The first time I saw the watch was not in real life but in a painting, a self-portrait.
In it, my grandmother wears a crisp white blouse, collar popped up, tucked into a matching full skirt. She’s standing in front of a marble fireplace decked with ivy. Her face is in three-quarter profile, and she’s wearing her cat-eye eyeglasses. Her arms are crossed and one of her pinkie fingers is slightly raised. The effect is somewhat regal; I imagine this was intentional. She’s wearing several pieces of jewelry in the image, all of them small, all of them gold. At the center of the canvas, right where her arms are crossed, is the watch. I think this placement was intentional too.
I never thought about the watch again until one day I realized it was in my possession. I can’t remember if she gave it to me or if I received it after she died. I look at it now — it’s sitting on my desk as I write. It casts an odd kind of spell over me. It feels like a talisman, a physical emblem of someone I loved very deeply who is no longer here to tell me why she placed the watch at the center of her most accomplished self-portrait (she painted many of them). It looks like a very beautiful bracelet; the watch’s face is small, the same width as its gold links. Using the tip of a sharpened pencil, I delicately push the minute hand of the watch around in a circle, though the hour hand is unmovable, permanently pointing at 11 o’clock. I wonder when it was — how many years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds ago — that the watch stopped. As I push the minute hand back and forth, it feels like I am rewinding time, back to the early 1960s when the portrait was made, then fast-forwarding it to now.
My grandmother and I were very similar. We both possessed a flair for the dramatic, a love of cinema, and a voluptuous desire to be as much of ourselves as we could be. In her early 30s, she decided to become a professional ballet dancer, and joined a company not long after. Preferring her own designs, she sewed all her own tutus (and many of her own clothes). At some point she decided to study painting, and spent 60 years making portraits, self-portraits and still lifes. She was forever reinventing herself, adding new layers of who she was to the old ones.
People seem to think that clothing is the best (or at least most conspicuous) representation of our personalities, of who we want to be. But it’s actually the jewelry we wear that most often speaks to who we think we are, and whom we costume accordingly. We tend to wear the same jewelry — such as a watch or wedding ring — or the same type of jewelry — beaded bracelets or chain necklaces — every day, whereas we change our clothes sometimes multiple times a day. Anything that adorns us daily begins, eventually, to define us. It becomes an emblem.
I own nearly all of my grandmother’s jewelry now. And while I don’t necessarily wear much of it on a daily basis, her jewelry has become part of who I think I am.
Nearly every day for the last 16 years, I’ve worn a silver ring and matching bracelet that my mother gave me. They’re very unique, even peculiar: heavy silver shaped by a mold that looks unsettlingly biomorphic, sort of like a prehistoric fossil. When people comment on them, I sometimes can’t tell if it’s out of admiration or a vague yet inquisitive repulsion. I like something about this ambiguity. I couldn’t tell you why I started wearing them every single day 16 years ago. But by now, part of the reason is that it feels comforting, even calming, to know that whatever else I clothe myself in — literally as well as figuratively — the ring and bracelet and their flickering strangeness will always be a feature of it. It’s as though they anchor some part of me while the rest fluctuates in the hurricane-force winds of daily life.
Maybe that’s what that watch did for my grandmother too. Maybe she felt that if she wore it regularly enough, she could count on being the same person she saw in the mirror every day. She amassed all sorts of jewelry over the years — Italian “cocktail rings” (named for their eye-catching appeal while the wearer sips her cocktail) set with large pink corals; Bakelite bangles and chains; chokers adorned with pink porcelain bows; a large brass pendant in the shape of a fish with glistening onyx eyes. Once at a fashion show, I was approached by a woman who saw my enormous floral necklace (my grandmother’s) from across the room and came up to tell me its storied provenance (I’ve forgotten it). I own nearly all of her jewelry now. And while I don’t necessarily wear much of it on a daily basis, her jewelry has become part of who I think I am.
