Woman Overboard

            A sailor was washed overboard in the nineteenth century at the Cape of Good Hope. Many were, actually, and plenty of ships were lost, too. The coast at the Cape is jagged; the water, gelid.

It’s a treacherous place to sail. The Cape of Good Hope is near where the waters of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet, and the waves of merging waters slam into one another ceaselessly. One of the fastest currents in the world is located at the Cape, and more often than not, the prevailing winds move against it. Rogue waves are common. I’m a lifelong landlubber, but the literature makes it clear; these are dangerous waters.

But the sailor I mentioned—the thing about him is that instead of being sucked down into the waters beneath the continental shelf, he was lifted up again. One of those wild, unpredictable waves took hold of him and threw him back onto the deck of his ship.

I learned recently that my position was eliminated. I teach English to international students at a small liberal arts college, and I love the work—it’s nothing short of exhilarating to see the progress the students make in such a short time. I can take a bit of the credit, but really, these are courageous students, who come from as far away as South Korea and Saudi Arabia and Kenya and Poland and Japan, and who do pretty well just by navigating the waters and talking to people, and even by half-listening to those commercials that would have them believe we all give each other beribboned Lexuses for Christmas.

I have another semester in front of me before I need to hunt for a job, and I plan to really treasure my students in the time I have left with them. It just about sinks me to know that I’ll be leaving the classroom soon, and that the day may come when I won’t be able to share in students’ growth and help them to overcome obstacles. Sometimes I try to imagine what the future might hold, and I feel numb and breathless—exactly like someone who is sinking.

But then I think of the sailor. I don’t know his name or the specifics; he’s someone I read or heard about, and he stayed with me. I can’t even find him in the endless ocean of Google, where there be dragons and Kardashian sex tapes and kitten after kitten after kitten. Maybe I made him up, but I don’t think I did. I think he’s real. Those waves certainly are. Even at this moment moment, they’re pounding into one another like watery crash cymbals, as I imagine it—although a friend's Merchant Marine husband clarifies that the sound of great waves coming together is more similar to a deep growl or a train.

I was in a ferry in dangerous waters once off the Massachusetts coast. Because waves are, well, waves, and arrive with regularity one after another, I experienced the same thing time and time again. The ferry plowed up a wave and launched off of it, just like your car might do on a dip in a country road. We went airborne and then belly-flopped into the trough before rising onto the next crest. With regularity, from Cape Cod to Boston, that ship launched itself into nothingness and then slammed into the water below. I understood it had been as bad as it seemed when numb passengers exited and the owner of the ferry line himself apologized to each of us for the frightening waters, the ferocity of which had taken the crew by surprise.

And that was just the Massachusetts Bay—the site of many shipwrecks, to be sure, but pretty safe for a twenty-first century traveler on a good-sized vessel. The terror of passage on a turbulent Cape of Good Hope—originally called the Cape of Storms—is beyond my imagining.

It must have been agonizing to slip into the salty drink of Western Africa. Finding oneself slammed back onto the deck would seem like a dubious blessing—to lie there stunned and breathless as fellow seafarers grabbed you, pulled you in, secured you while you recovered.

I hardly dare to hope for this sort of mercy, but I have to admit that I want it. I want to be pulled back in, where I can move and breathe and eventually be a productive, contributing part of a team once again.

And there’s always the chance that the sea won’t take me anyhow.

Vintage Fat

Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time in antique malls, flea markets, and vintage stores. I’m not a big shopper, but I like seeing and touching artifacts from the past, in exactly the way you can’t at a museum.

I enjoy the little mysteries. For instance, I often see hand towels and other bathroom linens at an antique store, but I’ve never once seen a washcloth from the 1800s or before. Why not, I wonder. Did people use sponges a long time ago? Did they use a bar of soap by itself? Were washcloths so well used that they wore out and never made it to our century? Were they considered too intimate to pass along after a person’s death? I don’t know. If I’m to find an answer, it will probably happen as I’m pawing through linens at a mall booth filled with old textiles.

Another thing I never see is women’s plus-sized clothing. There is seldom anything larger than a modern size ten, in fact. This is true for 1950s hostess aprons, it is true for 1880s dresses, and it is true for everything in between. None of them would fit me. Even the shoes are inches too short.

In general, most of us are larger than our recent forebears. If you don’t believe me, go try on some vintage shoes. Shoes from as recently as seventy years ago seem like they were made for a slightly less-evolved species—Homo Cinderellus, maybe. They run narrow and short. If you find a pair that fits, you can assume that they were worn by a giant of the past.

Our increase in relative size can almost certainly be credited to improvements in our nutrition, and maybe to our general robust health, thanks to modern drugs and vaccines and cures. We are hale and hearty. We live longer, and larger. We wash ourselves meticulously, with washcloths.

Then there’s the corset factor. People used to wear them—even men wore them in the Regency era. And although fashions and desirable body types changed throughout history, just as they do now (picture Twiggy alongside Kim Kardashian—a mere generation apart), women’s undergarments were generally form fitting and restrictive; in the Edwardian period, the wasp waist was all the rage. Perhaps antique clothes are smaller because the people who wore them were constantly trussed, or because being trussed trained their bodies into smaller configurations. As someone who has camped out near party spreads, cheesing multiple crackers, I don’t doubt that a tight girdle kills one’s capacity to ingest canapés.

