DC, reviewed

After eleven and a half years living in DC, I’m planning to move away, with my husband, to Wisconsin. As a result, we are finally discovering places in DC that we’d always admired but never experienced. Thus, this noticement could be considered a travelogue of my home, from the past couple weeks or so. Travelogues are sometimes hit or miss, because where is it going, where is the heart? But isn’t that the point of travel, to wander until you find it?

On we go:

Supreme Court

Seth and I arrived separately. We both enjoy our mornings in different ways. I like to think. He likes to sleep. So I took a long thinky walk in the cold while he slept in and then biked. I arrived before him and took my spot at the end of a sleepy, coffee-filled line of people. The line started moving before Seth arrived. I called him, panicking, “I don’t know what’s happening.” They let fifty of us into a separate waiting area, handing us each yellow tickets that guaranteed us seats. I was number fifty. I panicked again, which meant, at that early hour, a vague and filtered feeling of ‘oh no,’ of, ‘someone should do something about this, but who?’ Because I grabbed that ticket as precious as gold. Yet still they didn’t let me in. I waited in the cold as the security guards yelled at us that if we brought in food they would send us straight to jail. Or something about protesting indoors, it was early, I was tired. I had two slices of bread in my pocket. I ate one of them and hid the other deeper. Seth texted me that he had arrived but I couldn’t see. I was in too deep. They let me indoors and no one caught my bread slice. The man in front of me took off his sweater and his shirt came up too, all the way up to his deodorant-flecked armpits. His cotton hat fell on the ground. I picked it up and put it on the security belt by his sweater without telling him. I felt very righteous for doing this. It was only proper, in the Court of Justice, to become a Savior of Hats. (Or maybe I felt guilty about sneaking in the bread). Regardless, Seth was still outside, waiting, hoping. He had a chance of fitting into the “overflow” area.” The inside people made us put everything we owned into a locker. Especially the phones. “And if they don’t go on airplane mode,” they warned us, “and one of them rings, we’re going to blow them all up. Boom.”  In went the phone. Good bye, Seth! Good luck, Seth! Hope I survive this. One more round of security lines. The guard was wearing New Balance sneakers, as was one of the visitors, and they bonded over this. 

Inside the hearing room, as we waited for everything to begin, it was very quiet. Until it wasn’t. People began whispering to one another. The whispers grew louder. Like a concert of confusion. I was sitting next to deodorant man. I did not wish to speak to him as I’d already seen more of his armpits than I’d cared for. I’d saved his hat, wasn’t that enough? But he spoke to me, and once the seal was broken, he was quite nice. He was from Florida, in DC with his wife for a conference of some sort, killing time, attending a hearing because why not? All very normal chitchat, which apparently was shared by the hundred others in the room, this chitchat, and the noise kept growing, and there were several security guards throughout the hearing room looking very serious, and they all decided at once that the din had grown too loud and reprimanded everyone with a collective SHUSH!

Everybody stopped whispering and looked straight ahead. Several minutes more to wait. There was a beautiful clock hanging from the ceiling. A golden hand that swept through the seconds. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a clock that doesn’t tick. This clock didn’t tick. It moved timelessly, perfectly. I just wanted to watch this secondhand swim through time and take me wherever it wanted. It could have taken me to outer space. To China. To the top of the National Monument. 

Please look at this beautiful clock and how it dangles by a thread

When the judges arrived and the hearing began, I grew sad. Because where was Seth? All I had was deodorant man. There were beautiful red velvet curtains and tall black chairs and then there were these judges, sitting there, bored, and saying things that felt important, and although I loved the seriousness of the place, the brevity of it all, and that sweeping golden clock, I felt Seth would love the actuality of the event. The words. The meaning behind the words. I thought back to when I was handed that fiftieth yellow ticket. I should have shouted and screamed and said, It’s not right, it’s not for me! I should have said Please, please sir, I just want to sit in a nice chair and feel important for a minute, but my husband, he wants to see the actual hearing, he understands the words, he deserves this more than me. I spent most of the hearing wishing I could turn that magnificent clock backwards and do it over again, switching my seat for Seth’s. 

When I left the hearing room and gathered my phone, I got a call from Seth right away. He was let in five minutes after the hearing started. He’d seen it all.

We compared notes and discovered we were sitting three seats away from each other the whole time. 

