Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

by Duchess Goldblatt

“What else do you tell them to do?” “Oh, you know, I tell them to do their best creative work, extend forgiveness to others, practice patience. It’s the sort of thing my dad used to tell me to do, come to think of it. Most of the time when she tells them to do something, it’s just me talking to myself. She uses her powers for good. Duchess gave them mindfulness assignments last year for springtime sacrifice during Lent.” “No, sir. You did not. You’re making that up.” “Not at all. They took it very seriously.” “What did you make them give up?” “I didn’t make anybody do anything. Only the people who requested an assignment got one. Each person got something different. She suggested little sacrifices each person could consider making to help them practice mindfulness. You know, as a way to calm down and center your thinking.”

I was just thinking of this today! Please bestow one upon me, your grace.—C I think I’d like you to give up sandwiches. Every time you forego, you will pause to remember one who has greatly loved you. I am weak but the sourdough art strong. Still, I will try, your grace.—C

“My point,” I said, “is that Duchess is somehow tapping into other parts of my brain to remember everything. Look through her list of people she’s following.” I handed over my phone. “Ask me about them.”

“Are you telling me there’s a senator who knows about Duchess Goldblatt?” “I should certainly hope so. If anybody needs to benefit from the bright shining light and wisdom of the universe that Duchess embodies, it’s the US government.”

“They know my heart,” I said. “They know my voice. Those are the best parts of me. I never really liked my name anyway, to be honest with you. You know what’s funny, come to think of it? I used to have an incredible memory. It was freakish. I could recognize people from having been on the same bus with them five years before. I could hold a whole book in my head and see every part of it at once. I’ve lost so much ground, but it’s almost like Duchess has found a path back to my memory. She’s turned the lights back on.”

All lost manuscripts have since been found, numbered, bathed in rose water, and shredded for confetti. It’s what they would have wanted.

Food trucks never caught on in Crooked Path. We have advice trucks. People like to run out at noon and grab five minutes with a Jungian.

If she’d ever seen despair up close, she would know what I knew, that God understands the nature of a broken heart. The saddest people will always be allowed to go home first.

My only option was to retreat into the deep peace of silence. I didn’t look at people straight on. I kept my face smooth and still like a statue. But I listened, and inside my mind, I took notes.

I’m also aware of a quote often attributed to Freud: “All family life is organized around the most damaged person in

I’ve drawn a line down the page here, in invisible ink, between the part of the story that’s mine to tell and that which belongs to other people, both the living and the dead. I put my ear to the ground over here and over there. I have to if I want to see how the pieces of the world fit together.

I started to panic. How could I explain that this was innocence itself ? I was a fictional character, that’s all; I wrote online in the voice of an elderly author who considered herself a literary superstar. Nothing to see here. Move along, pal.

Crack yourself open 45 degrees at the waist and see if there’s another, smaller you inside. That might be the real one.

New Year’s Eve, steam the new year in a pot of water with a bay leaf. Any months that don’t open on their own are no good. Throw them out.

As a small child, I recognized that I had a calling in life. No one ever told me this was the case, but in the way that very young children can perceive the truth of the things happening around them without being able yet to articulate the reasons, I saw clearly: my father’s heart was breaking, and it was my job to lift his spirits. And I could do it, a tiny bit at a time, by making him laugh. Once I saw that I could do it, I had to do it.

Funny ideas are everywhere if you’re vigilant and always on the lookout, as I had to be. School and playmates were fleeting and irrelevant distractions from my real work, which went on in my head. I paced my stories out every afternoon, walking home, a miniature Wallace Stevens on his lunch hour.

From him I learned comic timing, the effect of the right word deployed in the right moment.

I keep a silver bowl full of emails by the front door. Anyone who tries to pop in for a visit has to take a bag of them for the ride home.

I prepared her for the special experience as gently as possible. “Stay out of the way or I’ll kill you,” I said. She nodded. “That feels fair.”

“He is a beautiful human being,” the teacher said, her eyes bright. “Just a beautiful soul. I’m so glad I got a chance to tell you that.” Once more, a sound moved through sudden rightnesses. I knew for sure that he was going to be all right because in that moment I saw it written on my bones. And finally, with that, I could breathe. I have never described to you what Hacienda looks like, and yet I almost think you might know.

Save on entertaining expenses by keeping up with only one friend, ideally a fictional person who prefers not to leave the house.

Lucy and Ethel could have been happy. Ethel could’ve run the building; Lucy could’ve been a bandleader. It would have been a good life.

You can take your feelings out to thaw, but figure 30 minutes per pound in the fridge. Don’t leave them in the sink. They’ll grow spores.

“Yeah. She’s definitely making me a better writer. Let’s say I’m consciously working on a hard problem at work, and I look away from it and play around with being Duchess for a few minutes. Then when I go back to my problem with fresh eyes, I can solve it. I’ll give you an example: Let’s say I’m tired of working and getting burned out. Duchess is thinking about Möbius strips and strip malls and thinking about the intersections between those two ideas, and what might be funny about that. It’s kind of like playing with a Rubik’s Cube while you’re trying to solve an equation.”

I have to fit it into the constraint of the space allowed, like a haiku. I figure out that puzzle, that takes me a couple of minutes, and then I turn my attention back to work, and the other part of my mind, my work mind, has figured out how to solve my real problem while I wasn’t looking.”

Writing isn’t hard. Worming my way into your heart one step at a time is hard. But it’s holy work, and I bought a boat with the overtime.

Choices are a luxury. We forget that sometimes, don’t we? Not everybody gets to have choices. If you have the education, wits, and leisure time to pursue your own interests, you have it better than 99% of the people who ever lived.

