The Invented Woman - The Recreation Of A Glorious Past That Never Existed

Vicki Chalmers knew that her memory was failing from 'Now, where did I put my keys?' to 'Who’s coming to dinner?' but she put those minor inconsistencies aside and said, 'But I can remember the important things'. 

Vicki had always preferred selective, creative memory.  There was no more idyllic time, she said, than those years in Greenwich Village smoking endless unfiltered cigarettes, drinking tequila, and loving the one she was with. 

There was Emil the conceptual artist. 'We made love underneath his The Human Odyssey, looking up at Homer standing astride the whitecapped waves of the Mediterranean', none of which was even vaguely true, but when told in such dreamy-eyed romantic verse to an eager group of ladies at tea, the truth did not matter. 

 

It all could have happened.  She did live in New York at the time, although on Staten Island as an au pair, released one night a week when she took the ferry to Manhattan and wandered up from the Battery to SoHo and the East Village.  As she walked past the dive bars, smoke-filled cafes, and coffee shops, she imagined herself there, cigarette dangling from her lip, eyes squinting against the smoke, a volume of Proust's Chez Swann opened in front of her, the pages dogeared from use, stained with tears and drops of expresso, next to an artist or a poet, longhaired, distant, and mythic. 

But for a few slips of fate she might have been a student at Columbia, or halfway through a doctorate on Deconstruction at NYU and living the postmodern moment at the Cafe Nero, or...the possibilities were endless, but the closest she got to her dream was  'the forgotten borough', an afterthought of the Dutch who settled Manhattan and the legions of entrepreneurs who later made the City what it was. 

Fate was fate, she believed, and there was nothing you could do about the cards you were dealt except to make the best of them; and soon in her young life 'extension' became the operative principle. With enough imagination and empathy it was enough to be in the occasion of cool, commit to memory the confected reality, and rely on it as a foundation for future recall.

Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described memorist, said that the past and only the past defined human existence.  The present, Nabokov went on to observe is nothing more than a millisecond of existence before becoming the past. The Higgs boson once produced has a lifetime of less than one sextillionth of a second; and this is slow compared to the passage of the present to the past. The  future is only a speculative time of possibilities and impossible dreams. 

The more one remembers the past, said Nabokov, lives it through constant recollection, and curates it as a personal, existential treasure, the more one’s life has substance and meaning.  Nabokov developed techniques to fix events in his memory and devised ways to recall them from his mental archives and replay them like a movie.  The more he could remember, he said, the more complete he was as a human being.

However one chooses to define the present, it quickly becomes the past, archived in our memory, and without attention can disappear.  If we cannot remember the beach at Deauville -  the umbrellas, the silhouette of the cliffs of Dover on the English side of the Channel, the seagulls, the chill, and the dresses of young girls – then it never happened.  Even if the events of that day had subliminal effects – our preference for colored dresses or our dislike of the chill – if we cannot remember them, they have lost their meaning, integrity, and substance.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an autobiography which was written not as a historical record of the author’s life, but as a pastiche of those memories which define him.  There was no reason to order them chronologically, to link them to future events citing cause and effect, only to celebrate them for what they were – integral and indispensable parts of him.

Vicki was a creative memorist.  She saw no distinction between her imaginings, their confection into valid memory, and the actual events of her life.  Why should one be forever harnessed to a mule endlessly plowing the same furrow? No, the human spirit was made of much finer stuff than just plodding through a solitary, brutish, short, and nasty Hobbesian existence.  

Of course she did not set out to construct this alternate reality, but fell into it naturally.  As a little girl, the world around her seemed too flat and grey until she invested it with brightness and color of her own. Birds were not just birds but messengers of God.  Clouds were the meadows of angels. 

Vicki came into her own later in life when she reined in her fanciful ambitions, finished college, and moved to Washington where she found an internship at an environmentalist non-profit agency.  Although she had no particular commitment to reversing climate change or to saving the snail darter or spotted owl, the idea of saving the earth had congeniality. 

