Raising the Stakes

It’s about a girl caring about someone.

Yours truly (purple dress) on the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park, sometime in the early 2000s.

I spent a large chunk of yesterday seated by the Central Park Model Boat Pond reading James by Percival Everett. If you spend enough time anchored to one public place, you’ll observe a cross-section of humanity –– or at least a cross-section of a specific teeming quadrant. Yesterday, for instance, I saw two identical twins in their late 70s with their hair fastened in elegant twists using a series of identically placed barrettes. I watched an engagement photoshoot for a woman in a white halter sundress and a man in professorial tweed. I listened to a teenage boy explain how to be admitted onto yachts in Monaco and the Virgin Islands, beginning each sentence with an emphatic “Bruh.”

I was seated with my back to the Alice in Wonderland statue, whose wide metal toadstools I scampered across as a kid. At one point, a father and his small daughter approached the area, and the father wondered in an excited tone, “Is that a mermaid?” His daughter eyed the statue with a furrowed brow and said, more to herself than to him, “I think it’s…a girl caring about someone.”

I filed away her words –– and her excellent interpretive instincts –– to aid me in future interactions with art. In my MFA program, we often discuss the “stakes” of a given story –– what freights it with tension and energy, what exerts pressure on the narrative, what allows a reader to invest herself in its fictional world? It strikes me that the premise of “a girl caring about someone” charges many of the stories I cherish the most –– whether it’s Pride and Prejudice or Sula or the underratedly sweet 2007 romantic comedy Music and Lyrics co-starring Drew Barrymore and Hugh Grant. For MFA purposes, we’ll put “girl” in quotes and make “someone” the optionally plural “someone(s).”

A girl (woman) caring about someone. Mary Cassatt, Breakfast in Bed, 1897, oil on canvas, from the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

This premise is one way of understanding Roman Holiday, which I also described after a recent rewatch at the Paris Theater as a film about a woman putting her career first. It could even be applied to Bringing Up Baby (which, alternatively, is a story about a man unwillingly putting a woman before his career). Can you tell I’ve been keeping my media consumption pre-1955?

I passed another father-daughter duo on the sidewalk and received a second dose of three-foot-tall perspective. On the other side of a chain-link fence, children romped around the flat recess area of the middle school where I go to vote during election seasons. As she passed, the small girl looked to the side and asked her dad, “Is that a college?”

It was a good reminder that middle-schoolers can look like college students to a younger child, and that we all might present as people of age and consequence even if we sometimes feel like the 19 year olds [or insert your mental age here] we were when last the world felt familiar.

Can you believe that today it’s been 10 years since I got my braces off? Time really does do that flying thing.

Sending many good spring tidings!