The Summer Without Men

Sometime after he said the word pause, I went mad and landed in the hospital. He did not say I don’t ever want to see you again or It’s over, but after thirty years of marriage pause was enough to turn me into a lunatic whose thoughts burst, ricocheted, and careened into one another like popcorn kernels in a microwave bag. I made this sorry observation as I lay on my bed in the South Unit, so heavy with Haldol I hated to move. The nasty rhythmical voices had grown softer, but they hadn’t disappeared, and when I closed my eyes I saw cartoon characters racing across pink hills and disappearing into blue forests. In the end, Dr. P. diagnosed me with Brief Psychotic Disorder, also known as Brief Reactive Psychosis, which means that you are genuinely crazy but not for long. If it goes on for more than one month, you need another label. Apparently, there’s often a trigger or, in psychiatric parlance, “a stressor,” for this particular form of derangement. In my case, it was Boris or, rather, the fact that there was no Boris, that Boris was having his pause. They kept me locked up for a week and a half, and then they let me go. I was an outpatient for a while before I found Dr. S., with her low musical voice, restrained smile, and good ear for poetry. She propped me up — still props me up, in fact.

* * *

I don’t like to remember the madwoman. She shamed me. For a long time, I was reluctant to look at what she had written in a black-and-white notebook during her stay on the ward. I knew what was scrawled on the outside in handwriting that looked nothing like mine, Brain shards, but I wouldn’t open it. I was afraid of her, you see. When my girl came to visit, Daisy hid her unease. I don’t know exactly what she saw, but I can guess: a woman gaunt from not eating, still confused, her body wooden from drugs, a person who couldn’t respond appropriately to her daughter’s words, who couldn’t hold her own child. And then, when she left, I heard her moan to the nurse, the noise of a sob in her throat: “It’s like it’s not my mom.” I was lost to myself then, but to recall that sentence now is an agony. I do not forgive myself.

* * *

The Pause was French with limp but shiny brown hair. She had significant breasts that were real, not manufactured, narrow rectangular glasses, and an excellent mind. She was young, of course, twenty years younger than I was, and my suspicion is that Boris had lusted after his colleague for some time before he lunged at her significant regions. I have pictured it over and over. Boris, snow-white locks falling onto his forehead as he grips the bosom of said Pause near the cages of genetically modified rats. I always see it in the lab, although this is probably wrong. The two of them were rarely alone there, and the “team” would have noticed noisy grappling in their midst. Perhaps they took refuge in a toilet stall, my Boris pounding away at his fellow scientist, his eyes moving upward in their sockets as he neared explosion. I knew all about it. I had seen his eyes roll thousands of times. The banality of the story — the fact that it is repeated every day ad nauseam by men who discover all at once or gradually that what IS does not HAVE TO BE and then act to free themselves from the aging women who have taken care of them and their children for years — does not mute the misery, jealousy, and humiliation that comes over those left behind. Women scorned. I wailed and shrieked and beat the wall with my fists. I frightened him. He wanted peace, to be left alone to go his own way with the well-mannered neuroscientist of his dreams, a woman with whom he had no past, no freighted pains, no grief, and no conflict. And yet he said pause, not stop, to keep the narrative open, in case he changed his mind. A cruel crac of hope. Boris, the Wall. Boris, who never shouts. Boris shaking his head on the sofa, looking discomfited. Boris, the rat man who married a poet in 1979. Boris, why did you leave me?

* * *

I had to get out of the apartment because being there hurt. The rooms and furniture, the sounds from the street, the light that shone into my study, the toothbrushes in the small rack, the bedroom closet with its missing knob — each had become like a bone that ached, a joint or rib or vertebrae in an articulated anatomy of shared memory, and each familiar thing, leaden with the accumulated meanings of time, seemed to weigh in my own body, and I found I could not bear them. And so I left Brooklyn and went home for the summer to the backwater town on what used to be the prairie in Minnesota, out where I had grown up. Dr. S. was not against it. We would have telephone sessions once a week except during August, when she took her usual vacation. The University had been “understanding” about my crack-up, and I would return to teaching in September. This was to be the Yawn between Crazed Winter and Sane Fall, an uneventful hollow to fill with poems. I would spend time with my mother and put flowers on my father’s grave. My sister and Daisy would come for visits, and I had been hired to teach a poetry class for kids at the local Arts Guild. “Award-Winning Home-Grown Poet Offers Workshop” ran a headline in the Bonden News. The Doris P. Zimmer Award for Poetry is an obscure prize that dropped down on my head from nowhere, offered exclusively to a woman whose work falls under the rubric “experimental.” I had accepted this dubious honor and the check that accompanied it graciously but with private reservations only to find that ANY prize is better than none, that the term “award-winning” offers a useful, if purely decorative gloss on the poet who lives in a world that knows nothing of poems. As John Ashbery once said, “Being a famous poet is the not the same thing as being famous.” And I am not a famous poet.

* * *

I rented a small house at the edge of town not far from my mother’s apartment in a building exclusively for the old and the very old. My mother lived in the independent zone. Despite arthritis and various other complaints, including occasional bursts of dangerously high blood pressure, she was remarkably spry and clear-headed at eighty-seven. The complex included two other distinct zones — for those who needed help, “assisted living,” and the “care center,” the end of the line. My father had died there six years earlier and, although I had once felt a tug to return and look at the place again, I had gotten no farther than the entryway before I turned around and fled from the paternal ghost.

* * *

“I haven’t told anybody here about your stay in the hospital,” my mother said in an anxious voice, her intense green eyes holding mine. “No one has to know.”

I shall forget the drop of Anguish

that scalds me now — that scalds me now!

Emily Dickinson No. #193 to the rescue. Address: Amherst.

Lines and phrases winged their way into my head all summer long. “If a thought without a thinker comes along,” Wilfred Bion said, “it may be what is a ‘stray thought’ or it could be a thought with the owner’s name and address upon it, or it could be a ‘wild thought.’ The problem, should such a thing come along, is what to do with it.”

* * *

There were houses on either side of my rental — new development domiciles — but the view from the back window was unobstructed. It consisted of a small backyard with a swing set and behind it a cornfield, and beyond that an alfalfa field. In the distance was a copse of trees, the outlines of a barn, a silo, and above them the big, restless sky. I liked the view, but the interior of the house disturbed me, not because it was ugly but because it was dense with the lives of its owners, a pair of young professors with two children who had absconded to Geneva for the summer on some kind of research grant. When I put down my bag and boxes of books and looked around, I wondered how I would fit myself into this place, with its family photographs and decorative pillows of unknown Asian origin, its rows of books on government and world courts and diplomacy, its boxes of toys, and the lingering smell of cats, blessedly not in residence. I had the grim thought that there had seldom been room for me and mine, that I had been a scribbler of the stolen interval. I had worked at the kitchen table in the early days and run to Daisy when she woke from her nap. Teaching and the poetry of my students — poems without urgency, poems dressed up in “literary” curlicues and ribbons — had run away with countless hours. But then, I hadn’t fought for myself or, rather, I hadn’t fought in the right way. Some people just take the room they need, elbowing out intruders to take possession of a space. Boris could do it without moving a muscle. All he had to do was stand there “quiet as a mouse.” I was a noisy mouse, one of those that scratched in the walls and made a ruckus, but somehow it made no difference. The magic of authority, money, penises.

I put every framed picture carefully into a box, noting on a small piece of tape where each one belonged. I folded up several rugs and stored them with about twenty superfluous pillows and children’s games, and then I methodically cleaned the house, excavating clumps of dust to which paper clips, burnt matchsticks, grains of cat litter, several smashed M&Ms, and unidentifiable bits of debris had adhered themselves. I bleached the three sinks, the two toilets, the bathtub, and the shower. I scoured the kitchen floor, dusted and washed the ceiling lamps, which were thick with grime. The purge lasted two days and left me with sore limbs and several cuts on my hands, but the savage activity left the rooms sharpened. The musty, indefinite edges of every object in my visual field had taken on a precision and clarity that cheered me, at least momentarily. I unpacked my books, set myself up in what appeared to be the husband’s study (clue: pipe paraphernalia), sat down, and wrote:

Loss.

A known absence.

If you did not know it,

it would be nothing,

which it is, of course,

a nothing of another kind,

as acutely felt as a blister,

but a tumult, too,

in the region of the heart and lungs,

an emptiness with a name: You.

* * *

My mother and her friends were widows. Their husbands had mostly been dead for years, but they had lived on and during that living on had not forgotten their departed men, though they didn’t appear to clutch at memories of their buried spouses, either. In fact, time had made the old ladies formidable. Privately, I called them the Five Swans, the elite of Rolling Meadows East, women who had earned their status, not through mere durability or a lack of physical problems (they all ailed in one way or the other), but because the Five shared a mental toughness and autonomy that gave them a veneer of enviable freedom. George (Georgiana), the oldest, acknowledged that the Swans had been lucky. “We’ve all kept our marbles so far,” she quipped. “Of course, you never know — we always say that anything can happen at any moment.” The woman had lifted her right hand from her walker and snapped her fingers. The friction was feeble, however, and generated no sound, a fact she seemed to recognize because her face wrinkled into an asymmetrical smile.

I did not tell George that my marbles had been lost and found, that losing them had scared me witless, or that as I stood chatting with her in the long hallway a line from another George, Georg Trakl, came to me: In kühlen Zimmern ohne Sinn. In cool rooms without sense. In cool senseless rooms.

“Do you know how old I am?” she continued.

“One hundred and two years old.”

She owned a century.

“And Mia, how old are you?”

“Fifty-five.”

“Just a child.”

Just a child.

There was Regina, eighty-eight. She had grown up in Bonden but fled the provinces and married a diplomat. She had lived in several countries, and her diction had an estranged quality — overly enunciated perhaps — the result both of repeated dips in foreign environs and, I suspected, pretension, but that self-conscious additive had aged along with the speaker until it could no longer be separated from her lips or tongue or teeth. Regina exuded an operatic mixture of vulnerability and charm. Since her husband’s death, she had been married twice — both men dropped dead — and thereafter followed several entanglements with men, including a dashing Englishman ten years younger than she was. Regina relied on my mother as confidante and fellow sampler of local cultural events — concerts, art shows, and the occasional play. There was Peg, eighty-four, who was born and raised in Lee, a town even smaller than Bonden, met her husband in high school, had six children with him, and had acquired multitudes of grandchildren she managed to keep track of in infinitesimal detail, a sign of striking neuronal health. And finally there was Abigail, ninety-four. Though she’d once been tall, her spine had given way to osteoporosis, and the woman hunched badly. On top of that, she was nearly deaf, but from my first glimpse of her, I had felt admiration. She dressed in neat pants and sweaters of her own handiwork, appliquéd or embroidered with apples or horses or dancing children. Her husband was long gone — dead, some said; others maintained it was divorce. Whichever it was, Private Gardener had vanished during or just after the Second World War, and his widow or divorcée had acquired a teaching degree and become a grade school art teacher. “Crooked and deaf, but not dumb,” she had said emphatically upon our first meeting. “Don’t hesitate to visit. I like the company. It’s three-two-oh-four. Repeat after me, three-two-oh-four.”

The five were all readers and met for a book club with a few other women once a month, a gathering that had, I gleaned from various sources, a somewhat competitive edge to it. During the time my mother had lived in Rolling Meadows, any number of characters in the theater of her everyday life had left the stage for “Care,” never to return. My mother told me frankly that once a person left the premises, she vanished into “a black hole.” Grief was minimal. The Five lived in a ferocious present because unlike the young, who entertain their finality in a remote, philosophical way, these women knew that death was not abstract.

* * *

Had it been possible to keep my ugly disintegration from my mother, I would have done it, but when one family member is hauled off and locked up in the bin, the others surge forth with their concern and pity. What I had wanted terribly to hide from Mama I was able freely to show my sister, Beatrice. She received the news and, two days after my admission to the South Unit, hopped a plane to New York. I didn’t see them open the glass doors for her. My attention must have wandered for an instant because I had been waiting and watching for her arrival. I think she spotted me right away because I looked up when I heard the determined clicking of her high heels she marched toward me, sat down on the oddly slippery sofa in the common area, and put her arms around me. As soon as I felt her fingers squeeze my arms, the choking dryness of the antipsychotic cocoon I had been living in broke to pieces, and I sobbed loudly. Bea rocked me and stroked my head. Mia, she said, my Mia. By the time Daisy returned for a second visit, I was sane. The ruin had been at least partially rebuilt, and I did not wail in front of her.

Crying jags, howling, screeches, and laughter for no reason were not at all uncommon on the Unit and mostly passed unnoticed. Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption. An extreme effort is required just to keep track of one’s self, and the turn toward wellness happens the moment a bit of the world is allowed back in, when a person or thing passes through the gate. Bea’s face. My sister’s face.

My breakdown pained Bea, but I was afraid it would kill my mother. It didn’t.

* * *

Sitting across from her in the small apartment, I had the thought that my mother was a place for me as well as a person. The Victorian family house on the corner of Moon Street where my parents had lived for over forty years, with its spacious parlor rooms and warren of bedrooms upstairs, had been sold after my father’s death, and when I walked past it, the loss pained me as if I were still a child who couldn’t make sense of some upstart occupying her old haunts. But it was my mother herself whom I had come home to. There is no living without a ground, without a sense of space that is not only external but internal — mental loci. For me, madness had been suspension. When Boris abruptly took his body and his voice away, I began to float. One day, he blurted out his wish for a pause, and that was all. No doubt he had meditated on his decision, but I had had no part in his deliberations. A man goes out for cigarettes and never returns. A man tells his wife he is taking a stroll and doesn’t come home for dinner — ever again. One day in winter the man just up and left. Boris had not articulated his unhappiness, had never told me he didn’t want me. It just came over him. Who were these men? After I had pieced myself together with “professional help,” I returned to older, more reliable territory, to the Land of M.

It was true that Mama’s world had shrunk, and she had shrunk with it. She ate too little, I thought. When left to her own devices, she assembled large plates of raw carrots and peppers and cucumbers with perhaps one tiny piece of fish or ham or cheese. For years the woman had cooked and baked enough for armies and stored the foodstuffs in a gigantic freezer in the basement. She had sewn our dresses, mended our wool stockings, shined copper and brass until it gleamed bright and hard. She had curled butter for parties, arranged flowers, hung out and ironed sheets that smelled of clean sun when you slept in them. She had sung to us at night, handed us edifying reading material, censored movies, and defended her daughters to uncomprehending schoolteachers. And when we were sick, she would make a bed for the ailing child on the floor near her while she did the housework. I loved being unwell with Mama, not vomiting or truly miserable perhaps, but in a state of recovery by increments. I loved to lie on the special bed and feel Mama’s hand on my forehead, which she then moved up into my sweaty hair as she checked the fevern joved to sense her legs moving near me, to listen to her voice take on that special intonation for the invalid, songlike and tender, which would make me want to stay ill, to lie there forever on the little pallet, pale, Romantic, and pathetic, half me, half swooning actress, but always securely orbited by my mother.

Sometimes now, her hands shook in the kitchen and a plate or spoon would drop suddenly to the floor. She remained elegant and immaculate in her dress, but worried terribly over spots, wrinkles, and shoes that were improperly shined, something I didn’t remember from when I was young. I think the shining house had gone inward and been replaced by shining garments. Her memory sometimes lapsed, but only about recent incidents or sentences just uttered. The early days of her life had an acuity that seemed almost supernatural. As she aged, I did more and she did less, but this change in our rapport seemed minor. Although the indefatigable champion of domesticity had vanished, the woman who had fixed up a little bed to keep her sick children near her sat across from me, undiminished.

“I always thought you felt too much,” she said, repeating a family theme, “that you were overly sensitive, a princess on the pea, and now with Boris…” My mother’s expression turned rigid. “How could he? He’s over sixty. He must be crazy…” She glanced at me and put her hand over her mouth.

I laughed.

“You’re still beautiful,” my mother said.

“Thanks, Mama.” The comment was no doubt meant for Boris. How could you desert the still beautiful? “I want you to know,” I said, in answer to nothing, “that the doctors really say I am recovered, that this can happen and then never happen again. They believe that I have returned to myself — just a garden-variety neurotic — nothing more.”

“I think teaching that little class will do you good. Are you looking forward to it at all?” Her voice cracked with feeling — hope mingled with anxiety.

“Yes,” I said. “Although I’ve never taught children.”

My mother was silent, then said, “Do you think Boris will get over it?”

The “it” was actually a “she,” but I appreciated my mother’s tact. We would not give it a name. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what goes on in him. I never have.”

My mother nodded sadly, as if she knew all about it, as if this turn in my marriage were part of a world script she had glimpsed long ago. Mama, the Sage. The reverberations of felt meaning moved like a current through her thin body. This had not changed.

As I walked down the hallway of Rolling Meadows East, I found myself humming and then singing softly,

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!

How I wonder what you’re at!

Up above the world you fly,

Like a tea-tray in the sky.

* * *

I managed the mornings of that first week, working quietly at the borrowed desk, then reading for a couple of hours until the afternoon visits and long talks with my mother. I listened to her stories about Boston and my grandparents, to her recitation of the idyllic routines of her middle-class childhood, disrupted now and again by her brother Harry, an imp, not a revolutionary, who died at twelve of polio when my mother was nine and changed her world. She had told herself on that day in December to write down everything she remembered about Harry, and she did it for months on end. “Harry couldn’t keep his feet still. He was always swinging them against the chair legs at breakfast.” “Harry had a freckle on his elbow that looked like a tiny mouse.” “I remember Harry cried in the closet once so I couldn’t see him.”

I cooked dinner for Mama most evenings at my place or hers, feeding her well with meat and potatoes and pasta, and then I walked over the moist grass into the rented house where I raged alone. Sturm und Drang. Whose play was that? Friedrich von Klinger. Kling. Klang. Bang. Mia Fredricksen in revolt against the Stressor. Storm and Stress. Tears. Pillow beating. Monster Woman blasts into space and bursts into bits that scatter and settle over the little town of Bonden. The grand theater of Mia Fredricksen in torment with no audience but the walls, not her Wall, not Boris Izcovich, traitor, creep, and beloved. Not He. Not B.I. No sleep but for pharmacology and its dreamless oblivion.

* * *

“The nights are hard,” I said. “I just keep thinking about the marriage.”

I could hear Dr. S. breathe. “What kind of thoughts?”

“Fury, hatred, and love.”

“That’s succinct,” she said.

I imagined her smiling but said, “I hate him. I got an e-mail: ‘How are you, Mia? Boris.’ I wanted to send back a big gob of my saliva.”

“Boris is probably feeling guilty, don’t you think, and worried. I would guess that he’s confused, too, and from what you told me Daisy has been awfully angry with him, and that must cut pretty deep. It’s obvious that he#x2019;s not a person who does well with conflict. There are reasons for that, Mia. Think of his family, his brother. Think of Stefan’s suicide.”