It wasn't long before she conflated her own fancy with the affairs of environmental action.  She became  a preservationist, a poet of the forest, a Rousseau and a Walt Whitman. She wove these stories and accumulating 'memories' so convincingly that her actual deskwork, endless editing of policy papers and screeds disappeared, in fact for all intents and purposes never existed.

The progressive tent is a big one with room enough to accommodate all manner of activists - climate change activists were joined by civil rights workers, transgender advocates, socialists and communists, and former farm workers.  In the heady atmosphere of social reform, all issues were conflated or subsumed within a universal anti-capitalist ethos. 

Slowly but surely, she created memories of abortion camaraderie on the National Mall, marches down the avenues of Washington with Black Lives Matter, standing tall and defiantly against the storm troopers of ICE. 

None of it was true, but it could have been, so close was she to the action in its preparatory phases in her office on U Street; and years later she spoke with confidence about those good, purposeful, righteous times. 

She didn't stop there, and as an older woman revived 'memories' of marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Woodstock, and Montgomery sit-ins. 

The remarkable thing of it was she never once considered herself an imposter, a fraud, a balmy dreamer.  Her invented memories were so real, so intimate, and so peopled with friends, lovers, and colleagues that she became a totally invented person. 

She always kept one step ahead of the truth - her stories of her halcyon years were so rooted in chronology, fact, and record that few questioned her; and her passionate retelling of them complete with love, hate, deception, dishonesty, and courage deflected any suspicion. 

Her marvelous confection was so convincing that she herself had no idea what was real and what wasn't. In a land already filled with striving, desirous, upward-reaching, credulous people whose grasp on reality or real possibility was fragile at best, Vicki fit right in.  No one really cared about the truth, veracity, or fact.  It could have been was enough for them. 

Artists like Browning, Durrell, and Kurosawa let alone trial lawyers knew that truth was evasive. Eye witness accounts of the same scene differ greatly.  Stories told around Aunt Leona's Easter dinner table about Uncle Harry and his third wife never jibed. The Ring and the Book was all about mnemonic artifact. 

So for Vicki Chalmers the niggling doubts about memory loss were insignificant.  If one memory faded, she could replace it with another, and till the end of her life she was so adept at confabulating her past that she was revered - a freedom fighter, a reformist, a progressive.  Yet, not only was she none of those things, she cared little about them.  They had been convenient, accessible realities, no more no less. 

A marvelous human invention was Vicki Chalmers, a marvel, talented creator of reality, an eye-painter, a dreamer brought to life, a unique creation.  Those who suspected that much of what she told was reverie, never called her out for dishonesty.  They, like everyone else, loved the stories, the passion, the engagement, and the vitality.  Who needed the truth?

The Faithful Husband - Leftovers In The Survival Of The Fittest

New Brighton is a small Connecticut city once known for its industry.  Its factories produced arms and materiel for the Union Army in the Civil War, the United States Army in WWI and WWI, and hardware for the domestic market. Its factories eventually shut their doors in the face of foreign competition, but small tool-and-dye shops remained. 

New Brighton in the modern era was like many in New England, recovering from the end of their industrial heyday, losing population to the wealthier suburban towns serving New York, Hartford, and Boston, but managing.  For those who remained - a healthy cadre of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants - like was good.  Crime was rising due to Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants; the Polish neighborhoods, always anchors of civility, were now far smaller than they were fifty years ago, but there was the Frederick Law Olmstead park, an important regional hospital, and a small university. 

The older residents remember the town in its halcyon years - a bustling downtown, festooned with lights and window displays at Christmas, Holy Week processions, and a post-war optimism shared by many in the country.  Things changed, of course.  Religion was no longer the common thread of the community, children are driven to school rather than walk, the finer stores have moved to the suburbs, and marriages are more open, women more free to come and go as they please, and men involved with other women.  It isn't exactly the free-for-all found in big cities, but the old life of fidelity and Kinder Kirche Kuchen is no longer. 

