My name has always felt, somehow, apart from me. But names, like all words, are approximations. From the day of my birth, I was called Christie, though it wasn’t really my name. My real name was Christine. Well, my middle name was Christine. My first name — Miriam — I heard only at the receptionist’s window of the dentist’s office or on the first day of school. Whenever someone would call that name, reading it from a card or a chart, I would timidly acknowledge myself as Miriam, made shy by the strangeness of this unused word meant to represent me, and then correct the record. “I go by a nickname,” I would say. I remember looking up my names in baby name directories. Miriam means “rebellious.” Christine denotes belief in Christ. I never could embody both at once — finally finding my rebellion, I lost my faith. I have always been a little out of phase with my names. When I married, I added another name — I liked the x — to my collection, as if it were a figurine on the shelf. There they were, my names: glass images lined up in front of me but never mine entirely, never me.
And like glass, they are fragile. A typo at the Social Security office once gave me, briefly, the surname of Benne Dixon, an almost-welcome error, redolent of blessing. I am regularly mislabeled Chrissy, Christy, Kristen, or Kirstie, in endless permutations. Friends forget my first name and, in their guessing, make me Marian or Muriel. I myself chip off pieces of my names and sign my writing and my checks with my initials. I find it hard to get attached to my many, frangible names. But then, they do not seem particularly attached to me, either.
My names are metaphors. They refer to things outside of me, to people who are not me: Moses’ sister and the savior of the world. My names are genealogies. “Christine” is my aunt’s middle name, too. I am a reference to her. Long ago, somewhere in Germany or Switzerland perhaps, there was a wicker-weaver — a maker of “Bennen” baskets, a “Benner.” This basket-weaver was named for his occupation; the name, Benner, was then attached to his sons after him, until we reach my father, and then me. In the Lowlands of Scotland, I’m told, there was another man, whose father was named Richard. This man called himself Thomas Dick’s Son, and so they called the others in his line Dixon, until we reach my husband, and then me. My names dress me up as other people, cast me in stories that aren’t quite mine.
Or are they? I can’t deny that I am, at least in part, what my metaphors say I am. I am a rebellious sister. I am faithful and credulous. I am as patient and meticulous as a basket-weaver. I am someone’s child, someone’s wife, someone’s niece. Perky and blonde. Austere and old-fashioned. I am an accidental benediction. I am broken glass shards of myself. With every name, I gain a metaphor that expands the definition of me. Maybe I should learn to accept my metaphors as a matter of fact.
Keeping a collection of all these strange, fragmentary, and countless metaphors has given me a visceral understanding of the figurative power of language, how it binds ideas together more than it draws distinctions between them — at least this is so in the languages that I know best. In English, every word, almost, is an efficient little vehicle pointed outward at some piece of the wide and literal world.
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