What Fitzgerald said: Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in. Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell.
So I meet with the rich man. It’s a spectacularly ill-conceived project. He wishes to talk first about the making of the space program, then about the space race, then in the middle tell his own aggrieved story of almost but not quite making it into orbit. He’ll end the book with a proposal for how we might colonize the universe, complete with elaborate technical documents of his own devising. “Sounds good,” I say. “People like space.” The almost astronaut is pleased. He gives me a check. “It’s going to be a big book,” he says. “Big!”
Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself.
What do you want?
I don’t know.
What do you want?
I don’t know.
What seems to be the problem?
Just leave me alone.
A boy who is pure of heart comes over for dinner. One of the women who is dabbling with being young again brings him. He holds himself stiffly and permits himself only the smallest of smiles at our jokes. He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. “You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones,” someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.
Do not jump off a wall. Do not run in the street. Do not strike your head with a stone just to see what this will do.
Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.
In 1897, a French doctor named Hippolyte Baraduc conducted a series of photographic experiments. He hoped to prove that the soul does indeed reside in the body and leaves it at the moment of death. He fastened a live pigeon to a board with its wings outstretched, then placed a photographic plate on its chest and secured it tightly. As he’d hoped, when he cut the pigeon’s throat the plate depicted something. The soul leaving took the form of curling eddies, he said.
Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could an object attract or repel?
One day I see the dog-walking man kicking a mattress on the street. He kicks and kicks it. BUGS, NO GOOD, VERY BAD someone had written on it in red paint.
Baraduc claimed to be able to photograph emotions. “Hate, joy, grief, fear, sympathy, piety, & etc. No new chemical is necessary to obtain these results. Any ordinary camera will do it.” He sought out emotionally agitated people, then held light-proof paper a few inches from their heads. He found that the same emotion would make the same kind of impression upon the photographic plate, but that different emotions produced different images. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.
11
There are always other mothers at the school. Some of them arrive early, and because of this it is the same ones who notice every day if I am late. These are the same mothers, the early ones, who are also good at remembering what to bring on a given day. You might have to bring a picture of your child and her father, or suntan lotion, or an empty egg carton which is to be transformed into something. Because there are mothers like me who are sometimes late to school, the teachers have built a grace period into each day. There is choice time at the beginning of the morning and if this is missed by your child it is bad, of course, but not terrible. It is not like missing circle time, where they talk about how a flower grows and what it needs (water, sun) or how we humans too are animals or how the planets are particularly arranged nearest to and farthest from the sun. All of the children know that Pluto has been demoted and they shriek with glee if their older, slower parents forget this. There is also a grace period when it comes to the bringing in of things. The day the egg carton is due is not the real day but the day before it is really really necessary, before it is really really a catastrophe not to have it. And then, even then, some teachers make provisions for the moms who forget. They may bring extra cartons or receive extras from some of the other mothers, the rememberers, the ones who are always early.
There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.
Personality Questionnaire
1. I enjoy the sensation of speeding in a car.
2. Others know me by the long hours I keep.
3. I am drawn to games of chance.
4. Parties make me nervous.
5. I eat more quickly than other people.
6. Friends have called me thin-skinned.
7. I prefer indoor activities.
8. Often, I fear I am not up to life’s challenges.
9. I would like to learn to fly an airplane.
10. Sometimes I am restless for no apparent reason.
There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.
What the Yoga People say: None of this is banal, if only you would attend to it.
All right then, this thing clogging the sink. I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease.
My husband clears the table. Bits of meat cling to the plates, a soggy napkin floats in gravy. In India, they say, there are men who eat only air.
Someone has given my daughter a doctor’s kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. “Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?” I ask her. She looks at me oddly. “I’m already a doctor,” she says.
I would give it up for her, everything, the hours alone, the radiant book, the postage stamp in my likeness, but only if she would consent to lie quietly with me until she is eighteen. If she would lie quietly with me, if I could bury my face in her hair, yes, then yes, uncle.
Student Evaluations
She is a good teacher but VERY anecdotal.
No one would call her organized.
She seems to care about her students.
She acts as if writing has no rules.
“Where is the funny?” my husband says, clicking the remote. “Bring me the funny.”
What Keats said: No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in.
Our beautiful Italian babysitter tells me she broke up with her boyfriend. I know him, a serious young musician who adored her. “What did he do?” I say. She makes herself a cup of tea. “He cried like a clown.”