SEEING AND BEING SEEN by Barbara Browning

SEEING AND BEING SEEN

BARBARA BROWNING

A few years ago, I received an email from a woman saying she was publishing a memoir in which I appeared and she wanted to run the passages by me to see if I was okay with them. I’d met her nearly 30 years earlier when we were both young American students living in Brazil. After a few months, she went north to another city and we lost touch. When she wrote me after all those years, she said she thought my depiction in her book was fattering, but that she’d be happy to show me the manuscript if I had concerns. I said I empathized because I often wrote about real people and felt compelled to show them what I’d written, even if it was presented as fction. I said it certainly didn’t sound like anything I’d be discomfted by but that I’d be happy to look at the page(s) in question if it would make her feel more relaxed.

It was, indeed, a fattering portrait. I told her I felt I owed her, as the saying goes, a million dollars and a lap dance. She said, among other things, that I was “small, maybe 5’5”” (I’m 5’4”) and that I was exquisitely beautiful. She said I looked like “a young Vivien Leigh.” I told her that either due to fawed memory or poetic license she’d given me an extra inch of height and an incalculable exaggeration in the beauty department. She asked me if I wanted her to correct my height. I said, “Don’t take away my extra inch! I was so enjoying it!”

Tere were a couple of other odd details that might be read as less than fattering, depending on your perspective. She frst encountered me wearing a denim mini-skirt and a Che Guevara T-shirt which, as she correctly intuited, was not a particularly well-formulated political statement on my part but a fashion choice.

She also seemed to remember that all I ever ate was fried yucca and sausage, gleefully, with the grease coating my fngers and lips. I like the idea of this, but I’m pretty sure she also exaggerated there as well. (Maybe she was confating me with Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind: “Fiddle-dee-dee! Ashley Wilkes told me he likes to see a girl with a healthy appetite!”) Either way, the experience of reading this text was certainly uncanny — though almost entirely pleasurable! I don’t know if the fact that it was “nonfction” made it more of a pleasure. It was very well written.

Shortly after I received this email, I got a note in my departmental mailbox from a wonderful graduate student of mine. I’d given her a copy of the manuscript of the novel I was writing at the time. I told her that there was a character in the novel that was inspired by her. While I’d incorporated several real people into this book in recognizable forms, I felt it was inappropriate for me to do that with a student, even though I considered her in every other way a peer. I wanted her to know, however, that she had inspired me, and also that if there was anything in the character that made her uncomfortable, I’d be glad to change or delete it.

My student’s note was lovely, generous, and lyrical. We’d spoken briefy when I handed her the manuscript about what it means to encounter someone else’s perception of you. Since both she and I are performers (I am a dancer and she a conceptual artist who often uses her own body as her artistic medium), we were certainly aware of, on occasion, being looked at, and we’d both enjoyed and endured critical assessments of our art. But of course, someone’s depiction of you when you’re ostensibly not performing is quite another thing.

I’d changed a number of signifcant details about her. For one thing, in “real” life, she was Jewish, while my character was Chinese American. My character, Fang Li, was in my mind and in that of my narrator a charming person of intelligence, integrity, and sly humor, but also of great gentleness. In all of these respects she was inspired by my student, though a couple of her personal accoutrements were lifted from other friends.

In my novel, the narrator’s elderly neighbor comments that Fang is “cute, vewy cute.” Te narrator confrms this, but suspects that the neighbor may not have gotten close enough to notice the more unconventional aspects of Fang’s appearance: she was covered in “scrumbling,” free-form crocheted accessories made of fbrous organic materials like shredded banana peels that would start to smell a little funny after a while; a bracelet made of hardened goose shit; a pierced septum, in which she wears a ring that always recalls, for the narrator, that Edward Lear poem, “Te Owl and the Pussycat,” in which the unlikely newlyweds have to travel very far in a boat in order to fnd a ring, and they get it from a pig who’s wearing it in his nose.

Te scrumbling was, truth be told, a habit of mine, though I had the impression that my student did add decorations of her own devising to her boots. But neither she nor I actually used decaying vegetable matter (that was poetic license). I had an eccentric hippie poet friend years ago who wore a bracelet made of dried goose poop (it had no smell whatsoever). Te bit about Fang’s pierced septum was actually borrowed from another student I adore. When I frst met her, this punk rock detail made her very youthful, pretty, dimpled face seem all the more innocent —but indeed, every time I saw her I remembered that little ditty about the owl and the pussycat, and the wedding ring they took out of a pig’s nose. (She later removed it.)

What did my student think about these details of her depiction? She did mention them. She referred to them as the “grotesque” aspects of Fang when you got up close. She said she liked them. She told a beautiful anecdote of her own about a delicate young girl she’d once known who wore some bird bones that gave her a slightly sickly sweet taxidermy scent that she found profoundly melancholy. She professed not to be ofended by my description, but moved. She didn’t say anything about another detail from my manuscript — that Fang eats a lot of hot dogs. Tat was also poetic license. I can only hope it pleased her as I was pleased by my own greasy lips and fngers in that woman’s memoir.

Te elderly neighbor in the novel was also based on a real person. After I included her in my novel, my neighbor and I actually became pretty intimate, until she needed to be placed in assisted living. She was very old and we both thought she would soon die. She told me so before she left. Understandably, she didn’t want to be alone, so she took to knocking a lot on my door. She would also hang out in the lobby of our building for hours at a time. Te one thing my neighbor seemed to fnd very disappointing about me was that I wasn’t Jewish. She kept calling me Judy, as if that might change things.

We see each other the way we need to see each other. When I told the memoirist not to take away my extra inch, she sweetly responded, “Your stature is undiminished, now and always!” But of course, I’ll probably shrink — I’m probably already shrinking — and I was never really 5’5”. We must know we’re being misperceived, and we may even know we’re misperceiving, but this doesn’t mean we aren’t seeing each other, appreciating our charms.

Sometimes I think that fction is a way of keeping death at bay. Sometimes I think it’s a way of coming to terms with it. It’s also a way of coming to terms with the almost unbearable pleasure of being so alive — Fang’s voracious appetite for hot dogs, or what the memoirist confgured in my greasy lips and fngertips. Tomorrow, for now, is another day.