When she was eight, Alice Henderson briefly held the world record for filling her mouth with marbles. Her cousin, a smug-looking, sleek-haired good-for-nothing, showed her how to perform the magic of swallowing marbles. “Just swallow ‘em!”, he yelled, and Alice, her face blue from the effort of not swallowing the marbles, tried again and again to overcome her fear – “totally irrational,” her cousin promised her – by gathering the saliva into a pool on her tongue so the marbles would float smoothly down her throat like floaties down the lazy river (yes, she even summoned up the lovely image to assist her courage). Later, she would be surprised by how doggedly she held her own at such a young age, although, truth be told, this might be partly attributed to an instinctive wariness of taking risks. She had always been wimpish, she knew, and she couldn’t do much about it, it being in her nature (and would she consider it a character flaw? That would be too harsh!), but surely, would it not be a crime against the elemental human condition if she hurt herself? And for such silly nonsense, too, come to think of it!
That question, and many of its variations, had been troubling her until one day, when she was a little older, she had to in turn trouble her mother about it and with it came the episode of the marbles-swallowing that she and her cousin had sworn not to tell anyone. Ever the unperturbed buddha, her mother offered an advice that was wrapped in another riddle for Alice to chew on: “What makes us human if not the fact that we are conditioned by our insatiable desire to transcend?” Regarding the resurrected memory, her mother had only this to say: “Hmm, but didn’t Audrey Hepburn also have marbles in her mouth in that dreadful production of Pygmalion?” And besides, the good-for-nothing cousin was now a redoubtable somebody, no doubt curtesy of nepotism.
Looking back, she wondered if the event set a pattern that was to repeat itself over and over in a life riddled with misplaced ambitions and thwarted hopes, or was it really a manifestation whose symbolism she had failed to grasp and was only forced upon her after years of disquieting self-examination that didn’t seem to do much in the way of either turning her life around or equipping her with a more positive outlook. The adventurous spirit that was so lacking in her personality didn’t exactly hinder Alice from harbouring grand ideas for her future – for all she knew, determination was the cure-all for a markedly unpromising beginning.
And no one who knew her well would say otherwise. But many would agree that her drivenness was, for the most part, misdirected. When she was five her other cousins came to her house to play. She pulled out her doll collection but the cousins plumped for a game of gin rummy. Rules were taught, rules were followed but it was clear that Alice fumbled with the skills: her only tactic was to get rid of all the high cards. “Sorry, my daughter’s pretty inept at cards,” her mother apologised, when Alice was again the one dragging, saddled with the highest deadwood. Amid the ensuing hilarity – “Oh, hell, it was a light-hearted laughter,” her mother said impatiently later when Alice questioned her loyalty – the seed of a burning mission was sown: to excel at the game of cards.
She did, eventually, excel at cards, if not to the extent of making it her bread and butter. It was one of the best nights of her life, the night when she trounced them all at the game, the game night of the first day of college, and the spectacle of a freshman, a girl, her face partly hidden behind the piling chips, silently but surely commanding the card table, was so thrillingly bizarre to her peers that they took to calling her “Miss All-the-Marbles” or “Alice Stu Ungar”. But if Alice was ever under the illusion that the transient glory – pokers were banned at school the following year, a result of the “no gambling” injunction in campus– was going to warrant her a smooth sail in her adult life, or to endear her to the cool people and her name and celebrity logged in the local lore, she would be sadly disabused. She did forge a tight and lasting friendship with a group of average Janes, whose favourite ritual every few months they got together when they were out of school and into the real world was to compare each other’s long scrolls of domestic complaints and sob stories. The subject of poker soon became a recurring joke, instigated mostly by Alice herself. “Don’t you wanna take a pack of cards with you?” Alice would ask her children, concerning their upcoming camping trip (“We don’t even sing kumbaya around the camp fires anymore, mom,” they would have to remind her). And it was a chorus of loud groans when she suggested to her girlfriends that they should all partake in an old card game called Spite and Malice to while away the remaining hours of their get-together. “But who’s doing the spiting and which one of us is malicious?” Paula quipped. Anne suggested that Alice should enter one of those poker tournaments for the amateurs. Well, sounds exciting, but she so disliked the possibility of her being trounced – in the only activity of which she could confidently claim mastery!
