Damn the Sublime
Christine Donegan Segall
As with dreams or poetry, the meaning of the word that came to Sarah that morning in the coffee shop—heartless—was layered and condensed. Heartless, as in gaping cavity beneath her ribs. An aching kind of emptiness. Heartless, as in a face that could harden in an instant into a kind of gargoyle, petrified in a grimace of rage, of hurt, of fear.
Both were heartless. Both were she. And it was all Jim’s fault.
The waitress came over to refill Sarah’s cup, but she placed her hand over it. She could still feel the adrenaline of the fight, like caffeine surging through her veins. She didn’t need any more right now. She poked at her scrambled eggs with her fork and replayed the morning in her head. He had called her selfish; she had called him smothering. What was so selfish about not wanting every minute to be about him? she had asked. How about one minute? he had screamed.
Well, who would want to spend even one minute with someone who screams and calls you selfish? she had wanted to know. If he had any compassion, any real love for her, he would want her to have peace, to be able to unwind from the day, from work, from the kids. From him. Those were the things that drained her. But that’s everything! he had cried. No, she had said, it was the sameness of it all, the everyday monotony. Where is the adventure, the joy, the passion, the goddamn sublime? I do it, he had said. I do all the everyday chores, and I still want to be with with you. Even now, that perceived manipulation caused her blood pressure to rise. She had yelled? Cried?: You (with the emphasis on this word) have just become another chore to me, with your whining and pulling and pleading. You make me sick. She knew that these kinds of insults didn’t help matters and would eventually push him away, because it already had a little. He already looked hunched in defeat, like a weary old man. Still, she knew she had some time, and she wanted, strangely, to nurture her resentments.
She scanned the coffee shop and absently took a sip of coffee. It was cold and she made a face. Just as she raised her hand to call the waitress back, her attention was drawn to a woman in red Spandex tights and a white shirt tied at the waist several tables down from her, who rose from her chair and loudly addressed the stranger sitting next to her: “That looks delicious, lady. What is that?”
The woman seemed momentarily startled and then smiled and responded that it was eggs florentine.
The woman in the red tights hovered over her. “They kind of look like fluffy clouds with trees underneath them. Like I’m a bird looking down on them,” she said.
“Well, you know, now that you mention it, I think I can see that.”
Sarah was fascinated. Clearly, the woman was uncomfortable, but was making a great effort to be kind. Sarah had her pegged as a do-gooder type. Suddenly, the woman in the red tights unrolled her silverware from the napkin, raised a fork and planted it right in the nice woman’s eggs! Sarah put her hand up to her mouth, her eyes darting to the other diners, and softly gasped, thinking, oh, boy, even do-gooders must have their limits.
But to Sarah’s surprise, the nice woman simply said, “Are you still hungry? I can order you something or I can give you some of mine, if you’d like.” She raised two fingers in the air and said, “Excuse me, miss? Could we please get another plate here? Thank you so much.”
Sarah’s phone rang and she saw that it was Jim, but she ignored the call. She turned her attention back to the unfolding events in the shop. For the moment, it seemed her anger had
dissipated and she was grateful for the distraction.
The nice lady pulled out a chair from her table and offered it to the young woman. “What’s your name, dear?” she asked.
“Me? Oh, I’m Alana,” she said and took a large book out of her backpack and plopped it on the table.
“Alana. What a beautiful name.”
“My mother says it means I am bright and fair. Do you want to see my pictures?”
The waitress put a white plate on the table. “Well, your mother was right. You are bright and fair, Alana,” the kind woman said, as she used a fork and spoon to lift one of her English muffins off her plate and onto Alana’s. “Is that your photo album, Alana?” she asked.
“That is my life!” Alana said, as she motioned to several diners sitting nearby. “Let’s look at my beautiful life, everybody!”
Sarah sat transfixed. The patrons actually rose at the invitation, afraid, seemingly, to appear insensitive. She was amazed at how, in the space of about five minutes, this young woman had drawn so many to her. She was plain looking and obviously challenged in some way. She was just a little bit overweight, but her red tights were too small and it made them stretch thin enough that it showed the pink of her flesh beneath the material in some spots. Sarah’s desire to share this story overrode her anger, and she had just picked up her cell phone to call Jim, when the young woman in the red tights called to her: “Oh, lady, lady. You look sad. You come too and look at the book of my life.”
By now, there were three more women and one elderly man gathering around the nice woman and Alana. Sarah would rather have observed from a distance, but now everyone was looking at her and waiting, and, truth be told, she did have some mild curiosity about the photo album. So she stood up, raised her coffee cup to show the waitress that she now wanted a refill, mouthed the word “cold,” and joined the group. The elderly man moved aside to make room for her.