From an evolutionary point of view, this is a good thing.  Darwin would have been cautionary at best had he seen the sedate homeliness of the Fifties, men settling for one woman, women happy as homemakers and mothers, and children brought up in an atmosphere of propriety, faithfulness, and patriotism. 

The real world was held in abeyance during those years of happy marriages and a welcoming but censorious society.  The Sixties changed all that.  Love the one you're with replaced the old tired nostrums of sexual ordinariness.  Sex was offered, accepted, negotiated in a free marketplace, the fetters, tethers, and halters were off.  Mr. Right went packing.  Men were free to roam. 

Something happened, however, in later years.  Somehow sex was again being put back in carefully-wrapped boxes, opened carefully to save the ribbons. Women were once again nicely trimmed, honorable, and as untouchable as the Virgin Mary...unless they let their knickers down, set the rules of engagement, warned against untoward advances, and in the interest of personal integrity replaced ravishment with dutiful respect.

 

Arnold Perkins was a man who accepted this new ethos.  He washed the dishes, kept hair meticulously out of the sink, encouraged and congratulated his wife at every turn, never questioned her intentions or movements, and saw only the emergence of the New Woman - independent, confident, ready and able to take the place of men everywhere. 

Needless to say, his wife quickly tired of his toadying complaisance. She was a woman, after all, programmed for bad boys, genetically primed for male confidence, pursuit, and sexual desire.  Before her inclusion within the new paradigm of female supremacy turning the tables on formerly predatory, abusive men and giving them a taste of their own medicine, she was a girly girl who fell for the football captain, the dreamboat, the man of a thousand women. 

Subject to the insistence of her political sisters she came to realize the error of her ways - this macho thing was what had incarcerated women for millennia.  Forget the hunters of the plains, the warriors, the shamans and bed the farmers who will finally and at long last treat you right. 

Now that she had roped the calf, she wanted only the bull.  She wanted to feel the glory of being taken, being used, being ravished.   She was initially ashamed of these feelings, a traitor to the cause, but nature overruled nurture, and before you know it she was in bed with a billionaire she met at the Town & Country bar at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, an after conference hours affair she had always dreamed of. 

In fact she could have written the script herself - handsome, well-dressed man treated like royalty as he came into the bar, kissed by a hundred women as he walked to his place, ordering a dry Stoli martini straight up, three olives. 

This was the very man she was told to avoid - the predatory male indifferent to women except as vessels of pleasure, the epitome of self-interest and arrogant self-assurance - and yet she could not resist, succumbed without a whimper, and wanted to come back for more. 

'Another time' he said, and of course she never saw him again. 

Meanwhile Arnold waited patiently for his wife's return from her business trip.  Dinner was in the oven, the table was set, the bathrooms had been given an extra swish, and her favorite music was playing.  When her heard her familiar step on the walk, he smiled, delighted that she was back. 

'I'm tired...sorry, see you in the morning' she said to a disappointed but understanding Arnold as she went up the stairs. 

'Of course, dear. These trips take a lot out of you', and with that he replaced the china and silver, carefully put away the roast, the parsley potatoes, and the legumes almondine, turned off the music, and sat in his recliner. 

'Man up!' was the cry he should have listened to.  He had become his wife's doormat, her convenient househusband, her steady-as-she-goes plowman, her faithful, dependable mate and had gotten nothing but a peck on the cheek in return. 

He ignored the signs - sexual demurral, increasingly frequent trips to New York, a new dismissive indifference - and assumed the best, that his wife was coming into her own, a proud, defiantly positive woman. 

Meanwhile his wife cavorted in her newfound return to the old days, danced until midnight, squired by devilishly attractive men and was left in series on the curb.  She had been used, but she loved it. 

These men all had wives, lovers, and children by all of them.  They were Darwinian darlings, at the top of the phylogenetic chain, the progenitors of the best and the brightest, the fittest; while the Arnolds of the world died out, overmatched, ignorant, and useless. Blips on the evolutionary radar. 

