Katy Yun
It is one of those fall days that make you remember things largely forgotten. For instance: Clementine shoulders past families of four, dads (not fathers) with beer bellies and actuarial glasses, mothers (not moms) dressed in suede and funky sweaters, babies and children, babies and children, and she remembers that each one is born of what must have been a love story for someone, somewhere. At the end of any romantic comedy worth its salt is a marriage, or at least the promise of one. The marriage plot – and if that isn’t the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, then what is? For all her rage-against-the-machine-fuck-you-Louis-C.K. feminism, she can’t seem to find a good answer to that question.
Clementine also remembers that “pang” is a sound-word. She can hear “pang,” but she can also tell you where it lives. There is a pang somewhere in the crook between her second rib and her third, between her collarbone and the length of her spine. She hesitates to say “heart,” because that seems cliched. But there is a heart, somewhere, and the sound it makes is “pang”.
Clementine listens to the “pang,” but also Bob Dylan, as she always does when she’s cold. She suspects it’s a mental thing, born of some innate need of hers to be commiserated with. She turns on “Like a Rolling Stone,” and it’s like he’s there, next to her, hand in pockets, shivering in sympathy. To be absolutely clear, she doesn’t have a weird thing for Bob Dylan. Sometimes she just needs a friend. A metaphysically present, folk-singing, perpetually cold friend. Guys and girls can be friends, you know.
She waits for lights to change. She waits for drivers to signal, to turn to completion. She glances over at the vintage car speeding past her on the road. She doesn’t know what it is, exactly, but there’s something about vintage cars that make her uneasy. Maybe it’s that just by looking at them, she becomes an unwilling participant in their owners’ fantasies. Suddenly, she is not herself, but instead a Twenty-Year-Old-Girl, transfixed by the big, shiny, sexy vehicle, held permanently in a state of slack-jawed adoration.
Clementine is quite often not herself, these days. She’s really only herself when she’s ashamed. It’s the stickiness of it, the way it oozes and clings to her and reveals her shape—she is an invisible woman covered in tar.
She peers into coffeeshops, searching vainly for an empty seat—she has been to three already, and all of them were full. There’s something sort of humiliating about walking into a store and leaving without spending money. You’re breaching some contract, some unspoken agreement that allows you to exist there as long as you swipe debit or credit. You breathe their air, you step on their floors, and then you don’t give it up. You’re a tease.
She leaves a fourth shop, and the streets are flooded with children, dressed up in garish costumes that clash horribly with one another. It makes her nostalgic for a time when she didn’t know which colors were supposed to go with which.
The crowd also stops her from talking to herself, but only barely. There’re so many things she needs to put words to. “Crown and anchor me, or let me sail away,” for a start.
That is plagiarized, but Clementine figures Joni Mitchell wouldn’t mind if she borrowed the line for a bit. Sometimes she questions which came first, music or emotion. She can’t imagine a world without sound, a world where she couldn’t ask someone to croon what she is feeling in her ear and give it meaning, make it happen. And after all, a world without sound would mean a world without Bob Dylan. She shivers.
The fifth coffeeshop, thankfully, has a chair for Clementine to retreat into. It’ll do, for her purposes: she doesn’t like the art on its walls, but she is rather fond of the sad little plant by the doorway. It is when she finally sits that she begins to wonder if maybe she should have just stayed home (isn’t that always the way it goes)? Her suspicion grows stronger when she needs to go to the restroom but finds that there is no one to watch her things. Somehow, she thinks that would make the pang quieter—if there were someone to watch her things.
Just then, a family of three walks into the coffeeshop, and they belong in a Noah Baumbach movie about city-people-marriages which deal in rapid fire witticisms and wry laughter. A marriage with an ever-present intellectual sadness, one where “perfect happiness” is more than just myth, it is a social faux pas. The man wears a defiantly colorful sweater and curly hair past his shoulders; the woman has an impish blond haircut and jarringly trendy boots.
Their daughter screams with joy, drowning in her large-tiny grey coat, and it seems they are unsure how to interact with this light-hearted interloper in their midst. Clementine half expects them to turn to the child and ask if she’s read Proust.
She imagines herself as each of these people. The man, first, towering over his little kingdom. The woman, wondering how her own slight hands had gone from a daughter’s to a mother’s. What imperceptible changes hid there, burrowed into her skin. And the girl. Laughing except when she is crying, and even then, only playing at sadness. Trying it out, seeing how the tears feel on her small face.
Maybe Clementine is being unfair. Maybe they are not some unhappy urbanites shimmying into suburbanite skinny jeans, but honest-to-god, god-fearing, cornhole-playing, beer-drinking, joyful, gluttonous, wonderful Midwesterners. Maybe sweaters are just sweaters and women are just women and girls are just girls and maybe she is less feminist in practice than she’d like to think.
As an apology of sorts for her unspoken tirade, Clementine makes space for them by leaving. She even smiles at the man and the woman, waves to the girl on a whim. She doesn’t wait to see if the girl will wave back. She doesn’t think she should have to.
Instead, she steps out again into the biting cold. Sometimes as she walks, her depth perception fails her, and she can’t tell if the people in front of her are coming or going. She is nearly bowled over by a woman on the phone, talking in hushed rapid-fire to the person on the other side. Who is she talking to? And are they coming, or going?
Clementine is going. She can tell that much because the sidewalk art beneath her feet blends together into a miasma of color and shape only distinguished by the fact that she is leaving it behind. Bob Dylan is going. To where, Clementine doesn’t know: the album cover doesn’t show a destination, only the getting there.
She thinks she might take a page out of his book and remain in perpetual motion—it’s not a bad life, walking just to walk. Maybe by the time she circles around to the coffeeshop, the girl will be grown-up, and Clementine will recognize her by her now too-small grey coat, and she will have questions. Questions she needs to remember, questions she needs to put words to. “How is your mother?” for one. And of course: “Are you coming, or going?”
Katherine Yun is a second-year English Literature and Economics major from Buffalo, NY. She loves listening to music (including, of course, Bob Dylan), making music, and spending time with her dog, Sophie.
