The primary time I noticed the watch was not in actual life however in a portray, a self-portrait.
In it, my grandmother wears a crisp white shirt, collar popped up, tucked into an identical full skirt. She’s standing in entrance of a marble fire decked with ivy. Her face is in three-quarter profile, and he or she’s carrying her cat-eye eyeglasses. Her arms are crossed and considered one of her pinkie fingers is barely raised. The impact is considerably regal; I think about this was intentional. She’s carrying a number of items of knickknack within the picture, all of them small, all of them gold. On the heart of the canvas, proper the place her arms are crossed, is the watch. I feel this placement was intentional too.
I by no means thought in regards to the watch once more till in the future I noticed it was in my possession. I can’t keep in mind if she gave it to me or if I obtained it after she died. I have a look at it now — it’s sitting on my desk as I write. It casts an odd sort of spell over me. It looks like a talisman, a bodily emblem of somebody I cherished very deeply who’s not right here to inform me why she positioned the watch on the heart of her most achieved self-portrait (she painted lots of them). It appears to be like like a really stunning bracelet; the watch’s face is small, the identical width as its gold hyperlinks. Utilizing the tip of a sharpened pencil, I delicately push the minute hand of the watch round in a circle, although the hour hand is unmovable, completely pointing at 11 o’clock. I’m wondering when it was — what number of years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds in the past — that the watch stopped. As I push the minute hand forwards and backwards, it looks like I’m rewinding time, again to the early Nineteen Sixties when the portrait was made, then fast-forwarding it to now.
My grandmother and I have been very related. We each possessed a aptitude for the dramatic, a love of cinema, and a voluptuous want to be as a lot of ourselves as we might be. In her early 30s, she determined to change into knowledgeable ballet dancer, and joined an organization not lengthy after. Preferring her personal designs, she sewed all her personal tutus (and lots of of her personal garments). In some unspecified time in the future she determined to review portray, and spent 60 years making portraits, self-portraits and nonetheless lifes. She was eternally reinventing herself, including new layers of who she was to the previous ones.
Individuals appear to assume that clothes is the most effective (or not less than most conspicuous) illustration of our personalities, of who we wish to be. However it’s truly the jewellery we put on that the majority typically speaks to who we expect we’re, and whom we costume accordingly. We are likely to put on the identical jewellery — equivalent to a watch or marriage ceremony ring — or the identical kind of knickknack — beaded bracelets or chain necklaces — day-after-day, whereas we alter our garments typically a number of occasions a day. Something that adorns us every day begins, finally, to outline us. It turns into an emblem.
I personal almost all of my grandmother’s jewellery now. And whereas I don’t essentially put on a lot of it every day, her jewellery has change into a part of who I feel I’m.
Practically day-after-day for the final 16 years, I’ve worn a silver ring and matching bracelet that my mom gave me. They’re very distinctive, even peculiar: heavy silver formed by a mildew that appears unsettlingly biomorphic, form of like a prehistoric fossil. When folks touch upon them, I typically can’t inform if it’s out of admiration or a imprecise but inquisitive repulsion. I like one thing about this ambiguity. I couldn’t let you know why I began carrying them each single day 16 years in the past. However by now, a part of the reason being that it feels comforting, even calming, to know that no matter else I dress myself in — actually in addition to figuratively — the ring and bracelet and their flickering strangeness will at all times be a characteristic of it. It’s as if they anchor some a part of me whereas the remaining fluctuates within the hurricane-force winds of every day life.
Perhaps that’s what that watch did for my grandmother too. Perhaps she felt that if she wore it usually sufficient, she might depend on being the identical particular person she noticed within the mirror day-after-day. She amassed all types of knickknack through the years — Italian “cocktail rings” (named for his or her eye-catching enchantment whereas the wearer sips her cocktail) set with massive pink corals; Bakelite bangles and chains; chokers adorned with pink porcelain bows; a big brass pendant within the form of a fish with glistening onyx eyes. As soon as at a style present, I used to be approached by a lady who noticed my monumental floral necklace (my grandmother’s) from throughout the room and got here as much as inform me its storied provenance (I’ve forgotten it). I personal almost all of her jewellery now. And whereas I don’t essentially put on a lot of it every day, her jewellery has change into a part of who I feel I’m.