I didn’t answer her. I remembered Boris’s hollow voice on the phone saying he had found Stefan dead. I remembered the yellow note stuck to the kitchen wall that said, “Call plumber” and that each letter of that reminder had an alien quality as if it weren’t English. It had made no sense, but the voice in my head had been crisp, matter-of-fact: You must call the police and go to him now. No confusion, no panic, but an awareness that the terrible thing had come and that I felt hard. This has happened; it is true. You must act now. There were drops of rain on the cab window, then sudden thin slides of water, behind which I could see the fogged buildings downtown and then the street sign for N. Moore, so ordinary, so familiar. The elevator with its cold gray panels, the low ringing sound at the third floor. Stefan hanging. The word No. Then again. No. Boris throwing up in the bathroom. My hand stroking his head, gripping his shoulders firmly. He didn’t weep; he grunted in my arms like a hurt animal.

“It was terrible,” I said in a flat voice.

“Yes.”

“I took care of him. I held him up. What would he have done if I hadn’t been there? How can he not remember? He turned into a stone. I fed him. I talked to him. I tolerated his silence. He refused to get help. He went to the lab, ran the experiments, came home, and turned back into a rock. Sometimes I worry that I’ll incinerate myself with my anger. I’ll just blow up. I’ll break down again.”

“Blowing up is not the same as breaking down and, as we’ve said before, even breaking down can have its purpose, its meanings. You held yourself together for a long time, but tolerating cracks is part of being well and alive. I think you’re doing that. You don’t seem so afraid of yourself.”

“I love you, Dr. S.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

* * *

I heard the child before I saw her: a small voice that came from behind a bush. “I’m putting you in the garden, that’s it, and you mustn’t be sillies or willies or dillies … Absolutely not! Plop, here, here. Yes, look, a hill for you. Dandelion trees. Teeny wind blowing. Okay, peoples, a house.”

From my reclining position in the lawn chair where I was reading, I saw a pair of short, naked legs come into view, take two steps, and then drop to a kneeling position on the ground. The partly visible child had a green plastic bucket, which she dumped out on the grass. I saw a pink dollhouse and a host of figures, hard and stuffed, of various sizes, and then the girl’s head, which startled me before I understood that she was wearing a fright wig of se kind, a gnarled platinum concoction that made me think of an electrocuted Harpo Marx. The commentary resumed. “You can get in, Ratty, and you too, Beary. Look, you talk to each others. Some dishes.” Running exit, swift return, spillage of small cups and plates onto the grass. Busy arrangements and then chewing noises, lip smacking, and simulated burps. “It’s not polite to burp at the table. See, he’s coming, it’s Giraffey. Can you fit in? Squeeze in there.” Giraffey did not fit well, so his manipulator settled for the entrance of the fellow’s head and neck in-house, body beyond.

I returned to my book, but the child’s voice pulled me away now and again by small exclamations and loud humming. A brief silence was followed by a sudden lament: “Too bad I’m real so I can’t go in my little house and live!”

I remembered, remembered that threshold world of Almost, where wishes are nearly real. Could it be that my dolls stirred at night? Had the spoon moved of its own accord a fraction of an inch? Had my hope enchanted it? The real and unreal like mirror twins, so close to each other they both breathed living breaths. Some fear, too. You had to brush against the uneasy sense that dreams had broken out of their confinement in sleep and pushed into daylight. Don’t you wish, Bea said, the ceiling was the floor? Don’t you wish we could …

The girl was standing about five feet away, staring gravely in my direction, a round and sturdy person of three or four with a moon face and big eyes under the ludicrous wig. In one hand, she gripped Giraffey by the neck, a battle-scarred creature who looked as if he needed hospitalization.

“Hi,” I said. “What’s your name?”

She shook her head vigorously, puffed out her cheeks, turned suddenly, and ran.

Too bad I’m real, I thought.

* * *

My bout of nerves before meeting my poetry class of seven pubescent girls struck me as ridiculous, and yet I could feel the constriction in my lungs, hear my shallow breaths, the small puffs of my anxiety. I spoke sternly to myself. You have taught graduate school students writing for years, and these are only children. Also, you should have known that no self-respecting boy of Bonden would sign up for a poetry workshop, that out here in the provinces, poetry signifies frails, dolls, and dowagers. Why would you expect to attract more than a few girls with vague and probably sentimental fantasies about writing verse? Who was I anyway? I had my Doris prize and I had my PhD in comparative literature and my job at Columbia, crusts of respectability to offer as evidence that my failure wasn’t complete. The trouble with me was that the inside had touched the outside. After crumbling to bits, I had lost that brisk confidence in the wheels of my own mind, the realization that had come to me sometime in my late forties that I might be ignored, but I could out-think just about anybody, that massive reading had turned my brain into a synthetic machine that could summon philosophy and science and literature in the same breath. I rousemyself with a list of mad poets (some more and some less): Torquato Tasso, John Clare, Christopher Smart, Friedrich Hölderlin, Antonin Artaud, Paul Celan, Randall Jarrell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ezra Pound, Robert Fergusson, Velimir Khlebnikov, Georg Trakl, Gustaf Fröding, Hugh MacDiarmid, Gérard de Nerval, Edgar Allan Poe, Burns Singer, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Laura Riding, Sara Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay, John Berryman, James Schuyler, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz … Buoyed by the reputations of my fellow maniacs, depressives, and voice hearers, I hopped on my bicycle to meet the seven poetic flowers of Bonden.

* * *

As I looked around the table at my pupils, I grew calmer. They were indeed children. The preposterous but poignant realities of girls on the cusp asserted themselves immediately, and my sympathy for them almost choked me. Peyton Berg, several inches taller than I, very thin, with no breasts, constantly adjusted her arms and legs as if they were alien limbs. Jessica Lorquat was tiny, but she had the body of a woman. A false atmosphere of femininity hung about her that made itself known chiefly in an affectation — a cooing baby voice. Ashley Larsen, sleek brown hair, slightly protruding eyes, walked and sat with the self-conscious air that comes with a newly acquired erogenous zone — holding herself chest-out to display growing buds. Emma Hartley withdrew behind a veil of blond hair, smiling shyly. Nikki Borud and Joan Kavacek, both plump and loud, appeared to function in tandem, as one giggling, mincing persona. Alice Wright, pretty, large teeth covered by braces, was reading when I came in and continued to read quietly until the class started. When she closed the book, I saw that it was Jane Eyre, and I felt a moment of envy, the envy of first discovery.

At least one of them was wearing perfume, which on the warm June day mingled with the room’s dust and made me sneeze twice. Jessica, Ashley, Nikki, and Joan were dressed for something other than a poetry workshop. Adorned with trailing earrings, lip gloss, eye shadow, T-shirts with messages that exposed their bare bellies of various sizes and shapes, they had strutted rather than walked into the room. The Gang of Four, I thought. The comfort, the safety, the group.

I gave my speech then. “There are no rules,” I told them. “For six weeks, three days a week, we’re going to dance, dance with words. Nothing is prohibited — no thought or subject. Nonsense, stupidity, silliness of all kinds are allowed. Grammar, spelling, none of it matters, at least at first. We’ll read poems, but your poems don’t have to be like the ones we read.”

The seven were silent.

“You mean we can write about anything,” Nikki blurted out. “Even nasty stuff.”

“If that’s what you want,” I said. “In fact, let’s try nasty as a trigger word.”

After a short explanation about automatic writing, I had them write a response to nasty, whatever came into their mindin a ten-minute stretch. Poop, pee, snot, and vomit appeared under several pencils in short order. Joan included “Period mess,” which prompted giggles and gasps and made me wonder how many of them had crossed that threshold. Peyton discoursed on cow pies. Emma, incapable, it seemed, of letting herself go, stuck to moldy oranges and lemons, and Alice, who obviously inhabited the realm of the incurably bookish, wrote, “sharp, cruel, pointed, like piercing knives in my soft flesh,” a line that caused Nikki to roll her eyes and glance at Joan for confirmation, which quickly arrived in the form of a smirk.

That shared look of disparagement registered itself in my chest, like the briefest stab of a needle, and I noted aloud that nasty was a word that included more than objects of disgust, that there were nasty remarks, nasty thoughts, and nasty people. This went over without objection, and after more talk, embarrassed giggling, questions, my directive to keep their work in a single notebook, and an assignment to do more fast writing at home to the word cold, I dismissed them.

The Gang of Four led the way out with Peyton and Emma fast on their heels. Alice lingered at the table as she carefully, self-consciously inserted her book into a large canvas bag. Then I heard Ashley call to Alice in a bright, brittle voice, “Alice, aren’t you coming with?” (With is a preposition allowed to hang unaccompanied by a noun or pronoun in Minnesotan.) Looking toward Alice, I saw her face change. She smiled for an instant and, gathering up her notebook from the table, ran eagerly toward the others. Alice’s undisguised happiness combined with Ashley’s tone had for the second time in a single hour touched a raw spot in me, more bodily than cerebral. I had been called back to a young and hopelessly serious self, a girl without the distance of irony or a gift for covering up her emotions. You ARE overly sensitive. The two tiny exchanges between girls lingered into the evening like an old and annoying melody in my mind, one I understood I had never wanted to hear again.

The girls and their blooming bodies may have been an indirect catalyst for the project I launched that same evening. It served as a methodical way to ward off the demons that arrived every night, all of them named Boris, and all of them wielding knives of various lengths. The fact that I had spent over half my life with that man did not mean that there hadn’t been a period Before Boris (from now on to be designated B.B.) There had been sex, too, in that long-lost era, voluptuous, dirty, sweet, and sad. I decided to catalog my carnal adventures and misadventures in a pristine notebook, to defile the pages with my own pornographic history and to do my best to leave it husband-free. The Others, I hoped, would take my mind off the One.

Entry #1. Was I six or seven? I would say six, but it isn’t certain. My aunt and uncle’s house in Tidyville. My older cousin Rufus lounging on the sofa. If I was six, he was twelve. Other family members were around, I recall, moving in and out of the room. It was summer. Sunlight shone through the window, specks of dust visible, a fan blowing from the corner. As I passed the sofa, Rufus pulled me onto his lap, nothing unusual. We were cousins. He began to rub me or, rather, knead me between my legs as if I were dough, and a strange warm feeling arrived, a combination of dim arousal accompanied by a sensation of the not-quite-right. I put my hands on his knees, gave a push, dropped off his lap to the floor, and wandered away. This drive-by groping must count as my first sexual experience. I have never forgotten it. Although it was not traumatic in the least, it was novel, a curiosity that left a definite imprint on my memory. My view of the event, which I never told anyone about, except Boris, surely qualifies for what Freud (or, rather, James Strachey) called “deferred action”—early memories that take on different meanings as a person grows older. If I had not escaped so quickly, if I had not been able to retain a sense of my own will, the molestation might have scarred me. Today, it would be considered criminal and, if discovered, could send a boy like Rufus to jail or into treatment for sex offenders. Rufus became a dentist who now specializes in implants. Last time I saw him, he was carrying around a magazine called Implantology.

Entry #2. Lucy Pumper announces to me on the school bus: “I know they have to do it to have children, but do they have to take off all of their clothes?” Lucy was Catholic — an exotic category: incense, robes, crucifixes, rosaries (all coveted) — and she had eight brothers and sisters. I bowed to her superior knowledge. I, on the other hand, looked through that particular glass darkly and had nothing to say. I was nine years old and understood perfectly that I would discover a reflection of some kind if I looked hard enough, but when I gazed ahead I had no idea what I was seeing. All of their clothes?

A side entry: I promised not to, but I can’t help it. His hair was dark then, almost black, and there was no soft, loose flesh beneath his chin. As he sat across the table from me in the Hungarian Pastry Shop, he explained his research slowly and lucidly, and he drew a model on the napkin with his Bic pen. I leaned forward to look at it, followed one of the lines he had drawn with my finger, and looked up at him. The electric air. He placed his hand over mine and pressed my fingers into the table, but I felt it between my legs. I felt my jaw loosen and my mouth open. It was grand, my love, wasn’t it? Well, wasn’t it?

* * *

I am screaming, All these years you came first! You, never me! Who cleaned, did homework for hours, slogged through the shopping? Did you? Goddamned master of the universe! Phallic Übermensch off to a conference. The neural correlates of consciousness! It makes me puke!

Why are you always so angry? What happened to your sense of humor? Why are you rewriting our life?

I remember pieces, parts,

A chair without the room,

A flying phrase, a shriek, a foggy scene,

hippocampal fits

that summon David Hume,

his I as pale and lean and phantom-like

As mine.

Dear Mom,

I’m thinking of you every day. How is Grandmother? The play closes in August and then I’ll come to visit for a whole week. I love doing Muriel. She’s a pip — a great part and finally comedy! The laughs have been huge. I told Freddy the scripts were awful, but he kept sending me out for those ghastly torture-and-kill-the-girl movies. Yuck! The playhouse is trying to raise money, but it isn’t easy here in off-off-off land. Jason is fine except that he’s hating my schedule.

I saw Dad for lunch but it didn’t go so well. Mom, I’m worrying a lot about you. Are you okay? I love you so much.

Your own Daisy

I sent my own Daisy a reassuring message.

* * *

“He wasn’t an easy man to be married to, your father,” my mother said.

“No,” I said, “I can see that.”

My mother was sitting in a chair, hugging her thin knees. I thought to myself that although age had shrunk her, it had also intensified her, as if the lack of remaining time had had the effect of stripping away all fat — both physical and mental.

“Golf, the law, crosswords, martinis.”

“In that order?” I smiled at her.

“Possibly.” My mother sighed and reached to pick a dead leaf from a potted plant on the table beside her. “I have never told you,” she said, “but when you were still small, I believe your father fell in love with someone else.”

I took a breath. “He had an affair?”

My mother shook her head. “No, I don’t think there was sex. His rectitude was absolute, but there was the feeling.”

“He told you?”

“No. I guessed.”

Such were the circuitous routes of marital life, at least between my parents. Direct confrontation, of any kind, had been extremely rare. “But he admitted it.”

“No, he didn’t confirm or deny it.” My mother pressed her lips together. “He found it very difficult, you know, to talk to me about anything painful. He would say, ‘Please, I can’t. I can’t.’”

As she spoke, a mental image of my father came abruptly into my head. He was sitting with his back turned to me, silently watching the fire, a book of puzzles at his feet. Then I saw him lying in the hospital bed, a long skeletal figure adrift on morphine, no longer conscious. I remembered my mother touching his face. At first, she used a single finger, as if she were drawing his features directly onto his body, a wordless outline of her husband’s countenance. But then she pressed her palms against his forehead, cheeks, eyes, nose, and neck, squeezing his flesh hard like a sightless woman desperate to memorize a face. My mother, both tough and blighted, her lips pressed together, her eyes wide with urgency as she began to grasp his shoulders and arms and then his chest. I turned away from this private claim to a man, this possessive declaration of time spent, and I left the room. When I returned, my father was dead. He looked younger dead, smooth and incomprehensible. She was sitting in darkness with her hands folded in her lap. Narrow lines of light from the Venetian blinds made stripes across her forehead and cheek, and I felt awe, only awe in that instant.

In response to my silence, my mother continued. “I am telling you this now,” she said, “because I sometimes wished he had risked it, had thrown himself at her. He might, of course, have run off with her, and then again, he might have tired of it…” She exhaled loudly, a long shuddering breath. “He returned to me, emotionally, I mean, to the degree that it was possible for him. It went on for a few years — the distance — and then I don’t think he thought of her anymore, or if he did, she had lost her power.”

“I see,” I said. I did see. The Pause. I tried hard to remember sonnet 129. It begins, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” and then the lines about lust, “lust in action.” Somewhere the words “murderous, bloody, full of blame…”

Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;

Something, something … then:

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

“Who was she, Mama?”

“Does it matter?”

“No, maybe not,” I lied.

“She’s dead,” my mother said. “She’s been dead for twelve years.”

* * *

That evening, as I turned the key in the lock, I felt a presence on the other side of the door, a heavy, threatening being, palpable, alive, there, standing just as I stood, its hand raised. I heard myself breathing on the step, felt the cooling night on my bare arms, heard a lone car engine start up not far away, but I didn’t move. Neither did it. Stupid tears rose in my eyes. I had felt the same weighted body years ago at the bottom of the stairs at home, a waiting Echo. I counted to twenty, delayed for another twenty beats, then pushed hard at the door and turned on the light switch to face the reasonable emptiness of the mud hall. It was gone. This thing that was not a superstition or a vague apprehension, but a felt conviction. Why had it returned? Ghosts, devils, and doubles. I remembered telling Boris about the waiting presence, invisible but dense, and his eyes had lit up with interest. That was back in the days when he liked me, before his eyes went dull, before Stefan died, the little brother, who leapt and crashed, so smart, O God, the young philosopher who knocked them out at Princeton, who made them quake, who loved to talk to me, to me, not just to Boris, who read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell. I hate you for what you did, Stefan. You knew he would find you. You must have known he would find you. And you must have known he would call me and that I would go to him. For half a second, I saw the pool of urine on the floor mixed with watery feces staining the floorboards. No.

Stop thinking about that. Don’t think about that. Go back to the presence.

Boris had told me about presences. Karl Jaspers, wunder Mensch, had called the phenomenon leibhaftige Bewusstheit and somebody else, a Frenchman, no doubt, hallucination du compagnon. Had I been crazy as a girl, too? Bats for a year? No, not a whole year, months, the months of the cruelties when I had felt the Thing waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Not necessarily crazy,” Boris had said to me in his voice, thickened by cigars, and then he had smiled. Presences, he said, have been felt by patients, both in the psych ward and those in neurology, as well as by just plain folks. Yes, hordes of undiagnosed innocents, just like you, Dear Reader, whose minds are not cracked or disorderly or shredded to bits, but merely subject to a quirk or two.

I triedrd to remember then, as I lay on the sofa, presence-free, to unearth the distant cruelties of the sixth grade, “calmly and objectively,” as they say on television and in bad books. There had been a plot or several plots, a grandiose word for the doings of little girls, but does the age of the perpetrators or the location of intrigue really matter? Playground or royal court? Isn’t the human business the same?

How had it started? At a slumber party. Just fragments. This is certain: I didn’t want to breathe in until I fainted, gulping in the air over and over to propel me forward flat onto the mattress. It was stupid, and I had been frightened by Lucy’s white face.

“Don’t be chicken, Mia. Come on. Come on.” Whines of complicity.

No. I wouldn’t do it. Why would anyone want to faint? I felt too vulnerable. I didn’t like to be dizzy.

The girls whisper near me. Yes, I hear them but don’t understand. My sleeping bag was blue with a plaid lining. That I remember clearly. I’m tired, so tired. There is something about an aim, aiming at someone, then aiming a knife. A cryptic joke.

I laugh with them, not wanting to be left out, and the girls laugh harder. My friend Julia laughs hardest of all. I fall asleep after that. Confused and ignorant little girl.

The note in class: “AIM, dirty fingernails and greasy red hair. Wash yourself, piglet.” I saw my inverted name all at once. Mia in Aim.

“My nails are clean and so is my hair.”

Gales of laughter. High winds of cackling from the group, blowing me down into a hole. Don’t say anything. Pretend you hear, see nothing.

The pinch on the stairs.

“Stop pinching me.”

No expression on Julia’s face. “What’s wrong with you? I didn’t touch you. You’re crazy.”

More surreptitious pinches, my “imagination,” in the girls’ locker room.

Tears in the toilet stall.

Then, mostly, I don’t exist.

To reject, exclude, ignore, excommunicate, exile, push out. The cold shoulder. The silent treatment. Solitary confinement. Time out.

