I took Henry to the big-city style magazines and smokes store today, so he could get his Pokémon fix. They have the Pokémon packs stuck to the window with numbers on them, so you have to stand outside the store for a little while, while Henry studies his choices and picks a number. Then you go in and say, Number 28, Please and the man behind the counter silently reaches back and hands you a Number 28 with the manner he must use on the people buying dirty magazines. We also bought a pack of Lifesavers, one of which disintegrated into powder in my mouth. The Lifesaver I ate was so strange that I actually took the pack back out of my purse and studied it carefully, to see if I’d bought some variation on the normal Lifesaver—Now More Crumbly! Now Older Than Ever Before! Short-Lasting! Worse!

I don’t know if you noticed this, darlings, but yesterday was my one hundredth post. David said we should celebrate with Champagne, but I said I still had a head cold and would rather not, and we paid bills and then watched reruns of The Office with little half-smiles on our faces. So celebrate however you would like.

I gave blood again today. I have rare and valuable blood, and was most particularly requested to give some more of it by the blood people, who called my house and sent me persistent emails on the subject, but they needn't have hounded me, because I am either a saint who likes to do good for others even at the cost of some personal discomfort or a crazy person who likes to get attention by giving blood. Only time will tell. For now all you need to know is that when asked to give blood, I mostly do.

So there I was lying on the big rubber slatted outdoor chaise longues that they use for blood donors, a needle in my arm drawing my blood rapidly down to a big plastic bladder, balancing my enormous biography of Virginia Woolf by her nephew Quentin Bell on my lap and attempting to turn the pages one-handed, so as not to disturb my blood-giving arm, when the nurse who was in charge of my blood complimented me on my ability to balance the book and turn pages with one hand. Bragging, I told her that I could also read and walk, and was drawn suddenly to the path in camp from my cabin to the lake, down which I used to walk, slowly, reading—so slowly, once, that by the time I got to the lake everyone else was coming up the hill again, free swim being over. I was at the time very pleased by this little evasion but I never thought of a grander one, never dreamed that the four weeks I spent there for three summers running, being the most unpleasant twelve weeks of my youth, could be avoided altogether, and spent somewhere better and happier. What I lacked when I was younger was, despite all my reading, an imagination.

I haven't had an interesting thought in my head for two days. I'm filled with thoughts, of course, as I am, for better or worse, a consciousness that cannot be turned off, but they are all stupid. It's icy in the driveway. Don't hit it to her forehand. There's nothing good on television. I wish my head cold would go away. Our kitchen is nice. I like sugar.

I can go on, if you'd like. No, really I can.

For relief from myself I picked up Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. He wrote, about a Woolf forebear:

He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow’s eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded [darlings, wait for it] in the Hooghly.

About another relative:

He was, I believe, the author of One More Passionate Kiss; this embrace was reserved, however, not for his beautiful wife but for the second footman.

However real life may seem, says Bell, it is a story, and not only a story, but a joke.

Once David almost died. He had appendicitis but it went undiagnosed, and his appendix had burst by the time we got him to a doctor. When they operated on him to remove the appendix they didn’t clean him out well enough and he remained very ill and they had to operate again, and then he had to stay in the hospital until his temperature went down and they could be sure there was no risk of infection. We were in Brussels, I was eight months pregnant, and the whole period was very horrible, but we remember it fondly now that it’s over. We talk about it all the time. We never want to forget it. If you want I’ll tell you the story again.

I went to the second most horrible children’s birthday party ever, but it’s not nice to talk about it. It made me sad. I think I hit the car on something on the way out. I pulled over—it was raining—and put on the hazard lights and went out to check the car and then was like, I must leave here now. Got back in the car and drove John home.

I’m too susceptible, I realize, to other people’s situations. I get uncomfortable in, for example, expensive houses that are poorly decorated. I feel like there are no values in the world. This house had an enormous basement covered in yucky carpeting and I thought, These children are going to smoke pot here later. I will not let my children come over. All of which is ridiculous. I will say that no one, including the little birthday girl, face buried in her father's neck, liked the clown they got. John was initially critical because she didn’t have a red nose. She was otherwise dressed from head to toe in extremely distinctive clown gear (right before I did or did not hit the car on something I watched her drive away in her car still wearing the wig, the hat, the makeup and the shirt), but he felt the lack of nose was significant. Darlings, why can’t everything be nice in the world? Alternately, Why must everything have meaning?

