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 certainly 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 middle 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 concerning the watch once more till someday I spotted 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 take a look at it now — it’s sitting on my desk as I write. It casts an odd sort of spell over me. It appears 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 middle of her most achieved self-portrait (she painted lots of them). It appears like a really lovely 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 appears 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 may very well be. In her early 30s, she determined to turn out to be an expert 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). Sooner or later she determined to review portray, and spent 60 years making portraits, self-portraits and nonetheless lifes. She was endlessly reinventing herself, including new layers of who she was to the outdated ones.
Folks appear to suppose that clothes is the very best (or at the very least most conspicuous) illustration of our personalities, of who we wish to be. But it surely’s really the jewellery we put on that the majority usually speaks to who we predict we’re, and whom we costume accordingly. We are inclined 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 by day, whereas we alter our garments typically a number of occasions a day. Something that adorns us day by day begins, ultimately, to outline us. It turns into an emblem.
I personal practically all of my grandmother’s jewellery now. And whereas I don’t essentially put on a lot of it each day, her jewellery has turn out to be a part of who I feel I’m.
Almost day by 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, type 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 all the time be a function of it. It’s as if they anchor some a part of me whereas the remaining fluctuates within the hurricane-force winds of day by day life.
Possibly that’s what that watch did for my grandmother too. Possibly she felt that if she wore it commonly sufficient, she may rely on being the identical particular person she noticed within the mirror day by day. She amassed all kinds of knickknack over time — Italian “cocktail rings” (named for his or her eye-catching enchantment whereas the wearer sips her cocktail) set with giant 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 trend 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 practically all of her jewellery now. And whereas I don’t essentially put on a lot of it each day, her jewellery has turn out to be a part of who I feel I’m.
I steadily consider who my grandmother was to me, however much less steadily 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 completely distinctive was an odd affectation that she adopted so totally and for therefore 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 motion pictures. On the time, American actors have been inspired by manufacturing studios to sound extra subtle by talking with a “Mid-Atlantic” accent, which blended parts 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 undertaking this effort. When she was a really younger girl, my grandmother was a lifeless ringer for a well-known actor named Myrna Loy. Folks 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 along with her personal identify, not Loy’s. The starstruck admirer would invariably turn out to be 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 girl within the self-portrait is completely somebody who spoke with an assumed accent and every so often 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 may very well be in all of the items she collected over time.
My grandmother and I have been shut, however I’ve an odd want that I may 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 buddies.
I usually ask myself whether or not it was, partly, my grandmother’s affect that led me into the function 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? Actually one who needs the power of figuring out the time. However there’s extra to it than that. It additionally has to do with subscribing to the concept of being an individual who wears a watch. Some folks put on watches to seem conscientious, skilled; to others, it indicators standing or status. For the literary circles I journey in, I typically surprise if watch-wearers suppose it makes them look extra mental, scholarly. It’s not that anybody who wishes the looks of such qualities can’t additionally really embody them. Possibly a watch is solely 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 that someday I’ll know who I’m. Once 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 persona that exists in my thoughts — I’m wondering at what we regularly name the “superficiality” of appearances. I ponder whether they’re superficial in any respect. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” wrote Oscar Wilde in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Possibly 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 Overview of Books and the Brooklyn Rail. She co-founded and printed the humanities and tradition journal Riot of Fragrance from 2011 to 2019.
