A Visit to a Shop that Leads to Reflections on Two Fallen Stars
By Lynette Seator

The following is an introduction to a book in progress. Much has been written about the idea that men and women experience the world in different ways, that in a sense they are born and raised in two different, albeit parallel, cultures. I would like to re-frame this notion, characterizing this divide with the proposition that men live in time, and women live in space. 
-L. S.

It all started one day, a number of years ago, when I entered a shop with what I recall was the intention of buying a gift for a bride to-be and was suddenly caught up in my own surprise reaction to an experience so ordinary as to be seen as routine. As I stepped into the shop, I was carried away. Once inside, I was entranced. The arrangements of household chic were gorgeous. There were stacks of batik tablecloths, kitchen utensils enamelled in the colors of bright silk dresses, the best of Ukranian village cooking presented by braid-crowned women in sleek, photo-bedizened pages of recipes, hand-woven baskets and authentic pottery casseroles, wire whisks with wooden handles. The latest designs were combined with a return to the roots of domestic civilization. It was all there for the discerning feminine eye.

Two such eyes met mine, those of an elegant saleswoman who herself enhanced the mood and look of the place where she presided confidently. Here, I thought, you can pick anything. Just close your eyes. No bit of bad taste had slipped past the guardians of this palace of careful choices. I was suddenly aware of my presence in that particular place, incapacitated by the realization that I had come into what should have been home territory, as an alien. This woman-designated space I was so intensely experiencing purveyed au courant femininity. I had returned to familiar ground with which I was no longer familiar.

Having lived for ten years enmeshed in domesticity, I knew the relief that shopping offered from a steamy kitchen and nursery routine. In those days, I would come out from under the seamy edges of house-keeping and merge with legions of women to resurvey the parallel universe where pull-at-the-stitches didn't show, where pure white towels were an absolute form of whiteness removed from the hard grey reality of daily dryings, and where crisp aprons proclaimed bridal showers and their promise of eternal bliss unsullied by grease spots.

What had I been doing in the intervening years to isolate me from a culture I recognized but was now unable to claim? About the time my children were learning how to read, I had gone back to pick up that old habit, taking classes, one leading to another. Graduations brought travel to various places. I knew my way around Honduran villages, had climbed among the sturdy constructions of Machu Picchu and witnessed macumbá in Río. Here I was not a tourist, so why was I just now feeling strange? The service that the chic clerk was offering could not help me. Had I been a man in these female surroundings, I would have been treated as an invalid of sorts. The reigning goddess would have understood my discomfort, compassionately guided me through the alien territory, and packed me off with my purchase of her choice. But I was an expatriate returned to the homeland that no longer was home. I was a woman who had lived a long time outside the particular world of women.

I was experiencing culture shock when I had least expected it. But hadn't my daughter experienced culture shock when she came home from her rural sojourn among the deprived of a Central American village? Was my experience a microcosm of hers, a reaction to overabundance that she felt rising, threatening to choke her just when she was safely home from her harrowing experiences among the hunger-striking poor and a hell-bent military regime? She had come back to clean sheets and napkins with every meal and a weight of depression. Now here I was in a most amiable circumstance cushioned by an attending voice among the pastels of flowered cotton potholders, enhanced by the tones of delicately modelled wind chimes, struck dumb. 

Awkward as I felt, stepping into the smart shop was a revelation. I had come in as an outsider and, therefore, had seen the place, and what is more had seen myself seeing it. The moment illuminated the essential difference between my two adult lives: one in the tangible world of spatial dimensions, the other in the on-going world of time and abstractions. In my improvised analogy, I was reacting to this fully feminine abundance as a Third World traveller returning to First World consumerism. The experience was made new by the sharp contrast to what had gone before. Had I been living a life of deprivation surrounded by other students, blackboards, unadorned windows and dusty library stacks? I certainly had not experienced it as such but rather as freeing and exhilarating.