Having created Duchess as a fictional character who would talk to anyone meant that she did, in fact, have to talk to anyone. She answered every comment people made, and I had a couple of rules: I pushed myself to use every opportunity to respond as a chance to create an inevitable surprise for the reader: “inevitable” in the sense that once you saw it, there was no other response that would have been superior, and a “surprise” in that people couldn’t guess what she would say next. I tried to build in surprises around every corner.

Less a rule than a habit, Duchess used pet names for people: rascal, rascalino, sweets, sweetness, love of my life, pumpkin, poodle. She gets that from me. It’s handy if I see people and start talking to them before I can recall their names. Plus, you will perhaps agree with me that there are really only about five different names in the world. Put a couple of consonants and vowels together, that’s it, that’s every name. I can’t be expected to re...

I’m thinking of a little Etsy shop selling a beautiful boxed set of imaginary friends.

People often ask me how a fictional being made of spun sugar and justice can overcome life-threatening paper cuts. Simple: It’s magic.

And Duchess has to have wounds that are raw. It’s the only thing that explains the sadness that seeps in through the cracks when I’m not looking. Readers can see my scars even when I don’t think they’re showing. Missing Hacienda is a shorthand for all the losses Duchess has endured but never enumerated.

Stand straight, grab your toes, and fling yourself skywards. Oscillate. I believe in you weirdos. Let’s make it a beautiful day.

What happens to you people when I fall asleep? Do you cease to exist altogether or do you sit quietly and wait for me to come back?

Time expands and contracts on its own when the clock never registers quitting time.

When people say they’re going to “make time for you,” it’s instant time from a mix. Nobody bothers creating new time from scratch anymore.

Outperforming other people is of no interest to me. It certainly doesn’t motivate me. If anything, it makes me feel a little guilty. I was raised not to show off, not to be proud, not to draw attention to myself. I don’t like people looking at me or standing too close. Compliments make me uncomfortable. My greatest childhood dream was to be an author whom everyone would read but no one would look at directly, but I couldn’t figure out a way to write books without people knowing my name. (A word in your ear: I think I might have finally figured out a tiny loophole just big enough for me to slip through.)

Me: no. I don’t like being seen. I’d always rather be eavesdropping, watching people, standing at the back of the room with avenues of egress readily available just in case I need to split. I’m not competitive, which I used to flatter myself was a sign of maturity, but I realized a few years ago it could also be arrogance. I just don’t care enough about what other people are doing to compete with them. I see myself not in competition with anybody but in partnership with the page itself. It’s the beauty of the work that interests me, even if, like Duchess Goldblatt, like a Tibetan monk’s sand painting, it’s ephemeral. I will make it as perfect as I can while I work on it, and it will not hurt my heart when the wind sweeps it all away.

Duchess’s relentless insistence on her own physical beauty is both a running joke and a call to others to see and acknowledge their own gifts.

Duchess goes the other direction. Her old heart is broken and in tatters, but the world is beautiful and she loves it. She makes herself as large as possible. She reminds people that they’re better than they give themselves credit for, that their creative efforts matter, that they have a responsibility to extend themselves on the side of righteousness and do their best work. It’s part of the reason that she holds herself up as an example of physical beauty. If Duchess Goldblatt announces herself as beautiful, how can you not also acknowledge your own beauty?

I needed a word today and it eluded me for three hours. Finally, I treed it and put a canned ham outside. It’ll come down when it’s ready.

I’ve had a very hard time learning that lesson. I’m still trying to learn it. The mean joke is always right there at my fingertips. It’s effortless. Any asshole can make a mean joke. It’s harder work to reach out further for the joke that’s funny and can’t hurt anybody.

Gertrude Stein was talking about Oakland, California, when she said, “There’s no there there,” but she could have just as easily been talking about social media. I try to find the there that’s hidden there, or to plant some there there and watch it grow.

No, frankly, I don’t agree that I’m setting an impossible beauty standard. You could go put on a nicer ruff and ensaucen your sly gaze.

“Be at peace about the project,” I found myself saying to the CEO, loud enough for everyone around us to hear. “The partner falls ever more deeply in love with me as we live and flourish.” He burst out in a surprised laugh. He’s not generally a big laugher. A few people nearby lifted their heads to listen to us. “Why do you question it?” I asked him. “What have you heard?” “Certainly nothing negative,” he said. “I talked to her this morning. She said it’s going very well.” “READ BETWEEN THE LINES, SON,” I said. “She can’t be any more clear about her love for me,” and he laughed harder.

True. I remember following you and I thought you were a lot of fun. I can’t remember when or how or why you followed me back.—PJ Oh, I remember why. I was in the market for an emotionally healthy and functional friend. You edged out a number of other candidates.—DG

It’s true. When I was the boss at my old job, people would approach me with bullshit problems and I would stare at them hard and say, “How would you solve this problem if I didn’t exist?”—PJ

The American Psychiatric Association is pushing hard to get a blurb from me for the DSM-6.

I found a box of old hours at the back of the fridge. I don’t even know how long it had been there. Summer hours. Smelled like roses.

But now I know I can hold her peacefully within my heart and still have room left over. If this is the result of my own sorrow—an enlarged capacity; the ability to contain heartbreak not my own—if this was the deal, then it’s acceptable to me. Duchess Goldblatt wasn’t the one who taught me that grief would expand the boundaries of my heart, but she was the one who showed me how to share it with other people. This is not the life I wanted—I have mourned with every piece of my old broken heart for the life I always wanted, the happy family I couldn’t make out of thin air and good intentions for my kid and me—but this is the life I seem to have been groomed for.