The Shame (excerpt)
Even though I was wary of the internet, I gave myself a pass on Celeste. I was just a writer doing research. I was exploring a theory, and she was theoretical. But it was so easy in seconds here and there to look at my phone and dip into a world that was overflowing with material. I could scroll through thirty of Celeste’s photos while counting slowly to twenty, the kids looking for hiding spots in our endless game of hide-and-seek. Of course, Asa had no knowledge of Celeste or of my interest in her, and I hoped it would remain that way. When he talked with me about my writing, I spoke in broad terms, hiding behind the abstractions of the creative process.
But when I spent time with Celeste in her story, and then with Celeste in my story, it became more than just research. Her lens on the world was a little like looking in a mirror, like seeing the possibilities of my own life. There were differences, to be sure--her hair was longer and loose, mine was thicker. But I could see that our facial construction was similar, the tone of our skin, the way our hair parted slightly to one side, the rounding line of our lips, how our eyebrows didn’t quite reach all the way across the eye. We both cooked with excessive garlic; we both loved jazz; even our window curtains were a similar style, Indian cutout appliqué. The more I thought about it, the more it was true: I looked at her life and there I was, kayaking down a river in Utah; getting my hair cut at a salon lined with walls of mirrors; holding a rabbit in a surf shop in the Rockaways; about to take a bite of a sandwich while waiting for the subway; supporting the more progressive presidential candidate; relaxing after a workout; quoting some saying about loving oneself.
But in her version of life there was no darkness. And in the liminal space of counterpart, I began to weigh myself against her constantly. I anticipated her updates, and when they finally appeared, I analyzed them. And while she made me feel less lonely and less bored, I was also less happy. I was held fast in her moments. Time was measured not in minutes or hours but in the period between her publications. I would swell when she suggested I try out a new bar in Dumbo, even though I would likely never go there. Just reading about it made me feel like I was doing it, or would do it at some future date, and I could imagine myself on the stool next to her, laughing about something, eating olives.
I found myself drawn to her in other ways, ones that affected me physically. That aroused me. Maybe not sexually, or, if so, I never acted on the impulses directly, other than the moments when I saw her doing things that in reality Asa was doing on top of me. But I was also a respectable person. I cleaned, I was present with my kids, I organized their toys, I took them for hikes, I supported my husband, I wrote comments on his essays, I made dinner.
When I was really honest with myself, this much was true: I fixated predominantly on Celeste’s beauty. I wanted to solicit someone’s opinion. I wanted to take a photo of myself, put it next to a photo of Celeste, and ask who was more impressive, more attractive, more authentic, and have the answer be “You.” One day I got my wish. Phin caught me looking at her photos--Celeste was frying up steaks in a cast-iron pan and laughing in a cowboy hat and boots. He said, “Mommy, is that you?” I was so happy. That night we had steaks for dinner.
What impressed me most about Celeste’s beauty was how effortless it was. She was so at ease with herself in the world. I was reminded of the framed portraits on my wall, the relatives I passed every time I walked up or down the stairs, the arrangement an homage to their grace and elegance and strength, and to the features that I had succeeded in passing down to my own children. They were women who made me proud of my lineage, inspiring me to be better, as they had been, struggling against the confines of what their culture had to offer them. The rounder bodies, the softer edges, the structured clothing cinched at the waist, the blazers and the loafers, the hats with veils; the woman holding a child on the banks of a river, hair blowing in her face, limbs folded, the child’s curls. Celeste had already been granted the gift of ravishing representation that I had seen in these family portraits, that I was looking forward to achieving late in life, or, more likely, long after death, when my photograph would be taken out of a dusty box and hung on its own wall of old pictures. Unless it was ridiculed and replaced in the box--but then maybe the box would be sold; maybe someone would acquire my portraits at an estate sale, maybe they would cut me up and use me in collage.
At this point I was being stretched to my limit when it came to mothering. I tried to access a feeling of selfhood from small bouts of writing, daydreaming, and painting. But after the initial sensation of rebooting with these acts of self-preservation, or self-realization, or self-actualization--whatever they were--when my limited time was up, I found it increasingly difficult to shift gears and return to life as usual. I was even more exhausted in the morning when I’d stayed up too late at my computer. The barn chores felt even more daunting. The children even more parasitic. My home even more of a prison. I couldn’t write a word anymore without wondering what a future reviewer would say about that sentence, or if the parents at Phin’s school would think I was a freak, or how an advance, even a small one, would split and if that would guarantee my financial freedom if, say, Asa did leave me. I stopped taking pleasure in art as an escape or a way to express myself. I began to see it as an oppressor, asking me for something, forcing me to give until there was nothing left for myself. I gave up on my story, but almost as an afterthought, since it had already given up on me. At that point, when I was granted the rare hour or two of time for myself, I became immediately overwhelmed with fear and discouragement because the worst had happened: I had no idea who I was anymore, or what I liked to do.