While events occur in time, things exist in space. The historical moment expands to fill tomes. The more written, the greater the significance the event takes on. Yet, in the spatial dimension, confinement itself with its imposed limitations can give the illusion of importance. Seeking to be noted in the history books, the politician opts to appear successful by convening his rally in a space too small to comfortably contain those who attend. And, having seen old movies, you know that the sweater girl was the girl who achieved her title by wearing a tight sweater. She, the big breasted beauty, existed in space but not in time, for in time lay her downfall. Therefore, the fascination with the death of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana as with the death of romantic heroines who preceded them. Beauty preserved is a joy forever. Sleeping Beauty in her glass case, the bird in the gilded cage, the maiden in the tower are icons of perfection that remove the ideal feminine from teeming life and turn her into an immu
table object, a beautiful thing. 

A collection of things existing for the sake of themselves, things still unused and unattached to specific human identities, things in broad gender-identified and cost-determined categories can be reassuringly real. Lying there in all their new perfection they appear to be an end in themselves rather than a beginning. In the perfect condition of their bright surfaces lies the promise of redemption from the dents and creases our lives acquire in time. They suggest life outside of time where the ultimate is the finished product. It is up-to-the-minute and exists in its immediate situation. It will not improve, will take on no rich patina. What it is now is all that it is. It is whole. This is the world of spatial dimensions where time is the destroyer and so must be held in abeyance. This is the world in which I have lived and in which many women have gone on living.

One of the difficulties in understanding the historical and present realities of our lives is that they come to us as tried and true. The various arrangements our culture carries on "work." They are time-honored. They are familiar and close to us. Indeed, as real human life shapes our mythology, our myths shape us. To pick at tradition suggests disloyalty, not only to forbears but to self. While the everyday failures of small lives go unnoticed, outstanding figures moulded by our culture tower above us like mythic heroes affirming the rightness of gender assignments.



Ways to Make a Living That Don't Make It
"Modos de vivir que no dan de vivir"
By Lynette Seator

"Se puede observar que lo que se llama profesiones
conocidas o carreras no es lo que sostiene la gran muchedumbre.…"
- José Mariano de Larra

Table Man

Wood he has worked tied to his back,
the old man entreats me. ¿Señora,
no me compra esta mesa?
My question:
is this the same table, he asked me to buy yesterday
and the day before, this table he has made
a part of his anatomy, heavy as the shell
a tortoise lugs? Heaven knows
what I could do
with such a table sturdy as it is and ready
for shellac or to be painted with flowers 
like the shell of the turtle I as a child slipped
into a pocket with no thought for the life of 
the patient turtle.


Doll Seller

Dolls, beautiful in their red, green, and blue banded dresses,
bright as the woman whose ebony braids wind
their luster around her head and from the sidewalk offers you
a whole family of dolls
for dollars. And I wonder how
as dirt rises to defeat her, 
she keeps her cloth dolls clean and bright.
I who have a house with rooms but no place
for the Papa, the Mama, and the Baby.
Now more dolls 
and more and more sellers in their gorgeous skirts
gather in the street while no one provides
for dolls as they multiply.



Beggar

She sits huddled under a gray shawl, 
her cupped hand extended. Now she looks up,
and I gasp to see her face ruined
in years of privation, a mouth twisted around
one tooth, this woman who was once
a plump baby, courted as a girl.
As she waits for a coin to drop, I ask myself:
How much, señora, can you afford to give her?
As much as the bottle of wine 
you gave to last night's party? 
As the shoes to match your pink dress?
Whatever you can spare, be it a penny,
she will bless you
in the name of all that to her 
is holy.


Picker

Like a bee, he buzzes through a field constantly
in bloom and chooses what goes into his sack
swelling as he goes. 
Unlike the beggar, 
a picker receives from the bountiful hand 
that tosses out. The crop he picks over
goes on forever, for there is no end to
garbage.
A banged up typewriter, broken
sunglasses, half a 
sandwich all have possibilities, but a gleam of sun 
on a covey of cans is more than hope.
It is a sure thing as is the cigarette 
the picker, trailing cast-offs, finds
sweet and sucks.