Cynthia Clark: "Meet My Doppelganger, Peri Cronal"	Back to Students Page
Spring 2007 Mothers Who Write Reading

 

A few months ago, when I was telling my friend Julia my plans for this year’s birthday, she asked, “How old are you going to be?” and I answered, “50”.  Rolling her chair away from her desk and leaping to her feet, she squealed “Ahhhhkkk”, rushed me and gave me a triumphant slap on the back.  She then held me at arm’s length, looked me in the eye and gleefully announced, “You’re peri-cronal!” I got it right away—one thing that makes us friends is that Julia and I are both word nerds.  Peri—a prefix meaning around, about, surrounding, encircling (the drain perhaps?) and cronal, the realm of the Crone.  I knew Julia meant Crone in a positive, wise woman sense, but I really can’t think Crone without thinking unwanted facial hair. Like the brambles around Sleeping Beauty’s castle, my chin hairs have lately become enchanted, growing back instantaneously after being ripped out by the roots.  Too many times to count, I’ve been stunned by an accidental glimpse of a crop of chin hair so dense that, had I the tools and the inclination, I could harvest it and craft my own natural bristle paint brush. I laughed at Julia’s quick word play and said, “Peri Cronal.  Sounds like one of those tough protagonists in a police procedural.  You know, ‘Fourteenth in the Peri Cronal series, Dial M for Menopause, Peri faces her toughest adversary yet.’”  I thought it was funny, as Julia knew I would, but nobody else I repeated it to (all women of a certain age) seemed to think it was as funny as I did, even when I added my bit about the literary character.  I started to feel a little protective of both my friend Julia and of Peri Cronal.  Sensing that I was developing a soft spot for her, Peri started hanging around.  A lot.  At first, I only caught glimpses of her, like the morning when the light hit the inside of my left thigh as I lifted my leg to towel off.  Peri was there, precisely mirroring my every move, but on her thigh, the fat has begun to liquefy, a result no doubt, of fourteen summers in Phoenix.  I am well used to my thunder thighs, but, until Peri came along, I had no inkling that eventually they would be followed by a downpour of flesh. Then Peri started getting into my head.  She is wickedly and exuberantly sentimental, weeping at the drop of a hat, using my lips to begin far too many sentences with “Remember how we used to . . . . ?”  Two weekends ago, when I was in the car with my daughter, Briana, taking her for her prom-night up-do, Peri jumped into a conversation about prom and suddenly blurted out the theme song from my senior prom: the Carpenter’s “White Lace and Promises.”  Even in 1975 that was a pretty lame choice. When Briana expressed her disdain for the selection of a wedding song for a prom theme, Peri completely overtook me.  I had all I could do not to try to explain, tearfully, to Briana, about how beautiful everyone looked that soft spring night, how we all believed that we were about to embark on our “real” lives, how kind and handsome and romantic my date, Mark, was, how that too-sweet Karen Carpenter had dark secrets that eventually killed her, how my dear friend Tim Mancini, part of the Prom King’s Court, died of AIDS in 1988 and how I still miss the thought of him, though I hadn’t seen him once in all those years between ’75 and ‘88 , and how the prom’s theme was fitting in ways I couldn’t have imagined at the time. We may not have been about white lace, but we were all about promise.  When I first encountered Peri, I thought she was my older self, my self-to-come, but now I think she’s my younger self, here to refresh me, to remind me of how it feels to be awkward in my body, here to re-open me to the unknown future.  There’s been some collateral damage as Peri has taken up increasing amounts of space in my heart and mind---I find it exhausting to be so nostalgic, but I guess that’s just part of the price of the ticket for this segment of the grand tour, with Peri as my tour guide.