I let my toast burn.
I like the sound that a butter knife makes when scraping it off.
Before I’ve taken my first bite of breakfast, I like throwing bits of it away.
True or false: smelling burnt toast can be the first sign of a stroke.
When I am alone, I assume a mask. The mask is named Lilith.
Lilith is a Garamond girl.
She parts her hair down the middle.
She never listens to her voicemails.
Says no without the thank you.
Asks for extra whipped cream.
The only scale she owns is for coffee beans.
The only bags she wears are bowed.
After making a mistake, no matter how consequential, Lilith will just say oopsie daisy!
She wouldn’t be caught dead in polka dot.
Unless the polka dot is red.
A confession: I cheated on my driver’s test.
Another time it had been snowing. After the snow melted, I realized I’d parked on the sidewalk itself.
And one time I crashed my car into my mother’s car after a fight. I reversed into hers, 15 miles per hour. After missing a string of requests from my dean for a parent-teacher meeting, my mother was surprised to receive a letter suggesting it was time, respectfully, for me to find another school.
Lilith, of course, doesn’t drive. She lives exclusively in cities where she can lift her right hand and say, “Taxi!”
Like magic, the taxi arrives.
If it’s a day when she’s reading a particularly good book, she’ll take the underground.
Once she missed her stop three times in a row.
Rode to Holborn, then back to Bond Street, then too far to Oxford Circus, until finally to Tottenham Court Road.
Apparently, the book was that good.
Another confession: I don’t read books. I only compulsively buy them in hardcover.
Let them pile up by my bedside table until, one day, I give up, and take the stack to my shelf to organize them by theme:
FOOD WRITING. WRITER’S DIARIES. THE TROUBLES. WITCHES, ETC. THE INCOMPLETE WORKS OF SUSAN SONTAG.
Until the next dinner party when someone stares up at it with a glass of champagne bubbling and says, Oh, Gosh yes, the diaries of Sontag.
And I nod, gosh, yes.
Instead, I’m a magazine junkie. I wish I lived right next to a newsstand. On days where I don’t know what to do with myself, I walk thirteen minutes to the closest newsagents.
Ali, behind the counter, knew I’d left my boyfriend even before my closest friends. When he’s not speaking to his cousin in Karachi on speakerphone, he clicks the silver tally counter in his right hand.
I’m in the mood for poems, I’ll say, or carpets, do you have anything on carpets?
Here, Ali says, The Latest HALI.
A perfect day, really, is the very day I have in abundance, with monotonous frequency.
Lilith does not have mundane days. While doing household chores, she often plays games aloud. For example: Talk Show During Sweater Folding. Moss green sweater held up, Lilith says aloud in her American TV voice, “Many people wonder if they should fold or hang their sweaters. If you’re wondering which way to go, ask yourself—how much did I pay for this sweater? How often do I wear it? And most importantly: how prone is this material to losing structure from stretched shoulders?”
But my mundane days go dreamily like this:
Morning Ali.
Click.
Morning.
Click.
What’s the count today?
One thousand three hundred and four.
Mashallah.
Then I’m off. Flipping glossy pages. Profiles in The Gentlewoman. Turning to the classifieds in The New York Review of Books—apartments for rent in the Riviera. A woman, 60, well-read, looking to see if love might arise in ACT III. And sometimes even, why not? National Geographic. Arctic foxes and their long tails. The underbellies of stingrays, somehow both cartoonish and ghostly. The calming paintings in mindfulness magazines, articles encouraging me to keep a journal of my nightly dreams. Your subconscious is speaking to you: how to listen.
Seeing who has been photographed by whom, which near-unknown has risen straight to the cover of Vogue after which latest Netflix binge, and what jewelry is she wearing, a signature of pearls?
The latest trend in bathroom renovations, the bathtub like a beached whale in the middle of the bedroom. The return of extravagant floral wallpaper, gingham bedsheets.
And if I’m missing my mother: Women’s Health. Tried-and-tested one week diet plan for effective weight loss. Low-calorie easy to cook weeknight meals. The life-changing age-reversing effects of celery.
But Lilith doesn’t bother with the latest magazines.
Instead, she collects vintage ones, happens upon them left out on doorsteps, or buys them by the box from estate sales. Her home is a museum of historical artifacts.
How did she even get her hands on a Twiggy cover? Or a magazine spread featuring Françoise Hardy, young, boyish, perfect?
Lilith doesn’t have a style icon. (She is a style icon.)
But, if pressed, she’d say, “Françoise on her motorcycle.”
A bit of gossip: I knew a woman who knew a woman whose son went to the same school as Françoise Hardy’s son. Apparently she was a devoted school parent—never missed a parent-teacher conference, and was active in school board politics—voting passionately to keep hot lunches.
Does it count as gossip if it’s positive and utterly banal?
If you trace the origins of the word “gossip,” you find yourself at the Old English word “god-sibb,” which was once a term reserved for a woman’s closest female friends.
According to Silvia Federici, the term “gossip” turned from a term of affection honoring female friendship to its tarnished connotation during the 16th century, when witch-hunts grew feverishly popular.
“Female friendships,” said Federici, “were one of the targets of the witch hunts.”
Another confession: I was kicked out of Stonehenge when I was fourteen.
We had gathered my mother’s siblings and their children to celebrate my grandfather’s 85th birthday. Mute and inexpressive, we knew he was nearly a goner, so we rallied, driving hours to enjoy a sight of stones that he hadn’t even asked for. The landmark, a perfect backdrop for my mother’s photo op. Happy families. The two of us in hideous matching maroon coats.
To say I was bored out of my mind while the freckled university student on his summer job described Stonehenge as, “the most architecturally sophisticated surviving stone circle in the world,” would be an understatement. So I ran for it. I touched the smooth surface of the stone like it was someone else’s birthday cake.
The guards blew their whistles. I could hear their shouting. And my mother, shrieking my full name, both the middle ones. The guards jogged towards me—three of them—and escorted me out, past my mother’s siblings shaking their heads, past their stuffy wide-eyed children, past my mother, flushed and nose flaring, past my grandfather in his wheelchair.
My grandfather was the only one smiling.
That night, for the first time, I dreamt of Lilith.
It took me twenty-four years to Google the name.
In Jewish mythology, Lilith is thought to be the first wife of Adam. Unlike Eve, who was created from Adam’s rib, Lilith was made of the same clay. Angered by Adam’s attempts to dominate her, Lilith left him in the garden.
Some could say gossip is a political act, an act of survival, or rebellion.
An old wives’ tale: burnt toast contains a charcoal that can whiten teeth.
My mother read about it in some now-defunct women’s magazine. I’ll never forget her grinding burnt toast into a paste and applying a film over her teeth. Laying there, eyes closed, mouth open, teeth blackened, listening to her records.
She’d try anything, bless her. Still does.
Lilith doesn’t call it toast. She calls it an extra large crouton.