My skin itches, the hard bathwater has dried it, I slather on enriched cream, and stir greasily on my bed. I hadn't thought about mail, but it's an inducement and might be waiting in the mailroom in the main house, which hastens my dressing for drinks and then dinner. Everyday I wear the same thing, I buy several copies of the same shirt and trousers in different colors and shades, shoes, too, since, as much as possible, I don't like to consider what I wear or look like. I bathe frequently and shower daily, I do my laundry weekly, with Ivory Snow, for sensitive skin, all residents are expected to do their own washes, one of the conditions for staying here, as it's considered beneficial to perform sensible or practical duties and care for ourselves. One resident did her wash daily, because it made her feel worthwhile. My clothes are simple and free of ornamentation, though I like a cable stitch on heavy, all-cotton hand-knit sweaters, and I like stripes, solid bright and dark colors, small dots on cardigan sweaters and loose pants I can put on and pull off quickly. My mother and father urged me to do things fast, it was important to them, and even now that my mother is very old, she grows impatient when I or she can't accomplish a goal quickly, and one day I asked her, "Why is speed so important?" Without glancing at me, continuing to knit a yellow sweater for her internist's granddaughter, not missing a stitch, though her hands tremble, my mother said: "Speed's the thing." Then I realized that modernity had a room in her old body. She also likes buttons, not as much as I do, I'd like to design buttons and might some day, I have a button collection which I occasionally spread on the floor, marveling at their intricate designs and details, God is in the details, also the devil, and innocuousness. Buttons are undone all the time, they're supposed to be done and undone, one of the first things a child learns is to button a jacket and tie shoes, though zippers are fine, and, like flight, fast; still, I prefer buttons, a well-designed and perfectly suited button cheers me up, and though buttoning a cardigan sweater can slow my getting dressed for dinner, if the button slides through its buttonhole easily, I'm not very inconvenienced, since a bit of beauty is worth it to me.
Beauty is disputed, its relevance to society, whose values are temporary, beauty rises and falls like stock on Wall Street, since its fate is tied to the changing shape of history, crafted by good and bad times and events, and it's either an impediment or an incitement, since it's always arguable how beauty behaves and functions, for what reasons, yet it instills itself, with reasonable and unreasonable demands, holds sway or merely creates an insistent pressure. I have renounced its claims and been possessed and dispossessed by it, or I have embraced it as a renegade, disruptive hero. Once I carved the word beauty into a large bar of Ivory soap and floated the soap in a bath of hot water to efface the letters, it was beautiful. Once I wrote the word beauty a thousand times on a greenboard, but the word didn't become nonsense. Once, late at night, I shouted the word beauty over and over, it never sounded ugly to me, and oddly I could repeat it again and again without its becoming nonsense; it's only a word I said to myself, but I couldn't negate what had happened, because I can't pretend something didn't happen. I told myself it was because the concept joins to something beyond me or so much a part of me I couldn't recognize it, maybe an obstacle to my peace of mind. I like beautiful faces, though what kinds I think beautiful may not be anyone else's, yet often they are, so a perplexing consensus on beauty, when its value is regularly disputed, begets trouble. History is not beautiful, not elegant, the way design and formulae can be. I prefer a beautiful chair and beautiful skin and beautiful fabric. In a corner of my sleeping room, like a soldier, stands a bolt of beautiful fabric, which my father and his beloved brother designed and manufactured. Golden threads are woven through it, a silk and nylon material, Junior may once have carried it in his sturdy arms, and the fabric shimmers when sunlight hits it or when at night I shine my lamp on it. I call it the "Fabric Monolith," at attention and on duty near my bed where I sleep, sometimes fitfully, an object never done but complete in itself, and, in a sense, finished. I have thought of designing and commissioning a shirt from it, but then I would have to undo the bolt, worse, cut into it with big scissors, in the process ruining the integrity of the Fabric Monolith, which may never have been unrolled, except in the presence of my father, his brother, their salesmen, and junior. Now I long to unfurl it across a long, wide, wooden worktable and hear the whooshing noise it emits when it breathes, but I don't. I satisfy myself by imagining it, I can always imagine it without ever ruining it.
I propel my body off the bed, Where does this will come from? castigating myself for malingering when the promise of mail, drinks, and dinner awaits. Like breakfast, dinner is a complicated affair but, unlike breakfast, the meals are inconsistent, the quality varies widely, they are rarely good, though not regularly as poor or inadequate as lunch consistently is. At dinner, a hot meal is expected, and the head cook is even more constrained by everyone's diets, allergies, and preferences, which are both frivolous and serious, for a diet lacking in Vitamin D will cause rickets or defective bone growth in children, insufficient B1, or thiamin, appetite loss, beri beri, and nervousness, a deficiency in Vitamin E causes sterility in rats and possible sterility in humans, but here many take vitamins, though I imagine the bulimics among us disgorge any nutritional benefits after eating. Of the three meals, dinner most challenges the head cook's capacity to meet, with flavorful, variegated dishes, the residents' diverse tastes, needs, and desires, but a rumor persists that she is leaving, since she has been working a long time, she is past retirement age and pleasing fewer and fewer residents, whom, over time, she views as disagreeable. During dinner, in the same room where breakfast is served, but with a different atmosphere, the lights are lower, because I lower them, disliking the harsh glare of electricity and also publicity, people talk about their day or don't, but most tell stories. Residents are more expansive at dinner than breakfast, and I listen attentively for the eruption of the unanticipated, an exceptional reminiscence, attitude, or behavior that enlivens and affects me, even with consequence. Though this hardly happens, it has, and, at the time, the moment appeared not to have contained a direct consequence, so I was unaware of its potential for harm, as when I spurned the callow advances of a man, who'd sent me a lurid seduction note that accomplished its opposite, but he made sure I'd suffer for my lack of interest, which mission he accomplished stealthily, so our dinner talk and my subsequent rejection had consequence. He is now an enemy, but he behaved dramatically, and a man who would seek revenge and hurt a woman who wouldn't consent to have sex with him is oddly impressive. Revenge is a great motive and regularly indispensable for drama, and, if I ever see him again, especially here, it will be uncomfortable, but I'll pretend I don't know what he has accomplished and be kinder to him than he has reason to expect and for which he might feel unworthy and have sleepless nights. Health professionals, medical doctors, and laypeople have long recognized the importance of restful sleep. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., quoted in How To Sleep and Rest Better, lived by this single rule: "I do not permit myself to look at a timepiece after retiring at night," and I remembered the Count, who surrounded himself with timepieces and looked at them for consolation, but then he didn't retire at night, he arose. Going to bed should never be used as a punishment, the manual says, yet I trust the vengeful man's sleep will be shattered by punitive dreams in which he is rejected constantly, and though cognizant that such a vicious hope might rebound in my own sleep and distress it, I can't stop myself. "Go confidently in the directions of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined," Henry David Thoreau extolled, and I would prefer to be an exalted American dreamer. My mother's sleep is poor, in the middle of the night she awakens not knowing night from day, in thrall to devastating dreams in which she is again with her husband, he's alive, he's waiting for her in the car someplace she can't find, her sister is alive, her brothers, she's with her mother, no one is dead, her dream life is indistinguishable in her damaged brain from a waking reality that includes death, so she is often fearful and confused, and no one can help her when she awakens at 3 a.m. believing that she's not in her own bedroom, that she is a prisoner, and in a way she is, but not imprisoned by anyone, though she can't leave. Unlike Leslie Van Houten my mother has never been in jail, but she can imagine and fear it, the way Kafka did but not Genet.