Black Milk (14 page)

As Ivan Turgenyev once said, she was “a kind hearted woman, and a brave man!”

 

Jane Austen fell in love once. She was someone who criticized women marrying for wealth, status or a sense of security, firmly believing that one could marry only for love. Yet, though she loved and was loved in return, due to class differences, the marriage was not allowed to happen. His name was Tom Lefroy—a young man who had nothing to his name but would one day become the chief justice of Ireland. In a letter dated January 1796 and addressed to her sister Cassandra, Austen confessed that Tom was the love of her life. But she quickly added, “When you receive this, it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea.” Heartbroken, she retreated to her corner, to her writing.

“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and ill informed female who ever dared to be an authoress,” she said. It was not true, of course, and she knew it. Austen was very knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, having been admirably educated by her father—a clergyman—brothers, aunt and then through her own uninterrupted reading. She had a sharp tongue and a penchant for playfulness and sarcasm.

Years later, she was offered marriage again, this time by a respected man of great means. Though she was fond of her “solitary elegance,” as she once called her singleness, she accepted the offer. Finally she was going to become a wife, start a family and manage her own home. With these thoughts and hopes, she went to bed early. When she woke up the next morning, the first thing she did was to send a note of apology to her suitor. She had decided not to marry.

I often wonder what happened that night. What surreal place did Jane Austen visit in her dreams that made her change her mind? Did she have nightmares? Did she imagine herself scrubbing the staircase of a hundred-floor paper house with a bucket full of ink, watching every stair crumble as she cleaned and cleaned? What was it that made her decide against walking down the aisle?

Of all the American women writers of earlier generations, there is one that holds a special place in my heart: Carson McCullers. Perhaps it is because I came upon her work at a time when I was discovering the world and myself. Her words had a shattering effect on me. It was my last year of high school when I read
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,
drawn more to the title of the book than the name of the author. The year before I was very popular at school, if only for a few weeks, having newly arrived in Ankara from Madrid, where I had spent my teenage years. The kids in my new class had been thrilled to learn that I could speak Spanish and had even been to a bullfight. But the introvert in me had not taken long to show up and the sympathetic curiosity in the eyes of my classmates had been gradually replaced first by an absolute indifference, then a judgmental distance. Girls thought I was unsociable, boys thought I was bizarre, teachers thought I was aloof, and I trusted no one but books. That is when I met Carson McCullers.

I was a Turkish girl who had never been to America and yet the stories of lonely people in the American South moved me deeply. But there was more to it than that. Twenty pages into the book, I was dying to know the person who could write like this.

She was born Lula Carson Smith. By shortening her name to Carson she was not only trying to be noticeable but also standing on an ambiguous ground where it was hard for her readers to guess her gender. She was someone who did not easily blend with her peers and could be, at times, quite unfriendly. Instead of dressing up in stockings and shoes with high heels and slender skirts, as was the fashion in the 1930s, she preferred to walk around in high socks and tennis shoes, happy to startle her classmates. Despite her indifference to the established codes of beauty, I find it interesting that when she met the love of her life, Reeves McCullers, the first thing that struck her were his looks. “There was the shock, the shock of pure beauty, when I first saw him.” Though their relationship was beset with doubts and difficulties—they divorced at one point and then remarried—they remained inseparable for nearly twenty years—until the day he died.

So it is that world literary history is full of women who have changed their minds, their destinies and, yes, their names.

 

The next morning I gave the editor a call.

“Hi, Elif. . . . It is nice to hear from you,” he said briskly, but then paused. “Or did you change your name already? Shall I call you by a different name?”

“Actually, that’s the reason why I called,” I said. “I found my name. And I want you to use this new one when you print my story.”

“O-kay,” he said, once again, very slowly and loudly. By now I had figured out that was how he spoke when he couldn’t see where the conversation was heading. “How does it feel to shed your old name?”

“That part is easy,” I said. “The difficult part is to find a new one.”

