you may know me by my shell

W

hen the days shortened and the goldenrod turned to fluff, I was sent to the macro-invertebrate lab to sort molluscs out of creek muck. The most senior member of the lab showed me how to draw a wax grid on the bottom of a Petri dish, then how to measure out a sample of algae and bugs with a silver spoon. Only half a scoop at a time, I was warned, or I could be overwhelmed by the clutter under my microscope.

Mollusca is a large phylum. In Kentucky, the molluscs are represented by snails (204 species) and mussels (103 species). Most molluscs are soft-bodied animals living inside brittle shells. They are born with their shells, and they continue to add whorls and nobs and wings as they grow. A broken shell means death to a mollusc.

After eight hours of microscopy, I left the lab with a headache. I went to bed early and lay on my pillows, scrolling through House and Garden UK. It’s something I’ve been doing lately, a compulsion that came with purchasing my first house. Sometimes I hunt the internet for inspiration until my eyes ache. I’m not proud of this behaviour. Yet if a neighbour stops by, I will open my door wide, stand a little to the side, and watch to see if their gaze lingers on the hand-glazed ginger jar or the newly-framed linocut.

Most of Kentucky’s molluscs are detritivores; they eat detritus. The mussels are filter feeders. They extend a siphon through the lips of their shell to draw in water, which washes over their gills, leaving behind algae, zooplankton, bacteria, and bits of excrement. Eventually the water flows back out a second siphon. A single mussel can purify 15 gallons of water per day. The snails take a slightly less magnanimous approach to feeding. They may eat live plants, insects, or even smaller snails, shredding them with a tongue covered in thousands of teeth. (“Be careful with these ones,” a coworker once told me while we were combing a log for glassy grapeskin snails. “They bite.”) But for the most part, snails eat rotting plant material and fungi, ensuring those slippery nutrients stay inside the food web.

Molluscs eat to support all the usual metabolic functions: sensation, growth, movement, reproduction, the beating of tiny three-chambered hearts. But molluscs also eat for a uniquely molluscan purpose. Out of all that detritus, molluscs extract calcium to build shells.

I love women for many reasons, but what touches me most is a woman’s fraught relationship with beauty: beauty like a little sister, always tagging along. I don’t remember when I became conscious that, having been born a woman, I was responsible for cultivating beauty in a way men were not. I know I’ve never felt equal to the task. I study other women—my mom dabbing cream over her sun spots, my granny arranging gravy boats in the windowsill—I think I sense something. But when I try to harden the beauty I sense into something I can show others, I feel clumsy, heavy-handed, painfully easy to classify. I imagine a coworker running a finger down a dichotomous key. Fresh-cut hydrangeas? Go to southern housewife. Bronze setter statue? Go to pedigree dog lady.

I love women for many reasons, but what touches me most is a woman’s fraught relationship with beauty: beauty like a little sister, always tagging along.

Taxonomists classify molluscs by their shells. The common names of some of Kentucky’s mussels are especially charming. We have the heelsplitter, the pocketbook, the cat’s paw, the pistol grip. We count ridges and knobs, look for faint washes of yellow or purple to identify tricky specimen. We turn snail shells slowly between our thumb and forefinger to decide if they coil clockwise (dextral) or counterclockwise (sinistral). The formless, living interior? We ignore.

The rough periwinkle, Littorina saxatalis, was first identified by Europeans in 1792. A small snail, the rough periwinkle grazes through salt marshes and along rocky coasts. Depending on their environment, periwinkles can produce many types of shells. Shells can be bronze, lavender, white, or striped. When crabs are present, periwinkles grow large, sturdy shells to protect themselves from predation. In areas susceptible to drought, periwinkles grow shells with narrow openings that can be sealed to control water loss. All this variation has led taxonomists who focus on shells to misidentify the rough periwinkle as a new species 112 times. The periwinkles quietly hauled their shells through watery crevices, all the while.

Susan Sontag published Against Interpretation in 1966. In her argument that art should be experienced rather than explained, Sontag defined interpretation as “a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a certain code, certain ‘rules’ of interpretation.” The interpreter, according to Sontag says, “Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Z is really C?” She warns, “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the [sensual] world in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings.’ [ ... ] The world, our world, is depleted enough.”

Susan Sontag died on a windy day in 2004, the tinsel still hanging from the Christmas tree. I was nine years old. I wonder if she ever thought of people as artwork. I wonder what she would think of my adult world, with all its hashtags and algorithms ready to interpret me, suggest friends for me, “feed” me. I wonder if she would understand how I have internalized the algorithm, how I worry that asking for oat milk in my tea will flag me as a hyper-virtuous vegan or admitting I listen to Joni Mitchell will expose me as a hopeless romantic.

I wonder what she would say about the way my digital world has narrowed and narrowed around the code of myself, until I see nothing but foxgloves and labradors.

Pry open a mussel, and you will be confronted by otherworldly beauty. Iridescent nacre. Mother of pearl. For the mussel, nacre is a painstaking construction. Granules of calcium carbonate are packed into scales until each scale is 500 nm thick, roughly the wavelength of visible light. The scales are then arranged in parallel layers so that light reflecting from the upper layers interferes with light reflecting from the lower layers, and a beautiful confusion of colour swirls on the shell’s surface.