It would be less than honest to say that Alice had been let down by fate. True, there weren’t many remarkable moments in her life: two years at a printing press after college, three years of teaching art at a local school, left the job after marriage and baby, second baby followed a year later, divorced, homebound ever since. Everywhere she turned she felt the cold and piercing eyes of failure staring down at her: she was a failure at work, a semi-failure back in school, an incorrigible failure with both her childhood home and her present one. Clumsiness was one of the common facets: at a kitchenware store one day, she lost her balance momentarily and slammed into a row of dinner plates (“A bull in a china shop, literally!”, her husband said). She carried around her failure like a collar around her neck for months after her husband suddenly upped sticks and went to live with the woman that took his virginity. The day when her son told her that he thought the mistress was “ok” and decided to join them for dinner every other night, the lingering suspicion that she had failed as a mother roared at her with resounding clarity. Louisa chalked up her inclination to fail to a certain waywardness in her nature or upbringing that, instead of seeking an external outlet, goes into the innermost region and kills everything that is going to make her a stronger person. Hearing this, Alice cried. Louisa muttered an apology. They made up but Alice took what her friend had said to her heart like gospel.
Sometimes she wished she had her mother’s wry humour and aloofness to confront life’s discontents. They might seem fairly minuscule – turning them over in her head she felt like the fairy-tale princess complaining about pea under her bed – but when those discontents amassed to a certain volume, it became a burden that she couldn’t get rid of and, in time, had assimilated as part of her selfhood. In the story of what she considered her thoroughly drab existence laid the moral that when God deals you a bad hand, you better suck it up and play with what you have (there is only one winner in any game anyway!).
But it sounded so defeatist and somewhat reductive to bow to the divine will, knowing that no human consciousness is ever or totally immune from an innate urge to fight against reality. But a victorious fight is never guaranteed and, in Alice’s case, invariably left her a taste of bitterness. Is she thinking about the pokers again? It’s really long overdue that I retire the subject, she told herself on the way to an assignation with a person she’d been seeing – at the age of 45, probably the boldest and most reckless thing she’d done – who, according to Paula, pinched the butt of her colleague, and who her kids dubbed a “chubby chaser,” less in reference to his rather homogeneous dating history, she thought, than for the cruel entertainment of cutting their mother down to size. This is the pattern, I see, the pattern of failing myself consistently and repeatedly, and I guess Louisa was right, I really am cursed.
She wondered why she had struggled in vain to free herself from the ghosts of her past. She couldn’t even pinpoint the moment when all became hopeless: her desire to escape from the perennially incompetent lunk that had took over most of her identity. It was almost laughable because it seemed so paltry, the matter itself, and, racking her brain for a justification, or at least an explanation of why she’d been holding such a grudge against what appeared to her now an amorphous mass of trivial issues, she found none. Her mother’s elusive words all made perfect sense now, she suddenly realised: we are conditioned by our need to transcend. She was trying to pull her daughter out of this pathological absorption in herself, and her way of seeing Alice along with the other human beings as an aggregate downplayed effectively the child’s budding individualism. Maybe this was the mindset that she should’ve adopted, that of shifted emphasis, of the self-awareness to depart from the self: in short, I don’t matter.
But on her way to what she knew for sure was another doomed undertaking on her part, her mind again circled back to the past, and to her surprise she wondered if it would make all the difference if, at the age of 5, she did swallow those marbles.
Tung-Wei Ko, born and raised in Taiwan, was recently awarded a PhD in English from the University of Kent, with a thesis on intellectual parallels between Georges Bataille and Vladimir Nabokov (The Impossible Knowledge of Excess: An Appraisal of Works by Georges Bataille and Vladimir Nabokov – Kent Academic Repository). Previous work has appeared in Epoché, as well as in academic journals.