Feminist accusations of predatory, toxic masculinity, misogyny and swamp-and-cracker machismo were brushed off like pesky flies by these men who went on their merry way finding hundreds of women failed by the cant of femaleness and wanting only the hard, rough reality of sexual pleasure. 

The marriage ended, no surprises there.  Arnold quickly remarried to a simple, sexually complaisant, deferent woman from New Brighton with whom he shared common interests.  

He never blamed his first wife.  She had every right to choose her own path, her own destiny; and it was he who could not provide the support and consistency that she needed. 

Only once did he have his doubts about his life choices.  His Yale reunion was dominated by the wealthy, successful, sexually adventurous men of his class.  They talked only of conquests - a Wall Street merger, the billion dollar startup, offshore investments, homes in St. Bart's and third wives.  His lot - sharing misery stories in the shabby non-profit corner - was a sorry one; and he wondered if he had taken a different turn, he might be one of the big men at the bar. 

Unfortunately evolution is not a matter of choice, and he had gotten the short end of the stick. 

As to his wife? No one had heard much about her after she left Arnold and New Brighton.  His friends hoped that she was a sexual retread in Spokane, which was possible the way she started off; but no one cared that much except for the apocryphal lesson of her marriage to Arnold.  Man up! Throw the bitch out! but of course those angry howls had no resonance in a society still beholden to women. 

When Bob Porter Poisoned The Parsons' Dog - The Myth Of Neighborliness

University Park is a leafy, well-to-do neighborhood of Washington DC, home to lawyers, professors, non-profit executives, and mid-level government officials.  It is uniformly progressive - American flags are a no-no, rainbow flags and Hate Has No Home Here Signs are on every other lawn - and during COVID it mobilized a vigilante committee to call out and report mask and distance offenders. 

Children were enlisted in a Stasi-like secret service, taught by their parents to shout j'accuse at anyone not wearing a mask and then to spread the alarm that so-and-so was a Typhoid Mary.

There was really no cause for alarm, however, since the community was in lockstep - to a man they believed that COVID was The Big One. They stayed at home at the first sign of a sniffle, scrubbed their counters with industrial strength cleansers, installed air purifiers, had food delivered, and isolated mail for three days before bringing it indoors. 

The neighborhood was shocked when Donald Trump won the 2024 election.  They were sure Kamala Harris and her message of diversity would win the day, so when the returns came it, they were disconsolate, despondent, and fearful.  From that moment on Trump hatred went viral, neighbors consoled neighbors, busses were organized to take them to the National Mall to protest, and the entire community was as unified as never before in political solidarity. 

So it was with some surprise that the Parsons’ dog dropped dead on their doorstep. Fluffy had always been a healthy, hearty animal with boundless energy and enthusiasm, so his premature end was a surprise and cause for suspicion.  Of course, given the closeness of the neighborhood no foul play was initially suspected but rumors have a way of taking over reason, and the Parsons were convinced that the people across the street had done the unthinkable. 

Now, the dog was a royal pain in the ass, barking at every passing car, howling at night, snapping and yapping at squirrels.  He barked from the moment the lights went on in the Parsons' kitchen till the last nightlight was turned off.  He was a barking machine, an unstoppable, loud, annoying nuisance. 

When the across-the-street neighbors came over to ask the Parsons if something might be done about their dog, Marfa Parsons politely explained that Fluffy was simply experiencing readjustment pains.  He really was a lovely dog, quite friendly especially with children, and there was really nothing they could to.  Once he became more accustomed to his new home and the residents around it, he would quiet down. 

The dog, however, was a barker - a fouled up cross breed Schnauzer, Terrier, and Shepherd.  The bloody animal had barking hardwired into its genes and could no sooner 'quiet down' than sit at the table.  For weeks, months the dog barked until its vocal chords were frayed and by evening it could only utter muted, raspy sounds; but by the next morning it was on the front porch barking at every moving thing in sight. 

