It is the year of the bugs. It is the year of the pig. It is the year of losing money. It is the year of getting sick. It is the year of no book. It is the year of no music. It is the year of turning 5 and 39 and 37. It is the year of Wrong Living. That is how we will remember it if it ever passes.
With love and holiday wishes.
When we visit his parents, my daughter tries to learn to swim at the indoor pool. I watch her serious scrunched-up face, eyes closed, counting one stroke, two strokes. A few days later, she is up to fifty. Then my husband arrives from Brooklyn and she insists we rush him straight from the airport to the pool. But when we get there, she won’t do it. I am tight-lipped, resentful of all the fuss she has required to be made, the great anticlimax of it. My husband falls asleep in a deck chair as we are deliberating. He has been up all night, spraying poison. His mother, bright-eyed, gentles her through the water. “Once a swimmer, always a swimmer,” she says.
A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.
16
It is possible that I am getting too cranky and old to teach. Here I am ranting in the margins about definite vs. indefinite articles, about POV. Think about authorial distance! Who is speaking here?
My friend who teaches writing sometimes flips out when she is grading stories and types the same thing over and over again.
WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?
WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?
I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.
It’s different, of course, with the art monsters. They are always elsewhere.
It was quite difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no steady lodging or office. He was always on his way through the world and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.
This according to Stefan Zweig, one of his closest friends.
The philosopher is traveling across the country, giving lectures at colleges. He sends me his new book. It is called Stimmung and refers to the state of mind that precedes a schizophrenic breakdown. It is accompanied by something known as “the truth-taking stare.”
Everything seems charged with meaning. “I noticed particularly” is the refrain of those who are experiencing it.
I think the philosopher is a little bit famous now. Bright-eyed girls come to his lectures and want to talk to him about how paper thin the world feels. He doesn’t go out with them. He is holding out for someone who knows how to garden.
I keep forgetting to get glasses. It makes my husband crazy. I ask my most stylish friend to come with me to pick them out. The salesman wants me to buy bright blue ones. Fashion forward, he calls them. My friend laughs. “I don’t think they go with the way you dress.” How do I dress? I wonder. Like a bus driver is the answer.
Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.
I get glasses that are a little bit fashion backward. If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be filled with light.
Just after she turns five, my daughter starts making confessions to me. It seems she is noticing her thoughts as thoughts for the first time and wants absolution. I think she must be Catholic after all. I thought of stepping on her foot, but I didn’t. I tried to make her a little bit jealous. I pretended to be mad at him. “Everybody has bad thoughts,” I tell her. “Just try not to act on them.”
At night before she goes to bed, we look at pictures of cute animals on the Internet. My husband shows me how far back the meme goes, all the way back to a big ugly cat saying: I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?
But my daughter is not impressed. “When can we see real animals?” she says. She wants a dog. We decide that for her birthday she can have a cat. Better for the city, my husband says. Why make a dog miserable?
Sometimes she will come in complaining about seeing things when she closes her eyes at night. Streaks of light, she says. Stars.
My husband has taken to calling me Bizarro Wife. Because when he decided not to drink anymore I talked him out of it. Because I said once that he looked sexy smoking. Because I’ll give him a blow job anytime he wants, but mostly am too tired for sex. Also because I’m always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we’ll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid.
My husband doesn’t believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese. I often read catalogs meant for the rich.
But lately I’m like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let’s be pure of heart again!
I have lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in years. She orders things I’ve never heard of, sends back a piece of middling fish. I tell her various schemes to redeem my life. “I’m so compromised,” she says.
17
I’m spending a lot of time online trying to buy a deserted ramshackle bungalow colony. As soon as I find one (and the money to buy it), I’m going to get ten friends to stay up there with us all summer. Kind of a commune minus the hallucinogenic drugs and the mate swapping. My husband is unmoved by my scheme. “I don’t see how it will really affect me,” he says. “I still have to go to work every day.”
We find another apartment finally. The packing is epic, orchestrated for weeks and weeks. On the last day, the philosopher comes over and helps us drag the piano out onto the street. We put a sign on it. DON’T TAKE.
In the elevator of the new building, my daughter pushes the button for the eleventh floor. “If there were a fire, we’d have to take the stairs,” I say. “But what if there were a flood?” There won’t be, I tell her, not lying. For once, not.
Sometimes on the subway platform I still sway, imagining her in my arms.
Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.