patient denies seeing haloes

reading as a writer-boss + divorce is having a minute + my husband's almost delicious caesar salad

Natalie Serber

May 30, 2024

I love it when you:

Refer a friend

hey-ho,

Which is clearer, slide one or two? slide three or four? Clearer now? Now?

Perched on the edge of the fancy chair in the semi-dark, my eye doctor’s face is within kissing distance. We are separated only by the binocular machine. There is the steady click of lenses shifting, and her calm voice, “How about now?” The differences are slight, and I break into a sweat for fear I’ll get the answer wrong. Which invariably I do. I mean, I’m 62.

My eyesight is fine enough. Yes, I’ve experienced slippage in my vision, yet another paper cut that comes with time and age. Also, I have the start of cataracts and will someday need surgery which is cruddy, but they’ll fix my vision when they replace my lens. So…

But here’s the thing I’ve come to tell you. The doctor asked if I see haloes around lights at night. If in the dark light appears cracked. Of course I thought of Leonard Cohen:

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in

And then I thought of the Japanese pottery that celebrates cracks. I told my doctor the truth. No, I don’t see haloes. Which seemed like the correct answer if unsullied youthful perfection is the goal. But doesn’t not seeing haloes sound wrong, like a spiritual failure?

…

The next day I received two emails.

First, chart notes from the eye health visit, which read,

“Patient denies seeing haloes.”

Excuse me?? Did my doctor just accuse me of lying? I mean, back in the day I might have under reported alcoholic beverages consumed in a week (not 3-4). But I was telling the truth about the haloes! I know, I know, it’s medical language. I imagined my doctor wagging her finger at me. “Bald faced lier!” she may have muttered as she filled my chart. “Doesn’t see haloes? Sure.”

And next, I swear I’m not lying, this poem arrived from the Poetry Foundation daily email,

Monet Refuses the Operation
By Lisel Mueller
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
…continued here

I know! Oh world, I love you!

a pastel painting of trees in a foggy sky — Branch of the Seine, Claude Monet. Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

read:

Divorce is having a minute in my inbox and in my TBR stack. First I read the terrific essay, “The Lure of Divorce,” by Emily Gould. Gould writes with clarity and willingness to investigate not just her husband’s bad actions, but her own behavior that led her marriage toward its end. Next I reread CJ Hauser’s “The Crane Wife,” which is about the end of an engagement viewed partially through the lens of a Japanese fairy tale, and ultimately about what we’re willing to put up with until suddenly and all at once we aren’t. Both essays are insightful, unflinching, and beautifully written.

Now I’ve read, SPLINTERS: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison, an examination of her divorce and new motherhood, which was mostly unflinching and insightful, and at times self-important. First off, I feel I have much to learn from Jamison’s writing. She is gorgeously specific in her details. She recognizes and reports on the complexity of consciousness, the contradictions of being human. Jamison is described as “a scribe of the real, the true, the complex.” I wholeheartedly concur. Part of being real, and true and complex is being vain. As we all can be. I felt at times in this memoir that Jamison was standing in front of her sentences, more or less saying, observe my cleverness.

In a scene in which she has begun dating, she and her date are in a golden sauna with a bucket of cold water and ladle in the center of the room. She describes the heat, the fatigue, the joy and guilt of being in the world without her baby daughter (it’s her ex-husband’s day with the baby). Jamison dowses herself with chilly water and says, “How good it felt to need something so badly and then to reach for it.” It’s a mic drop moment that says to the reader, pay attention, my meaning is deep. I’m not just talking about the cold water. It may seem a small quibble, but there were many of these. The NYTs review describes these chiseled sentences as “standing before a firing squad,” awaiting judgment. I felt as if her ego was writing the book in those moments, letting us know how great she is, her insights, her turns of phrase.

My other quibble, she often reached toward sentiment rather than true emotion. I don’t want to be told how to feel (sentiment) I want to actually feel (emotion). A prime example of sentiment was the use of the word tiny… tiny hands, tiny diapers, tiny drops of blood, tiny bandaids, tiny shoes. When one is writing about a baby, tiny seems a cheap shot, so easy to manipulate feelings with that word. Tiny = vulnerable. Tiny = precious. We get it. It’s a baby. If I were playing a drinking game and swallowed a shot every time the word tiny showed up, I would have alcohol poisoning! In case you find this callous, please know I too am a mother. I too was amazed by the perfect fingernails of my newborn, plush eyelashes, the fluttering skin flap of a burst nursing blister on a bottom lip as my baby breathed in sleep, the contented roll back of the baby’s eyes as soon as they latched on and the milk began to flow.

And, there were moments of absolute truth and beauty.

