Arbitrary tragedy

rereading "Cassandra at the Wedding"

Hi, thanks for being here. This is an essay about one of my favorite books Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker. If you want to support this project financially & have access to all posts, you can upgrade your subscription below. xoxo.

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Sometimes I have an evil twin. She only makes an appearance on certain occasions. The rain, biblical, excessive, started coming down an hour before, but my cute shoes lead to my feet getting soaked so my evil twin replaces my attendance at a party. She arrives at the party, obviously, in an evil mood. She begins a conversation with a man who calls himself a leftist. She asks what he means exactly by that. He says he’d vote for Marianne Williamson if she’d cool it with the crystals. My evil twin says this is the very reason she’d vote for Williamson. And maybe he shouldn’t knock what he clearly doesn’t understand. The man politely excuses himself to find another White Claw. My evil twin doesn’t mind being alone in the center of the room. When left alone, she gets to misbehave more. She might break a mug or forget her phone. My friends come around. They call my name, so I leave the room where the coats are stashed. I look around for my evil twin, but she slipped away when I came back.

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I wake up in the middle of the night with a single clear thought—I should reread Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker so I can write this essay as a part of a project Charlotte and I are starting. I’d been thinking about some sentences Charlotte wrote about us in her last essay: Twin flames. Two sides of the same coin. Stubborn girls. We watch each other making the same mistakes repeatedly, while abandoning the shame of fool me twice and should’ve known. So I’m thinking about the ways she and I are twins. On a rainy day in December, Charlotte and I discovered we both loved Cassandra at the Wedding. It’s May now and still rainy. In the middle of sleeplessness, I start typing. It takes a few days, but I end up scrapping the idea to write the essay for the project with Charlotte. It’s gotten too far away from me before I even really start. So I go back to the novel to, back to December, back to the mild anxiety of not writing, much like the mild anxiety Cassandra faces when she avoids writing her thesis. 

I want to reread Cassandra partly because I remember how much I identified with Cassandra’s desperation. Lately I’ve felt shades of unfamiliar desperation. She’s desperate to live, to love, to be seen. The most desperate of her needs is to be the person her twin loved more than anyone else.  Even more than her twin loved her soon-to-be husband. That’s what Cassie wants and doesn’t really end up getting. I guess like so many of us. Judith says to her twin, You’ve always needed a lot more of everything than I do. It reminds me of that Fiona Apple lyric referenced in Girls. I’m not nuts, I just want to feel it all. I want to have it all, and more. What Cassie wants is both absolutely insane and sane—at least to me. To have all someone’s love. To never be apart from that person. To choose your soulmate and have them choose you back. 

#37: protect innocence

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There is hardly anyone else in the restaurant. We’re talking about a project that we’re more excited to do than we are disciplined to finish by the arbitrary deadline we set for ourselves. Our hair is always in contrasting lengths—when we first met in the summer, mine was short and yours long. Now the opposite. Our server brings us two final glasses of wine, says they’re on him. We giggle like school girls. He’s wearing a stupid hat that I can’t believe anyone would wear, but so many people in this city wear hats just like his. I’m trying to explain myself, but the wine and lack of dinner makes me clumsy. I have the oddest sensation, that sitting here at the table, we’re two for one. I can’t separate myself from the person staring back at me. We switch our glasses of wine, and time speeds up, then slows again. It may be the wine, but I lose sense of where one of us starts and the other one ends. 

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It’s a short book. It only takes me a matter of days to reread it. I’m not a fast reader anymore but I absorb this book again like I did when I first read it. Carrying the novel around in my bag during the weekend of endless rain, it gets soaked. I’m miserable for a few days because of the weather and my own choices, reaching a low point that is difficult for me to admit to anyone except when it’s late enough at night or I’m in my first therapy session in two years. Met with concern or nervous laughter. I tell Charlotte how much I’m vocalizing things that I shouldn’t vocalize lately. The antagonistic side of me that is suddenly the version that shows up at the party, half-invited. I don’t know how to flirt. I try to dominate with my wit and hope that this is charming. What I mean is I’m becoming like Cassie. Doing all the talking, a kind of circus. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be with me when I’m like this. 

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I have a fraternal twin. He looks nothing like me, though sometimes I try to look like him. We walk around Soho one afternoon. I’m coat-less so he gives me his. Then he gives me his glasses to hold while he takes a picture. My vision blurs, but I could pass I bet. I tell him I’ll impersonate him at his job. I’ll make millions. We talk about switching jackets. There have been several occasions when we show up in matching outfits by accident. Down to our shoes. I wonder what it would be like to be able to read his mind when so often I’m sure he can read mine.  

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What the self lacks is something to secure itself to. That’s why Cassie’s insecurity rears its head in such an ugly way in Cassandra at the Wedding. She becomes manipulative, domineering, antagonistic because she’s afraid of floating forever, selfless. (Do you remember that night when we were falling asleep, we talked about dying, I said falling forever, you said no, just floating forever.) Cassie feels untethered, from herself and from her twin. Naturally, twins are a product of separation. The cells split, the soul maybe does not. In the novel, again and again, Cassie says how she and her twin Judith should have been one. And spoiler, this is part of her reasoning for contemplating and then attempting to kill herself. Whatever dies with Cassie would live on in Judith. The discontinuous would become continuous, the unattached would finally be attached.