In Athens, they formalized ostracism to rid themselves of those suspected of having accumulated too much power, from ostrakon, the word for “shard.” They wrote down the names of the threats on broken pieces of crockery. Word Shards. The Pathan tribes in Pakistan exile renegade members, sending them into a dusty nowhere. The Apache ignore widows. They fear the paroxysms of grief and pretend those who suffer from them do not exist. Chimpanzees, lions, wolves all have forms of ostracism, forcing out one of their own, either too weak or too obstreperous to be tolerated by the group. Scientists describe this as an “innate and adaptive” method of social control. Lester the chimpanzee lusted after power above his rank, tried to hump females out of his league. He didn’t know his place and, finally, was expelled. Without the others, he starved to death. The researchers found his emaciated body under a tree. The Amish call it Meidung. When a member breaks a law, he or she is shunned. All interactions cease, and the one they have turned against falls into destitution or worse. A man bought a car to take his sick child to a doctor, but the Amish are not allowed to drive cars. After that breach, the powers that be declared him anathema. No one recognized him. Old friends and neighbors looked through him. He no longer existed among them, and so he lost himself to himself. He cringed at the blank faces. His posture changed; he folded inward; and he found he couldn’t eat. His eyes lost their focus, and when he spoke to his son, he realized he was whispering. He found a lawyer and filed suit against the elders. Not long after, his boy died. A month later, he died. Meidung is also known as “the slow death.” Two of the elders who had approved the Meidung also died. There were bodies all over the stage.

It seemed to me at the time that I had fallen under an evil enchantment, the source of which could not be proven, only guessed at, because the crimes were small and mostly hidden: pinches that didn’t happen, hurtful notes written by no one: “You are a big fake,” the mysterious destruction of my English paper, the drawing I had left on my desk — found scribbled over — jeers and whispers, anonymous telephone calls, the silence of not being answered. We find ourselves in the faces of others, and so for a time every mirror reflected a foreigner, a despised outsider unworthy of being alive. Mia. I rescrambled it. I am. I wrote it over and over in my notebook. I am. I am Mia. Among my mother’s books I found an anthology of poems and in it, John Clare’s poem, “I Am.”

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows

My friends forsake me like a memory lost,

I am the self-consumer of my woes—

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied, stifled throes—

And yet, I am, and live — like vapors tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise …

I had no idea what “self-consumer of my s tossedx201D; meant. It might have helped. A little irony, child, a little distance, a little humor, a little indifference. Indifference was the cure, but I couldn’t find it in myself. The actual cure was escape. That simple. My mother arranged it. St. John’s Academy in St. Paul, a boarding school. There I was smiled upon, recognized, befriended. There I found Rita, co-conspirator with long black braids and Mad magazine, fan of Ella, Piaf, and Tom Lehrer. Lying each in a bunk, we crooned out in faltering harmony every verse of “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” (I felt bad for the fictional pigeons, actually, but the sweet camaraderie of Rita far outweighed the pinch of pity.) Her pale brown legs. My white ones with a few freckles. My bad poems. Her good cartoons.

I remember my mother as she stood in the doorway to our room on the first day. She was so much younger, and I can’t summon the precise features of her face as it was then. I do recall the worried but hopeful look in her eyes before she left me, and that when I hugged her I smashed my face into the shoulder of her jacket and told myself to inhale. I wanted to keep the smell of her with me — that mingled odor of loose powder and Shalimar and wool.

* * *

It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes. And yet, as I sit here at my desk and try to bring it back, that summer not so long ago, I know turns were made that affected what followed. Some of them stand out like bumps on a relief map, but then I was unable to perceive them because my view of things was lost in the undifferentiated flatness of living one moment after another. Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia. Consciousness is the product of delay. Sometime in early June, during the second week of my stay, I made a small turn without being aware of it, and I think it began with the secret amusements.

* * *

Abigail had arranged for me to see her handicrafts. Her apartment was smaller than my mother’s and, at first glance, I felt inundated by the shelves of tiny glass figurines, the embroidered pillows and wall signs (“Home Sweet Home”), and the multicolored quilts folded over furniture. Various artworks covered most of the walls and Abigail herself, who was decked out in a long loose dress embellished with what appeared to be an alligator and other creatures. Despite the dense arrangements, the room had that neat, newly dusted, proud feeling I had come to expect from the swans of Rolling Meadows. Because she could no longer stand upright, Abigail used a walker to deftly propel herself around in the doubled-over position. She opened the door, shifted her head sideways to eye me, and, fingering her hearing aid with her free hand, looked intently in my direction. The auditory devices were not like the ones my mother wore; they were much larger and protruded from her ears like great dark flowers. Thick cords dangled from them, and I wondered whether these were extra technology for her extreme deafness or a throwback to an earlier era. Although not nearly so big, the contraptions reminded me of ear trumpets in the nineteenth century. She settled me into a chair, offered me cookies and a glass of milk, as if I were seven, and then, without any preliminaries, she brought forth the two works she had selected for me to examine and placed one on top of the other on my lap. Then she slowly made her way to the green sofa and carefully deposited herself in a position that was painful to look at, but her cheerful, direct expression mitigated my discomfort, and I picked up the top piece.

“That’s an old one,” she said. “Doesn’t bother me. That’s the best I can say. At least that one doesn’t bother me. After I put them up, some of them get to bothering me, and then I have to put them away, go right in the closet. Well, what do you think?”

After taking out my reading glasses, I looked down at an elaborate scene of what appeared to be a cliché: In the foreground a cherubic blond boy made of felt cutouts danced with a bear against a background of riotous flower patterns. Over him was a yellow sun with a smiling face. Happy-wappy, I thought. The derisive expression was Bea’s. But then as I continued to look, I noticed that behind the dull boy, nearly hidden by leaf patterns, was a tiny girl embroidered into fabric, her form rendered in threads of muted colors. Wielding an oversized open pair of scissors as a weapon, she grinned malevolently at a sleeping cat. Then I noticed a set of pale pink winged dentures above her that, without scrutiny, could have been mistaken for petals, and a gray-green skeleton key. As I continued to investigate the shapes in the foliage, I saw what appeared to be a pair of naked breasts in a little window and soon after some words, the letters of which were so small I had to hold them away from me to read: O remember that my life is wind. I knew I had read those words but couldn’t place them.

When I looked up, Abigail smiled.

“It’s not what it seems to be at first,” I yelled in her direction. “The girl. The teeth. Where is the quote from?”

“Hollering is not helpful,” she said loudly. “A firm loud voice will do the trick. Job. ‘O remember that my life is wind; mine eye shall no more see good.’”

I said nothing.

“They don’t see it, you know.” Abigail stroked a hearing-aid cord as she tilted her head. “Most of them. They see only what they expect to see, sugar, not spice, if you comprehend my meaning. Even your mother took her time noticing them. Of course, the eyesight around these parts isn’t too hot. I started doing it, oh, it was years ago, at my crafts club, made my own patterns, but it wouldn’t do to come right out with it — up front — you know, so I began what I came to call the private amusements, little scenes within scenes, secret undies, if you understand. Take a gander at the next one. It’s got a door.”

I laid the small blanket on my lap and looked down at needlepoint roses, yellow and pink on a black background, with leaves in various greens. The stitching was flawless. There were also tiny pastel buttons sewn here and there into the floral motif. No door.

“One of the buttons opens, Mia,” she said. Her voice shook as she spoke, and I could sense her excitement.

After fumbling with several buttons, I looked up to see Abigail grab her walker, raise herself twice before she pushed herself up off her seat, and begin to move slowly toward me — walker tap, step, tap, step. Once she had arrived, her lowered head poised just above my own, she gestured toward a yellow button. “That one. Then pull.”

I pushed the button through a hole and pulled. The rose fabric gave way to a different view. The image on my lap was another needlepoint, but this one was dominated by a huge gray-blue vacuum cleaner, complete with an Electrolux label on its flank. The thing was not grounded but airborne, a flying machine guided by a disproportionately small, mostly naked woman — she wore only high heels — who sailed alongside it in the blue sky, commandeering its long hose. The household appliance was engaged in the business of sucking up a miniature town below. I studied the two legs of a tiny man that stuck out from the bottom of the attachment and the hair of another pulled upward by the air, his mouth open in terror. Cows, pigs, and chickens, a church, and a school had all been uprooted and were soon to be digested by the hungry hose. Abigail had worked hard on the suction disaster scene; each figure and building had been rendered in tiny precise stitches. Then I saw the miniature sign that said BONDEN hovering just outside the vacuum’s mouth. I thought of the hours of work and the pleasure that must have pushed her forward, a secret pleasure, one touched by anger or revenge or at the very least a gleeful feeling of vicarious destruction. Many days, perhaps months, had gone into creating this “undie.”

A low sound came from my throat, but I don’t think she heard it. I looked at her, nodded, smiled my appreciation, and said, careful not to yell, “It’s great.”

Abigail slowly returned to the sofa. I waited through the taps and steps, and then through the lowering ritual that began with a double-fisted grip on the walker and concluded with a rocking drop into the seat cushion. “Did it in fifty-seven,” she said. “Too much for me now. My fingers won’t cooperate, the work’s too fine.”

“You had to hide it?”

She nodded, then smiled. “I was spitting mad at the time. Made me feel better.”

Abigail did not elaborate, and I felt too much the outsider to press her. We sat together for a while without speaking. I watched the old Swan munch her cookie very neatly, gingerly wiping away a few crumbs that had settled at the corner of her mouth with an embroidered napkin. After some minutes, I said I had to go, and when she reached for her walker, I told her not to worry about showing me to the door. And then, in a fit of admiration, I leaned over, found her cheek, and kissed it warmly.

What do we know about people really? I thought. What the hell do we know about nyone?

* * *

After only a week of class, my seven girls emerged from behind their adolescent wardrobes and their tics, and I found myself interested in them. Ashley and Alice, the two A girls, were friends. Both were bright, had read books, even some poets, and they vied for my attention in class. Ashley was poised, however, in a way Alice was not. Alice was inward. A couple of times she absentmindedly picked her nose in class while she worked on a poem. She was inclined toward stilted Romantic images — moors, wild tears, and savage breasts — that indicated her immersion in the Brontë sisters but often sounded merely silly when she read her works aloud in emotional tones that made her compatriots writhe with embarrassment. But in spite of her pretensions, she wrote grammatically and with far more sophistication than any of the other girls and came out with a few lines I truly liked: Silence is a good neighbor and I watched my sullen self walk away. Ashley, on the other hand, had a strong sense of what would fly with the others. She liked rhymes, the influence of rap music, and impressed her friends with her agility, matching fret and Internet, for example, and plate with investigate. The girl had perfect pitch for workshop politics and dealt out praise, comfort, and delicate criticism in beneficent doses to her peers. Emma lost some of her shyness, pushed aside her hair, and revealed a sense of humor: “Never put a rainbow in a poem. Never rhyme true with you, but scarf and barf will do.” After a few classes, Peyton had become so relaxed, she set herself up with an extra chair to accommodate her long legs. Like Alice’s, Peyton’s body lagged behind the other girls’. The hormonal onslaught of puberty showed no signs of having visited her person, and though I’m sure it worried her, I couldn’t help but think that backwardness in this area had its advantages. In all events, that is how I read the grass stains on her shorts and the fact that horses, not boys, continually found their way into her poems. Jessie looked the little woman already, but I sensed she was waging an internal battle. The mature body must have come fast. The camp that welcomed it preened and smelled musky, while the other side donned roomy T-shirts to disguise ample breasts that appeared to be growing apace every week. Whatever else took place in Jessie’s inner life remained hidden behind clichés. The grinding stupidity of phrases such as “You just have to believe in yourself” and “Don’t let anything get you down” recurred without cease, and I soon understood that these weren’t just lazy expressions but dictates of dogma, and she would not have them wrested away from her without a fight. After her early efforts, I had gently suggested she reconsider her wording and had watched her face close. “But it’s true,” she would intone. I gave in. What did it matter? I asked myself. She probably needed these slogans to end her war. Nikki and Joan remained a team, although I came to see that Nikki was the dominant of the two. One day they both arrived with chalky faces, heavy eyeliner, and black lipstick, an experiment I decided not to notice. The Halloween getup had no effect on their personas, however, which remained chirrupy. Their tittering back and forth was equaled only by the expansive delight they took in fart poems, which was mostly contagious, and they responded warmly to my short lecture on the scatological in literature. Rabelais. wift. Beckett.

I was not deluded that I knew what was going on in the lives of these seven. After class, telephones suddenly appeared in their hands, and I watched the girls’ thumbs pick out text messages at high speed, half of them, it seemed, directed at friends on the other side of the room. After a Tuesday class I found an e-mail from Ashley.

Dear Ms. Fredricksen,

I had to tell u how great the class is. My Mom said I would like it but I didn’t believe her. She was right. You are really different from other teachers, like a friend. No like an ANGEL. I am learning a lot. I guess I just had to say it. Also, you have great hair.

Your very devoted Student,

Ashley

And then another message from an address I didn’t recognize.

I know all about you. You’re Insane, Crazy, Bonkers.

Mr. Nobody.

I felt slapped. I remembered the sign from NAMI on the wall of the hospital unit’s small library: FIGHTING THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS. Stigmatos, marked by a sharp instrument, the sign of a wound. Sometime much later, the fifteenth century, maybe, it also came to mean a mark of disgrace. Christ’s wounds and the saints and hysterics who bled from their hands and feet. Stigmata. I wondered who would want to harass me anonymously — and to what purpose? Any number of people probably knew that I had been hospitalized, but I couldn’t think who would want to send me this note. I tried to remember if I had given my e-mail to another patient, to Laurie maybe, sad, sad Laurie who had shuffled around in her slippers with her diary clutched to her chest, making small moaning sounds. It was possible, but unlikely.

As I lay in bed that night, roiled by the usual tempests — Stefan’s note: It is too hard; the Pause shaking my hand in the lab and smiling, the memory of Boris in bed and the weight of sleep in his body, then his shrouded face as he comes out with his decision, and Daisy, tears running, the sound of her shuddering breaths and sniffs; she is sobbing about her father leaving her mother, and I think of my own inscrutable father’s passion for someone else — the word crazy returned, and I pushed it away, and then the word in the note Ashley had capitalized, ANGEL, appeared for a moment on the screen behind my closed eyelids. I thought of Blake’s celestial visitors, the legend of Rilke’s supernatural gift, the first words of the Duino Elegies, and then of Leonard, my fellow inmate on the South Unit. He had proclaimed himself the Prophet of Nothing. He pontificated and he discoursed and he clearly loved the stentorian tones of his own bass voice, expounding to anyone who came near him. But no one listened to him, not his fellow patients, not the staff. Even his psychiatrist had looked blank as he sat across from Leonard in a meeting I glimpsed through one of the large glass windows. He interested me, however, and his grandiose appeals had genuine brilliance. On the morning of my release I had sat with him in the common area. With his balding pate surrounded by graying curls that fell near his shoulders, Leonard looked the part. He turned toward me and began his prophecies. He talked to me about Meister Eckhart as a messenger of the Nothing, who influenced Schelling, Hegel, and Heidegger. And he told me that Kierkegaard’s angst was an encounter with Nothing, and that we lived in a time of actualized Nothingness, and this was essential and mystical; “It should not be amiss,” he said, waving his index finger, “to open ourselves to the truth that Nothing is the primal ground of this world.” Leonard may have been mad, but his thoughts were not nearly as addled as the powers that be in the hospital assumed. He continued his oratory by explaining that this was all related to the deeper levels of Buddhism, and as I walked toward Daisy, who had come through the door to take me home, he drifted on to Goethe’s Faust and his descent into the realm of the Mothers and his union with the nothing, and that was the last I heard.

Lonely man. He couldn’t be Mr. Nobody, could he? After I had left the hospital, I regretted that I hadn’t made it clear to him that I was following at least some of his leaps, but all I could think about then was my daughter’s face. That something was all that mattered.

To recall me as she,

rocking in rooms

as white as eggs.

An underground of string—

these violent lines

of what used to be called

the heart, lost to

my now-bitter mouth.

“A tangle,” he said.

No, knots.

Not this or these.

She was distinct,

I believe. Shelved.

Put her away.

Inanimate thing.

Put her away,

And let her rock.

* * *

“Dear Mia,” Boris wrote. “Whatever happens between us, it is very important to me to know how you are. For Daisy’s sake, too, we have to be in communication. Please send a message back when you receive this.” So reasonable, I thought, such stiff prose: in communication. I felt like biting something. He was obviously worried. He had seen me on the day after I landed in the hospital, when I was acute, delusional and hallucinating, bouffée délirante, and I was convinced he was going to steal the apartment, push me into the street, a conspiracy cooked up with the Pause and the other scientists at the lab, and when he sat across from me in the room with Dr. P., a voice said, “Of course he hates you. Everyone hates you. You’re impossible to live with.” And then, “You’ll end up like Stefan.” I screamed, “No!” and an orderly pulled me away and they injected more Haldol, and I knew they were in on it.

His brother and his wife. Poor Boris, I could hear them say. Poor Boris, surrounded by crazy people. I remember babbling to Felicia, who had come to clean. I remember tearing down the shower curtain, explaining about the plot, yelling. I remember it perfectly, but now it’s as if I were someone else, as if I’m looking at myself from afar. It all fell away after Bea arrived. But I had frightened Boris, and because he had “agitated” me on the ward, they didn’t want him to visit again. I stared at the message for a long time before I wrote back: “I am not crazy anymore. I am hurt.” The words seemed true, but when I tried to elaborate, all further commentary seemed merely decorative. What was there to communicate? And the irony that Boris wanted communication was almost too much to bear.

I don’t want to talk about it. I’m waking up. Let me have my tea. We’ll talk later. I can’t talk about it. We’ve been over this a thousand times. How many times had he uttered those sentences? Repetition. Repetition, not identity. Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words. I am walking back and forth over the same floor. I am singing the same song. I am married to the same man. No, not really. How many times had he answered Stefan’s calls in the middle of night? Years and years of calls and rescues and doctors and the treatise that would change philosophy forever. And then the silence. Ten years of no Stefan. He was forty-seven when he died. Boris was five years older, and once, only once, the older brother had whispered to me after two scotches that the most terrible thing was that it was a relief, too, that his own beloved brother’s suicide had also been a relief. And then when his mother died — the flamboyant, complicated, self-pitying Dora — Boris was the lone survivor. His father had dropped dead of heart failure when the boys were still young. Boris did not grieve in any demonstrative way. Instead, he receded. What had my father said? “I can’t. I can’t.” I had longed to find both men, hadn’t I? My father and my husband, both prone to long disquisitions about torts or genes and so mute about their own suffering. “Your father and your husband shared a number of traits,” Dr. S. had said. The past tense: shared. I looked at the message. I am hurt. Boris had been hurt, too. I added, “I love you. Mia.”

