More Didion. This time two essays; ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ and ‘On Self-Respect.’ Both can be found in the volume Slouching Towards Bethlehem, first published in 1968. This is our reading homework for our writing class. While reading ‘On Keeping a Notebook’ I have a sudden memory of a lobster. I turn to the back of my jotter and write ‘measuring the lobster with a tape measure. Photographing it. Evidence. Black Rock. Outdoor toilet. Childhood. Eels. Wind-up motorboat toys.’ I finish Didion’s essay and ponder the lobster. What should I do with it?
In her notebook essay, Didion outlines why she takes notes, and what she does with them. She argues that the notes help her ‘remember what it was like to be me’ and that the notes are ‘bits of the mind’s string too short to use.’ While this is interesting, I am more intrigued by her deftness in taking a note and turning it into a story with just a few lines. My favourite example of this is her note ‘what’s new in the whiskey business.’ With just this, she conjures two icky men with a woman in a bathing suit by a pool in Beverley Hills. Many years later, she ‘sees’ the same woman, now worn out and worn in, in the wrong coat in the wrong season. I fill in the blanks. I make judgements about the woman’s character. I hope the seedy men are now in jail.
Should I write the true story of the lobster and the measuring stick? Or turn it into something sinister or mischievous or wistful?
The truth is there is no lobster story. Not yet. I recollect only the moment. The faded yellow linoleum floor. The lobster, still alive, stretched out beside the stick. Two long thin antennae swaying grace. My uncle leaning over the lobster to take its photograph. Someone, my aunt maybe, exclaiming over its healthy size. Which pot to boil it in? Crustacean eyes on crustacean stalks. Homarus gannarus lurching forward to leave the scene.
I remember the lobster as dark. Navy or black. I search for Scottish lobsters online. This one would have been a Blue Lobster, with both claws intact. If they are one-clawed, they are referred to as Crippled Lobsters. I am surprised by this. Isn’t there a kinder word? Another online search reveals that the lobster can regrow its claw, although it will take several moults to do so.
I’d like to regrow my leg. Do away with it and start again. Lobsters have a lot going for them.
I have more lobster facts. Should I provide them now or save them for the story? Carapace is a nice word. Each ‘a’ pronounced differently. I try it as if it were Spanish. Then look up the Spanish word. Caparazón.
Lobsters flick their antennae to smell. What are they smelling? Does my lobster smell the peatsmoke from the hearth as it sways beneath the camera lens? Or gloopy cannelloni casserole with garlic and late summer green beans? Or breakfast scones with bramble jelly and slabs of hard salted butter, reheated over the fire on the griddle?
Didion wrote that she had ‘already lost touch with people I used to be.’ I was a little girl with bow legs and ugly blue spectacles and braced buck teeth and petulance on lobster day. I believe we’re still in touch although we’re both surprised the way we’ve turned out.
Emily let the lobster, who was as old as Cicero, who had been gravely wounded in the Battle of Gannerus, who had led his militant factions to revenge out of the underwater trenches in the Sea of Jura, who had lost count of his murdered wives, his armaments, his pandalus platyceros slaves, his rhetoric and his principles, sleep on the blue and white gingham cotton pillow beside her curled-up fist.
Lobsters can survive two to three days out of water. On the west coast of Scotland they are generally caught in baited creels or pots on the seabed. The fishing season is between May and September.
Robert had never danced with a lobster before. Tom had talked him into it. Look at her, he’d said. All alone over there. In such a beautiful gown. Do us all a favour. Get her up on the dance floor before there’s an almight scene. ‘I was pleasantly surprised’, he confessed to Tom on return from his honeymoon, ‘by the way she moved and shook.’ ‘And the crusher claws?’ Tom asked, pointing at Robert’s groin guard.
Lobsters can take up to seven years to get to their legal catch size. They are especially vulnerable to predators in their first months of life with barely 1% surviving to reach adulthood. Threats from marine pollution and overfishing are putting Scottish stocks at risk of collapse. The climate crisis is an existential threat.
They will cook the lobster. Boil it alive. After the meal, the homemade mayonnaise, the Irish soda bread, the wilting beeswax candles, he will leave without speaking, without closing the door. When she learns he will not return, she will leave the dirty dishes out, the cracked and skuppered carapace shells, the hammer, the scald-red knuckles, the splintered claws, the sucked out legs, the wooden salad bowl with its watercress and iceberg lettuce and yellow geranium flowers, just leave it all there on the spagnum orange oil cloth. A still life. Life, still. The measuring stick, she will take with her. Eventually. She will remember what it was like to be her and she will go.
SANDERLINGS 