Again the across-the-street neighbor paid Marfa a visit, but this time was more insistent.  There were rules of civility and neighborliness she said as well as local ordinances; and the Parsons would do well to heed both. 

'Well, if that doesn't take the cake', said Marfa Parsons in a huff, and reported the episode to her husband, a lawyer whose brain began to sift and filter cases of nuisance suits.

The barking went on for another two or three months at which time the dog died. ‘It was them', said Marfa. 'It has to be.  Who else would do such a thing?' 

Of course the accused neighbors denied it, taking great offence at being accused of breaking the unspoken civil code of the neighborhood. 'Do an autopsy', Bob Porter shouted, knowing full well that the Parsons would never agree to have Fluffy cut open and give their children nightmares for years; for of course he poisoned the dog and did the neighborhood a favor by doing it. 

'What happened to that Parsons dog'? everyone within earshot said, thankful that they had been given a reprieve; but the Parsons were not going quietly and so what is commonplace even in well-ordered, considerate neighborhoods, began. 

A tit for tat, increasingly vandalizing affair - petunias trampled, tires deflated, car windows soaped, trash strewn in the gutter, and so on. It actually almost came to blows when Bob Porter and Frank Parsons squared off in the middle of the street but both thought better of it.  A tussle in lawyer-heavy University Park would be not just male bravado but assault and battery. 

So the Parsons decided on rumor and innuendo.  'Did you know that the Porters poisoned Fluffy?' Marfa told all her friends, the mothers of her children's schoolmates, the postman, the garbage men, and passersby. It worked and before long the Porters were pariahs, dunned out of the babysitting coop, the PTA, and the ANC3 council. 

This spawned counter rumors - also true - that Frank Parsons spent his Thursday evenings not at the bowling alley but in Adams Morgan with Betty from Accounting and that Marfa Parsons was no shrinking violet herself. 

Luckily for everyone the storm blew itself out, the Parsons got a new non-barking dog, a Basenji-Shih Tzu mix, two canine breeds that cannot bark. The cross breeding did something to the torso and legs, so this miserable animal waddled and rocked and couldn't fetch or chase. 

Up and down Blanding Place there were incidents.  Herb Archer told his neighbors to move their car back of their property line 'for their own protection'.  An old tree in the front yard might lose a limb in a storm and fall on their car.  The tree however was as solid as the Charter Oak, so for the windy neighbor the car had become an obsession which caused no end of bumper-car antics. 

The people next to the Parsons objected to them parking in front of their house.  'It's a public street', said the already suspicious and on-alert Marfa to which the neighbor slammed out the door and backed her car into the Parsons's Porsche. 

Spite fences gave Long Fence a boost in corporate revenues.  Lagging for years in University Park which was uninterested in boundary lines, the company, after the various spats in the neighborhood, began to put up fences left and right - not simple white picket fences, but stockade fences, ten feet tall, wooden barricades up and down both sides of the house. 

Before long, University Park, formerly a congenial politically uniform, neighborly place had turned into a snipped and bitten one.  Children walking to school were told to keep to themselves and speak to no one.  No cups of sugar were exchanged, no kind words were spoken to the elderly, and worst of all, all but armed guards were put around dug-out parking spaces. 

In the space of a few years not a scintilla of the old neighborliness remained.  Cynics said that it just reverted to normal - territorialism and self-interest was the human rule, not the exception - while die-hard optimists thought that once the bad apples had left for other stomping grounds, the neighborhood would once again become Washington's model community. 

Human nature being what it is - as the man said, territorial and self-interested - and hardwired into the human genome, the new crop of University Park residents were likely to ne no different than those they replaced. 

Marfa Parsons moved to a condo in a Bethesda high-rise - that way she would have no territorial disputes with neighbors and would rarely see the people in 327 or 325 - but of course no building is completely soundproof and the smell of garlic never stays put, so she had to put up with nuisance and assholes.