Writing about being apart from her baby, Jamison says,“One piece of me said, it’s unbearable. The other piece said, it’s fine. Both pieces were lying. Nothing was fine, and nothing was unbearable.”
She talks about relationships with men and says, “Boundaries feel like acts of violence.” Wow. And Oh… true and messed up!
After a break-up she imagines saying “Tell me I’m good enough. Free me from the endless work of being good enough. Of am I? am I? am I?”
And, watching her daughter play with toys in the water, putting her plastic turtle on a sponge, Jamison says, “This is how she maximized her pleasure, by sharing it.”

That is certainly my truth, I mean, consider this whole newsletter project, sharing what pleases me definitely makes the pleasure more intense. I believe it is Jamison’s truth as well. The pleasure she is maximizing by sharing is the discovery of mother-love, the difficulty, the struggle, and the success she is having as an artist who mothers, a mother who makes art.

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how about now?

write:

Because I’ve been talking so much about her work, here is an essay by Leslie Jamison, “Ways to Escape.” It’s a perfect opportunity to practice reading as a writer. Read the essay carefully. Where are you moved? Where does the writing come alive? Are there places you feel bored and want to check instagram? Why do you suppose she lost your interest? Is there a good combo of interiority and external action? Are there details that really stand out to you? Are there truths in the essay that hit you hard and make you feel you understand yourself and the world a little better? Is there a paragraph that moves you, that interests you, that makes you wish you’d written it? Is there complexity and contradiction in the narrator’s experiences?

Here’s a paragraph I love for the desperation and pride wrapped together in one moment. I love the drama of nearly missing the graduation ceremony and the thrill of the glittery heels. I love the final sentence because in it Jamison uses those shoes as representation of everything she thinks she wants, and yet we feel dread.

After Jake’s prom, which happened the night before my graduation, we went back to a suite at a budget hotel with a bunch of his friends—all of us drunk, fooling around in our own dim corners until we passed out. When I woke up the next morning, it was ten minutes past the time I was supposed to have arrived at school, less than an hour before the start of my ceremony, and I couldn’t find my shoes anywhere. I grabbed a pair of glittery silver heels by the door. They belonged to a stranger. I don’t know what she must have thought when she woke up to find them gone, but I know that for me they became a kind of talisman: something strange and glimmering under my somber black robes, these stolen disco shoes, the closing beat of a night I couldn’t fully remember. They were proof that I was living beyond the boundaries of the predictable, the expected, the obedient, and the ordinary.

What paragraph do you love? What stands out as effective? As troubling?

prompt:

Leslie Jamison asks her students to:

be specific
get granular
invoke interiority
include the complexity of consciousness

I encourage you to do the same. Write the story of a hospital visit. Whether that is a birth, a death, a surgery, visiting a friend or relative. I encourage you to set a timer for 7 minutes and write everything you can. This may be something that you experienced or something you are creating for a character in your story or novel. Once you have a draft on the page, go back. What specific details can you add? Drill down into minute specificity. What does the light through the window hit upon? How are the unused instruments and tubes stored? What designs are on the hospital gowns? What are the characters thinking and feeling? What contradictions abound, in the intentions of the characters and in their actions.

eat:

Yes, that’s my husband dancing!

We’ve been married for 34 years this week and we’re still over the moon about each other. One of the things we enjoy doing together is cooking and eating well. He’s got the moves, and I’m a better cook. For years we’ve had a dueling caesar salad thing going. Okay he might win for the best meal prep photo…

Dear Reader, I married him.

Yes, I could watch him make caesar salad dressing all day long, but I’d rather eat mine. Here’s how I do it:

Caesar Salad

1 egg
2 - 3 cloves of garlic, minced
4 anchovy filets
1T Worcestershire
2t dijon mustard
2/3c good olive oil
juice of one lemon, or to taste.
Croutons
1/2c grated parmesan, or to taste
1 head of romaine lettuce, outer leaves set aside -or- 3-4 little gems, washed and dried, broken into bit sized pieces

Put the egg in a coffee cup and cover with boiling water. Let sit while you prepare the rest of the ingredients
On a cutting board, mash together the garlic and anchovies. Place in a small bowl. Add the Worcestershire and dijon. Mix well.
Separate the egg yolk, discard the white, and add yolk to the bowl. Mix well, using a fork.
Slowly add the olive oil in a consistent stream, whisking with a fork the entire time. The dressing will thicken.
Add the lemon juice at the end, use enough to suit you.
Never underestimate the power of a terrific crouton! Start with really good bread: a slightly stale focaccia, peasant bread, como, or sourdough. Cut into generous squares. Heat 2-3 T good olive oil in a cast iron skillet. When the oil shimmers, add the bread and let brown on each side. Take your time. You want a nice crust. Just saying.
Place lettuce in a salad bowl. Add the grated Parmesan and the croutons. Add the dressing and toss to coat everything well.
Pass the pepper mill

I want to know your recipe… anything special you do differently? Cornbread croutons? Fried Halloumi cheese cubes?