What snails lack in colour, they make up for in the shape of their shells: discs and cones with ratios artists have mimicked for centuries. A snail’s shell protects a hump of vital organs on its back. As the snail grows, a new layer of calcium is added to the opening of its shell, always a little wider than the last layer to accommodate the snail’s new bulk. This slow widening around a fixed point creates the hypnotic spiral of the snail’s shell.

Humans have found many uses for mollusc shells. Abalone and cowrie shells have served as currency. Lumps of nacre have been included in royal dowries: La Peregrina painted on Spanish queens over and over again. The Calusa and Ohlone people built shell mounds to lift their houses out of the reach of the sea. Scientists construct records of ancient ocean conditions by studying the carbon isotopes stored in giant clam shells. Powdered shells can be fed to chickens as a calcium supplement or added to acidic soil to help beans and peas grow. Almost anyone who finds a conch shell will lift it to their lips, try to blow music from it.

Labels have always been useful to humans. They simplify our world, allowing us to make faster, safer choices. Eat the carrot, toss the hemlock. As human culture has evolved, labels have taken on commercial and political value. Show the ad to animal lovers. Forward the petition to democrats. We have clung to labels, through time, because they promise one of our deepest desires: to know and be known.

I wonder if this is especially true for women, who have moved unknown through so much history, denied access to many identities that differentiated men. Maybe the years when we felt we could only be labeled as “mother” produced a special sensitivity in us. Would we be Tide or Gain mothers? Skippy or Jiff? The ads made our decisions seem important, at least. Today, social media seems to have plugged into women’s sensitivity to image and nuance. 78 percent of “influencers” who monetize their products on Instagram identify as women, 76 percent on TikTok. The top three niches for influencers are: lifestyle, beauty, and fashion.

I have never wanted to be a mother (though I have yet to convince Instagram my mind is made up). Still, I wonder how the legacy of generations of women attempting to express themselves through the whitewash of motherhood lives on in me. I remember feeling revolutionary the first time I bought mascarpone rather than my mother’s beloved Philadelphia cream cheese. A small, anxious thrill of being reborn: softer, subtler, slightly more European.

I wonder how the legacy of generations of women attempting to express themselves through the whitewash of motherhood lives on in me.

I want to know. I want to be known.

But do the labels keep their promise? Even our modern, egalitarian ones? When I contort myself into recognizable forms, forms that can endure being passed from mouth to mouth, she’s an old soul, she’s an introvert, she’s a Leo rising, do I lose some more vital truth about myself? When I slip away from the man at the party who says he drives a Tesla, does he feel the sudden anxiety of shrinking, like I do? The fear of becoming finite?

Mollusca is an ancient phylum. Molluscs begin to show up in the fossil record as dimples in Cambrian rocks, roughly 550 million years old. Because Mollusca is ancient, the molluscs living among us are often thought to be primitive. The nautilus, for example, with its tiger-striped shell and bouquet of 60 tentacles, has been nicknamed a “living fossil.” But there’s another way to look at it.

Humans share a common ancestor with the mollusc: a single-celled organism that wriggled through the ocean 600-700 million years ago. If our existence started at the same time, we are, in a sense, the same age as the molluscs. We are the same age as every living thing on Earth.

Besides, when we call a mollusc a living fossil, we are only considering half the organism. Shells make excellent fossils. They are mineralized with calcium even before a mollusc dies. Half the work of fossilization is complete. Soft tissues, on the other hand, are eaten by scavengers and bacteria before the process of fossilization can begin. They leave no trace. A mollusc’s shell may look the same from one epoch to the next, but it’s impossible to know what their soft bodies have been doing these millions of years. Impossible to know all the colours, poisons, and antennae they have cycled through.

I like to believe I’m improving myself. Each choice I make gives my surface a new contour. I wait to see who will notice, how I will be received, what name I will be given. When I look back at my old phases, I feel a frenzied desire to separate myself from them. I want to be smarter than my previous selves. I want them to be beneath me. Mineralize them, bury them, I am so much more evolved.

But maybe I’m not. Maybe the same fluid life inside me is simply responding to new stimuli. It’s a peaceful thought. I think it, and I begin to feel whole.

The days have begun to lengthen again. The creeks have overrun their banks and left snags of debris in the tree branches. I’ve been released from the lab to collect molluscs from the wild. My coworkers and I drag nets along the creek bottom, then dump our catch into plastic buckets. Sometimes I pluck a wet shell out of the leaves and roll it into my palm. If I hold still, a pair of eyestalks will emerge. A grey foot will unfurl.

I cannot speak for molluscs, yet I feel I have learned from them. The molluscs seem, to me, at peace with the duality of their existence: the definable shell attached to the secret, fluid self. They grow, they use, they meet, they are. I return them to the water rushing cold around my knees. They fit their bodies to the slick creek rocks and slowly glide away.