* * *

The sex journal was not providing me with the release I had hoped for. Recording my early, furtive masturbatory journeys up a mountain that had rather suddenly presented itself as something to climb; the tongue dives with M.B. that had left my mouth sore in the morning because neither I nor said youth had dared venture into territories farther south; the later, daring advances by J.Q. under bras and into jeans as he pressed on despite colonial resistance, the forces of which admittedly weakened over time, had accumulated a bathetic quality I found hard to ignore. Who cares? I thought. And yet, why did the mature woman look back at the girl with such coolness, such lack of sympathy? Why did the aging persona produce only expeditions into irony? Hadn’t I sighed and heaved and longed and wept? Hadn’t I lost my virginity in a heated but deeply confused state, still unaware, despite my adventures with M.B. and J.Q., of how exactly it all worked? I remember the wooden stairs to the second floor, the bunched sheets and blankets, but no color or details. Only that there was a dim light that shone through the window and that the branches of the tree outside moved and the light moved with them. There was some pain, but no blood and no orgasm.

* * *

The second message read simply:

Looney.

Mr. Somebody.

Although it was unsettling, I decided not to worry. These missives had a puerile ring to them, and what harm could they really do? Without an answer, the sender would tire and disappear into the nebula from which he had come. He was no more threatening than the presence behind the door — nothing but a felt absence.

* * *

From time to time my neighbors on the left, the parents of the diminutive Harpo who had turned up on my small lawn, quarreled loudly. The content of these disputes was mostly inaudible. What carried into my domain was anger: the screech of her voice that changed register when it cracked into sobs, and his booming tenor — both of which were occasionally punctuated by a crash. The crashes were frightening, and I found myself looking closely at the house and its residents. They were a young, pink, pudgy pair. I saw little of him. He drove off in the morning to some job in a Toyota and sometimes didn’t return for days, a young man who must have traveled here a there for work. The young woman stayed home with her Marx brother and an infant no more than six weeks old — a person in the still floppy, stunned by visual stimuli, sucking, arm and foot waving, grunting, grimacing phase of life. How I had loved that stage in my own Daisy’s path of becoming. One afternoon, while I sat outside on the rickety chaise longue that had become my reading furniture, I saw the mother through a gap in the bushes. As she held the flailing, screaming baby in her arms, she leaned over her bewigged three-year-old, deeply engaged in fierce, if controlled, negotiations about the false hair: “You can’t wear it every minute. Your head must be sweating. What about your own hair? I can hardly remember what it looks like anymore.” “It’s not sweaty! It’s not sweaty!” I put down my copy of Repetition, which I was reading for the sixth time, and wandered a few yards to offer my help.

My intervention meant that the fright wig remained on the young head. The mother was Lola, Harpo was actually Flora, and the person in a paper diaper was Simon, with whom I had a conversation of coos, nods, and smiles I found extremely gratifying. The four of us ended up in the professors’ yard drinking lemonade, and I discovered that Lola had attended Swedenborg College as an art major, made jewelry and sold it, that her husband, Pete, worked for a company in Minneapolis, which had been steadily cutting back its workforce, a fact Lola found “kinda scary,” that he did indeed travel a lot, and that Lola was tired. She did not say she was tired, but exhaustion was written all over her soft, round twenty-six-year-old face. While we sat together, she nursed Simon with an easy, practiced air and fended off Flora’s intrusions of false solicitude that threatened to unhinge her son’s mouth from her nipple. I tried to distract Flora by asking her questions. At first she refused to answer me. I spoke to her back and to the wig, but after prodding and several questions, she changed character, and I became audience to a chattering, dancing, singing show-off. “Watch my feet! Look at me jump. Simon can’t jump. Look, Mom. Watch me! Look, Mom!” Lola watched with a faint smile as her bald babe’s eyes flickered open and shut, open and shut, his little arms reaching tremulously for nothing, before he sank back toward her breast into sleep.

* * *

Boris wrote back:

Thank you for answering, Mia. I have a conference in July in Sydney. Will keep you posted on all dates. Boris.

There was no love to my love. I gathered he hoped to push our relations onto a civil but cold plane for the sake of the beloved, shared offspring, and I had a brief fantasy of bursting in on him and the Pause in the lab, and flying from one cage to the next. Mia, the Fury of perpetual anger, releases all the tormented rats from their prisons and looks on with malicious glee as their milk-white bodies shoot across the floor.

* * *

The classes continued into the second week, and as we eight sat around the table and wrote and talked, I began to sense an invisible undertow among the girls that ma me uneasy. I knew that the real pull of this force took place before and after class, during the hours of their lives that had nothing to do with me, and that its dynamics were part of the necessary secrecy and alliances of early adolescence. There were glances exchanged among them and barely discernible nods that sometimes made me feel as if I were watching a play that was taking place behind an opaque screen. The bits of their conversations I overheard were stereotypical in the extreme, a primitive banter punctuated by the words like and so, used chiefly to telegraph approval and disapproval.

Like why do that? I mean, that’s so retarded.

Well, isn’t it? Oh my God, don’t you know that’s like so uncool?

Did you see Frannie’s brother? He’s so hot!

No, dummy, he’s fifteen, not sixteen.

Did you see her bag? Like it’s so bad.

You called me a lesbian! That’s sick. Oh my God.

When I listened idly to their talk during the minutes before we began and after I had dismissed them, I often felt the girls’ speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon, with the exception of Alice, whose diction was not infected with as many likes and sos, and yet even she fell into the curious, moronic dialect of Early Female. But after each child had sat down, she became suddenly differentiated from the others, as if a charm had been lifted and she could speak for herself. Little by little fragments of her family story appeared, which altered my perception of her. I discovered that Ashley was one of five children and her parents divorced when she was three years old; that Emma’s little sister had muscular dystrophy; and that Peyton’s father lived in California. She was going to visit him in late August, as she did every summer. He was the parent with horses. Alice had lived in Bonden for only two years. Before that she lived in Chicago, and her repeated references to that lost metropolis inevitably set off a contagion of looks among the others. Joan and Nikki had become fast friends in the third grade. Jessica’s parents were serious Christians of some kind, perhaps of the newish variety that mingled pop psychology and religion, but I wasn’t sure.

In order to scrape at their inner worlds, the ones I felt were as distinct as their stories, we began to work on the “secret me” poems. I introduced the cleft between outer perceptions and our own sense of inner reality, the misunderstandings that can sometimes shape our relations with other people, that most of us have a feeling of a hidden self, that the social self is different from the solitary self, and so on. I emphasized that this was not Truth or Dare, a game I remembered from my own youth, not an exercise in confession or betrayal of secrets we want to keep hidden. I suggested contrasting two lines: You think I’m … and But I’m really … We discussed metaphors, using an animal or thing instead of an adjective.

I praised Joan’s lines.

You think I’m bland and a little silly.

But inside I’m a red-hot chili.

Emma compared her inner self to mud, but it was Peyton who produced the most startling image. She wrote that on the inside she was a “chipped piece of a door that looks like an island on a map.” When she read this, Peyton’s thin, narrow face had a pensive, taut expression. She hesitated, then explained. When she was eight, she told us, her parents had a terrible shouting fight while she was lying in bed. Her father left the house in a fury and slammed the door so hard, a part of it loosened and a chip fell off. The next morning she took the piece that had fallen and kept it. We were silent for a few seconds. Then I said that sometimes a small thing, even a bit of debris, can come to signify a whole world of feeling. “Nothing was the same after that,” she said quietly.

As I walked toward the open doors after class, I noticed that Ashley and Alice were in deep conversation on the steps just outside the building. I saw Alice nod and smile, then hand over a book or notebook. After that, Ashley stepped to one side and began to type madly on her telephone. When I passed her as I left, she looked up at me and smiled. “Really good class.”

“Thanks, Ashley,” I said.

That night as I lay in bed, a June storm rolled in over town, and it thundered loudly, sharp cracks like a series of detonations mingled with resonant booms above me, echoing again and again. Soon after came the rushing noise of thick, fast rain outside. I remembered the great winds of my childhood, remembered waking up in the morning to see that branches had fallen all over the street. I remembered the enchanted stillness that came before the twister or tempest, as if the whole earth were holding its breath, and the eerie green color that tinged the sky. I remembered the immensity of the world.

* * *

Dr. S. said, “You sound like you’re enjoying yourself.”

I was shocked. How could I enjoy myself? A woman who had been abandoned by her husband and gone bananas in the bargain, however “briefly”; how could she enjoy herself?

“You seem to have struck a chord with your young poets.” (I heard a chord on a guitar — metaphors often do this to me, even the deadest of the dead.) “You seem to like being with your mother. Abigail sounds very interesting. You’ve met the neighbors. You’re writing well. You answered Boris’s e-mail.” She paused. “I hear it in your voice.”

Feeling stubborn, I made a sound of dismissal.

Dr. S. waited.

I thought, Could she be right? Had I been clinging to an idea of wretchedness while I was secretly enjoying myself? Secret amusements. Unconscious knowledge. There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, she was very, very good … “You might be right.”

I could hear her breathe.

“There was a storm last night,” I said, “a big one. I liked it.” I was rambling, but that was good, free association. “It was like listening to my own rage, but rage with real power, big, masculine, godlike, magisterial, paternal bangs in the heavens, the kind of thundering rage that makes the lackeys hop to, a baritone roar shaking the sky. I could almost feel the town move.”

“You think if your anger had power, paternal power, you could shape things in your life more to your liking. Is that what you mean?”

Is that what I meant? “I don’t know.”

“Is it perhaps that you felt your father’s emotions had power in the family, power over your mother, your sister, and you, and you were always stepping around his feelings, trying not to upset him. And you’ve felt the same thing in your marriage, perhaps reproduced the same story, and all the while you’ve gotten angrier and angrier?”

Lord, the woman is sharp, I thought. I answered her with a small, meek “Yes.”

* * *

Try at another sex entry:

It started in the library with Kant. Libraries are sexual dream factories. The languor brings it on. The body must adjust its position — a leg crossed, a palm leaned upon, a back stretched — but the body is going nowhere. The reading and the looking up from one’s reading brings it on; the mind leaves the book and meanders onto a thigh or an elbow, real or imagined. The gloom of the stacks brings it on with its suggestion of the hidden. The dry odor of paper and bindings and very possibly the smell of old glue bring it on. It wasn’t difficult Kant: The Critique of Practical Reason, much easier than Pure, but I was twenty, and Practical was quite difficult enough, and he leaned over me to see which book it was. His warm breath, his beard, very close. Professor B. in his white shirt, his shoulder an inch from mine. My whole body stiffened, and I said nothing. Then he was reading in a low voice, but the only word I remember is tutelage. He said it slowly, enunciating each syllable, and I was his. It ended badly, as they say, whoever they are, but his eyes watching me as I undressed—No, your blouse first. Now your skirt. Slowly—his long fingers moving into my pubic hair, then withdrawing, teasing me, smiling, creating desration — these wanton pleasures in the library after it had closed, these I keep safe in memory.

* * *

“George is dead,” my mother said, and pressed her index finger to her mouth for a moment. “They found her this morning on the floor in the bathroom.”

“Poor George,” Regina said. She pursed her lips. “I doubt I’ll get to one hundred and two; it’s really extraordinary when you contemplate it, even for a moment.”

Did people contemplate for a moment?

“Not with my leg,” she continued. “I had never heard of what I have, you know. The doctor told me if I’m not careful, one day it goes right to your brain or your lungs or somewhere and you’re dead, instantly.” Her eyes looked moist. “If I forget the Coumadin, then, well, it’s over.”

“She loved to tell people her age.” Abigail was steadying her hunched self with one hand on the edge of the table. She turned her head in my direction. “Never tired of it. Her oldest daughter’s seventy-nine.” She breathed in. “It seems another one goes every day. Alive one minute. Dead the next.”

Peg examined her hands on the table. They were heavily spotted and lined with great protruding veins. “She’s with her Maker.” Peg had a true warble in her voice, like the throaty sound of a pigeon. “And Alvin,” she added.

“Unless they’ve remade the man in heaven, God save her from Alvin,” Abigail said forcefully. “The most persnickety little tyrant I’ve ever seen. His pens had to lie just so, an inch apart, his collars had to be ironed flat, flat, flat. The bed, Lord, the bed and its corners. George was lucky to be rid of him. Had twenty-seven blessed years without that bald, nasty little despot.”

“Abigail, it’s not right to speak like that about the dead,” Peg said, her voice lilting sweetly.

Abigail was not listening. She was pressing a piece of paper into my hand under the table. I closed my hand around it and tucked into my pocket.

My mother shook her head. “I’ve never thought it was right to turn people into paragons of virtue after their deaths, either.”

I murmured an agreement.

“Nothing wrong with looking on the bright side.” Peg’s voice lifted a whole octave on the penultimate word. She smiled.

“Not at all,” Regina said in her oddly accented voice. “With my leg I must His pens n bright and hopeful. What else can I do? If it bursts, that’s it, straight to my brain or my heart, dead in a second.”

We were sitting in the game room, around the bridge table. The summer light came through the window and I looked out at the clouds, one of which drifted upward like a smoke ring. I heard a dryer flapping clothes somewhere down the hallway and the low sound of a motorized scooter, but that was all.

Four Swans.

Mia,

I have more to show you. Would Thursday be suitable?

Yours,

Abigail

Each word was a tremulous but careful scrawl of letters. I remembered what my mother had once said: “Getting old is fine. The only problem with it is that your body falls apart.”

* * *

“Your poetry’s cracked,” my anonymous tormenter had written. “Nobody can understand it. Nobody wants twisted shit like that. Who do you think you are?!#*

Mr. Nobody.”

* * *

I read the message several times. The more I read it, the more peculiar it became. The repetition of Nobody followed by the pseudonym, Nobody, made it sound as if he, Nobody, did understand it and did, in fact, want twisted shit. Who do you think you are? became another question entirely in that case. Sliding meanings. It seemed unlikely that the phantom was ironic, making some superior joke about the novis dictum for “accessible” poems or playing with the words twisted shit and cracked. Unless it was Leonard, released from South, and annoying me for some preposterous reason of his own. It was true that for years I had been toiling away at work few wanted or understood, that my isolation had become increasingly painful, and that I had harangued Boris with my diatribes about our shallow, debased, virulently anti-intellectual culture that worships mediocrity and despises its poets. Where was Whitman Street in New York City? I had whined about the poets who wrote for the few remaining middlebrow folk in the United States who bothered to glance at a feeble line or two in their copy of the New Yorker and satisfy themselves that they had just nibbled on a morsel of “sophisticated” poetic sentiment or wit about lawns or old watches or wine because, after all, it was in the magazine. Rejection accumulates; lodges itself like black bile in the belly, which, when spewed outecomes a screed, the vain rantings of one redheaded lady poet against the ignoramuses and insiders and culture makers who have failed to recognize her, and poor Boris had lived with her/my bawling ululations, Boris, a man for whom all conflict was anathema, a man for whom the raised voice, the passionate exclamation scraped like sandpaper on his soul. Paranoia chases rejection. During the days of my complete clinical derangement, hadn’t I been paranoid? They plotted against me. Now the words on the screen, the words of Nobody, had taken the place of the accusing voices in my head. Everyone hates you. You’re nothing. No wonder he left you. It was as if Mr. Nobody knew, as if he understood where to strike. I thought of George lying dead on the bathroom floor that same morning, and the future turned suddenly both vast and barren, and doubt, the deforming constant doubts that my poems were shit, a waste, that I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion, that I, not Boris, was to blame for the Pause, that my truly great work, Daisy, was behind me seemed all to be true. Now, menopausal, abandoned, bereft, and forgotten, I had nothing left. I put my head on the desk, thinking bitterly that it wasn’t even my own, and wept.

After a couple of minutes of full-throated sobbing, I felt someone’s warm breath on my arm and flinched. Flora and Giraffey were standing very close to me. The child’s eyes were round with attention. A piece of her own light brown hair stuck out from under the wig and the skin all around her mouth had been stained pink from some unknown substance. We looked at each other. Neither of us said anything, but I felt she was observing me with the cool eyes of a scientist, a zoologist perhaps. Her sober gaze was digesting the whole animal, pondering its behavior, and then, without a word, she acted. She lifted up Giraffey and held him out toward me. It wasn’t at all obvious what she intended by the gesture so, rather than take him, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and patted the filthy creature on the head.

An instant later I heard Lola call her daughter loudly and urgently and, taking Flora’s hand, which she accepted easily, naturally, I walked with her into the other room to greet Lola and Simon (in Snugli) outside the open screen door. I saw Lola register my face; what it looked like I have no idea — a red-gray mash of tears and mascara, probably — but her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second in sympathy. The young mother looked bedraggled at that moment, almost slovenly, in her cut-off jeans, a pink halter top, and earrings of her own making, two golden birdcages that hung from her earlobes. She had pulled her bleached hair back, and I noticed that she was a little sunburned across her nose. I remember these details because all at once I understood how glad I was to see her, and the emotion I felt has fixed the particulars of the encounter. By then it was around seven-thirty in the evening. Pete was off again and she was going to try to get the children to bed, and then, she said, with an open smile, she had a plan to break out a bottle of wine and eat the quiche she had made that day, and she would love me to join her, and I accepted with an enthusiasm that would have embarrassed me in almost any other circumstance, but which in this instance seemed entirely “normal.” My mother was at her book club discussing Austen’s Emma over a variety of cheeses, and I had no obligations of any kind.

And so that was the night we tackled the double bedtime together. On my side, this involved a complex strategy of rocking, bouncing, and occasionally shaking the just-nrsed Simon, who seemed to have developed paroxysms in the gut vicinity. The little red man squirmed with discomfort, spat milk on my shoulder, and then, after straining mightily, let out in one heavenly, propulsive motion a gob of creamy yellow shit into his diaper, which I happily cleaned while examining his tiny, adorable penis and surprisingly consequential testicles and tucking up his bottom in a Pamper, and then I found a rocking chair, into which we settled, and I rocked and lullabyed the small scion of the family into the arms or, rather, the lap of Morpheus. Meanwhile, Lola waged a parallel campaign with the chattering, not-yet-four fruitcake, Flora, who dillydallied and shammed and bargained her way toward what Sir Thomas Browne once called the “Brother of Death.” Valiantly, how valiantly she fought the loss of consciousness with every possible ruse: bedtime stories and glasses of water and just one more song until she, too, exhausted from the rigors of battle, collapsed, knuckle of curled index finger inside her mouth, free arm flung out across bedspread featuring large purple dinosaur, while Giraffey and his companion, a peroxide beast stolen from the head of slumbering warrior, kept vigil from the bedside table.

Lola and I ate the quiche and slowly got potted over the course of several hours. She lay on the sofa, birdcages catching the light, her tanned, round legs stretched out in front of her. From time to time she wiggled her bare feet, with their slightly dirtied soles, as if she were reminding herself that they were still attached to her ankles. By eleven o’clock I had discovered that Pete was a problem, “even though I love him.” Lola had been informed of my marital fiasco and a tear or two had dripped down both of our noses. We had laughed about our Problems as well, chortled loudly over their mutual propensity for odiferous socks that stiffened with some unknown manly secretion, especially in winter. The girl had a good laugh, a deep and surprising one, which seemed to come from somewhere below her lungs, and a direct way of speaking that charmed me. No indirect discourse or Kierkegaardian ironies for this daughter of Minnesota. “I wish I knew what you know,” she said at one point. “I should have studied harder. Now with the kids, I don’t have time.” I muttered some platitude in response to this, but the fact was, the content of our conversation that night was of little importance. What mattered was that an alliance had been established between us, a felt camaraderie that we both hoped would continue. The unspoken directed the evening. When we parted we hugged and, in a fit of affection augmented by alcohol, I cupped her round face in my hands and thanked her heartily for everything.