Even when I was young, undergarments were de rigueur, despite the fact that I grew up during the height of the feminist movement. Regardless, in my small hometown, women wore pantyhose. My mother insisted on the importance of my equipping myself with control-top hose, a supportive bra, a slip (good Lord, when is the last time I wore one of those?), and even a tummy-taming girdle-type garment for when I wanted to look my sleek best.

All that elastic held my moving parts in place. Maybe it even took me down a dress size, temporarily. Maybe day after day after day of wearing constraining undergarments took people down a size permanently.

This theory would explain antique clothes being just a size away from my own size, but that’s not the case. No part of me fits into any part of a hundred-year-old dress. Period.

Clearly, I am the fattest woman in history.

This is a startling thought, and one that first gave me pause. I’m starting to own it, though.

Even so, I’ve developed a few alternate theories, as one does when one is unable to find evidence that any human like herself walked the Earth before her lifetime. (Imagine if every garment from the past had two neck holes or three arms. It’s kind of like that. You’d look everywhere for the one-neckers, the two-armers—the evidence that you’re not, in fact, the first of your kind.)

I mentioned nutrition, medicine, and improved overall health. I think another reason for the lack of antique plus-sized clothes may be what I call the Curtain Factor. When a woman my size died, it was seen as a waste merely to pass along her clothing to other people. So much material! The whole stunted, emaciated, corset-carved family could have outfits from a single hearty woman’s dress. A single gown could yield a men’s vest, a couple of baby onesies, a few light summer frocks, and some cheery curtains.

Just think of how sad those poor people would be. Not only is their loved one dead and buried, but they’re drying dishes on what used to be her petticoat. The couch is upholstered in her best winter coat. Her bloomers have been converted to mosquito nets. Everywhere they look, there are traces of her. They dab their eyes on an armless sleeve, and rinse it, maybe, and wash their face with it.

Andrew Jackson's Parrot

            Andrew Jackson’s parrot, Poll, was ejected from his funeral for his use of blue language.

            This fact gives me pleasure, if indeed it is a fact. More likely it’s just a baseless story, like George Washington’s wooden teeth. It turns out that when you marry the richest woman on the continent, like George did, you can afford dentures made of human teeth, gold, and hippopotamus ivory (although all the wealth in the world couldn’t save him from the lifelong misery caused by his inflamed gums).

            I encountered this story about Poll the parrot quite a while back, but I thought of it again recently after a question came up on Trivia Crack, my latest addiction. Trivia Crack is an aptly named app that pits players against challengers, either friends or strangers, to answer questions about history, entertainment, the arts, sports, geography, and science. Although I’m a lifelong sports fan, you would never know it by my performance in that category, where my accuracy hovers around the 79 percent mark.

            I don’t know what it is about besting complete strangers over sets of fairly obvious questions, but I confess—I like it. I do not like losing to friends, something that happens with some frequency, so I just avoid them, and instead I opt to impress strangers with my knowledge of the fact that Vincent Van Gogh was Dutch and the chemical symbol for Sodium is Na—really heady stuff, in other words.

            It seems to me that young people may not understand the way we used to live in the years before WiFi. If we didn’t know a fact, we would argue about it, ideally over drinks.

Van Gogh was Belgian.

No, I swear he was Dutch.

Van Gogh is clearly a Belgian name.

Oh, yeah? Well, I’ve been to Dutch, and I was in Van Gogh’s house. I even saw where his ear was buried. There’s a stone.

And that last person of course is adjudged correct, the “I’ve been to …” sort of the adult equivalent of the double-dog dare—the logical end of the discussion, or the illogical one, as the case may be. At any rate, it is usually the loudest.

These days, if we wonder where Van Gogh was from, a half-dozen people pull out their phones and check. Before you can take enough sips to stop caring, you know beyond a doubt that Van Gogh was born in Zundert, Netherlands, that his middle name was Willem, that no one ever found the gun responsible for his so-called self-inflicted gunshot wound.

I don’t doubt that we have a richer life because of our access to information—no one loves a good factoid more than I do. All I really know is that it’s far less rewarding to be a loudmouth in the current climate, and that hurts some of us more than others.

Enter Trivia Crack, which lets me jab my finger in the air and proclaim that, yes, Nashville is the capital of Tennessee, and touch is the first sense a baby develops, and the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1900. (No? Hell!)

The bluster of the pointless debate is rich. Although mistakes are quickly noted and turns are lost as a result, it is good to try to one-up strangers. And bluster makes me think of no one so much as Andrew Jackson, that old Presbyterian warrior, sitting alone in a room and cussing a blue streak beside his dead wife’s gray parrot until his own dying day.

            I think I would like to live a life like that—loud and at turns pious or profane—so that at its end, some dumb animal might curse my departure, shock everyone with his vehemence.