Sarah was situated a little to the right and behind Alana’s shoulder where she had an unobstructed view of the photos. There was one of Alana leaning against an ornamental iron railing in front of a red brick apartment building. It seemed that all the photos had captions beneath then, made with what appeared to have been a label maker, beautifully and painstakingly done. This one said, “This is me standing in front of our first happy home.” Another showed two young girls, somewhere between eight and twelve years old, Sarah guessed, sitting back to back on a blue ottoman. Both had on khaki-colored pants and knitted tops and had their brown hair in bobs, one a little longer than the other. One of them looked like Alana, and Sarah
wondered if it could be her when she was younger, but then she read the caption: “Our girls always lean on each other.” Sarah didn’t know if Alana was simply being literal or if she was capable of playing with words to be cute. There was a shot of Alana and a man who was wearing jeans and work boots and a red and gray plaid flannel shirt, holding hands and walking down a beautiful elm tree-lined street, looking back over their shoulders. In front of them was a
handsome facade of a bank. The caption was: “Me and my love going to the bank.”
“That’s so sweet, Alana, to have documented all the wonderfully simple moments of life. Such a good idea,” the nice woman said. “Yes,” said the chorus, “good idea.” The waitress refilled Sarah’s coffee and looked a little confused at the impromptu convention taking place.
There were endless pictures of everyday scenes: “Me cooking with the girls” and “Tony and me dancing to our music. Fun!” and a photo of four pairs of feet on a bed and a TV screen with some film playing: “All of us watching our favorite movie.” There was a close-up photo of the guy (boyfriend? husband?), Tony. He was nice-looking, in a kind of rough, blue collar way, and didn’t look like he belonged with her at all. He looked younger than she did, and was wiry slim, in a way that seemed like any muscles underneath the clothes would have been a surprise. What was he doing with her? she wondered.
Sarah continued to scan the photos: Oh, they got a new rug, and wow, they woke up in the morning so happy to see each other and
Sarah’s mouth dropped open. In the midst of all this was a photo of Alana in a backless blue negligee, sitting on a bed, the tip of a male’s white crew sock visible on the bottom left. “This is for my love,” it simply said. This was followed by more mundane events: grocery shopping with the girls, a picnic by a duck pond. Sarah looked at her fellow voyeurs to see if anyone was reacting. The old gent next to her gave her an impish grin as he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. The nice woman seemed to want to turn the pages as quickly as possible, only commenting on the ones of everyday business.
There were another three or four of Alana in slightly risqué poses, to which there were murmurings of “well” and “oh, my”: one with her stretched out on a bed, smiling at the camera and curling her finger at the photographer, wearing only a red satin camisole and black panties. There was a slight roll of belly fat visible and a red stone in her navel. Then there was one, taken using a self-timer, Sarah guessed, of Tony holding her while she’s draped in a bath towel,
apparently just fresh from the shower. She appeared to have no sense of the inappropriateness of these photos being part of this personal family photo album. When she had said that this was her life, she wasn’t kidding, Sarah thought. There didn’t seem to be anything she had left out.
“Well, these were lovely, Alana,” the nice lady said, and closed the album a little more abruptly than she probably had meant to, because it gave a thwack of finality and relief. “Thank you for sharing it with us.”
“And now we are all friends,” Alana said with some pride. “You have seen me in my life.” Sarah thought, oh, yes, we have seen you, my dear. She wondered whether anyone would ever teach this young woman about being discreet, being modest, or tell her that some things should remain private.
Sarah and the others went back to their own tables. The nice woman paid her check and hugged Alana goodbye. Alana put her arm around the woman and took a picture of them both with her phone. Sarah guessed this caption would be: “Made a new friend today!” Alana called out, “See you soon, friends!”
Oh, Sarah thought, Jim would really get a kick out of this. That was how it was with them. They would hold things in in resentment and anger and then explode. Then they would go off into their own little corners to fume and think and lick their wounds and then forget about it, glad to be rid of it for the time being. Wasn’t that part of the process? Everything had its place. This morning’s fight would be put aside as if it hadn’t happened, and they would resume without mentioning it until the next time, leaving the meantime to its own comfortable lies.
Sarah called Jim back and told him the whole story of Alana and the nice lady in the
coffee shop. “She had pictures of the most ordinary things, Jim, as if they were of supreme
importance. Who cares that you went to the hair salon or the bank or grocery shopping or watched a goddamn movie? We all do that!”