“Hm . . . umm,” he said in sympathy.

“I have been researching the lives of writers, perusing words in dictionaries, reading literary anecdotes, looking for an unusual name. I mean, not as unusual as David Bowie’s child Zowie; or Frank Zappa, of course, who named one of his children Moon Unit. But perhaps it is a bit easier when you are trying to name a newborn baby with endless potentials and unknowns than to name your old, familiar, limited self.”

“David Bowie has a child named Zowie Bowie?” he asked.

“Yup,” I said.

“All right, go on, please.”

“Well, I once had a boyfriend who wanted everyone to call him ‘A Glass Half Full’ because he said that was his philosophy in life. He even wrote the name on his exam papers, getting funny reactions from the professors. But then he graduated and went into the military. When he came back, he didn’t want anything to do with A Glass Half Full. He had gone back to his old name, Kaya—the Rock.”

“O-kay,” the editor said.

“Anyhow, I decided I didn’t have to go that far. Actually, I didn’t have to go anywhere. Better to look at what I have with me here and now,” I said. “Instead of carrying my father’s surname, I decided to adopt my mother’s first name as my last name.”

“I’m not sure I am following,” he said.

“Dawn,” I explained. “Shafak is my mother’s first name. I will make it my surname from this day on.”

A month later when the magazine was published, I saw my new name for the first time in print. It didn’t feel strange. It didn’t feel wrong. It felt just right, as if in a world of endless shadows and echoes, my name and I had finally found each other.

O
n the first day of September 2002, the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul to New York takes off with me on it. The plane is jam-packed with undergraduate and graduate students, businessmen and businesswomen, trained professionals, journalists, academics, tourists and a newlywed couple on honeymoon. . . . Besides Turks and Americans, there are Indians, Russians, Bulgarians, Arabs and Japanese who have come from connecting flights. This will be my first visit to America. I think about Anaïs Nin arriving in the United States in 1914 with her brother’s violin case in one hand and a yet-to-be-filled diary in the other. I am smiling at the curious little girl in my mind’s eye when I notice something and stop.

A young, lanky man two rows in front of me is grinning sheepishly at me. He thinks I was smiling at him. There is no way I can explain it was for Anaïs Nin. In order to cause no more misunderstandings, I slide down in my seat and hide my face behind a book:
In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays.

Shortly after the food service, I walk down the corridor to go to the toilet. Out of the corner of my eye, I check to see what the other passengers are reading, craning my head left and right to decipher the titles of the books they are holding. I notice some Westerners reading books on Turkey or Istanbul (including a novel of mine), which intrigues me, because most tourists read about a foreign country
before
they go to see it, but very few continue reading
after
they have seen it.

There are two vacant restrooms. As soon as I open the door of the first one and step inside, I freeze on the spot. There, next to the liquidsoap dispenser beside the sink, stands a finger-woman. I’m just about to say “excuse me” and leave when she calls out.

“No, please, stay. . . . I want to talk to you.”

I look at the stranger quizzically. She kind of resembles the others in the Choir of Discordant Voices. She is no taller than them, but probably weighs more. She has a kind, round, freckled face, a pointy chin, hair the color of Turkish coffee and eyes so blue they suck you in. She’s wearing no makeup except for eyeliner and perhaps some mascara on her long lashes, it’s hard to tell. She seems to be in her early or mid-thirties, and I am sure I’ve never seen her before.

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you recognize me?” she says again, sounding slightly offended.

I scan her from head to toe. She is wearing an aquamarine dress that reaches her knees, red shoes without heels, a belt of the same color, beige nylon stockings. Her wavy hair is held back in a ponytail by a modest hair band. The chubbiness of her cheeks is due to her extra pounds, but she seems to be at peace with her body. She doesn’t have the tense air that the calorie-counting Little Miss Practical radiates.

“I’m one of your inner voices,” she says finally.

“Really? I’ve never seen you before. Did you just arrive?”