The Library of Congress

I didn’t know anything about what to do or where to go in the Library of Congress except which building to enter. The Madison building. I could remember this without writing it down, as Madison is where we’re planning to move. After the traumatic Supreme Court experience, I was sure they wouldn’t let me bring in any food, so I hid my snacks well. But they didn’t check for snacks, and furthermore, the map indoors suggested several cafeterias were hidden somewhere in the basement. I walked inside and was immediately confused, so walked into the first room I could find and told them I was confused, and they told me where to go. Properly directed, I found the office where they took my information and snapped a photo for a library reader card. They didn’t make me take my hat off for the photo! I knew then, despite the formality of the many locked doors and ID scanners, that this was a lawless place. They handed me a confusing map that stated where I could go and I immediately got lost on the third floor in a maze of blue doors. I decided to leave the Madison building and head to the tunnels underground. There I passed a Subway restaurant and realized it was 1:00 PM, which is exactly my lunchtime. It was meant to be. I hadn’t yet seen a single book but I decided I needed a sandwich (I had forgotten about my pitiful snacks), even though I was fully aware of how sad this whole place looked. Basement cafeterias are sad by design. Everything is made of linoleum. 

I didn’t take this photo because I forgot but I think every single same person in this photo was there that day

I ordered a sandwich and promptly forgot how to eat a sandwich. I held it by the top and everything fell out the bottom onto the Subway paper. There were no forks so I couldn’t turn it into a sandwich-salad. Instead I gave up and tore it into pieces and used the bread as a utensil. 

I don’t regret a thing. After finishing the sandwich, I could meander from room to room without hunger. I went into the European room and asked if I could go into the stacks. The librarian asked if I wanted to read about Russia, Slovenia, or the Netherlands. I said Russia because I couldn’t think of anything else. He let me explore by myself. I sat on the ground with a pile of books about ancient myths and saunas. No one bothered me or even came near. If I had wanted, I could have eaten my snacks right then and there. But I was full from the sandwich. Full of books. Full of Subway. Wearing my hat that matched my new library ID of me, surrounded by stories, happy. 

Seth: “You look like a cat-burglar in a teenage rom-com”

Upstairs on Seventh

Upstairs on Seventh is neither upstairs nor on the seventh floor, Seventh Street, or anything to do with the number seven. It is a store at 1299 Pennsylvania although it is also not on Pennsylvania either, it’s on E Street and 13th. I was invited to a private book event at a place called Upstairs on Seventh and I walked through a very trafficky downtown DC to get there, and when I was nearby, saw a group of people gathered in a window eating cheese and drinking wine and I thought, They look like they’re at a book event, but that couldn’t possibly be my event, which is definitely on the seventh floor somewhere. When I went into the building I asked to go to the seventh floor but the concierge quickly disabused me of this notion. He pointed me instead to the people eating cheese and drinking wine among what I later discovered were thousand dollar jean jackets, and fascinating necklace-scarf combos. 

Is it a scarf? Is it a necklace? Why not both?

Eventually they decided they didn’t feel like having the party in this clothing store anymore, so they took us through a tunnel to a basement area with two fake fireplaces. There they read from this lovely book and we all clapped and everyone was very nice. I put four cookies in a napkin to bring home to Seth. Even though the fireplaces were fake it all felt cozy. During the reading, the book editor told us all that the some of the stories in the book were fiction and some were memoir and she chose not to differentiate between them, because a story is a story is a story. 

Everything I write in my noticements is true, but my fiction feels truer, yet I won’t be able to share that with you for months or probably years. In fiction I am able to write uninhibitedly about someone who worries immensely they’ll never have children. I can write about how hard it is to want, and how big the gulf is between wanting and having, no matter how hard you try. These noticements are true but they leave things out, like how the only reason I went to the Library of Congress was to kill time before an x-ray that will soon tell me whether or not I have endometriosis, or how the answer to this question almost doesn’t matter, because if I do that’s bad, and if I don’t that’s also bad because it means what’s happening to me is still a very painful mystery. The noticements can tell you why I love DC and they can also hide why I am leaving, for a better future for the theoretical children that may not even be physically feasible with this body I’ve been given, this body that is struggling to do what women have done for millennia. My noticements have always been true and that’s why they are becoming so much more difficult to write now that there is one hard thing on my mind all the time, and why I thought I would be able to write something fun about Supreme Court hearings and broken sandwiches and thousand-dollar jean jackets but instead I am here writing about this, way down here, for those of you brave enough to journey through overlong paragraphs about stories that maybe don’t matter, but maybe they do because they’re all about barriers, about the difficulty of crossing thresholds, and how nice it was that I was able to cross them, even if I never knew I wanted to do so, even if it took years before discovering this want and deciding it was time, how even then I faced difficulties, like waiting in the cold or getting lost downtown or just giving up and asking for help. There were people I had to know, there were maps, there was luck. There are more things, too, like a half-moon half-hidden by clouds, and the soft brass Christmas music playing from somewhere by the White House, but from where? From where? And so you’ve been reading this not knowing where it was going, and I didn’t know either, but that’s the way it goes, in twists and turns before getting to the heart of it, all of it. And I don’t ever want to write without my whole heart, so here you go, here it is, I am scared, and still, somehow, hopeful, because I still believe that these twists and turns might get me there, and even when I felt alone, I never was. 

Happy New Year,

Denise