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made of chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again.

* * *

It may come as no surprise to you that brains are not all that different from those of our mammalian cousins the rats. My own rat man has spent his life championing a subcortical primal affective self across species, heralding our shared brain areas and neurochemistries. Only in later years has he begun to relate this core spot to the puzzle of higher levels of reflection, mirroring, and self-consciousness — in monkeys, dolphins, elephants, human beings, and pigeons, too (most recently) — publishing papers on the various systems of this mysterious thing we call selfness, enriching his understanding with phenomenology, with quotes from the luminous Merleau-Ponty and the murkier Edmund Husserl, courtesy of HIS WIFE, who walked him through the philosophy step by step, retreating to Hegel, Kant, and Hume when needed (although the old man has less use for them, his interest is in embodiment, yes, Leib, schéma corporel), and read over each word carefully, painstakingly correcting errors and smoothing prose. No, you moan, not she, not she of the small stature, red curls, and comely bosom! Not the lady poet! Yes, it is so, I tell you in all gravity. The great Boris Izcovich has repeatedly gone marauding for ideas in the brain of his own wife, has even acknowledged her contributions. So? So? you say. Isn’t that all right then? It is NOT all right because THEY do not believe him. He is the Philosopher King and Man of Rat Science. After all, Dear Reader, I ask you how many men have thanked their wives for this or that service, usually at the very end of a long list of colleagues and foundations? “Without the unflagging support and inestimable patience of Muffin Pickle, my wife, as well as my children, Jimmy Junior and Topsy Pickle, this book never could have been written.”

* * *

Without the bilateral prefrontal cortex of my wife, Mia Fredricksen, this book would not exist.

* * *

“That period is over,” my mother said when I asked her about men in her life. “I don’t want to take care of a man again.” I was behind her when she said this, massaging her back, and saw only the line of her straight clipped white hair. “I miss your father,” she said. “I miss our friendship, our talks. He could, after all, talk about many things, but, no, I can’t see the advantages of taking up with someone now. Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don’t, because it makes their lives harder. Regina is an exception. I suspect she needs the attention. She flirts with everyone.”

My mother, her chin lowered as I gently pressed my fingers into her neck, continued the theme of relations between the sexes with a story: Returning from her book club the night before, she had run into Oscar Busley, one of a dwindling number of Rolling’s male residents. Although his peripatetic days were behind him, Oscar had retained kinesis and increased his personal velocity by means of an Electric Mobility Scooter. Busley had whirred beside my mother down the corridor, chatting amiably, as they headed in the direction of her apartment. When they reached her door, she stopped to take her keys from her bag. The man must have unclenched his fists from the Mobility’s handlebars and lunged precipitously, because my mother was amazed to discover that Oscar had attached himself to her midsection. He had tric Mobild his arms firmly around her as he nestled his pate just beneath her breasts. With equal suddenness and probably greater force (she lifted weights twice a week), my mother had disengaged herself from the unwelcome embrace, rushed into her apartment, and slammed the door.

There followed a brief discussion between us about the disinhibition that sometimes occurs in cases of dementia. My mother, however, insisted that the man was “quite all right in his mind”; it was the rest of him that needed restraining. She then countered the Oscar Busley tale with the Robert Springer story. She had attended a dinner in St. Paul and met one of my father’s old law acquaintances, Springer, “a tall handsome man” with “a nice head of hair,” who was there with Mrs. Springer. This entirely nonviolent encounter consisted of a handshake accompanied by a meaningful gaze. By then, back rub over, my mother had moved into a chair and was facing me. She made an opening gesture with both hands, palms up. “He held it too long, you understand, just a little longer than was appropriate.”

“And?” I said.

“And I nearly swooned. The pressure of his hand went right through me. I was weak in the knees. Mia, it was lovely.”

Yes, I thought, the electric air.

… lift your fingers white

And strip me naked, touch me light,

Light, light all over.

Lawrence in my head. Touch me light.

My mother’s wrinkled, slender face looked thoughtful. Our minds moved along parallel paths. She said, “I make a point of touching my friends, you know, a pat, a hug. It’s a problem. In a place like this, many people aren’t touched enough.”

* * *

The girls were out of sorts. It may have been the heat. We were cool inside, but outside the day was muggy — swamp weather. Alice looked especially wilted, and her large brown eyes had a rheumy glaze to them. When I asked her if she was unwell, she said her allergies were bothering her. They chattered about Facebook, and boys’ names were mentioned: Andrew, Sean, Brandon, Dylan, Zack. I heard the phrase “later at the pool” several times, “bikinis,” and lots of whispering and hushing. But beyond the titillating expectation of meeting members of the other sex, there was an additional tension among them, not without excitement, but that turbulence, whatever it was, had a smothered, invidious quality I could feel as surely as the humidity beyond the room. Nikki, especially, seemed discomposed. She was unable to stop herself from simpering at every possible interval. Jessie’s pale blue eyes were heavy with significance, and once she mouthed a word to Emma, but I couldn’t rher lips. Peyton repeatedly laid her head down on the table as if she were suffering from a sudden onset of narcolepsy. Although her expression was illegible, Ashley’s always erect posture had an extra rigidity, and she applied lip gloss to her already shining mouth three times in a single hour. Emma, too, appeared preoccupied with some unknown, only half-suppressed joke. I had a powerful sensation of a text inscribed beneath it all, but I was looking at a palimpsest so thick with writings that nothing was legible.

As the class continued, I had to disguise my irritation. Nikki’s pudgy face, with its sparkling eye shadow and heavy mascara, which only two days earlier had struck me as good-humored, now looked merely moronic. Joan’s barely visible grin and similar makeup rankled rather than amused me. While they were writing their poems about color, I had to remind myself that some of the girls hadn’t turned thirteen — that their self-control was limited and that if I allowed myself to become alienated the whole class would sour. I also knew that my hypersensitivity to the atmospheric nuances around the table, combined with my own sorry experience at their age, could easily distort my perceptions. How many times had Boris said, “Mia, you’re blowing this way out of proportion,” and how many times had I seen myself holding a flaccid balloon between my lips, breathing into it as it slowly expanded into a great pear or long wiener, thereby changing it from one thing into another? No, the same thing, only bigger: more air.

After a not entirely dull discussion of color and feeling — bitter, mean green; glum or soothing or huge blue; hot, yelling red; bursting yellow; blank, cold white; grumpy brown; scary, deadly black; and airy, sweet-tasting pink — they departed, and I, self-anointed adult spy, stood on the sultry front steps of the small building and watched.

There unfolded before me a kind of dance, a jostling, animated shuffle of approaches, withdrawals, and various doublings, triplings, and quadruplings. I could see, only yards away, at the end of the short block, a group of five boys, happily pounding, slapping, pushing, and tripping one another as they exclaimed, “You fuck, what’d’ya think yer doin’?” and “Get your hands off me, homo!” With a single exception — a tall boy in wide shorts and a baseball cap turned backward on his head — they were runty amours, much shorter than most of the girls, but all five — towering boy included — were engaged in what appeared to be a clumsy, testosterone-infused form of group gymnastics. Meanwhile, my seven were also in performance mode. Nikki, Joan, Emma, and Jessie shrieked with self-conscious laughter, glancing over their shoulders at their stumpy suitors. Peyton’s drowsiness seemed to have lifted. I saw her aggressively insert herself between Nikki and Joan, lean down, and whisper some thought into Nikki’s ear, which instantly produced in the listener another high-pitched squeal. Ashley, rod straight, breasts up, out, and forward, shook her hair onto her back with two little twists of her neck, before she moved confidingly toward Alice. The latter listened, rapt, to the former, and immediately afterward, I saw Emma glance at Ashley. It was a glittering, facetious look, but also, I realized, with a flash of discomfort, a servile one.

As they wandered off in a loose pack toward the still-raucous savages on the corner, I felt a mixture of pity and dread — pity, quite simply, because I was remembering not any particular day, any particular boy or girl, not even the gloomy period when I was pushed out by Julia and her disciples. Rather, I remembered that time of life when most of what matters can be summed up by the phrase “the other kids,” and it struck me as pitiful. The dread was more complex. In his journals, Kierkegaard writes that dread is an attraction, and he is right. Dread is a lure, and I could feel its tug, but why? What had I actually seen or heard that created this mild but definite pull in me? Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it. There is a hallucinatory quality to all perception, and illusions are easy to create. Even you, Dear Reader, can easily be persuaded that a rubber arm is your own by a charming neurologist with a few tricks either up his sleeves or in the pockets of his white coat. I had to ask myself if my circumstances, my own unwanted pause from “real” life, my own postpsychotic state had affected me in ways I wasn’t aware of and couldn’t predict.

* * *

The two further amusements Abigail revealed to me that Thursday were as follows:

One floral, hand-knit tea cozy, which, when turned inside out, exposed a tapestry lining of female monsters with oozing eyes, flaming breath, breasts with spears, and long swordlike talons.

One long green table runner embroidered with white Christmas trees. When reversed and unzipped, it displayed (moving from left to right) five finely rendered female onanists on a black background. (Onan, the disgraced Biblical character, got into trouble for spilling his seed on the ground. As I examined the row of voluptuaries, I wondered if the term could apply to those of us who are seedless but egg-full. We waste those eggs like crazy, of course, flushing them out every month in days of bleeding, but then most sperm are wholly useless as well, a thought to be considered elsewhere at greater length.)

Slender sylph reclines in easy chair, strategically dandling a feather between her open legs.

Dark lady lies at edge of bed, legs in the air, two hands hidden beneath disordered petticoats.

Chunky redhead straddles the bar of a trapeze, head thrown back, mouth open in orgasmic extremity.

Grinning blonde with shower nozzle — spray stitched in neat fanning lines of blue thread.

And, finally, a white-haired woman lying in bed clad in a long nightgown, her hands pressed over the cloth against her genitals. This last character changed the work entirely. The jocularity of the four younger revelers turned suddenly poignant, and I thought about the loneliness of masturbatory consolations, of my own lonely consolations.

When I looked up from the tapestry of self-pleasuring women, Abigail’s expression was both shrewd and sad. She told me she had not shown the masturbators to anyone but me. I asked her why. “Too risky” was her curt response.

It was strange how quickly I had become accustomed to the woman’s jackknife posture and how little I thought about it as we talked. I noticed, however, that her hands were shaking more than when we were last together. She told me three times that no one had seen “the runner” but me, as if to be sure of my confidence. I said I would never speak of it without her permission. Abigail’s sharp eyes gave me the strong impression that choosing me as a repository for her artistic secrets was not caprice. She had a reason, and she knew it. Nevertheless, she explained little and conducted a roving, shapeless conversation with me that afternoon over lemon cookies and tea, moving from her visit to New York in 1938 and her love for the Frick Collection to the fact that she was six years old when women got the vote to the poor supplies that were offered to art teachers in her day and how she had had to buy her own or deprive her pupils. I listened patiently to her, aware that despite the insignificance of what she was telling me, an urgency in her tone held me in my seat. After an hour of this, I felt she was tiring and suggested we make another date.

When we parted, Abigail grasped both my hands in hers. The squeeze she gave them was weak and tremulous. Then, lifting my hands to her lips, she kissed them, turned her head to one side, and pressed her cheek hard against the skin of my knuckles. Outside her door, I leaned against the wall in the corridor and felt tears come into my eyes, but whether they were for Abigail or for me, I had no idea.

* * *

I knew Pete was back because I heard him. Now that I had befriended Lola, I felt worse about the noise. I was sitting in the backyard on my chair after a long talk with Daisy on the telephone, my up-and-coming comedienne with the kind but overly possessive boyfriend “who wants to be with me every minute when he’s not at work.” She had called because she needed to discuss diplomacy. Daisy wanted to find the perfect way to tell him, “I need my space.” When I suggested that the phrase she had just used seemed inoffensive, she moaned, “He’ll hate that.” Pete was hating something, too, but fortunately after only minutes his bellowing stopped, and the house next door went quiet. Perhaps the combatants had taken to the wordless thrusts and parries of copulation. My father had not been a yeller, Boris was not a yeller, but there can be power in silences, too, more power sometimes. The silence draws you into the mystery of the man. What goes on in there? Why don’t you tell me? Are you glad or sad or mad? We must be careful, very careful with you. Your moods are our weather and we want it always to be sunny. I want to please you, Dad, to do tricks and dance and tell stories and sing songs and make you laugh. I want you to see me, see Mia. Esse est percipi. I am. It was so easy with Mama, her hands holding my face, her eyes with mine. She could roar at me, too, at my mess and disorderly ways, my crying jags and my eruptions, and then I was so sorry, and it was easy to get her back. And with Bea, too, but you were too far, and I couldn’t find your eyes or, if I did find them, they turned inward and there was gloom in that mental sky. Harold Fredricksen, Attorney at Law. It was a great joke in the family that when I was four, I had recited the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name.” And Boris, yes, Boris, too, husband, father, father, husband. A repetition of the pull. What goes on in thre? Why don’t you tell me? Your silences pull me toward you but then there are clouds in your eyes. I want to ram the fortress of that gaze, blast beyond it to find you. I am the fighting Spirit of Communion. But you are afraid of being broken into, or maybe you are afraid of being eaten. The seductive Dora, glamour-puss mother weighted down by the myriad gestures and accoutrements of femininity, the sulks and coos and eyelash batting and shoulder rolling and hints and around-the-bend methods that will get her what she wants. I can hear her gold bracelets jingling. How she loved you, her bubeleh, her boychik, her darling, but there was something cloying in that love, something theatrical and selfish, and you knew it and, as soon as you were big enough, you kept her at a safe distance. Stefan knew, and he also knew that for her he came second in all things. Two boys with a father in heaven. And so it was, Boris, that we carried them, our parents, with us to each other. The Pause, too, must have them, father and mother, but I cannot think of her. I don’t want to think of her.

* * *

The presence behind the door came and went. It was there, and then it wasn’t there. I talked my way inside whenever I felt it, using my reason to trump the potent sensation. I continued to think of the presence as a speechless version of Mr. Nobody, a nut who sent regular messages but had shifted his tone from harassing mean guy to borderline philosopher, which again made me suspect Leonard. “Reality is immaterial, made from events, actions, potentialities. Regard these mysterious subjectivities that alter the mind-world, the Zeno effect! Relay this to Izcovich, your faithless spouse. Yours, Nobody.”

Annoyed and upset by the reference to Boris, I quickly typed a response and sent it, regretting it instantly: Who are you and what do you want from me?

* * *

“I knew he had a temper when I married him,” Lola said late in the afternoon while Simon dozed on her knees and Flora jumped in and out of a small turquoise blow-up pool. “But I didn’t have kids then. Flora gets so scared.” These three sentences seemed to float in the hot air between us, and I felt sad. I wanted to say, But he doesn’t hit anyone, right? He’s not violent? The questions that rose up sank back inside me, and I never pronounced the words. Lola was wearing a green bathing suit, sunglasses, and a baseball cap. Her body hadn’t entirely lost the swollen proportions of pregnancy, and her breasts were large with milk. She was a hefty girl, but looking at her I found her attractive. I guessed it was her youth — her smooth skin, her curves, her unlined face, with its gray eyes, slightly flat nose, and full lips — no part of her had succumbed to age, no brown spots or protruding veins or wrinkles or drooping skin.

“I wonder if she’ll ever take off that wig. Pete hates it. I keep telling him, who cares? She doesn’t wear it to church. I think he wanted a sweet little thing…” Lola didn’t finish. “He worries there’s something wrong with her, hyperactivity or something.”

Flora was engrossed in giving Giraffeyather violent bath. She was kneeling in the pool, bouncing him up and down as she sang, “Da, da, little Giraffey-boo. Bumba, bumba! Baby, you!” Giraffey was left floating, face down, and Flora began a new game — she lay back on her elbows and kicked vigorously enough to spray water onto my legs. “Watch, Mom! Look, Mom. Look, Mia!”

My feelings about Pete grew darker. What an idiot.

Pete’s son squirmed into wakefulness. He waved his small fists in front of his face, began stretching his knees and spine, and by the time I held him only minutes later he was fully conscious, his dark eyes like seeds locked into mine. I stroked the down on his head, examined his mouth pursing and grimacing. I spoke to him and he answered me with small sounds. After a time, he turned and began to root for food, and I felt the shadow of a familiar sensation in my breasts, a bodily memory. I handed him to Lola. Once her son was comfortably nursing, she looked over at me and said, “He didn’t want her at first. I got pregnant. We were already going to get married, it wasn’t that. It was too soon for him.” Lola leaned back in her chair. “Pete’s an anxious guy. I knew that, too. He had an older sister who was born with lots of things wrong with her and really retarded. They had to put her in a home. She never learned to walk or talk or anything. She died when she was seven. Pete doesn’t like to talk about it.” Lola examined her nail polish. “His dad never went to see her, not once. The whole thing was really awful for his mom. You can imagine.”

I could imagine. I looked up at the clouds, a dense cirrus configuration, and, as I watched a head dangling long streams of hair break away very slowly from a long attenuated neck, I realized that I had been more comfortable with the angry cipher Pete than with this new person, the young man with the dead sister.

It may have been the general emptiness of the view — corn and sky. It may have been the heat or my own quiet desperation or simply a need to fill the irremediably dull present with bluster and blabber, but when Lola asked me about life in New York, I regaled her with one story after another and listened to her laugh. I emphasized the crass, the prurient, and the outlandish. I turned the city into a nonstop carnival of poseurs, hucksters, and clowns whose pratfalls and escapades made for high entertainment. I told her about Charlie and Wayne, two poets who nearly came to blows over Ezra Pound one long-day’s-journey-into-a-drunken-night but ended up in a literal pissing contest on the roof of a building in SoHo. I told her about Miriam Hunt, the aging heiress with the big bucks, little boobs, surgical face, and Hermès bags, who true to her name stalked young male scientists eager for her money by sidling up to them and breathing sweet somethings into their ears: “How much did you say the research project you’re proposing would cost?” I told her about my friend Rupert, who, halfway through a sex-change operation, stopped, deciding that two-in-one was the way to go. I told her about the octogenarian billionaire I sat next to at a fund-raising dinner who farted and sighed, farted and sighed, farted some more and sighed some more throughout the entire meal, as if he were home alone on the toilet. I told her about my homeless pal, Frankie, whose children, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles died at a rate of about two a week after contracting colorful or rare diseases, including scurvy, leprosy, dengue fever, Klinefelter’s syndrome, tospirosis, fatal familial insomnia, and Chagas disease. Indeed, Frankie’s supply of relatives was so great, he forgot the names of the recent dead between our meetings on Seventh Avenue.

Lola’s eyes gleamed with pleasure and interest as she listened to my tales of the cosmopolitans, all of them true but all fictions nevertheless. Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. It doesn’t matter whether you are stuck in the provincial backwater of Bonden or wandering down the Champs-Élysées. The merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired, wanted to see myself as a shining reflection in Lola’s eyes. I was no different from Flora. Watch me, Mommy! Look at me do a cartwheel, Dad! Watch Mia do verbal dances in Sheri and Allan Burda’s weedy backyard embellished with one swiftly sagging kiddy pool.

* * *

That night I received a message from Boris informing me that Roger Dapp was returning from London, which meant that he was losing his temporary digs and would be moving in with the Pause. For the time being, this was “practical.” He wanted me to know. It was only “fair.” I took it like a woman. I wept.