“Yes, we all do those awful chores,” Jim said. “The audacity of someone thinking these things might be important.” Sarah felt the sting of the sarcasm, the coldness. Jim was clearly not over the fight.
Sarah wanted to justify herself. “I told you, Jim. This woman was not completely right. You have to see that.” She repeated the story. “She started to eat right off the woman’s plate, for Chrissake. She had pictures of herself in lingerie and getting out of the shower, cuddling up with her man while she was in a bath towel, as if those things are just as ordinary as all the others, as ordinary as going to the store or having a picnic.”
Jim sighed. “Maybe in her mind, those things are as ordinary as everything else, just a wonderful part of everyday life. Or… maybe she thinks everything else is simply elevated. You know…sublime.”
Sarah thought, How dare he use my word against me? She was trying to think of a retort, when Jim, his voice softening a bit, finally said, “Look, Sarah, I know you need time to yourself, things of your own, space to stretch and think and just be…you. Believe it or not, I do too. But,” he added, almost wistfully, “don’t you want this—us—too? Don’t you want our lives together to be sublime? Or for us to at least to be more present in it? Maybe the girl in the coffee shop was onto something.”
Sarah thought: Maybe the girl in the coffee shop was onto something, but Jim’s response was out of the ordinary and she didn’t know what to do. She had spent so long in the comfort of resentment, the easy and predictable repartee of everyday arguments that, now, she didn’t know how to act, what to say. Did she even want a more intimate life with Jim—with herself, even? Or did she want to have the right to simply complain about not having it? If she wasn’t fighting for her rights, then who was she? He wants me to be more present in our lives? I thought I needed to be more absent. She felt nearly paralyzed. Normally, they would have argued and then forgotten it. There was a real kind of safety and contentment in that. This sounded like a lot of work.
“Sarah?”
“Yes, Jim,” she answered. “Yes, of course I want to grow together and be a better version of ourselves (was she speaking in self-help tongues?). We’re in a rut, I know. “But,” she added, “it won’t happen overnight, you realize. It will take time.”
“Of course,” Jim said, his tone more hopeful now.
Okay, Sarah thought, okay. All he wanted was for her to try. And she would—slowly. But despite the part of her that knew this was probably necessary, and might eventually even be good, she still thought: Damn the sublime and damn that coffee shop girl. It’s all her fault.
Christine Donegan Segall
As with dreams or poetry, the meaning of the word that came to Sarah that morning in the coffee shop—heartless—was layered and condensed. Heartless, as in gaping cavity beneath her ribs. An aching kind of emptiness. Heartless, as in a face that could harden in an instant into a kind of gargoyle, petrified in a grimace of rage, of hurt, of fear.
Both were heartless. Both were she. And it was all Jim’s fault.
The waitress came over to refill Sarah’s cup, but she placed her hand over it. She could still feel the adrenaline of the fight, like caffeine surging through her veins. She didn’t need any more right now. She poked at her scrambled eggs with her fork and replayed the morning in her head. He had called her selfish; she had called him smothering. What was so selfish about not wanting every minute to be about him? she had asked. How about one minute? he had screamed.
Well, who would want to spend even one minute with someone who screams and calls you selfish? she had wanted to know. If he had any compassion, any real love for her, he would want her to have peace, to be able to unwind from the day, from work, from the kids. From him. Those were the things that drained her. But that’s everything! he had cried. No, she had said, it was the sameness of it all, the everyday monotony. Where is the adventure, the joy, the passion, the goddamn sublime? I do it, he had said. I do all the everyday chores, and I still want to be with with you. Even now, that perceived manipulation caused her blood pressure to rise. She had yelled? Cried?: You (with the emphasis on this word) have just become another chore to me, with your whining and pulling and pleading. You make me sick. She knew that these kinds of insults didn’t help matters and would eventually push him away, because it already had a little. He already looked hunched in defeat, like a weary old man. Still, she knew she had some time, and she wanted, strangely, to nurture her resentments.
She scanned the coffee shop and absently took a sip of coffee. It was cold and she made a face. Just as she raised her hand to call the waitress back, her attention was drawn to a woman in red Spandex tights and a white shirt tied at the waist several tables down from her, who rose from her chair and loudly addressed the stranger sitting next to her: “That looks delicious, lady. What is that?”
The woman seemed momentarily startled and then smiled and responded that it was eggs florentine.
The woman in the red tights hovered over her. “They kind of look like fluffy clouds with trees underneath them. Like I’m a bird looking down on them,” she said.
“Well, you know, now that you mention it, I think I can see that.”