I gaze on the watch and determine to place it on my wrist. I think about the mundane actions my grandmother made whereas carrying it way back. I see her studying the newspaper, knocking on somebody’s door, or elevating her hand to protect her face from the solar. This watch I put on was as soon as wrapped round her arm, as soon as touched her pores and skin. It makes me take into consideration who I’m, particularly as I get older, as I change into each extra attuned to and confounded by who it’s I feel I’m. Perhaps I want to color a self-portrait too. I really feel the cool metallic on my arm, and for a fraction of a second, it nearly looks as if I’m my grandmother’s arm, that the pores and skin I see beneath the dented gold hyperlinks will not be mine, however hers. It’s as if this object has change into an enchanted amulet that has introduced me concurrently again into the previous, her previous, and ahead into the long run, my future.
I incessantly consider who my grandmother was to me, however much less incessantly do I consider who she was to herself.
As I write these phrases, I hear her voice. I cherished her smooth, New Orleanian accent, however what made it significantly particular and totally distinctive was a wierd affectation that she adopted so completely and for thus lengthy that it grew to become a part of who she was. My grandfather labored within the movie enterprise beginning within the Thirties, however even earlier than they married, my grandmother was obsessive about films. On the time, American actors have been inspired by manufacturing studios to sound extra subtle by talking with a “Mid-Atlantic” accent, which blended components of British and American pronunciation. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn spoke with this accent; so did my grandmother. I think about it had much less to do with impressing folks than it did with a love of pretending, costuming and self-adornment — a love of turning into another person.
She discovered different cinema-related technique of conducting this effort. When she was a really younger lady, my grandmother was a useless ringer for a well-known actor named Myrna Loy. Individuals would cease her on the road and ask for her autograph, mistaking her for Loy. She would cease and smile graciously, and signal her autograph — however together with her personal title, not Loy’s. The starstruck admirer would invariably change into irate and storm off. I can see my grandmother standing there on the road laughing to herself, the gold watch glowing within the scorching solar.
The lady within the self-portrait is totally somebody who spoke with an assumed accent and occasionally half-pretended to be a well-known actor. The ironic factor is that these affectations made her, one way or the other, extra authentically herself. And the jewellery she wore, together with the watch, was a part of it. She saved seeing prospects for who she might be in all of the items she collected through the years.
My grandmother and I have been shut, however I’ve a wierd want that I might have identified her lengthy earlier than I used to be born. I want the very younger girls we each as soon as have been had gotten to fulfill one another. They might have been quick associates.
I typically ask myself whether or not it was, partly, my grandmother’s affect that led me into the position of a author, a calling that necessitates the power to conjure a personality in your thoughts, then costume that character into life on the web page.
I look once more on the watch on my wrist. I’ve worn watches earlier than, lots of them, although not persistently. What sort of an individual wears a watch? Definitely one who needs the power of realizing the time. However there’s extra to it than that. It additionally has to do with subscribing to the thought of being an individual who wears a watch. Some folks put on watches to seem conscientious, skilled; to others, it alerts standing or status. For the literary circles I journey in, I typically surprise if watch-wearers assume it makes them look extra mental, scholarly. It’s not that anybody who needs the looks of such qualities can’t additionally actually embody them. Perhaps a watch is just the right instance of how each element of our look is a shifting mixture of each intention and intuition.
The concept that I subscribe to, each consciously and never, after I put on my grandmother’s watch, is the concept in the future I’ll know who I’m. After I consider her Mid-Atlantic accent, her ballet profession, her tutus, her cat-eye-frame eyeglasses, her work, that raised pinkie finger — briefly, all of the issues that mix to create the picture of her character that exists in my thoughts — I’m wondering at what we regularly name the “superficiality” of appearances. I wonder if they’re superficial in any respect. “It is just shallow individuals who don’t decide by appearances,” wrote Oscar Wilde in “The Image of Dorian Grey.” “The true thriller of the world is the seen, not the invisible.” Perhaps the particular person my grandmother was pretending to be, in the long run, was herself. And thru that self, I journey towards my very own too.
Eugenie Dalland is a author and editor based mostly in upstate New York. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Assessment of Books and the Brooklyn Rail. She co-founded and printed the humanities and tradition journal Riot of Fragrance from 2011 to 2019.