The children are fighting downstairs. I can hear them thudding into the walls. Early this morning I thought that one of the children was upstairs, dropping marbles on the floor above my head, but it was squirrels dropping nuts in the gutter, instead. The children were asleep in their rooms.

Now the children are fighting downstairs. Henry has a friend over and I’m sure this is part of the fight—John would like to be included in the play date—but the boys don’t need something to fight about in order to fight. They have all of childhood and adulthood to fight about. They can fight about the possibilities of outer space and endless time.

Yesterday morning David left for work and the children woke and came into my room. I turned on the bedside lamp and everything was cozy and nice. You’re warm, Henry said, getting under the covers. John sat on the floor reading. Then I went to the bathroom and closed the door and they started hitting each other. On the phone later David and I imagined what happens when I close the door. The children turn to each other. What should we do? one of them asks. I could hit you in the head, says the other. You hit me in the head last time, says the first one. Anything else? Naw, all out. All right, all right, hit me in the head. Then, cooperatively, lovingly, they hit each other and cry.

I made a lot of lists last week, and I ran a lot of errands. I chopped a lot of vegetables. I chopped so many vegetables that I became seriously fatigued, and, as I watched my hands chopping vegetables, some of my fingers holding the vegetables down and then four other fingers on the handle of knife, which wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, I thought, I am so tired but I must focus, so that I don’t cut off my own fingers. Focus. And I did focus, and I cut all the vegetables into very thin batons and teeny tiny little mince and I did not chop off even one of my fingers, not even one.

Lately I am estranged from my own hands, I look at them on the steering wheel, or taking off their rings to wash the dishes and am interested by them in a friendly but, given that they’re my hands, kind of distant way. Of course this is because they look like my mother’s hands, as they were when I was young, and they are doing what her hands used to do. And they are glamorous as my mother’s hands used to be for me, bony and veiny and useful.

Very busy. Loads to do. Will write soon.

Today in the paper I read a review of a dance production which produced in the reviewer “vague and intermitten boredom.” Of course this idea, this stupid idea of “vague boredom”, which doesn’t exist, sent me back immediately twenty years, to my first high school English course, where I felt not “vague boredom” but an acute, earthshaking, presexual but otherwise orgasmic boredom for the first time in my life. This horribly painful boredom has fixed forever in my mind the position of my seat in the class, the click back of the clock hand before it moved forward, the long gray beard of my professor, and the shining blond hair of the teacher’s favorite student as she passed among us, handing out the papers for her special project—an experiment, naturally, in which her classmates were consumed by the flames of boredom. I was ecstatic with boredom, and, burned by boredom, I came as close as I have ever come to breaking free from all social constraints, to finishing, finally, with the thoughts and concerns and judgments of those around me, to standing, as I longed to stand, as I burned to stand, and screaming a wordless scream from the bottom of my soul. I was so bored.

The lamp in the living room needed fixing, I thought, so I took it to the light store. As it turned out, the lamp worked—it was the light bulbs that were broken—but then it also turned out that the lamp could be rewired and fitted with a harp for a new shade while I waited. I sat down in a chair by the couple who own the store and talked about lamp shades and children and holidays and I pretended that they were my grandparents, whom I miss very much. Everything at this light store is wonderful: First of all that it is a light store, and the ceiling is thick with lights, the walls are covered in lights, floor lamps crowd the floor, and table lamps sit on any available surface; secondly, that the philosophy of the people who own the light store is total shamelessness regarding what can be a lamp, they will turn absolutely anything into a lamp, including an old tennis racquet with a ball stuck to it and a light bulb stuck on it next to the ball; thirdly that there is candy everywhere, in little dishes and desk drawers; fourthly that they fix your lamps quickly and inexpensively, while you wait; and finally that even things that are not really broken can be taken there and fixed.