Sarah was fascinated. Clearly, the woman was uncomfortable, but was making a great effort to be kind. Sarah had her pegged as a do-gooder type. Suddenly, the woman in the red tights unrolled her silverware from the napkin, raised a fork and planted it right in the nice woman’s eggs! Sarah put her hand up to her mouth, her eyes darting to the other diners, and softly gasped, thinking, oh, boy, even do-gooders must have their limits.
But to Sarah’s surprise, the nice woman simply said, “Are you still hungry? I can order you something or I can give you some of mine, if you’d like.” She raised two fingers in the air and said, “Excuse me, miss? Could we please get another plate here? Thank you so much.”
Sarah’s phone rang and she saw that it was Jim, but she ignored the call. She turned her attention back to the unfolding events in the shop. For the moment, it seemed her anger had
dissipated and she was grateful for the distraction.
The nice lady pulled out a chair from her table and offered it to the young woman. “What’s your name, dear?” she asked.
“Me? Oh, I’m Alana,” she said and took a large book out of her backpack and plopped it on the table.
“Alana. What a beautiful name.”
“My mother says it means I am bright and fair. Do you want to see my pictures?”
The waitress put a white plate on the table. “Well, your mother was right. You are bright and fair, Alana,” the kind woman said, as she used a fork and spoon to lift one of her English muffins off her plate and onto Alana’s. “Is that your photo album, Alana?” she asked.
“That is my life!” Alana said, as she motioned to several diners sitting nearby. “Let’s look at my beautiful life, everybody!”
Sarah sat transfixed. The patrons actually rose at the invitation, afraid, seemingly, to appear insensitive. She was amazed at how, in the space of about five minutes, this young woman had drawn so many to her. She was plain looking and obviously challenged in some way. She was just a little bit overweight, but her red tights were too small and it made them stretch thin enough that it showed the pink of her flesh beneath the material in some spots. Sarah’s desire to share this story overrode her anger, and she had just picked up her cell phone to call Jim, when the young woman in the red tights called to her: “Oh, lady, lady. You look sad. You come too and look at the book of my life.”
By now, there were three more women and one elderly man gathering around the nice woman and Alana. Sarah would rather have observed from a distance, but now everyone was looking at her and waiting, and, truth be told, she did have some mild curiosity about the photo album. So she stood up, raised her coffee cup to show the waitress that she now wanted a refill, mouthed the word “cold,” and joined the group. The elderly man moved aside to make room for her.
Sarah was situated a little to the right and behind Alana’s shoulder where she had an unobstructed view of the photos. There was one of Alana leaning against an ornamental iron railing in front of a red brick apartment building. It seemed that all the photos had captions beneath then, made with what appeared to have been a label maker, beautifully and painstakingly done. This one said, “This is me standing in front of our first happy home.” Another showed two young girls, somewhere between eight and twelve years old, Sarah guessed, sitting back to back on a blue ottoman. Both had on khaki-colored pants and knitted tops and had their brown hair in bobs, one a little longer than the other. One of them looked like Alana, and Sarah
wondered if it could be her when she was younger, but then she read the caption: “Our girls always lean on each other.” Sarah didn’t know if Alana was simply being literal or if she was capable of playing with words to be cute. There was a shot of Alana and a man who was wearing jeans and work boots and a red and gray plaid flannel shirt, holding hands and walking down a beautiful elm tree-lined street, looking back over their shoulders. In front of them was a
handsome facade of a bank. The caption was: “Me and my love going to the bank.”
“That’s so sweet, Alana, to have documented all the wonderfully simple moments of life. Such a good idea,” the nice woman said. “Yes,” said the chorus, “good idea.” The waitress refilled Sarah’s coffee and looked a little confused at the impromptu convention taking place.
There were endless pictures of everyday scenes: “Me cooking with the girls” and “Tony and me dancing to our music. Fun!” and a photo of four pairs of feet on a bed and a TV screen with some film playing: “All of us watching our favorite movie.” There was a close-up photo of the guy (boyfriend? husband?), Tony. He was nice-looking, in a kind of rough, blue collar way, and didn’t look like he belonged with her at all. He looked younger than she did, and was wiry slim, in a way that seemed like any muscles underneath the clothes would have been a surprise. What was he doing with her? she wondered.
Sarah continued to scan the photos: Oh, they got a new rug, and wow, they woke up in the morning so happy to see each other and
Sarah’s mouth dropped open. In the midst of all this was a photo of Alana in a backless blue negligee, sitting on a bed, the tip of a male’s white crew sock visible on the bottom left. “This is for my love,” it simply said. This was followed by more mundane events: grocery shopping with the girls, a picnic by a duck pond. Sarah looked at her fellow voyeurs to see if anyone was reacting. The old gent next to her gave her an impish grin as he shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. The nice woman seemed to want to turn the pages as quickly as possible, only commenting on the ones of everyday business.