“Actually, I’ve been with you since you were a little girl playing with dollhouses,” she says.

Confused and clueless, I ask her name.

“They call me Mama Rice Pudding.”

I break into a laugh, but when I see her scowl I swallow my chuckles and put on a serious face.

“I see you find my name amusing,” she says coldly.

“I am sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

At my guilty pause she smiles. “What strikes me is that you don’t find the names of the others amusing at all,” she says. “You don’t laugh at Milady Ambitious Chekhovian or Miss Highbrowed Cynic, do you?”

She’s right. I have nothing to say.

“My name is what it is because I happen to be a motherly, loving person,” she continues, flipping her hands upward to make a point.

“Really?” I say, under my breath.

“Yes, I relish hanging bamboo wind chimes on the porch, growing begonias in cute little pots, pickling vegetables in the summer, making pink grapefruit marmalade. . . . You know, keeping the home fires burning. I know how to get ink stains off carpets, what to do when you spill olive oil on your best skirt, how to clean a rusted teapot and other important tricks. I bake pastries and desserts. Just this month one of my recipes has been featured in a cooking video, and they named it Mama’s Heavenly Rice Pudding.”

For almost a minute I don’t say anything. I am sure there must be a mistake and I consider how to kindly break the news to her. There is no way a finger-woman like her can be one of my inner voices. I lack the skill to crack eggs for an omelet or the patience to boil water for tea. I hate house chores and other domestic duties, and avoid them as much and as best as I can. My friends don’t need to know about this, but I could live in a room without cleaning it for days and weeks, and if the going gets rough, I’d prefer to redecorate the room than to have to clean it. And if the entire house gets too dirty, I’d rather move into a new one than have to vacuum, scrub and polish it thoroughly. My take on this is that of a hotel client, easygoing and laid-back: I like to sleep in my bed knowing that I’ll not have to wash and iron the sheets the next day.

Mama Rice Pudding purses her lips and pouts as if she can read my thoughts. “You never let me speak, not once! You stored me away in the depot of your personality, and then forgot all about me. All these years, I’ve been waiting for you to accept and love me as I am.”

That is when a bigger wave of guilt begins tugging at the edges of my mind. I feel like an old-fashioned conservative parent who has renounced his son for being gay and pretends he doesn’t even exist. Is that what I have done to the maternal side of me?

“How about the other finger-women?” I ask. “Do they know about you?”

“Of course they do,” replies Mama Rice Pudding. “But they prefer not to tell you about me and the other chick.”

“What do you mean by ‘the other chick’?”

But she ignores my question. “Like many young women I, too, want to get married, wear a wedding dress, have a diamond ring, raise children and cruise the sales aisles of supermarkets. But you pushed away all my desires and looked down on them with such force that I couldn’t even mention them. I was silenced, suppressed and denied.”

I think of Anaïs Nin again—a vigorous woman who once said, “Ordinary life does not interest me”; who believed that a critical writer such as herself could never make a housewife. She had an unruly side, a mostly disordered lifestyle and more than one lover by her side. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” she would say.

“What are you thinking about?” Mama Rice Pudding asks.

“Anaïs Nin . . .” I murmur, not expecting her to recognize the name.

But she does. “Those edgy avant-garde writers!” she says, spitting the words out. “You know what your problem is? You read too much, that’s your problem.”

“Wait a minute, what kind of criticism is that?”

But she raves on about the terrible effects of books on my soul, getting more and more carried away. “You convinced yourself that you couldn’t be a
normal
woman. Why do you frown upon the ordinary?”

Seeing that this conversation is taking on political overtones, I try to navigate my way through it as delicately as I can. “Hmm . . . Miss Highbrowed Cynic always says whatever calamity has befallen humanity is because of ordinary people. She quotes the bright Jewish woman philosopher Hannah Arendt, who has shown us that fascism has thrived and grown due not to the
bad
people with wicked aims but, in fact, to the
ordinary
people with good intentions.”