he moved to New York City and the two of them became rather chummy. It is rumored that they were lovers, and when they were given a grant by the Richmond Museum of Fine Arts, the pair traveled the world together collecting artifacts and romantically imagining cultures outside their own. The thought of that companionship nearly takes my breath away. If death were a measurement of skill and ingenuity, it let the wrong artist get buried first.

There aren’t any biographies on Cy Twombly, but there are at least a dozen coffee table books because his art looks spectacular when it’s strewn across sheets of glass that lay low to the floor and that make everyone under a certain tax bracket feel incredibly nervous when you’re over for espresso and wheat berry scones. Sadly, those people don’t really even get Cy Twombly. Not the way I do.

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The rain was really pelting, so I changed into rainboots before I got out of the car, twisting and turning and throwing things overhead and behind me. Without explanation, my dad had gotten out, put on a khaki bucket hat with fishing wire tied around the rim, and stood there, waiting for me. He was soaking.

“Dad, get back in the car,” I yelled through the closed window, feeling selfish enough to want to stay dry while he got consistently wetter. “Dad! In the car!”

He didn’t even look in my direction. He zipped up his windbreaker and continued to get wet.

The sky in Philadelphia was turning a dim black and as we walked up the several flights of iconic steps that lead to the entrance of the museum, a very bad thing happened, and I tried to look away.

“Ma’am, are you all right?” my dad rumbled loudly toward the woman who had slipped, reaching his hand down in a gallant gesture that I’d never before seen him do. She lay, moaning, on her back, every raindrop pounding down on her face, body, hands, and her neck, which fell slackly back like Jesus of the Pietà. She didn’t respond, only gaped her mouth as wide open as it would go, drinking in the water like a pup. Water to wine. Water to wine.

“Let me help you up,” he yelled; the wind was picking up around him, and the first thing to fly off was the bucket hat with the fishing wire. He didn’t even grab after it, his focus so singular as to not have noticed. My position, several steps above both of them, was regal, political. I kept a severe distance. No hand in the fray, as much a Queen Elizabeth as a Pontius Pilate.

A crowd was beginning to form near the woman, closing in as well around my father, his long arm still reaching down, stretching, dripping, intense and tight. His position barely shifted as the others endeavored to help her. The weight of the crush rendered him to stone from my perch above. My father, one form of the Three Shades.

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There are less than four reputable biographies on Auguste Rodin on the website Amazon.com. It seems this is due to people’s belief that artists’ work should speak for itself in the form of ninety-pound hardback books with inordinate and impractical trim sizes. But all I want to know is what Rodin was feeling when he sculpted the Gates of Hell. I’ve felt curious about Dante’s feelings while writing The Inferno. Both men must have struggled with such dark, unmoored obsessions.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently decided to exhibit several of Cy Twombly’s finished sculptures, of which none look like they are inspired by Rodin. They are rough, spackled, plain, and every bit as white as his most chaotic drawings aren’t. I find these sculptures heartbreaking because every sculptor should be inspired by Rodin at least a little bit.

When Twombly visited France for the first time in the mid-50s, he wore pressed gray slacks, a blue linen button-down with the sleeves rolled up, and navy suspenders. His clothes were never speckled with paint like other artists’ were because he took very meticulous care of his workspace, always wearing an apron over his clothes, and occasionally he’d tie shorn scraps of muslin around his brown loafers with rudimentary twine or elastics. In France, he beamed in photographs, but the draw to Italy was magnificently strong, where the sculptures were whiter than bleached farina and smooth like warmed milk.

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My father had given up on the woman once authorities arrived. Within a terrifying, short instant, he was upright again, walking toward me, and my face, as grim as ever, watched him through two gray stones. Somehow there was light behind his green eyes, which I had never cared to notice were green. He blinked and they were black again.

“I’m soaked through,” he said to me from one step below.

“Yes. You looked awfully heroic, though.”

“I still feel carsick. That woman’s probably going to be in a bad way for a good while.”

The rain hadn’t stopped and I really hated getting wet and I found it impossible that my dad didn’t mind the weather.

“Can we go inside now?” he asked, and I was sure he meant it, though only because it was inside, and not necessarily because of what that inside was. We walked next to each other taking the steps slowly, aware more than ever of the danger a little water and concrete can befall upon you.

The museum felt wet and echoey, like the inside of a near-empty white vinegar bottle. I inhaled and walked forward, not certain that today was the day to step into the white room with the ten drawings that felt like a studio apartment without the coffee table and the coffee table books.

“What do you want to see first?” I asked my dad as he stripped off his cobalt windbreaker, shaking it without discretion all over the cerise hall rug, stained here and there with tourists’ accidents and curators’ coffee slips.

“The café. I’d like to grab a handful of crackers. I feel rather carsick.” Water to wine and back again.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about not lust. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here.

"Milk and Black Spiders" - Foals (mp3)

"Late Night" - Foals (mp3)