This is the first in a series, called “Loosies.” Like buying a single cigarette out of someone else’s pack, I pluck a single word out of another language and make it unreturnably mine.
Sgrìob – Gaelic, n. – Refers to the peculiar itchiness that settles on the upper lip before taking a sip of whiskey. Lost in Translation, Ella Frances Sanders.
A taste of someone’s medicine, but whose?
My sgrìob always feels borrowed, stolen even. This pre-kiss on the lips heralds a quenching autonomy when I am thirsty to be someone I’m not supposed to be. It’s an itchy pause before a great exhale of a deep, steamy breath I did not take.
I am who I am and there are conventions as to what should be in my glass. Whiskey is not on that list but it’s often what I drink, in small part because I love it and largely because I insist on it. Neat, ice on the side. I like to drop in one ice cube at a time. I’m not sure why but the melt sometimes leaves an oil spill-like swirl that creeps towards my head as I tilt it back, back, my eyes crossing to watch. It’s beautiful. If you don’t drink whiskey, describing the way its potential airs out of the glass like an unlit candle and the way it tastes like warmth added to the tangled feeling of sedated relief and riled up accomplishment after exercising won’t make much sense. If you drink whiskey, I don’t need to describe it.
I resolved to learn about whiskey, scotch in particular, a couple of years ago. As the universe often does to perpetuate our best and worst habits, it sent me a ticket to a tasting. In the early evening of a January Saturday, I put on a casual dress and went to a fundraising event to benefit the Rutherford Education Foundation. I got the ticket through my sister’s boss, one of the event organizers, and I borrowed her scotch-drinking husband to be my drinking buddy.
I ran up the stairs to the second floor of the suburban liquor store to keep pace with my brother-in-law’s long, skinny legs, and because I was giddy for my first sgrìob. At the landing, I realized I was out of my comfort zone. The first of six tastings, distributed between all six whisky-producing regions of Scotland, was ready to be poured. There were chips and sandwiches, pickles and cookies. Over forty people shuffled around, but I was the only person of color. I was also the only woman. The back of my neck felt hot.
I picked at the finger foods and gulped down four of the six tastings. I tried the third one twice because it was my favorite (Oban 14). I asked the presenter two questions, which he politely considered and thoughtfully answered. One man asked if I was looking to buy someone I work for a gift. Another hit on me only to the point of mild discomfort. No one was rude or unwelcoming. But I didn’t belong.
Since then, I’ve heard a constant stream of “You don’t drink whiskey!” “What do you know about scotch?” “I can’t believe you just drank that.” I once asked a waiter what scotch was available at the bar, and he handed me a wine list saying he’d never heard of a “scotch” wine. “I’m not asking for wine, I’m asking for scotch,” I said getting no further to one. “She wants a scotch,” my husband translated, which finally worked.
This condescension is not foreign to me. It’s a perfect metaphor for what it is like to be a small, brown, female litigator in this white shoe world. This is exactly how I roll through nearly any professional event, sharing a single physical attribute with 0-10% of any one else in the room. I’m often confused for being the guest of someone more naturally in attendance, an intern, a daughter, an event organizer. I’ve been yelled at for the quality of food ordered at a Continuing Legal Education lunch program I co-presented, like the sustenance but not substance could be mine. Forwarding my mother an article I co-authored on the New York Law Journal’s Expert Analysis page, I became self-conscious of the fact that I stuck out to readers who scrolled through the photos of eight middle-aged to elderly white men before getting to mine. (I visited that page today and I found 11 such male authors and only two women—one of whom is a judge.) When I binge-watched HBO’s The Night Of, I cheered Chandra on for being a young, brown, female big firm associate, in over her head but working very hard to meet the challenge—like me! Imagine my heartbreak when the show flushed her down the toilet by writing in superfluous scenes where she makes out with her accused murderer client and smuggles drugs to him using her least questionable assets—her breasts and vagina.
The legal world, like the whiskey world, is not meant to be mine. I wedge my way into adequacy by working twice as hard with half the confidence to learn what I need to know, talk the talk, walk the walk, drink the drink. I don’t have to drink whiskey any more than I have to litigate. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m slightly motivated to do either because I’m not predisposed to and can prove that I can. But the real reason I drink whiskey and litigate is because I’m not a character playing the wrong part with the wrong parts; I’m me being me.
No, I don’t measure a pour by the width of my finger like other whiskey drinkers. My hands are freakishly small and have shortchanged enough of my life otherwise. Instead, I use an invisible marker in the playful dot motif of my Baccarat glass. The sgrìob creeps up on me in my living room as I read or type, at my kitchen counter as I rummage through mail, or in my bed as I watch Conan or some other program I commit my attention to in very short segments. But even here, at home, where it doesn’t matter if I’m wearing pants or if my hair is left to its nappy ways, the sgrìob is summoned and retreating.
The whiskey does not detect what I look like and I get a sgrìob all the same. But it doesn’t come to me as a matter of course. It comes as a matter of my course.