You may well wonder why I wanted Boris at all, a man who tells his still-wife that he’s shacking up with his new squeeze for “practical” reasons, as if this shocking new arrangement is simply a matter of New York real estate. I wondered why I wanted him myself. Had Boris left me after two years or even ten, the damage would have been considerably less. Thirty years is a long time, and a marriage acquires an ingrown, almost incestuous quality, with complex rhythms of feeling, dialogue, and associations. We had come to the point where listening to a story or anecdote at a dinner party would simultaneously prompt the same thought in our two heads, and it was simply a matter of which one of us would articulate it aloud. Our memories had also begun to mingle. Boris would swear up and down that he was the one who came upon the great blue heron standing on the doorstep of the house we rented in Maine, and I am just as certain that I saw the enormous bird alone and told him about it. There is no answer to the riddle, no documentation — just the flimsy, shifting tissue of remembering and imagining. One of us had listened to the other tell the story, had seen in his or her mind the encounter with the bird, and had created a memory from the mental images that accompanied the heard narrative. Inside and outside are easily confused. You and I. Boris and Mia. Mental overlap.

I didn’t tell my mother about the new status of the Pause. It would have made it real, more real than I was willing to accept at the moment. Too bad I’m real, Flora had said. She had wanted to climb into the little house and live with her toys. Too bad I’m not a character in a book or a play, not that things go so well for most of them, but then I could be written elsewhere. I will write myself elsewhere, I thought, reinvent the story in a new light: I am better off without him. Did he ever do a domestic chore in his life besides the dishes? Did he or did he not tune you out regularly as if you were a radio? Did he not interrupt you in mid-sentence countless times as if you were an airy nothing, a Ms. Nobody, a Missing Person at the table? Are you not “still beautiful” in the words of your mother? Are you not still capable of great things?

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Mia Fredricksen, who was Born in Bonden, and during a Life of Continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, Was Poetic Paramour and Mistress to Various and Sundry, Thirty Years a Wife (to Naturalist and Scoundrel), at Last Gained Riches and Renown from the Concerted Efforts of Her Pen, Liv’d Mostly Honest, and Died Impenitent.

Or: “No one knew who Fredricksen was. She rode into the village of Bonden in the summer of 2009, a quiet stranger who kept her well-oiled Colt in her saddle roll, but could use it to deadly effect when the need arose.”

Or: “I distinguished her step, restlessly measuring the floor, and she frequently broke the silence by a deep inspiration, resembling a groan. She muttered detached words; the only one I could catch was the name of Boris, coupled with some wild term of endearment or suffering, and spoken as one would speak to a person present — low and earnest, and wrung from the depth of her soul.” Mia as Heathcliff — a terrible, sneering corpse become ghost, who haunts a Manhattan apartment on East Seventieth Street, returning again and again to torment Izcovich and his Pause.

* * *

The whole story is in my head, isn’t it? I am not so philosophically naïve as to believe that one can establish some empirical reality of THE STORY. We can’t even agree on what we remember, for God’s sake. We were in a taxi when the ten-year-old Daisy announced her theatrical ambitions. No, we were in the subway. Cab. Subway. Cab! The problem was that any number of Borises were IN MY HEAD. He was running around all over the place. Even if I never saw him in the flesh again, Boris as thought machinery was inevitable. How many times had he rubbed my feet while we watched a film together, patiently kneading and stroking the soles and the toes and the once-badly-broken ankle pained by arthritis? How many times had he looked up at me after I had washed his hair in the bathtub with the expression of a happy child? How many times had he embraced and rocked me after a rejection letter arrived? That was Boris, too, you see. That was Boris, too.

* * *

I arrived a couple of minutes late to class. On the steps I heard peals of laughter, shrieks, and the familiar mocking singsong sound of “Oh my Gawd!” The instant I entered the room, the girls went silent. As I approached them, I saw that all eyes were on me and that there was something lying in the middle of the table: a spotty wad. What was it? A bloody Kleenex.

“Did someone have a bloody nose?”

Silence. I looked around at their seven closed faces and a phrase I hadn’t used since childhood came into my mind: What gives? No noses limpaired in any way. I took hold of a still pristine part of the soiled paper between my thumb and index finger and escorted it to the wastebasket. I then asked if anyone would like to enlighten me about the “the mystery of the bloody Kleenex,” while a mental image of Nancy Drew in her blue roadster zoomed by.

“We found it there,” Ashley said, “when we came in, but it was so gross no one wanted to touch it. The janitor or somebody must have put it there.”

I saw Jessie press her lips together hard.

“Disgusting,” Emma said. “How could anybody just leave it out like that?”

Alice stared rigidly at the table.

Nikki glanced at the wastebasket and made a face. “Some people just aren’t clean.”

Joan nodded in eager assent. Peyton looked embarrassed.

“There are many things worse than a Kleenex with a little blood on it. Let’s get to the real business of the day: nonsense.”

I was armed with poems: nursery rhymes, Ogden Nash, Christopher Isherwood, Lewis Carroll, Antonin Artaud, Edward Lear, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I hoped to move their attention from wastepaper to the pleasures of subverting meaning. We all wrote. The girls appeared to have fun, and I praised Peyton’s “tasty” poem.

Oohen the goohen in mouther sway

Licken and sticken and wulpen it im,

I dub the doben and dub the crim.

Luffen my muffin, foray!

Near the end of class, when Alice was reading her rather sad nonsense, “Lones in the wild ravage…,” Ashley began to cough, hard. She apologized, said she needed a drink, and left the room.

When class was over, they all rushed out, except Alice, who lingered. Although morose, she looked particularly pretty that day in a white T-shirt and shorts, and I walked over to her and was just about to speak when I heard someone behind me.

It turned out to be Jessie’s mother, a rotund woman in her thirties, her dark blond hair styled and sprayed. Her expression informed me instantly that she was on a mission of great seriousness. Neither Jessie’s mother nor Jessie herself, it seemed, had expected my kind of poetry class. It had come to her attention that I had given the girls a poem by, long breath, “D. H. Lawrence.” The writer’s name alone, it appeared, augured peril forhe goheretofore-unpollinated imaginations of the Bonden flowers. When I explained that “Snake” was a poem about a man attentively watching the animal and his guilt for frightening it, her jaw locked. “We have our beliefs,” she said. The woman did not look stupid. She looked dangerous. In Bonden, a rumor, a bit of gossip, even outright slander could spread with preternatural speed. I mollified her, asserting my great respect for beliefs of all kinds — an outright lie — and by the end of our conversation, I felt I had assuaged her worries. One sentence has stayed with me, however: “God is frowning on this, I tell you. He’s frowning.” I saw him, Mrs. Lorquat’s own God the Father filling the sky, a clean-shaven chap in a suit and tie, brow furrowed, implacably stern, an utterly humorless lover of mediocrity, God as the quintessential American reviewer.

When I looked for Alice, she had disappeared.

* * *

I confess now that I had already entered into a correspondence with Mr. Nobody. In response to my inquiry as to who he was and what he wanted, he had written, “I am any one of your voices, take your pick, an oracular voice, a plebian voice, an orator-for-the-ages voice, a girl’s voice, a boy’s voice, a woof, a howl, a tweet. Hurtful, coddling, angry, kind, I am the voice from Nowhere come to speak to you.”

I fell for it, pushed by my loneliness, a particular kind of aching mental loneliness. Boris had been my husband, but he had also been my interlocutor. We taught each other and, without him, I had no one to dance with anymore. I wrote to poet friends, but most of them were locked into the poetry world as much as most of Boris’s colleagues had been neuro shut-ins. This Nobody fellow was a leaper and a twister. He hopped from Leibniz’s Monadology to Heisenberg and Bohr in Copenhagen to Wallace Stevens almost without taking a breath and, despite his loopiness, I found myself entertained and wrote back, coming at him with counterthoughts and new spiraling arguments. He was an adamant anti-materialist, that much I gathered. He spat on physicalists, such as Daniel Dennett and Patricia Churchland, touting a post-Newtonian world that had left substance in the dust. An intellectual omnivore who seemed to have pressed himself to the limits of his own whirling brain, he wasn’t well, but he was fun. When I wrote to him, I always saw a picture of Leonard. Most of us need an image, after all, a someone to see, and that was how I gave Mr. Nobody a face.

* * *

That night I dreamed I woke up in the bedroom with the Buddha on the dresser where I slept. I climbed out of bed, and although the light was dim, I noticed that the walls were wet and glistening. I reached out, touched the damp surface with my fingers, put them to my mouth, and tasted blood. Then, from the next room, I heard a child screaming. I rushed through the door, saw a bundle of white rags on the floor, and began pulling at them to unravel the cloth and uncover the child, but all I found were more and more wrappings. I woke up, breathing hard. I woke up in the room where the dream had begun, but the story did not stop. I heard screaming. Was I still asleep? No. With a racing heart, I understood that the sound was coming from next door. Good Go whihought, Pete. I threw on a robe and flew across the yard. Without knocking or ringing the bell, I ran into the house.

There was a wigless Flora, brown curls exposed, prostrate on the living room floor, shrieking. Her small face was purple with rage and her burning cheeks streamed with tears and snot as she kicked a chair with her heels and slammed her fists into the floor. Simon was emitting a series of desperate gasping wails from the bedroom upstairs and before me was Ashley. Standing only a foot or so away from Flora, she looked down at the child with blank, dead eyes, and I saw her mouth twitch once. When she understood someone had come in and, in the same moment, recognized me, I watched her expression change instantly to one of concern and helplessness. I swooped down on Flora, picked her up in my arms, and pressed her close to me. The fit didn’t end, but I started talking. “It’s Mia, sweetheart, Mia. What’s the matter?” That was when I realized she was screaming, “I want my air! Air!”

“Where’s her wig?”

Ashley looked at me. “I threw it away. It was gross.”

“Get it this instant!” I growled at her.

Flora stopped writhing the minute her “air” was restored, and with the sniffing child in my arms I mounted the steps to the bedroom to rescue Simon. Telling Flora I had to put her down in order to retrieve Simon, I instructed her to hug my leg. The baby’s little body was convulsing with sobs. I picked him up and began rocking him until he grew calmer. The three of us, now one three-headed body, lumbered slowly down the stairs into the living room.

The person I had first seen when I arrived had vanished. In her place was the Ashley I knew from class, a person who was relieved I had come, a person who had been overwhelmed, a person who hadn’t known what to do when Flora had smeared peanut butter in her wig, a person who had wanted to pick up Simon but was afraid to leave Flora. It all made perfect sense. Weren’t Lola and Pete dunderheads for leaving two children under four with a thirteen-year-old? I did not argue with her. I told her I understood. What was I to say? When I came in, I saw something in you that shocked me? I gleaned it from your eyes, your mouth? These insights do not count in social discourse; they may be true, but articulating them sounds insane. After I had settled the three of us onto the sofa, I asked Ashley to get me a bottle for Simon and sent her home.

The children were both exhausted. Simon collapsed after his food, his tiny curled hand pressed into my collarbone. Flora found a clinging spot a little lower on my body and rested her head on my abdomen. We slept.

I woke to Lola’s touch. Her hand was moving over my forehead and into my hair. I heard footsteps in the front hall, the bullying or to-be-pitied Pete (depending on my mood), and felt Lola lift Simon from my arms. She smelled of liquor, and her eyes had a watery, sentimental look. I gave her a brief synopsis. All she did was smile, my Madonna of the Split-Level, in her low-necked sparkly top, her tight jeans, and her own golden earrings — two Eiffel towers swaying slightly as she ld down at me.

* * *

Dr. S. and I talked at length about Boris’s housing arrangement, during which I leaked a small bucket of tears, and then I told her about the bloody Kleenex, Alice slipping away, Mrs. Lorquat’s complaint, and Ashley’s face. I used the sentence “I feel something is brewing” and saw witches steaming toads on their Sabbath. Dr. S. agreed that it was entirely possible that the girls were engaged in popularity politics, but the evidence of anything more sinister was, well, nonexistent. My blood dream interested her more. Rags. The Change. No more children. The babes next door. There is a wistful sadness when fertility ends, a longing, not to return to the days of bleeding, but a longing for the repetition itself, for the steady monthly rhythms, for the invisible tug of the Moon herself, to whom you once belonged: Diana, Ishtar, Mardoll, Artemis, Luna, Albion, Galata — waxing and waning — maiden, mother, crone.

* * *

In class, I found myself examining Ashley’s face for some sign of the frightening babysitter, but there was no trace of her. The other girls were slightly withheld, I noticed, but cooperative, and I did not have to confiscate any phones. And Alice, Alice looked happy, more than happy. She looked elated. I had never seen her in a radiant state before. Her eyes gleamed, and the poem she wrote had a jazzy tone I would have thought was completely out of character. “I’m banging out my thoughts today / Singing on a comet / Yelling in the clouds / Dancing on the sun.” Something has happened, I said to myself. Alice left last, as was often the case. She stood over the table, carefully depositing her notebook and pens into her bag, and she hummed a few notes from an unrecognizable tune.

“You’re in a good mood.”

She looked up at me and smiled; her braces shone silver for an instant in the light from the window.

“Have you had good news?”

Alice nodded.

I looked at her young face encouragingly.

“You might find it silly,” she said. “But I’ve had a message, a nice message, from a boy I like.”

“That’s not silly,” I said. “I remember. I remember how nice that was.”

As we walked to the door, I told her she should keep writing. She laughed. It may have been the first time I had heard her laugh. Outside, she jumped down the steps, turned to wave at me, and started to run. Farther down the block, she slowed her pace, but her joy remained visible in the added bounce she gave to her walk.

* * *

It was the title that got me thinking. Persuasion. My mother was reading it for her next book club with the other Swans and they had invited me, Mia, Mistress Degree, to say a few words of introduction. A story of love postponed, of love found, lost, and refound. Austen’s heroine is persuaded to give HIM up. Persuasion: to influence, sway, move, induce, soft-pedal, weigh upon, cajole, convince, the work of words, mostly, words that play on weakness, on a vulnerable spot. Honeyed tongues wag as men sweet-talk women into parting their thighs, the smooth palaver that breaks down feminine resistance. Wily women urge men toward this or that crime; the cool seductress of cinema with a teeny little pearl-handled revolver in her purse. Speed-talking Rosalind Russell snaps lines at Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. Love as verbal war. Scheherazade keeps on talking and stays alive one more night. The troubadours moon and croon for a lady’s favor. I will win her with words and music. I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and seas. I will dissect the Beloved’s body in metaphor. I will compliment her. I will lure her with wit. “Had we but world enough, and time…” I will tell stories. I will stay alive one more night. Comedies end in marriage, tragedies in death. Otherwise they aren’t so different. In the end, Scheherazade gets the man who wanted to kill her, but he’s besotted by then. Anne Elliot gets Captain Wentworth. The wrap-up is swift. It is the getting him back that counts and the marrying, but in spirit, Austen knows, they were wed before and suffered the emptiness of separation for six long years. This story of Mia and Boris begins deep in a marriage, after years of sex and talk and fights. If it is to be a comedy, then it must fall into Stanley Cavell’s territory, the comedies of repetition, of the already-married coming together again. The philosopher gives us a trenchant parenthesis: “(Can human beings change? The humor, and the sadness, of remarriage comedies can be said to result from the fact that we have no good answer to that question.)”

The Eleatics did not believe in change, in motion. When does one thing cease to be itself and become another? Diogenes walks back and forth in silence.

Can we change and stay the same? I remember. I repeat.

* * *

Dear Boris,

I am thinking of you in the bath, smoking a cigar. I am thinking of that day your zipper broke in Berkeley and it was summer and you had not worn your boxer shorts and you had to give a lecture, so you pulled out your shirttails and hoped that no breeze would blow and reveal Sidney to the audience of three hundred or more, and I am thinking of time and rifts and pauses and that you sometimes called me Red, Curly, and Fire Head, and I called you Ollie after your belly got a bit big and Izcovich Without a Stitch in bed and that’s all except that Bonden isn’t too bad, albeit a bit slow and baked. I am waiting for Bea and then Daisy to visit and Mama is good, and I’ve been thinking of Stefan, too, but about the light days, the laughs, the three Musketeers in the old apartment on Tompkins Place and that really is it. Love, Mia * * *

Dr. S. talked to me about magical thinking. She was right. We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can’t control, on others. She did not say that writing to Boris was a bad idea, but then she never judged anything. That was her magic.

* * *

Lola brought me earrings, two miniature Chrysler Buildings. I had told her it was my favorite building in New York City, and she had rendered it twice in delicate gold wire. Holding them up, I couldn’t help thinking of the buildings in the city that had come as a pair, as twins, and a feeling of sorrow silenced me for a moment, but then I thanked her enthusiastically, tried them on, and she smiled. Looking at her smile, I realized how calm she was, how easy, how unflappable, and that these related qualities, which bordered on languor, were what drew me to her. I guessed that inside her head, the discourse that went on was also tranquil. My own head was a storehouse for multiloquy, the flux de mots of myriad contrarians who argued and debated and skewered one another with mordant parley and then started up all over again. Sometimes that internal babble wore me out. Lola wasn’t dull, however. I had met people who bored me stiff because they seemed drained of all internal conference and deliberation (the SMUGLY STUPID) and others who, whatever their inner capacity for complex cogitations, lived in an impenetrable box, immune to dialogue (the INTELLIGENT BUT DEAD). Lola belonged to neither camp, and even though her utterances were neither original nor witty, I felt an acumen in her body that was missing from her speech. Small alterations in her facial expression, a slow movement of her fingers, or a new tension in her shoulders when I spoke to her made me aware of how intently she was listening, and she seemed to be able to listen even while she was adjusting Flora’s shorts or putting a new bib on Simon. I suspect that she knew, without having to tell herself, that I admired her.

The offering of the Chrysler Buildings happened on a Saturday, if I am not confused, and I often am about days and dates, but as I remember it, Simon was asleep in a stroller, well strapped in, and Flora’s wig was not on her head. She clutched it tightly in her arms at first, sucked on a thick bunch of strands after that, meditating deeply on some subject known only to her, and once abandoned it entirely to run into the bedroom and examine the professors’ Buddha. All three looked exceptionally clean and shiny. They were off to visit Lola’s parents in White Bear Lake. When I admired the children’s outfits, Lola sighed and said, “If it will only last. I can’t tell you how many times we get there and Flora’s spilled grape juice and Simon’s spit up and I’m slimy. I have clean clothes for them in the car.”

That same day, Flora introduced me to Moki. As she told me about him, she swayed back and forth, pushed out her bottom lip, puckered both lips, rolled her head, and breathed heavily between phrases.

“He was bad today. Too loud. Too loud. And bouncy.”

“Bouncy?19;s sp1D;

Flora grinned at me, her eyes lit with excitement. “He bounced on the house. And then he flied.”

“Can he fly?”

She nodded eagerly. “But he can’t go fast. He flied slow like this.” She demonstrated by moving her legs and arms as if she were swimming in the air.

She came very close to me and said, “He jumped on the ceiling and in the window and on a car!”

“Wow,” I said.

She gabbled on about him, her mother smiling. They had to wait for Moki because he dawdled. Moki loved chocolate chip cookies, bananas, and lemonade, and he had beautiful long blond hair. He was strong, too, and could lift heavy objects, “even trucks!”