But Celeste traveled to Bali, to Mexico City. She captured moments of political unrest on the street. She played the harmonium. She had a friend who won an award, and she wore a head wrap to the ceremony. She was a swimmer. She was sent a birthday cake in the shape of a shoe from a designer friend. She was a trained linguist. She was a good citizen. She asked us to boycott things I wanted to be against. I went to the website of an organization she supported and signed their petition.
I studied Celeste’s photos in secret so often, pretending to be emailing and swearing at our slow wireless, and, after looking at her images one, two, three, ten times, would scroll backward in her timeline enough so that I began to recognize her memories and would summon them, instinctively, when something in my own daily life felt oddly familiar. And in the hours between news of Celeste’s experiences I waited impatiently. It was like any good story; I wanted to find out what would happen next. It was agonizing to wait.
I watched Celeste from afar, but also from very close-up. It became part of my morning routine; I’d check my email, the New York Times, the weather, then Celeste. And my afternoon routine: feed and water the sheep, garden or clean, make some tea, then spend time with Celeste. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be doing it anymore or why I was doing it, but I was doing it and I continued to do it. I caught myself saying her name aloud in my car when I was alone, to hear how it sounded in my mouth. And while the act of inspecting her was with the deeper intention of improving myself, it had started to feel more urgent than any new idea I might find in a book. How could someone be so blind to her own vanity, I wondered. But then again, I was jealous of her blindness. I zoomed in on photos to study her pores.
She wasn’t all problematic, though, and that confused me, especially when she admitted to softened versions of what seemed like despair. I began to see hints of the deeper, truer part of myself in Celeste, and with my admiration of her life and the way she presented herself to the world came an occasional appreciation for myself. I discovered through her an all-woman Malian band, and I listened to their music often, dancing freely in the living room. And when Celeste brought home sorrel from the farmers’ market, I made the same salad she did, relishing the lemony flavor of the greens I had ignored for so long as weeds in my own garden.
I had been isolated, but through Celeste I was seeing the world. And as her experiences piled on top of one another in my memory, over time they eventually became mine. She offered me her shell, and I could hear the ocean. And while I still felt like the copy to her original, at times I could imagine that if I took a picture of myself lying prostrate on a sofa wearing a bathrobe, I, too, could appear heavenly, that someone somewhere could think me a goddess. That the basket of eggs I was carrying, the handful of zinnias, the bushels of dirty potatoes, were symbols of my own accomplishments, my own success. I wasn’t far off. I wasn’t there yet, but I wasn’t far. And while I had always been aware of my own humanity somewhere inside me, Celeste brought what was buried in me to the surface. It was fucked-up.
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Every now and then I reached out for my phone in the dark car. When I found the round button and pressed down, the car was flooded with white-blue light and I could see the seats reflected in both the windshield and the driver’s side window, so that my perspective was from two directions, one of them upside down. I pressed the button again so I wouldn’t lose the light, and swiped into a sensation so deep it penetrated the density of the car, the pavement, and the earth’s crust, into the raw lava nucleus of whatever was beneath. Without looking, I found the page of applications and tapped into a boundaryless zone. I keyed in the letters of her name and swerved onto the rumble strip as I corrected my spelling errors, juddering back to attention. But the road was empty. There was no risk.
There she was, surrounded by a halo of rainbow light at the Japanese embassy. She was in the bathroom, her dress structured and cinched, sustainably made, the sleeves cut at a bias. Her earrings were a pair but didn’t match; one was a gold leaf encircling a diamond, the other a staple. Her handbag was a cube of Oaxacan palm leaves, her shoes velvet with kitten heels, the straps crossing her ankle. Her hair was up, and her skin was damp with oil I could almost smell. The phone went dark, and I set it down again on the seat beside me. I drew in a breath, stretched my chest forward, and arched slightly, my hands at ten and two, hearing a pop in my upper back.
Makenna Goodman is the author of The Shame, which was named a Harvard Review Favorite Book of 2020, a White Review Recommended Read, a Refinery29 Best New Book, a Literary Hub Recommended Read, a Bustle Most Anticipated Book, a Boston.com Book Club Pick, and more. Interviews, words, and work have been featured in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Paris Review, Electric Literature, Guernica, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, the Adroit Journal, and Commonplace Podcast, and are forthcoming in the Harvard Review, BOMB, the White Review, and the New York Review of Books. Based in Vermont, Goodman is a former editor of books on agriculture and food who writes about, among other things, the intersection of land stewardship and capitalism.
