Mary, Mary

 Mary Wesley is on my mind as I wake up, nine books in a rapid row and then she said she had nothing more. She used her own life cannibalistically, but shrouded it in plot and character. Her life was her material.

I’m approaching the age when she began to write as a serious business. Her children were grown, many of the men she had loved were dead, so were her parents. She was estranged from her sister, and her good female friends were not the sort to care if they found their scandals revealed in a novel.

She was knitting sweaters to keep herself alive until she found that books would do that and much more lavishly too. She had learned to be frugal, and her children were provided for by her first husband’s estate so she became generous toward people of straitened circumstances, whether she was close to them or not. Her papers were filled with letters of gratitude, waiting for her biographer to find after she died.

She was beautiful to the last, more and more as she aged. She was described as small and finely drawn when she grew old and she indulged herself with cashmere and silk and good shoes, as soon as she was able to afford them. She loved a broad brim on a black hat and was photographed frequently in profile, displaying a firm little chin well into her old age.

Robert Bolt loved her enough to leave Sarah Miles for her, until he found that Mary was no longer the marrying kind but a woman who refused to submerge her own talents in the more demanding ones of a husband, a state that she knew far too well. He was twelve years younger than she but that wasn’t the problem. In her eighties, Mary flirted outrageously with a lover of a woman who was her age; the man was twenty years younger than either of them. She pouted later that she wanted a young man too.

She and her best friend were predators when they were young. “They hunted in pairs,” a man who had lived to tell the tale observed, and a photo of the two of them, sprawled full-length on a lawn surrounded by men and looking triumphant, bears witness to that statement.

She was often photographed in a two-piece bathing suit that bore little resemblance to a bikini but was ragingly daring in the 30s, with its bared midriff. Her figure looks almost statuesque with long legs; although Mary was a tiny woman, she had great presence and style. A photo of her after a court presentation, dressed in the robes of a peeress and holding a cigarette, her husband clipped out of the picture, just about sums her up.

It never occurred to her not to be a householder, in true British fashion. She was rooted in England and having her life flower under two world wars certainly did a lot to keep her that way. At least twice her second husband was given good jobs in Europe, and once Mary joined him there, in Berlin. But his mad first wife destroyed his career and that was the beginning of near-poverty and the death of travel.

She was desperately poor after that husband committed suicide. She had been keeping the household going until his death and then she fell ill. She had put her Dartmoor cottage up for sale and a prospective buyer found her there in bed, a sixty-nine-year-old woman who was too ill to speak, alone in a perishingly cold house. Unable to speak, she waved him on in his exploration. Instead he stopped and saved her life. “Double pneumonia” a doctor diagnosed and she was helpless with it for three weeks.

That improbable rescue was only one event in an eventful life that had to be tempered into credibility if it were to be put into fiction. Ten novels, all wicked fun except for the last which was dark and vicious. Then she stopped writing, having perhaps found layers that she no longer wanted to publicly explore, and died a woman who entered a whole new phase of being alive in her seventies, one that was of her choosing and that used her talent to the hilt.

Shopping, Twentieth Century Style

 Here is how far my world has sunk. I went shopping at Bellevue Square and survived. Not only that, but I almost enjoyed it.

My kind of shopping is more like hunting for food. It’s focused and purposeful. The last time I did it was when I was on a quest for shoes, which took me on a fruitless tour of downtown stores and finally to Anderson Shoes, a venerable institution that's surrounded by hospitals and caters to nurses who need useful footwear. Eureka--I came home with the ugliest and most comfortable sandals that have ever been on my feet.

This time was an even more utilitarian search--all-cotton underpants. I usually buy these in Bangkok but my last trip was too emotionally fraught to accomplish this. The synthetic fibers in the underwear I found in a Hong Kong street market finally did exactly what had made me turn from them many years ago and I needed granny panties.

What I found in the handful of stores still left in downtown Seattle were polyester and spandex, occasionally blended with cotton. A more upscale alternative was cotton and bamboo--after all, if bamboo works for toilet paper why not underwear? There were alluring little scraps of what was supposed to look like silk and used to be found only in Victoria’s Secret, and many derivatives of Spanx that looked like a slightly tweaked version of the panty girdle that we all wore in the days before pantyhose were invented. 

I came home drenched in gloom and went online, purely for investigative purposes, in search of stores that would have what I wanted. The internet produced several possibilities, all in stores that had abandoned downtown and were now only found in malls.

In Seattle malls are gone, except for one that’s a depressingly long bus ride away. However Bellevue, once a bedroom community for people of means that’s now becoming a city for tech workers, has a stunning assortment of them and was only a swift bus trip away. It’s a weird place where malls are staples and buildings look as if they’d just survived a neutron bomb, pristine and apparently without human life. The streets are quellingly empty and on my few forays into this place, I’ve come home feeling very tired, all of my energy drained away.