Moki lived. After they had left, I meditated for a moment on the imaginary and the real, on wish fulfillment, on fantasy, on stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends. We chart delusions through collective agreement. The man who believes he’s emitting toxic rays while nobody around him seems to be the least bit affected can be safely said to be suffering from one pathology or another and put away in a locked ward. But let us say that same man’s fantasy is so vivid, it affects his neighbor, who then begins to suffer from headaches and vomiting spells, and a contagious hysteria ensues, the whole town retching — isn’t there some AMBIGUITY here? The vomit is real. I thought of the crazed women flailing and wounding themselves in the churchyard of St. Medard, their gruesome deliriums and convulsions, their hideous pleasures, their glorious subversion of EVERYTHING. And what did I think in my madness? I thought that Boris, in concert with “them,” stood against me, and this was, in fact, delusion, and yet, wasn’t it also a howl against the way things are for me, a cri de coeur to be truly SEEN, not buried in the clichés and mirages of other people’s desires, buried up to my neck like poor Winnie. Beckett knew. Haven’t they distorted me with my collusion? Ibsen’s Nora dances the tarantella, but it has gotten out of hand. It is too fierce. Abigail hides her vacuum cleaner that sucks up the town. It is too fierce. I can see in my father’s eyebrows that it is not right, in my mother’s mouth that it is inappropriate, in Boris’s frown that I am too loud — too forceful. I am too fierce. I am Moki. I am bouncing on the house, but I cannot fly.

* * *

I do believe that on March 23, 1998, the only person who saw Sidney was you.

Boris

* * & fi*

When I read it, I smiled. Of course, he would know the date. His brain is a goddamned calendar. I was glad he remembered that I had pounced on the unzippered door to the little soldier himself, standing at attention the instant I gave the command. Oh Sidney, what have you gone and done now? Why AWOL now, old friend? You were never too bright, of course. Like all your brethren, you’ve served as little more than a moronic tool of your owner’s alligator brain. But still, I cannot help wondering, wherefore now, old pal of mine?

* * *

Soon, you are saying, we shall come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, aging penis, more than Mia’s extravagant tangents onto this or that, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends, or dead people or Pauses or men offstage, for heaven’s sake, and one of these old ladies or girl poetesses or the mild young neighbor woman or the teetering-on-the-brink-of-four version of Harpo Marx or even wee Simon will DO something. And I promise you they will. There is a brewing, oh yes, there is some witches’ stew brewing. I know because I lived it. But before I get to that, I want to tell you, Gentle Person out there, that if you are here with me now, on the page, I mean, if you have come to this paragraph, if you have not given up and sent me, Mia, flying across the room or even if you have, but you got to wondering whether something might not happen soon and picked me up again and are reading still, then I want to reach out for you and take your face in both my hands and cover you with kisses, kisses on your cheeks and chin and all over your forehead and one on the bridge of your (variously shaped) nose, because I am yours, all yours.

I just wanted you to know.

* * *

Alice did not come to class. There were only the six, and when I asked if any of them knew whether Alice was ill, Ashley volunteered that it might be allergies; she was quite allergic to any number of substances, and a titter spread among them, a minor contagion of humor, which gave me an opportunity. “Allergies are funny?” I said.

The girls went mum, and so we leapt into Stevens and Roethke and what it means to really look at something, anything, and how after a while, the thing becomes stranger and stranger, and I turned them all into phenomenologists and had them staring at pencils and erasers and my Kleenex pack and a cell phone and we wrote about looking and things and light.

After class, Ashley, Emma, Nikki, and Nikki’s second incarnation, Joan, imparted the news that Alice had been a little “weird” lately and had “made a scene just yesterday because she couldn’t take a joke.” When I asked what the joke was, Peyton looked sheepish and moved her eyes away from mine. Jessie said in her high small voice that I should know by now that Alice “is kinda different.”

I muddled forward, remarking that Alice was Alice, and I hadn’t been ticularly aware of any disturbing differences as such. We all had our idiosyncrasies and I ventured that she had seemed “up” during the last class (without letting on that I knew why), and she had written an amusing poem, so I was surprised that she couldn’t take a joke.

Ashley was sucking on a mint or hard candy, and I watched her mouth move as she pushed the lozenge around in her mouth, her eyes meditative. “Well, she takes meds for something about her mood, you know, cause she’s a little…” Ashley gestured as if she were throwing balls in the air.

“I didn’t know that,” Peyton said loudly.

“She’s got ADHD, you mean?” Nikki said.

“She didn’t say what it’s called; it’s something…” Ashley said, eyes clouded.

“Half of school’s on something, Ritalin or something,” Peyton announced. “That’s no big deal.”

I saw Emma give Peyton a hard reproving look. Emma was not subtle.

Enlightenment about Alice was not forthcoming. I smiled at the little group gathered around me and said very slowly, “It may be hard to believe, but I was young once, too, and moreover, I remember being young. I remember being exactly your age, in fact, and I remember jokes, too.” It was a cinematic moment, and I was fully conscious of it. I did my best to don my most all-knowing, authoritative, good-teacher-beloved-by-the-students expression, a cross between Mr. Chips and Miss Jean Brodie, and then I slapped Theodore Roethke shut, stood up, and made my exit. In the film, the camera would follow my back to the door, my high heels — sandals in reality — clipping smartly on the floorboards, and then I pause, just for a moment, and turn to look over my shoulder. The camera is now close. Only my face is visible, and on the screen, it is gigantic, perhaps twelve feet tall. I beam out at you, the audience, turn again, and the door shuts with a loud Foley click behind me.

* * *

Something seemed to be wrong with Abigail. My mother was sitting beside her on the sofa, stroking her back. Regina was making noises: high-pitched, staccato wails.

“She fell,” Mama said to me, her face white. “Just now.”

Abigail was examining her knees with a confused expression, and I felt a spasm of fear. I bent over her, took her hand, and asked all the usual questions, beginning with “Are you okay?” and moving on to particulars about pains and odd sensations. She didn’t answer but stared hard downward and then began shaking her head slowly.

Regina flapped her hands in the air and in a strangled voice said, “I’m going to pthe string for help right now. I’m going into the bathroom to yank it. She can’t talk. Oh my God. I have to call Nigel. He’ll know what to do.” (Nigel was the Englishman, and exactly what he was going to do in Leeds for Abigail in Bonden was a secret known only to Regina.)

Abigail turned her head toward her panicked friend and said in a loud even voice, “Shut up, Regina. Someone help me adjust my bra before it chokes me.”

Regina looked offended. She folded her hands and sank back on the sofa, a ladylike frown on her still remarkably pretty face.

Together, my mother and I managed to pull down the offending garment, which had slipped upward in the excitement, and settle our mutual friend on the sofa.

“Abigail,” my mother said. “I was so scared.”

Falling was a universal fear at Rolling Meadows. Some people, like George, never got up. Hips snapped, ankles cracked, and they were never the same. Old bones. That Abigail had not broken some piece of her frail skeleton struck me as supernatural. I discovered later that my mother, perhaps unwisely, had intervened with her own body and turned a crash into a slow tumble.

At some point during the conversation that followed, I understood that Abigail felt considerably better, because she began to signal me with her eyebrows, a gesture followed by peering down at her lap. I had no idea what she was up to until I saw that she had her hands in the pockets of her embroidered dress and was exposing small parts of their red linings. The woman was wearing a secret amusement. Concealed inside her pockets was some subversive message, erotic needlepoint, or other undie, no doubt created years ago. I telegraphed back my silent comprehension that the dress was loaded, so to speak, another hidden fabric in Abigail’s private arsenal, and this tacit knowledge between us appeared to give her genuine pleasure, because she smiled slyly and gave me some extra eyebrow lifts to confirm our complicity. Peg arrived then and, after hearing the story, took it in the vein most true to her nature, declaring Abigail “blessed” and my mother a “hero” (a designation my mother adamantly disavowed, but which she clearly enjoyed), and then she moved on to Robin Womack, a local television personality with abundant hair. She ended her eulogy with the phrase “He can put his shoes on my bed anytime!” Although I found the reference to shoes superfluous, this permission clearly imparted a fancy for Womack and his serious hair.

Exactly how we arrived at poetry I am not certain, but the Swans fondly recalled some loved lines from their earlier days. Peg wandered lonely as a cloud, and my mother read aloud Wallace Stevens’s “The Reader.” There are no words on his reader’s page, only “the trace of burning stars / In the frosty heaven.” And Regina recalled Joyce Kilmer’s immortal American “tree,” and I recited Ron Padgett’s poem “Haiku.” “That was fast. / I mean life.” I had always laughed aloud at that poem, but not one of the Swans emitted even the briefest chuckle or snort. My mother smiled sadly. Abigail nodded. Peg’s eyes glazed over with what I gued were memories. Regina appeared to be on the verge of tears, but then she hoped aloud that I hadn’t given my girls “that poem,” to which I responded that it would be entirely lost on them because at their age life truly is long. Time is a question of both percentages and belief. If half your life ago you were six or seven, the span of those years is even longer than fifty for a centagenarian, because the young experience the future as endless and normally think of adults as members of another species. Only the aged have access to life’s brevity.

Regina then informed me, in a muddled speech of frustrating vagueness, that something had “happened” to one of the girls in my class. She simply couldn’t remember the name of the child, “Lucy perhaps, no, Janet, no, not that either,” but whatever the girl’s name was, Regina had heard from Adrian Bortwaffle’s brother-in-law, who was a close friend of Tony Rosterhaus’s (Tony’s connection to my class was completely unknown to me and to Regina), that there had been an accident of some kind, and the girl had spent a night in the hospital.

There are times when the fragility of all living things is so apparent that one begins to wait for a shock, a fall, or a break at any moment. I had been in this state since Boris left me and my nerves exploded — no, earlier than that, since Stefan’s suicide. There is no future without a past because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. I had begun to expect calamities.

My mother and I walked Abigail to her apartment and then helped her get comfortable on her sofa. She ordered us several times to “stop fussing,” but in her face I read relief that she was not alone, not alone yet. She promised to see her doctor and kissed us both before we left.

Later that evening, I saw the multicolored bruise my mother had sustained on her side when she rescued her friend from the floor. The walker had somehow been involved and my mother must have banged into it hard. “You mustn’t mention it to Abigail,” my mother said. She said it several times. I promised several times. We sat together in the living room and I felt the hush of the building, nearly silent except for the sound of a distant television.

“Mia,” she said, not long before I left her. “I want you to know that I would do it all over again.”

My mother sometimes behaved as if I had access to her thoughts. “What, Mama?”

She looked surprised. “Marry your father.”

“Despite your differences, you mean?”

“Yes, it would have been nice if he had been a little different, but he wasn’t, and there were so many good days along with the bad days and sometimes the very thing I wanted to change about him one day was the thing that made another thing possible another day that was good, not bad, if you see what I mean.”

“Such as?”

“His sense of duty, honor, rectitude. What made me want to scream one day could make me proud the next.”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”

“I want you to know how good it’s been to have you close, how happy I’ve been. I’ve had fun. It can be rather lonely here and you have been my happiness, my comfort, my friend.”

This rather formal little speech made me glad, but I recognized in the hint of ceremony the ever-present pinch of time. My mother was old. Tomorrow she might fall or be stricken suddenly. Tomorrow she might be dead. When we parted at the door, my small mother was wearing flowered cotton pajamas. The pants ballooned around her tiny thighs and stopped just above the knobs of her scrawny anklebones. She was holding a liver-colored hot water bottle in her arms.

* * *

Daisy wrote:

Dear Mom,

I saw Dad for lunch and he didn’t look so good. He had stains all over his shirt, smelled like an ashtray, and he hadn’t shaved. I mean, I know he often waits a couple days, but he looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week, and even worse, I thought he might have been crying before he saw me. I told him he looked bad, like a clochard, but he just kept saying he was fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. Mr. Denial. Any thoughts? Should I keep trying to get him to talk to me? Send out a detective? It won’t be long now, Mamasita, before I see you!

Big kisses from your own Dazed-and-still-disappointed-in-

Daddy Daisy.

* * *

I replied:

Your father couldn’t have been crying. He only cries at the movies. But do check on him.

Love, Mom

* * *

I had known Boris for perhaps a week when he took me to Elia Kazan’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at the Thalia on Ninety-fifth and Broadway. There is a moment in the film when the young heroine, played by Peggy Ann Garner, walks into a barbershop to retrieve her dead father’s shaving mug. It is an affecting scene. The girl adored her drunken, sentimental father, with his false hopes and impractical dreams, and losing him is a massive blow. I don’t believe Boris sniffed, although he may have, but for some reason, I turned to look at him. The man beside me oozed tears in two heavy streams as the liquid dripped steadily off his chin and onto his shirt. I was so astonished by this display of feeling, I politely ignored it. Later, I came to understand that Boris responded far more directly to the indirect; that is to say, his real emotions surfaced only when mediated by the unreal. Time and again, I had sat dry-eyed beside him while he snuffled and wept over actors on a big, flat screen. I had never, ever seen him cry in the so-called real world, not for Stefan, not for his mother, not for me or for Daisy or for dead friends or for any human being who wasn’t made of celluloid. That said, I was shaken by the oddly frightening thought that Boris had changed, that if he hadn’t met Daisy immediately after a movie (which seemed unlikely since he worked all the time and had mostly watched films on DVD in recent years) the Pause might have altered the deep structure of Boris’s character. Was he crying over her, the Frenchwoman searching for new neuropeptides? Had the wall come down for her?

* * *

Nobody was on the rampage. Nobody understood Nobody — that was the gist of the problem. The two of us had stumbled onto “the hard problem”: consciousness. What is it? Why do we have it? My highly conscious correspondent inveighed against the monumental stupidities of scientism and the atomization of processes that were clearly inseparable, “a flow, flood, wave, stream, not a series of rigid discrete pebbles lined up in a row! Any idiot should be able to divine this truth. Read your William James, that stupendous Melancholic!” A Thomas Bernhard of philosophy, Nobody indulged in splenetic rages that had a weirdly calming effect on me. I loved the Stupendous Melancholic, too, but I steered him to Plutarch’s flux and flow, the Greek wit who railed against the Stoics in his On Common Conceptions:

1. All individual substances are in flux and motion, letting go parts of themselves and receiving others coming from elsewhere.

2. The numbers and quantities to which they come or from which they go do not remain the same but become different, as the substance accepts a transformation with the said comings and goings.

3. It is wrong that it has become prevalent through custom that these changes are called growth and diminution. It would be appropriate that they should instead be called creation and destruction (phthorai), because they oust a thing from its established character into a different one, whereas growth and diminution happen to a body that underlies the change and remains throughout it.

The story is old. When does one thing become another? How can we tell? He attacked Boris, too, as a naïf, a man whose notions of a sub or primal self were absurd, misplaced. “You can’t locate the self in neural networks!” I defended my alienated family member with some vigor, arguing that self was an elastic term certainly, but Boris was quite specific about what he meant — that he was talking about an underlying biological system necessary for a self. According to my invisible comrade, not only Boris but everybody was asking the wrong questions, with the exception of Nobody himself, isolated spokesman for a synthetic vision that would unite all fields, end expert culture, and return thought to “dance and play.” A utopian nihilist is what he was, a utopian nihilist in a manic phase. I kept thinking what he really needed was a good, long head rub. And yet, I did say to myself, When I was mad, was I myself or not myself? When does one person become another?

Do you remember, I wrote to Boris, that evening two years ago when we realized we had just had exactly the same thought, not an obvious one at all, a rather eccentric notion that was brought about by some mutual catalyst, and you said to me, “You know, if we lived together another hundred years we would become the same person?” Ton amie, Mia

* * *

When Alice didn’t show up in class and I asked for information, the girls played dumb, or at least, that is what I guessed. I didn’t know whether the hospital rumor was true, and it seemed silly to perpetuate it, so I went to the source. I called Alice’s house, her mother answered, and she told me that Alice had been ill with severe stomach pains and had been rushed to the hospital, but the doctors had found nothing and had sent her home after a night of tests. When I asked how her daughter was feeling, she said she seemed to be out of pain but was listless and low and refused to go back to class. With all the delicacy I could muster I said that there had been talk about “a joke” on Alice among the girls, and it had worried me. I wanted to speak to Alice. The woman was obliging, even eager, I thought, and I heard in her voice that particular note of maternal fear founded not on evidence but on a feeling.

Alice did not get up for me. I was ushered into her abnormally neat pale blue room, where she lay on top of her pale blue bedspread covered with white cumulus clouds and stared at the ceiling, her arms crossed over her chest like a corpse that had been prepared for burial. I pulled a chair near her bed, sat down on it, and listened as her mother discreetly pulled the door shut behind her. The girl’s face was masklike. As I spoke to her, she didn’t move a muscle. I told her we had missed her in class, that it wasn’t the same without her, that I was sorry she had been ill but hoped she would return soon, once she was fully recovered.

Without turning her head to look at me, she said to the ceiling, “I can’t go back.”

Not telling is as interesting as telling, I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside, can be so excruciating under certain circumstances is fascinating. I pressed her, kindly, but I pressed. All Alice did was shake her head back and forth. I mentioned “the joke” then, and her face broke into an expression of pain. Her lips disappeared as she curled them inward, and I saw a tear dribble from each duct, and because she was supine neither fell. Rather, they sank into the skin of her cheeks.

We are going to leave Alice lying there on her cloudy bedspread with her shiny cheeks. We are going to take a respite, because, although I remained sitting there in person, I left myself for at least half an hour. I took a mind walk. It is not easy talking to a thirteen-year-old who does not want to talk to you or, if she does want to talk to you, must nevertheless be coddled and coaxed and wheedled for the few precious utterances that will resolve the mystery of the crime. To be frank, it’s a bit boring, so we shall dispense with the long and tortured job of getting the words out of the child and return to her once she has produced them.

* * *

Why I thought of that erotic explosion I can’t say. The clouds, the bed, the light that shone through the girl’s window that afternoon, a thick haze of summer illumination — any or all may have done it. Boris had accompanied me to a poetry festival, where I had read to a crowd of twenty (quite good, I thought) and we had wandered about San Francisco in the foggy air. A fellow poet had recommended a massage therapist, a man of sterling quality who altered human bodies with his hands. This was an attractive idea for someone whose crammed and speeding head occasionally lost sight of her body far below. The man’s name was Bedgood. Archibald Bedgood. I am not a liar. It may have been his name that started the whole enterprise. Nothing is certain. Anyway, while Boris waited in the wings (a restful room with New Age music designed to turn all human beings into somnambulists), I lay myself down naked but for a towel covering my rump on Bedgood’s massage bed, with some anxiety, if the truth be told, and the man began to rub. He was methodical, decorous — by some magic the towel never lost its purpose as modest covering. He took each body part individually, all four limbs, feet and hands, back and head, even my face at the end. I had no sexual feelings whatsoever, no erotic leaps or fantasies. I had no thoughts that I recall, but after an hour and a half, Bedgood had reduced me to jelly. Mia was missing, missing in action, so to speak. The person who emerged from the massage room to find Boris snoring on a soft pink sofa had been transformed, just as advertised. She had been remade into a limp, empty-headed, but altogether euphoric being. After rousing Izcovich from his pastel divan, this redone personage (who deserved a new name: FiFi or Didi or Dollface or just Doll) sauntered arm in arm with Husband toward Poetry Hotel, and that is where on the somewhat too soft bed I (or she) was split open, broken into flaming pieces, and transported to Paradise four times in quick succession.

