She is forgetting the idea she had about moderation.
She does the dishes so wildly that soap flies everywhere and water splashes on the floor and the front of her clothes. During the day she washes her hands often, rubbing them together briskly, almost violently, because she feels that everything she touches is coated with grease.
She stands by the door and hears someone whistling in the marble lobby.
One day she sees an apartment she is willing to take. It is not very pretty, but she is ready to take it because she wants to have a home again, she wants to be bound to this city by a lease, she doesn’t want to go on feeling the way she does, loose in the world, the only one without any place. She imagines that when she moves in, she will have a party. She signs some papers. The agent will call her later and tell her whether the deal has gone through or not. She walks home and shops for food with a sort of forced tranquillity, as though if she moves too quickly something will break. She continues to move this way, gently, with deliberation, the rest of the day. Then, later in the evening, the agent calls and tells her she has lost the apartment. The owner has decided suddenly not to rent it. She can hardly believe this explanation.
Now she is sure she will never find a place to live.
She lies in bed with a bottle of beer. She finishes the beer and wants to put it down. She can’t put it on the bare wood of the bedside table because it will leave a mark, and the table is not hers. She puts it on a book, but the book is not hers either. She moves it to another book, which is hers, a song book.
Then she gets up because she sees that the clothes she took off earlier are heaped on a chair. She wants to lay them out straight in case she decides to wear them the next day, and she lays them out, but since she is quite drunk they are not straight, as she can see. She is drunk because she has had two bottles of beer, a glass of Drambuie, and then a third bottle of beer.
In spite of being drunk, she can still hold on to some things in her mind, though with an effort. She sees how well she is holding on to things and thinks that she is still smart. She thinks about how her smartness doesn’t seem to count for much anymore, the way it used to. Her smartness has counted for less and less as she has grown older. She lies there in the dark trying to pull herself together. She can feel this is a cliff edge, this return. Now it is after two in the morning, but she can’t let herself fall asleep.
On the white side of a truck, a dark blue eagle with its wings raised. Watching for it, she sees, outside the window, the mail truck pull up by the hydrant. She sees the mailbag tossed out of the truck onto the sidewalk and the handyman of the building drag it across the sidewalk and then stand holding it by the neck while he talks to another handyman and she grows angry as she watches because there may be a letter for her in the bag.
She is told about an apartment in a nice small street, but she won’t look at it because she is also told that on the floor below lives a retarded man and his father and they argue and shout and she would have to listen to that.
The day is dark again with the threat of rain. In the yellow light she sweeps up the dead leaves of the houseplants and waters the pots. On this day there is more order.
In the dining room she pushes upright the heavy books that have been leaning far over to one side on the shelves and sprawling open for so long now that their covers are warped out of shape. There is another bookcase in the living room, with glass doors, and on top of it a clock that hisses every time the second hand passes a certain point. Now she walks down the hall, straightening more books as she comes to them. The hall is long and dark, with many angles, so that around every bend more hallway opens out and this hallway seems to her, sometimes, infinitely long.
In the bedroom, where she watches television, she can often hear the sound of a string quartet or some other classical music. It is a small sound, but perfectly clear. When she first heard it, she wondered if there was a radio somewhere in the room, turned very low. She walked slowly around the room, listening. The walls of the room are dark, the windows are shaded, and there is a large low bureau of scratched green wood with a mirror above it into which she looks again and again, as she also looks into the three long mirrors on the three doors of the closet. The music was coming from the radiator, which stands below a framed photograph of a bearded man; he is the classicist whose books were falling over in the other room. She put her ear down near the radiator and found that the music was coming from the knob. Now she sometimes lies on the bed listening to the music. It is just low enough so that it doesn’t stop her from thinking.
One day a fly walks over her hand and she feels that the fly is a friendly presence. The same day, she wants to stop a policeman in the street and talk to him. Then that impulse passes.
She decides to call several people. She tells herself she has to talk to some people. She is worried, and then she is angry at herself for worrying, for always thinking about herself and for always looking at the world so darkly. But she doesn’t know how to stop.
She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight parts of Buddha’s eight-fold path and thinks she might follow it. She sees that it mainly involves doing everything right.
Even though it is late enough to go to sleep she has something more to eat. Cereal, then, after the cereal, bread and butter, then marshmallows and other foods. She turns over onto her stomach and looks at the covers of some books. She can go on reading now without eating. Her stomach is so full that she can’t lie on it comfortably, and she feels as though she were lying on a rock or a bundle of sticks. She has filled her stomach as though she were filling a knapsack or a boat for a long journey. It will be slow and hot, and she will wake and sleep again several times and have uncomfortable dreams, or there will be no sleep but hard questions. No tears, though.
The rain continues to fall steadily just beyond the sound of an air conditioner. It is a soft drumming with an occasional louder splat into the courtyard.
She can’t fall asleep. She lies with her ear on the mattress and listens to her loud heartbeat, first the rush of blood from her heart, which she can feel, then a split second later the thump in her ear. The sound is shethump, shethump. Then she starts to fall asleep and wakes again when she begins dreaming that her heart is a police station.
Another night it is her lungs; she shuts her eyes and her lungs seem as large as the room, and as dark, and enclosed in a fragile shell of bone, and in one dark lung she is crouching and the wind whistles around her, in and out.
Some things in her behavior now strike her as odd. Then something happens that should frighten her, but she is not frightened.
The way it happens: at the end of the day she turns on the news and immediately she is addressed eye to eye, with almost unbearable intensity, by a male newscaster. He is the first person who has spoken to her all day. Shaken by these few minutes of direct address, she goes out to the kitchen to make an omelette. She mixes the eggs and pours them into the pan, where the butter is beginning to burn. As the omelette forms, it bubbles and chatters, making its own violent kind of noise, and she suddenly thinks it is going to speak to her. Bright yellow, glistening, spotted with oil, it is heaving gently and subsiding in the pan.
Or rather, she doesn’t expect the omelette to speak, but when it doesn’t articulate something she is surprised. But when she later thinks of what happened, she sees that really she suffered something like a physical assault. The muteness of the omelette emanated from it in a large balloon and pressed against her eardrums.
But it is not this incident, but the very latest sign of disturbance, on the highway, that frightens her enough to make her list and count up the signs of disturbance, though even then she cannot always decide whether what seems to her a sign of disturbance should be counted as such, since it is fairly normal for her, such as talking aloud to herself or eating too much, or whether it should be counted because to someone else it might seem at least somewhat abnormal, and so, after thinking of ten or eleven signs, she wavers between counting five and seven signs as real signs of disturbance and finally settles on five, partly because she cannot accept the idea that there could be as many as seven.