There were another three or four of Alana in slightly risqué poses, to which there were murmurings of “well” and “oh, my”: one with her stretched out on a bed, smiling at the camera and curling her finger at the photographer, wearing only a red satin camisole and black panties. There was a slight roll of belly fat visible and a red stone in her navel. Then there was one, taken using a self-timer, Sarah guessed, of Tony holding her while she’s draped in a bath towel,
apparently just fresh from the shower. She appeared to have no sense of the inappropriateness of these photos being part of this personal family photo album. When she had said that this was her life, she wasn’t kidding, Sarah thought. There didn’t seem to be anything she had left out.
“Well, these were lovely, Alana,” the nice lady said, and closed the album a little more abruptly than she probably had meant to, because it gave a thwack of finality and relief. “Thank you for sharing it with us.”
“And now we are all friends,” Alana said with some pride. “You have seen me in my life.” Sarah thought, oh, yes, we have seen you, my dear. She wondered whether anyone would ever teach this young woman about being discreet, being modest, or tell her that some things should remain private.
Sarah and the others went back to their own tables. The nice woman paid her check and hugged Alana goodbye. Alana put her arm around the woman and took a picture of them both with her phone. Sarah guessed this caption would be: “Made a new friend today!” Alana called out, “See you soon, friends!”
Oh, Sarah thought, Jim would really get a kick out of this. That was how it was with them. They would hold things in in resentment and anger and then explode. Then they would go off into their own little corners to fume and think and lick their wounds and then forget about it, glad to be rid of it for the time being. Wasn’t that part of the process? Everything had its place. This morning’s fight would be put aside as if it hadn’t happened, and they would resume without mentioning it until the next time, leaving the meantime to its own comfortable lies.
Sarah called Jim back and told him the whole story of Alana and the nice lady in the
coffee shop. “She had pictures of the most ordinary things, Jim, as if they were of supreme
importance. Who cares that you went to the hair salon or the bank or grocery shopping or watched a goddamn movie? We all do that!”
“Yes, we all do those awful chores,” Jim said. “The audacity of someone thinking these things might be important.” Sarah felt the sting of the sarcasm, the coldness. Jim was clearly not over the fight.
Sarah wanted to justify herself. “I told you, Jim. This woman was not completely right. You have to see that.” She repeated the story. “She started to eat right off the woman’s plate, for Chrissake. She had pictures of herself in lingerie and getting out of the shower, cuddling up with her man while she was in a bath towel, as if those things are just as ordinary as all the others, as ordinary as going to the store or having a picnic.”
Jim sighed. “Maybe in her mind, those things are as ordinary as everything else, just a wonderful part of everyday life. Or… maybe she thinks everything else is simply elevated. You know…sublime.”
Sarah thought, How dare he use my word against me? She was trying to think of a retort, when Jim, his voice softening a bit, finally said, “Look, Sarah, I know you need time to yourself, things of your own, space to stretch and think and just be…you. Believe it or not, I do too. But,” he added, almost wistfully, “don’t you want this—us—too? Don’t you want our lives together to be sublime? Or for us to at least to be more present in it? Maybe the girl in the coffee shop was onto something.”
Sarah thought: Maybe the girl in the coffee shop was onto something, but Jim’s response was out of the ordinary and she didn’t know what to do. She had spent so long in the comfort of resentment, the easy and predictable repartee of everyday arguments that, now, she didn’t know how to act, what to say. Did she even want a more intimate life with Jim—with herself, even? Or did she want to have the right to simply complain about not having it? If she wasn’t fighting for her rights, then who was she? He wants me to be more present in our lives? I thought I needed to be more absent. She felt nearly paralyzed. Normally, they would have argued and then forgotten it. There was a real kind of safety and contentment in that. This sounded like a lot of work.
“Sarah?”
“Yes, Jim,” she answered. “Yes, of course I want to grow together and be a better version of ourselves (was she speaking in self-help tongues?). We’re in a rut, I know. “But,” she added, “it won’t happen overnight, you realize. It will take time.”
“Of course,” Jim said, his tone more hopeful now.
Okay, Sarah thought, okay. All he wanted was for her to try. And she would—slowly. But despite the part of her that knew this was probably necessary, and might eventually even be good, she still thought: Damn the sublime and damn that coffee shop girl. It’s all her fault.