The experience deserves commentary, not a word of which forwards any conventional notion of Romance. Post Bedgood ministrations, any person — no, I amend that — any person, bird, beast, or even inanimate object (provided it wasn’t cold) could have sent me flying into the higher regions of erotic experience. The lesson here is that extreme relaxation promotes pleasure and extreme relaxation is a state of nearly complete openness to whatever comes along. It is also thoughtlessness. I began to wonder whether there were people who lived their lives loose, easy, and fairly blank much of the time, whether there were Dollfaces out there in a kind of permanent sensual transport. I once read about a woman who had regular orgasms brushing her teeth, a report that astonished me, but which after Bedgood began to make some sense. A toothbrush might hae done it.

Only a couple of years ago at a discussion group on sex and the brain, I was SHOCKED when a colleague of Boris’s assured me that in the animal kingdom — or, rather, in the female side of the animal kingdom, in other words, in the whole animal queendom — only human women experience orgasm. When I expressed my amazement, Boris and five other male researchers at the table concurred with Dr. Brooder. We two-leggers could do it but no other animals. In males, of course, prowess went all the way down the mammalian ladder. Male arousal has deep biological roots; in women it’s just a fluke, an accident. From a purely physiological point of view, this struck me as absurd. My primate sisters, who shared so much of my equipment, upstairs and downstairs, had no fun during sex! What did that mean? Among our four-legged cousins, only the males experienced joy? While I argued my point, Boris glowered at me from across the table (I had been admitted as a special guest). A couple of books and several papers later, I discovered that the smug six were dead wrong, which meant, of course, that I was dead right. In 1971 Frances Burton verified orgasm in four out of five of the female rhesus monkeys in her lab. Female stump-tailed macaque monkeys experience orgasms regularly but most often with other females, not with males, and when they come, the simian ladies cry out just as we do. Alan F. Dixson, the author of Primate Sexuality: Comparative Studies of Prosimians, Monkeys, Apes, and Human Beings, writes that they express their rapture in sounds reminiscent of Mrs. Claus: “Ho, ho, ho!” I used those three verbal ejaculations when I confronted the old man with my evidence. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” I said, slapping down two tomes and six articles, all marked with Post-its.

Why, you may ask, did the no-fun theory for girl apes become so well known that all six guys at the table had swallowed it as a matter of course, even though the primates in question have clitorises, as do ALL female mammals? Onan, if you recall from page 66, was punished for wasting his seed. He was supposed not to cast it on the ground but to put it somewhere — inside a woman. This is the waste-not-want-not-for-children argument. But unlike Onan, who can’t inseminate anybody without orgasm, Onan’s hypothetical woman (the woman he should have been inside) can conceive without having the big O, a fact recognized by Aristotle but forgotten for centuries. In 1559 Columbus discovered the clitoris (dulcedo amoris) — Renaldus Columbus, that is. He sailed into it during one of his anatomical voyages, although Gabriele Fallopius disputed this, insisting that he had seen the hillock first. Permit me to draw an analogy between the two exploring Columbuses, Christopher and Renaldus. Their disclosures, less than a hundred years apart, the former of a body of land, the latter of a body part, share a familiar hubris, one of hierarchical perspective. In the case of the new world, the viewer looking down is European. In the clitoral case, he is a man. Both the peoples who had been living on “New World” soil for thousands of years and, I dare say, most women would have been stupefied by these “discoveries.” That said, the clitoris remains a Darwinian puzzle. If it’s not needed for conception, WHY is it there? Is it adaptive or nonadaptive? The shriveled-up little penis (nonadaptive) view has a long history. Gould and Lewontin argue that clits are like tits in men, an anatomical leftover. Others say no; the pleasure pea serves an evolutionary purpose. The battles are bloody. But, I ask you, what matters adaptation or size if the blessed little member does the job? Before we return to our story, I leave you with the immortal words of Jane arp, a seventeenth-century Englishwoman and practicing midwife, who wrote of the clitoris, “It will stand and fall as a yard doth and makes women lustful and take delight in copulation.” (Women, I contend, their simian sisters, and, awaiting further research, probably other mammals, too. Further subcommentary: Doesn’t the seventeenth-century use of the measurement yard for penis strike you as a bit of an exaggeration, unless the yard then was not the yard now?)

When Columbus spied the Mount of bliss,

He stopped and asked himself, “What is this?”

A button, a pea?

An anomaly?

No, silly man, it’s a clitoris!

* * *

Alice’s confession was not coherent, but it was possible to piece together a narrative after it was over. She spoke to me and to her mother, Ellen, who was admitted not long after the bean-spilling began. My eyes moved from child to mother as the girl shifted from barely audible whispers to choked admissions to hoarse gasping sobs. I noted that the mother’s face functioned as a vague mirror of her child’s. When Alice spoke softly, Ellen leaned forward, her eyes intent as her lips registered every insult with tiny movements. When Alice cried, Ellen’s eyes grew smaller, a wrinkle appeared between her brows, and her mouth tensed into a thin straight line, but she did not weep. Maternal listening is of a special kind. The mother must listen, and she must empathize, but she cannot identify entirely with the child. This calls for an enforced remove, a distance acquired only by steeling oneself against the story being told. The knowledge they have hurt my child can easily summon a brute response, something on the order of I will tear those little tarts into a thousand pieces and gobble them up for dessert. Watching Ellen, I sensed that she was resisting the desire for grisly vengeance, and I realized that I liked her — both for her rage and for blocking it.

Alice had been receiving ugly messages for quite some time. “Skank” and “Ho” had appeared regularly as text messages, as had the highly original commentaries “You think you’re so smart,” “Go back to Chicago if it’s so great there,” “Ugly slut,” “skinny weird bitch,” and “Fake.” All anonymous. As for my cabal of girl poets, Alice admitted that they had been on again and off again with her, one day confiding, the next, cold. They reeled her in and they cast her out. When, after weeks of misery, she confronted them with the bald statement “What did I do?” they snickered, rolled their eyes, and chanted “What did I do?” over and over again. It pained me especially to think of Peyton among the tormenters. Then photos of a naked Alice standing in front of her own mirror at home had been posted on Facebook — blurry images taken with the spy’s cell phone through a crack the blind. The poor kid snuffled hard when she coughed up this humiliation. She had taken the pictures down, of course, but not before the damage had been done. The memory of my changing body at thirteen and the achingly private, protective feeling I had had for my newly swollen breasts, three pubic hairs, and the mysterious red lines that appeared on my hips (which I discovered only two years later were stretch marks) made me squirm with discomfort. The bloody tissue narrative was garbled, but eventually Ellen and I understood that Alice had gotten her period just before my class and had been unequipped and too shy to ask any of her “friends” for a pad. She had stuffed her underpants with the Kleenex she was carrying in her purse (always on hand for her allergies), but when she walked into the room, one slightly bloody tissue had dislodged itself from her shorts and fallen to the floor, at which moment Ashley had grabbed it and then, pretending to understand all at once what she had touched, had thrown it on the table and begun to squeal the word gross. The most recent ruse, the one that must have induced the stomach pains, involved the message from the desired boy, Zack, who had arranged to meet her at the park near the swings at three. That must have been where Alice was off to when I saw her bouncing down the sidewalk after she left class at two forty-five. Upon her arrival, however, there was no Zack. She waited half an hour and then, realizing that something was wrong, sat down on the grass, put her hands over her face, and cried. When the tears came, so did the jeers and laughter from behind a tall fence that bordered the park. The invisible hooting girls berated Alice for her fantasy that a boy like Zack would even look at her. This was, it seemed, the most recent “joke,” the one Alice hadn’t been able to “take.”

Despite its particulars, Alice’s story is depressingly familiar. Its basic structure is repeated, with multiple variations, everywhere all the time. Although occasionally overt, the cruelties are most often hidden, surreptitious jabs to shame and hurt the victim, a strategy most often adopted by girls, not boys, who go for the direct punch, blow, or kick in the groin. The duel at dawn, with its elaborate legalisms, its seconds and its paces; its mythical reincarnation in the Wild West when black hat and white hat face off with their six-shooters; the plain old let’s-take-it-outside fisticuffs between two male disputants, who are each cheered on by a rooting faction; even the playground brawl (young boy returns home beaten bloody to face Father, who says, “Son, did you win?”) — all are granted a dignity in the culture that no female form of rivalry can match. A physical fight between girls or women is a catfight, one characterized by scratching, biting, slapping, flying skirts, and a scent of the ridiculous or, conversely, of erotic spectacle for male enjoyment, the delectable vision of two women “going at it.” There is nothing noble about emerging victorious from such a squabble. There is no such thing as a good, clean catfight. As I sat there looking at Alice’s sad, red countenance, I imagined her socking Ashley in the jaw and wondered if the masculine solution wasn’t more efficient. If girls banged each other over the head instead of plotting nasty little games of sabotage, would they suffer less? But that, I thought, could only happen in another world. And even in that improbable world where a girl could dust herself off after a wrestling match with her nemesis and declare victory, what good would it do?

By the time I said good-bye to them, Ellen had managed to coax her big girl onto her lap. Mother and daughter were enfolded in the beanbag chair, where Ellen had bitting alone only minutes before, listening to Alice’s saga of intrigue and deception. Alice buried her head in her mother’s neck, and her long bare legs and feet hung over the side of the chair. Ellen’s hand was moving up and down her daughter’s back, slowly and rhythmically. Behind the two, I noticed a row of the child’s dolls on a shelf. The impassive porcelain face of one of them stared at the wall behind me. Another poppet had a faint smile on her pink lips. A woman doll in a kimono stood rigidly at attention. An antique baby lay on her back with her arms in the air. The chorus, I said to myself, and they began to stir and move their lips in unison. I saw their teeth. The old magic trembled inside them all for an instant, animus, élan vital. On the sidewalk as I made my way “home,” I had a wild thought:

But I can no longer stand in awe of this,

Nor, seeing what I see, keep back my tears.

As my feet moved, one in front of the other, my gait jogged loose the source. It had arrived courtesy of the doll chorus. Antigone. I smiled. A tragedy for a travesty, but still, I said to myself, there is grief. And who is to measure suffering? Which one of you will calculate the magnitude of pain to be found inside a human being at any given moment?

* * *

Multiply by words, Alice—

Your airborne army spits spears,

Cracks syllables, breaks glass

Spews fury skyward.

The hundred tricksters

In flight on the page are you,

A swarm of grins penciled in

While oval heads are trampled underfoot,

Or name the Gorgon in the mirror

Alice. The monster twin, the other story,

Whose mouth blasts killing winds,

Forbidden thoughts, brazen phrases

Held back in the years of silent ainthood.

Good behavior. Conduct E for excellent.

Weep, Alice, if you want to, howl!

Make it rain, a deluge

Of N’s for needles from your eyes.

Your many I’s. Your multitudes.

Be foment, Alice, ruckus, tirade, trouble,

And if you wish, wish three times.

Wish them out. Write them null.

Blacken their bodies with ink.

Gorge them on sublimated sweets

Until they reel and fall

Beneath your dancing feet.

I wasn’t at all sure I liked the poem, but it felt awfully good to write it. “Why are they so mean to me?” Alice had uttered this several times in a soft, bewildered voice. Wasn’t this the puzzled refrain of the “kinda different?” Jessie had said that by now I ought to know that Alice was “kinda different.” How different? Perception is laden with visible differences, with light and shadow and object masses and moving bodies, but also always there are invisible differences and similarities, ideas that draw the lines, separate, isolate, identify. I was, am kinda different. Not one of the gang. Outside, always outside. I feel the cold winds blow over me. I would have to decide what to do about them: the clique, the girls. I couldn’t let the business go. But I would have to resist hating them, my six still unformed little broads with their sadistic pleasures, the envy they sweated from their pores, and their shocking lack of empathy. Ashley, the princess of punishment. Hadn’t I seen it when she looked at Flora? Ashley, my devoted student. The girl wanted power. No doubt she had too little at home, a middle child in that large family who had probably fought for recognition from Ma and Da. Look at me! Surely, she deserved sympathy, too. I thought of her mother; it is worse to be the mother of a bully than a victim, worse to have a cruel child than one whose vulnerability allows attack. I would have to devise a strategy, if not to save the situation, at least to bring it into the open air. I like that expression, the open air. Before me I see the wide fields outside Bonden, flat and broad, with the immense sky over them.

* * *

I cried on Bea the first night after she arrived. You’d think that all the bawling and blubbering I had done over the course of about six months would have drained my ducts and left my eyeballs permanently damaged from flooding, but it seems that there is an endless supply of the salty secretion, and it can pour forth at regular, bounteous intervals without any lasting effects. The old fleshy temple truly is a marvel. It felt so good to have Bea patting my back and shushing me and rocking me a little in her arms. Mia and Be-a. Once we had dispensed with my keening lachrymosity, we settled into the Burdas’ bed, and she filled me in on the doings of Jack and the boys. (Jack, the same old, same old, driving her crazy with his weekend sculpting, the results of which she referred to as erections because they were, each and every one, towering protrusions inspired by the Gaudí phalluses on top of the Padrera, but she did not want them all over the lawn. She did not want a skyline of yards in the yard, for Christ’s sake. Jonah thriving in college, Ben a little lost in class but soaring in musical theater and no girlfriend ever, and maybe he’s gay, which was fine by Bea, she just knew she couldn’t say it first, what kind of mother would do that, if he was or wasn’t, and then he had never been obviously fey, or anything like that, so they’d just have to let him figure it out, and her lawyering, which she loved the way Harold had, Our Father before her, the subtleties and loopholes and the precedents and even the grind.)

And then with our two heads, one brown, one red, propped on pillows, we lay beside each other and gazed upward at the white ceiling and remembered playing Baby Huey. I was usually Huey, the enormous baby duck in diapers who drooled and puked and pooped and issued guttural gagas to Bea’s howling joy. We remembered Mrs. Klinchklonch, the witch woman we invented, who hated children, and how we delighted in describing her monstrous doings. She threw children out the window, dunked them in wells, peppered them vigorously, and drenched them in chocolate sauce. We remembered becoming the Mellolards, a vocal team that appeared when we sat at our little red table in our little red chairs and sang commercials, not real commercials, but made-up ones about toothpaste that spurted from the tube and laundry detergent that turned the clothes green and candy that melted in your hand, not in your mouth. We remembered our blue dresses with pinafores and our patent leather shoes that shone with Vaseline and that we held our knees together and folded our hands in our laps and were very, very good. We remembered Mama’s embroidered calendar and the tiny wrapped presents that appeared on it every day of December and that our anticipation for Christmas gave us stomachaches, and we remembered baths. We held a washcloth over our eyes so we wouldn’t get soap in them and leaned backward, and Mama poured the warm water over our heads with a pitcher, and she heated towels in the dryer and wrapped us in the warm terry cloth, and then Father would lift us, one at a time, high up into his arms and gently lower us into chairs in front of the fire to keep us warm. Baths were paradise, said Bea. They were, said I, and then she told me she used to pretend to be asleep in the car when we returned late from our grandparents’ so that Father would carry her inside, and I told her I knew she was faking and that I had been jealous because I was too big, and I had sometimes worried that he loved her more. I was a crybaby and she wasn’t. You’re still a crybaby, she said. So true, I said. Maybe, my sister said, I should hried more. I always had to be so tough. We were quiet then.

I’m sorry I was such a wimp, Bea.

Let’s go to sleep, she said, and I said, Yes, and we did, and I didn’t take a pill, and I slept very well.

* * *

How to tell it? asks your sad, crack-brained, crybaby narrator. How to tell it? It gets a bit crowded from here on in — there’s simultaneity, one thing happening at Rolling Meadows, another at the Arts Guild, another at the neighboring house, not to speak of my Boris wandering the streets of NYC with my concerned Daisy on his heels; all of this will have to be dealt with. And we all know that simultaneity is a BIG problem for words. They come in sequence, always, only in sequence, so while I sort it out, I will refer to Dr. Johnson. Referring to Dr. Johnson in a pinch is a good bet, our own man of the English language, our wise, fat, gouty, scrofulous, kindhearted, witty glutton, a being of authority, to whom we can all turn in moments of trouble, a cultural pater familias who was so important he had his own man document him while he was still ALIVE. And that was the eighteenth century, well before every Tom, Dick, Harry, Lila, and Jane recorded each tawdry, moronic detail of his or her lamentable life on the Internet. (Please note the addition of Lila and Jane; there is no female equivalent of “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” which connotes Everyman; Everywoman, alas, is something entirely different.) Grub Street, however, to the great dismay of Dr. Johnson, was churning out countless confessions or faux confessions, just as lurid and hair-raising as today’s misery memoirs. But enough. We cite Rasselas, a section on marriage, in which our hero offers his appraisal of the sacrament:

Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and a maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.

Willful ignorance disguises grim reality: You mean I’m stuck with you? But it’s different now, says the savvy reader. That was the old days. We are more enlightened than the Enlightenment, we of the twenty-first century, with our widgets and gadgets and high-speed winklets and no-fault divorce. Ho! Ho! Ho! is my response to you. The sorrows of sex are never-ending. Give me an epoch, and I’ll give you a sobbing narrative of conjugal relations turned sour. Can I really blame Boris for his Pause, for his need to seize the day, for snatching the pausal snatch while there was still time, still time for the old-timer he was swiftly becoming? Don’t we all deserve to romp and hump and carry on? Dr. Johnson’s own sex life remains under wraps, mostly, thank heaven, but we do know that David Garrick told David Hume, who told Boswell, who recorded it in his journal, that after witnessing Dr. Johnson’s pleasure one night at the theater, Garrick hoped aloue happy tohe eminent lexicographer would return often, but the Great Man averred he would not. “For the white bubbies and the silk stockings of your Actresses,” said the Sage, “excite my genitals.” We all have ticklers, adaptive or not, and it is our nature to use them. One can be sick with jealousy and loneliness and still understand that.

But there is another aspect of long marriages that is rarely spoken about. What begins as ocular indulgence, the sight of the gleaming beloved, which incites the appetite for around-the-clock rumpty-rumpty, alters over time. The partners age and change and become so accustomed to the presence of the other that vision ceases to be the most important sense. I listened for Boris in the morning if I woke to see his half of the bed empty, listened for the flushing toilet or the sound of him filling the teakettle with water. I would feel the hard bones of his shoulders as I placed my hands on them to greet him silently while he read the paper before going to the lab. I did not peer into his face or examine his body; I merely felt that he was there, just as I smelled him at night in the dark. The odor of his warm body had become part of the room. And when we had our conversations that often went on into the night, it was his sentences I attended to. Alert to the transitions he made from one thought to the next, I concentrated on the content of his speech as it unwound in my mind, and I placed it inside the ongoing dialogue between us, which was sometimes savage, but more often not. It was rare that I studied him. Sometimes after we had done the deed, and he walked naked across the room, I would look at his long pale body with its round belly and his left leg with its blue varicose vein and at his soft well-formed feet, but not always. This is not the voluntary blindness of new attraction; it is the blindness of an intimacy wrought from years of parallel living, both from its bruises and its balms.