There’s a feeling, when you’re neurotic like me, that you are always missing something, that whatever the present state of being you are isn’t enough. That whatever is missing in you exists in someone else. You become obsessed with trying to find it. So you fixate on something else to fulfill you. For Cassandra, it’s someone else. For me, it’s also someone else who I believe can give me the security I’m missing in myself. (Recently, Em asked me what I was looking forward to this year. I half-quoted boygenius, I am looking forward to being strong enough to be my own man. A half-quote for a half-hearted belief.) I’m convinced I’m forgetting something, but it’s because I’m actually missing something. The self that was severed from all the other possible selves at birth. Cassandra can’t quite be herself unless she imagines herself as half of someone else. And this strikes a chord with me. Because I’m always in half, always cut to pieces, collaging myself into the world I want to be in or person I want to be. And that person usually looks nothing like me.    

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I see my friend who is one half of a pair of twins. When I call her a genius, she shrouds her blush in her auburn hair. She says she doesn’t know what that word means. She’s spent all day at the Apple Genius Bar and they are not geniuses she assures me. I laugh. I’ve never met her twin. She has told me how they share little resemblance—in interests and appearance. I wonder what his type of genius is. I tell her about how I’m writing this essay and immediately remember how she wrote an essay about being a twin, and her origin as a test tube baby—her words, not mine. She wrote: How could I not be absorbed into this possibility, that perhaps I had three other siblings somewhere, raised with similar blood under completely different circumstances? I wanted to know what they looked like, how they spoke, moved, what they were interested in— if they existed, I wanted to meet them, embrace them, see any fragment of myself in them, my other almost-twins.

Two-of-a-kind science miracle

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After a beautiful brunch of hash and blueberry muffins (Cassandra and her family eat blueberry muffins on the morning of the wedding), Charlotte and I sit on the couch to start writing. Instead, we start talking about our hair. Charlotte is about to get a haircut in about an hour, so we both show each other our gallery of former selves stored on our computers. All the haircuts and colors and eras. For a few weeks, we both had been talking about going back blonde for the summer. We’re both naturally blonde and also naturally have grown tired of this iteration of our chameleon selves. I started to picture it. Our two heads bumping against each other in flash saturated photos. Twin sister summer. She decides to get a short cut and hold off on the blonde. I’m still considering. We’ll be twins in different ways.

The potential of twinning reminds me of The Garden of Eden by Ernest Hemingway. Later in the novel, when the married couple is tangled in a nearly vicious love triangle, they get the same blonde color and cut. They’re so jealous of each other (and the lover they share) that they try to become each other. Is this jealousy or is it just desire at its most extreme, I don’t know. I have a tendency to start dressing like the people I love most, I want their qualities to be as becoming on me as they are on them. Evidence that love is just another expression of our most narcissistic impulses.

A few days later, Charlotte comes to my apartment and applies bleach all over my head. To bleach at home is ill-advised, but I trust her. She’s careful, using the basting brush to evenly distribute the chemicals through my hair. In less than an hour, the person in front of the mirror—though it wasn’t like looking in a mirror, nothing like so sharp and precise, and I was able to look straight at it without shock—wasn’t quite me or Charlotte, but someone else entirely.

The Virgin Suicides, dir. Sofia Coppola

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I meet up with a twin in the East Village during the deluge on Sunday. He tells me that his own twin recently got married when I tell him about Cassandra and my attempt to write this essay. Did he like the new husband? No, and he told his twin as much. I think of other friends with siblings and how often the feeling towards their sibling’s partner is ambivalence. I am often caught in this realization that soon many of my friends will marry, will go into their lives differently, and where will I be? How will I feel towards their partners? A little bit later, Rochelle says that it’s rare she likes her friends’ partners, mostly because she knows how good her friends are. A few days later, Madeline unknowingly echoes Rochelle. All I can think about these days are weddings. How marrying is an attempt to tie two disparate souls together. Charlotte and I talk about how now we’re not even sure that we ever want to be married. When I used to be so sure. 

Sometimes I worry I’ll be like Cassandra, desperate enough when I face the slightest rejection to believe I’m fated to marry the grave like all the tragic heroines before me. I love the arbitrary tragedy, Charlotte texts me. I do too. And I believe in fated tragedies as much as I believe in good destiny. But either way, believing in fate is neurotic. Cassandra and I are the most similar in that at the height of our neuroticism, it’s our belief in destiny that convinces us to take any action necessary to fulfill it. Even if that means running ourselves into ruin.

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Then again, I don’t know if I believe in singular soulmates. I really believe all friendships are fated. I can’t work it out any other way, these inevitable connections that happen again and again. Which is another way to say that there can’t just be one single soulmate for a person. It takes Cassandra the length of a novel to realize this, the reversal of fate she never saw coming.

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The things that get in your way, the indignities you have to suffer before you’re free to do one simple, personal, necessary thing. The book ends happily, if not a bit ambiguous. Cassie is on a bridge. She survives her suicide attempt. Her sister is married. She seems to accept the severing between herself and Judith that may have only been possible through her near encounter with the grave. I’m not sure. It seems reckless to make this equation. It also seems impossible not to. She finds freedom in the third option, something between living and dying.  Whatever the secret third thing is, it’s that one simple, personal, necessary thing.

I write journal entries in the back of the book when I finish reading about all the people I love that I’ve been disappointing lately. And maybe I’m disappointing them because I love them too much or because we are in a constant rotation of choosing between ourselves and each other. Judith at one point wishes Cassie could find someone to love more than her. I write a list of names of people who might feel this way about me. The list is not exhaustive. Sometimes it floors me to think about how every problem I have, millions of other people have had the same ones and survived. There are people right now who love exactly the way I do. Nothing I have is distinctly mine because I am distinctly not a single self. Cassie puts it better than I could—We’ve got stars named after us, and what’s wrong with that? Nothing and everything. Two opposing things can exist simultaneously and still both be true.