“There’s a yearning, I think, that is a part of our relationship to games and play. There’s a desire, to feel as though there are maybe more rules governing the way in which the universe is working at any given moment than we can.”
Tracy O’Neill was one of the panelists for our Lab roundtable about games. She shared an excerpt from her memoir Woman of Interest:
In the months leading up to my first call to Joe Adams, the line I fed myself was that I was fine. When I remembered to, I hammed up my own impression of “fine.” To friends, I declared I was only late to the party——as usual——on my own rotten mommy issues. Privately, I held on to the wisdom of a friend who, as he told it, recovered from his quickly enough when a therapist shrieked, “If I hear one more word about that woman!”
As it happened, no one would have exercised that particular form of therapeutic disgust on me because, prior to 2020, I had uttered few words about “that woman” who didn’t raise me at all. I had for many years suspected that my life paradoxically was conditional on and had little to do with her, but I could not summon what the logical stakes of apprehending her were. My stance was that when I determined the name for the feeling I had about Cho Kee Yeon——if ever I did——then I’d know how to act, and I would. The operant fiction I told myself was that if I chose to find her, it would be a garden-variety matter of execution.
It was only in the spring of 2020 when I, preposterously, ransacked the paper for better news than the city’s storage of surfeit corpses in freezer trucks that I’d read a South China Morning Post article. It reported that a sixty-three-year-old man had died of COVID in a locked Korean ward with no known friends or family——no one to be contacted about the matter of his ashes. The paper referred to his death as “lonely,” and it was observed, not without poetry, that the dead man, weighing ninety pounds, “barely took up any space in this world.”
That last phrase did it. That phrase got it through my own thick skull that my woman could be dead or dying alone, no one to contact about the matter of her ashes. And though I could not define what it meant to die well, let alone how she hoped to, I was afraid that she was afraid. It did not stretch the imagination that someone might wish to die alone, then in the grand eventual rue it.
As it turned out, I could not stomach the image of an orphaned old woman. My regret moved forward and backward, inside out, and in the dizzy reckoning with a phantasmal urn of Jane Doe, I couldn’t see where anything started or ended, so that pretty soon my own thinking resembled a regrettable little obverse poem:
Were I not someone who had lived without here
I would have known why it mattered not knowing her.
Immaculate of doubt,
I would have found her.
Roland Barthes said, “Only a mother can regret.” Imagine believing that.
Imagine believing that
Roland Barthes said, “Only a mother can regret.”
I would have found her.
Immaculate of doubt,
I would have known why it mattered not knowing her
Were I not someone who had lived without her.
I’m saying the new nausea tripped a wire organizing my life. I’d come up with a particular O'Neill ethos in which family was formed not by nature but by the fact that you wanted enough to be family at all. That ethos had allowed me to be——despite material evidence to the contrary——“Irish American”; for my mother to say we both had olive complexions that looked like puke in yellow; and for me to recklessly hang on to the narrowing effect of wanting enough to as the primary feature of my identity.
And I loved wanting enough to. Or, if I got aboveboard, wanting too much. In obsession, I didn’t give a shit about the fat slice of life. If asked, I had my answer. I was already giving all my shit to the one thing. My shit had been spoken for. I’m writing. I’m writing. I’m writing. I adored the William James idea, “My experience is what I agree to attend to," the thought that I could narrow my perception to white peony, big dogs, dance, whiskey, poetry——and if I succeeded, that would be my experience. This was how writing worked: what I agreed to attend to was my story. Until 2020, my story was that I had been too busy wanting to write a novel, write another, write a dissertation or article about marginal sports to resolve my ambivalence about secondary subjects such as marriage, children, and Cho Kee Yeon, who had something to do with my birth but not my life.
Perhaps this historical tendency is why, when in 2020 I mentioned the burgeoning fixation on Cho Kee Yeon, my friend Maggie said, “But I thought you didn’t care about finding her.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
Maggie was in a position to know that, of course. She was the first friend I’d made when I’d moved to Brooklyn thirteen years before. When we were neighbors in an infested Bushwick dump, she’d witnessed our landlord call out to me as I’d pet a stray, “Hey, Tracy! How come you don't take care of me like that? I want to be that cat! Meow! Meow! Meow!” When she was twenty, I’d snuck her into filthy aquarium-looking bars where we drank Jack and Cokes. I loved her because she was sharp, exacting in her intelligence, and when her father was dying, she flew to Iowa to mow his lawn.
“I'm not angry,” Maggie said on the phone. “I just don’t know where this mother thing is coming from.”
“It’s coming,” I said, “from me.”
“I don't understand.”
“Which part?”
“You always said you didn’t want to!”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“So what happened?” and I could hear the sense of betrayal in her voice, as though I’d taken her on a ride.
I understood. Sometimes, we’d share each other’s stories to explain how we saw the world. She liked to tell people who referred to sexual abuse allegations as witch hunts that her friend Tracy said the metaphor was imprecise since it wasn’t as though there had been actual witches running around Salem, whereas there were real live abusers cruising for a bruising. And I liked to say that if you wanted an idea of what decisive looked like, Maggie once quit a job by carving a clementine skin to resemble a jack-o’-lantern, then attaching a paper speech-bubble resignation. Never had our repertoire included a near-idiopathic impulse to find a stranger who might be an apologist for her own unchained life or in hiding, a sad figure in an alley or, sadder still, dead.
“You know what? Never mind,” Maggie added. “Just don't become one of those assholes who leaves the city ‘for the children.’”
“Girl,” I said. “You do realize I’m in Poughkeepsie.”
I missed her. I missed an unlocked-down life, where it wasn’t so easy to forget we no longer lived in the same city. In those days, most everyone I knew missed each other, whether or not any of us had gone anywhere.
And all fall, men who claimed my case was hopeless disappointed me. I sat tight, sprawled stupid, waiting on developments——until in fevers I contacted more disappointing men. There were so very many! I did consider the words they offered, but I also considered how in that lousy shut-down world, language had been debased in pandemic articles, directives, directives contradicting previous directives, statements on the virus, statements on bleach, statements on not drinking bleach. Writing had long been my modus operandi, and while I did sometimes think that maybe I ought to just write a noir novel about a woman whose committed crime was a birth, I’d lost sight of the ascendance prose offered when there absolutely was no “there there”; there was quarantine.
Which is to say: I forgot that I was quote, unquote fine. Then, I decided I was again. An old, blackballed suspicion that life turned on chance’s autocracy returned. Apropos of zip, you could wake up in another world, country, house. Without S in the mix anymore, my conversations largely entailed complimenting the big, beautiful dog who, on first sight years before, had been nothing but a scared, clumsy blur of black fur with one and a half ears who came to me as soon as I inexplicably called him Cowboy.
During dark hours, I would startle from sleep, as though a fool had flipped on a lamp, believing that light would reveal the forgotten thing. The thing I’d forgotten was what was real and mine, here and now, but also what might come: a sense of stakes to my freedom or a soft edge of home, a direction for love or a place to put it away, a confirmation I was a woman still able to write a new narrative into her life. Now, it was incumbent on me to track one down I could live with. Here, I told myself, is a story: time passes, but it means something. That’s all I needed.
Where does a woman go on her own? I wondered. What’s her story?
Tracy O’Neill is the author of the memoir Woman of Interest. Her novels include The Hopeful and Quotients. She holds an MFA from the City College of New York; and an MA, an MPhil, and a PhD from Columbia University. She teaches at Vassar College.