This time I wasn’t a tourist. I had a good reason to be there so I entered the closest mall with a strong sense of purpose. Ignoring everything that usually set my teeth on edge, I began my trudge toward the stores that supposedly had what I needed. Unfortunately this place was too upscale for them and I knew I didn’t have the strength to search for where they might be hiding. Instead I plunged into stores I usually never enter, ones that left Seattle in 2020, apparently never to return.

None of them had what I was looking for and I began to think of buying men’s shorts and be done with it. But on every floor of this mall was a place that I thought was dead and buried. In separate pieces but still attracting shoppers was Macy’s.

My experience with Macy’s has always been on West 34th Street and I accepted no substitutes--until now. In the segment that held women’s clothing, I headed for what Macy’s calls Intimate Apparel. In the company of two other women who looked as though they might be older than I am, I searched through racks of underwear and then--at last--I found packages of Jockey underpants that proudly asserted what they held was made only of cotton.

Imbued with a sense of victory, I clutched my quarry and began to hunt for the closest exit. When this took me to Macy’s Housewares section, I saw a little blender at a price I could afford and in a burst of serendipity I bought that too. When I began to look at pillows, sanity prevailed and I went off to find the bus that would take me home.

I’ll never be a mall walker, although I certainly covered a lot of ground when I was in this one. I’ll never wander through one as a window-shopper. But if I have to make a choice between buying online or going to Bellevue, there’s no question. I’ll vote with my feet.

The Morning After

 

Nobody has solid figures on how many people filled the Seattle Center’s 74 acres yesterday. The Seattle Times, with its usual arrow-sharp reporting, says “thousands.” The organizers of the rally said 7,000 people had registered for it. I was there half an hour before it was scheduled to begin and the grounds were already packed solid. 

It invigorated some. It depressed me. The signs made it clear how many parts of our democracy have been violated since January 20th and the massive crowd pointed out our impotence. Half of the country could mobilize the same numbers on the opposite side with the same passionate fervor--and they’re the ones who control our government. 

Our numbers yesterday accomplished nothing. Milling around in a city park, carrying signs--it was Protest Lite. We could have shut down the city if we’d marched through downtown. Instead we showed off our clever signs and tried to hear the speakers who were kneecapped by a lousy sound system. 

At best this felt like going to church. At worst it seemed like performance art. Do you feel better than you did on April 4th? Not me.

Maybe I’m a jaundiced old woman and maybe I’m still reeling from the effects of a wild case of claustrophobia. Maybe I’m pierced by the fear that even when our economy goes into the garbage disposal and Russia is our only ally in the world, the other side will cling to the lies that they’re fed every day and blame it all on Biden.

This morning’s headlines from the BBC and the New York Times report that a federal judge’s order to return a man who was deported without cause is being ignored by the White House and that a third Presidential term is gaining plausibility. What might have been millions of people across our country who turned out against these issues and far too many others is only a sideshow.

To cry or to vomit? That is the question.

Cherry Blossom Revival

 “It’s a cliche,” I kept telling myself, “the cherry blossom viewing at UW doesn’t even belong to this country. We stole it from Japan.” Yes, I went there with my family on our trips from Alaska, but that was when we were tourists. It’s the equivalent to going to the top of the Empire State Building.

But here’s where social media comes into its reason to live. There are few non-political posts on my pages and I’m hungry for splashes of joy, wherever they may be found. When cherry blossom photos began to appear, I was glad to see them and when a sunny day appeared, I set off to look at blossoms.

The University of Washington campus apparently isn’t confusing only to me and reassuring signs giving directions to the trees had been placed along the way. Suddenly a cloud of pale pink appeared and soon I was immersed in flowering trees.

There were many of them, forming avenues along narrow paths that were filled with people, with their babies, with their dogs, and everyone with some sort of camera. One girl wore a full-skirted pink dress, looking like a human cherry blossom, while others wore kimono and variants that looked more like cosplay than Japan. 

What struck me and went straight into my spirit was that all of us were there for only one purpose, to revel in beauty. We weren’t only soaking up the perfection that came from thousands of petals, we were being saturated with happiness.

I came home feeling as if I’d gone through detox and that feeling is still with me this morning. After being under the trees, I stopped at the University Book Store and had a brief and delightful conversation with Brad Craft, in which politics never arose. I came home with two books that I hadn’t expected to find and my dreams last night were full of a chaotic sense of excitement and discovery.

I’ve been killing off my vagus nerve, that integral part of the body that’s nourished by communion with living beings. After being fed yesterday, it’s clamoring for more today--and damn it all, if it finds sustenance in tourist experiences, then I say bring them on. 

Discovery and random moments with strangers--these may be small adventures but without them I was beginning to shrivel. Ferry rides, festivals, farmers’ markets--whatever it takes to bring joy back as a staple, sign me up. I've been mourning the lack of a revolution when what I really needed was a revival.