I gaze at the watch and decide to put it on my wrist. I imagine the mundane actions my grandmother made while wearing it long ago. I see her reading the newspaper, knocking on someone’s door, or raising her hand to shield her face from the sun. This watch I wear was once wrapped around her arm, once touched her skin. It makes me think about who I am, especially as I grow older, as I become both more attuned to and confounded by who it is I think I am. Maybe I need to paint a self-portrait too. I feel the cool metal on my arm, and for a fraction of a second, it almost seems like I’m looking at my grandmother’s arm, that the skin I see beneath the dented gold links is not mine, but hers. It’s as though this object has become an enchanted amulet that has brought me simultaneously back into the past, her past, and forward into the future, my future.
I frequently think of who my grandmother was to me, but less frequently do I think of who she was to herself.
As I write these words, I hear her voice. I loved her soft, New Orleanian accent, but what made it particularly special and utterly unique was a strange affectation that she adopted so thoroughly and for so long that it became part of who she was. My grandfather worked in the film business starting in the 1930s, but even before they married, my grandmother was obsessed with movies. At the time, American actors were encouraged by production studios to sound more sophisticated by speaking with a “Mid-Atlantic” accent, which blended elements of British and American pronunciation. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn spoke with this accent; so did my grandmother. I imagine it had less to do with impressing people than it did with a love of pretending, costuming and self-adornment — a love of becoming someone else.
She found other cinema-related means of accomplishing this effort. When she was a very young woman, my grandmother was a dead ringer for a famous actor named Myrna Loy. People would stop her on the street and ask for her autograph, mistaking her for Loy. She would stop and smile graciously, and sign her autograph — but with her own name, not Loy’s. The starstruck admirer would invariably become irate and storm off. I can see my grandmother standing there on the street laughing to herself, the gold watch sparkling in the scorching sun.
The woman in the self-portrait is absolutely someone who spoke with an assumed accent and on occasion half-pretended to be a famous actor. The ironic thing is that those affectations made her, somehow, more authentically herself. And the jewelry she wore, including the watch, was part of it. She kept seeing possibilities for who she could be in all the pieces she collected over the years.
My grandmother and I were close, but I have a strange wish that I could have known her long before I was born. I wish the very young women we both once were had gotten to meet each other. They would have been fast friends.
I often ask myself whether it was, in part, my grandmother’s influence that led me into the role of a writer, a calling that necessitates the ability to conjure a character in your mind, then costume that character into life on the page.
I look again at the watch on my wrist. I’ve worn watches before, many of them, though not consistently. What kind of a person wears a watch? Certainly one who wants the facility of knowing the time. But there’s more to it than that. It also has to do with subscribing to the idea of being a person who wears a watch. Some people wear watches to appear conscientious, professional; to others, it signals status or prestige. For the literary circles I travel in, I sometimes wonder if watch-wearers think it makes them look more intellectual, scholarly. It’s not that anyone who desires the appearance of such qualities can’t also truly embody them. Maybe a watch is simply the perfect example of how every detail of our appearance is a shifting combination of both intention and instinct.
The idea that I subscribe to, both consciously and not, when I wear my grandmother’s watch, is the idea that one day I will know who I am. When I think of her Mid-Atlantic accent, her ballet career, her tutus, her cat-eye-frame eyeglasses, her paintings, that raised pinkie finger — in short, all the things that combine to create the image of her personality that exists in my mind — I wonder at what we often call the “superficiality” of appearances. I wonder whether they are superficial at all. “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances,” wrote Oscar Wilde in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Maybe the person my grandmother was pretending to be, in the end, was herself. And through that self, I travel toward my own too.
Eugenie Dalland is a writer and editor based in upstate New York. Her writing has appeared in Bomb, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books and the Brooklyn Rail. She co-founded and published the arts and culture magazine Riot of Perfume from 2011 to 2019.
This story originally appeared on LA Times