So here we are in “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!” I thought something like this at the Chinese restaurant two weeks ago, while I waited for my takeout. Staring at the sad live fish just lying around the tank, not doing anything, not really enjoying themselves, I thought, Listen, fishies, this is it. It’s not going to get better. Make the most of it.

Wordsworth said it better, if in a slightly different context.

Our own fish, Tyler, has left us. Well, he hasn’t left us, left us. He’s still lying under some rocks at the bottom of his bowl. But he’s dead. I’m feeling squeamish about the actual flushing. I want David around for this.

We saw a fantastic movie the other night. I don’t know if you’ll ever see it, since it is French and obscure and was only on TCM for a Louis Malle festival they had a few weeks ago. It's called Place de la République and in it Malle took a small crew to the place and asked people questions and filmed them. You could look at the film as an argument that every day everyone, by which I mean me and possibly you, should go out and film a stranger. The people he talks to are so happy to be noticed, to be captured, to be made monumental. And shouldn’t they be noticed? Shouldn’t they be made to feel even as they loiter, buy lottery tickets, worry about their illnesses and mourn the people they have lost, that they are important? Sorry, I’m back to Wordsworth again, to the idea, which Malle is working with also—at the end, over footage of a woman who has lost her mind, he runs a quotation, not Wordsworth, about enjoying the life that can be taken from us at any point—that existence is valuable in itself, and that a radical purposelessness, a failure to make of things more than what they are, is in fact a great success.

John locked himself in his room last night. He was on a tear yesterday, making messes everywhere he went, calling people, including his beloved babysitter Jennifer, dumber—I have to assume this word is related to the word dumb—and yelling if he didn’t like, for example, the food on his plate at his class’ Thanksgiving lunch. Take it off my plate! Right now! Well, I immediately instituted a rational system for training him to behave better and he was able to control himself. Just kidding! He continued like this for the rest of the day, including a period in the later afternoon where he ran from room to room trying to lock himself in. Jennifer was able to thwart him in this plan for most of the afternoon but didn’t realize that he had a lock on the door to his room, and so while I was making dinner his efforts met with success.

John’s door fits smoothly and almost seamlessly into its frame. The hinges are on the inside, and the only hardware on the outside is a very small, barely attached brass knob, and a tiny keyhole useless because we have no key, because John had stuffed a stick in it, and because in any case it isn’t attached to the lock mechanism. I know how the door locks, it locks on the inside with a tiny button on the bottom of the black box the knob comes through. I was sweet and calm. I spoke to him gently. His big eye looked out at me through the keyhole and my big eye looked back at him. I told him what to do to unlock the door. Instead he rattled the knob. I tried to tell him again. He kept rattling the knob. I said, John, sit on the floor please and look up at the black box on the door and just move that little button over and he said, I want the workmen to come and break down my door. Then I smacked my hand against his door so hard it turned red, frightening him and making him cry.

Then the crazy period began, in which everyone in the house stood outside John’s door and tried to get him to unlock it and he stared at us through the keyhole and jiggled the knob instead.

We called the workmen and Dom, the owner’s father, rushed over to our house with tools and realized that he had to crawl out onto the roof so stepped out onto the roof and broke the screen over John’s window and climbed in and unlocked the door and everyone was happy. There hasn’t been, yet, an appropriate time for me to take John aside to tell him that if he ever pulls a stunt like that again I’m going to kill him.

Sometimes I think about someone I’ll call Sammy, who sent in on average one poem every day to the magazine where I worked as the literary assistant. This was a long time ago, darlings. Long, long time ago. Before the war. Well, after one war, but before the next one. Before cell phones. One of my jobs at the magazine was to go through the poetry submissions, to reject the bad ones, and to send the good ones on to the poetry editor. The poetry editor looked over the names I sent her, and made sure I wasn't rejecting people she knew.

I was good at rejecting poems, in the sense that I could easily tell which poems were decent, and which were not. I was bad at rejecting poems, in the sense that I used the worst faded, smudged, off-center, copy of a copy of a copy of a form rejection letter and never wrote anything personal on it. I was a soul-crusher. On top of that, Sammy sent in a poem or two every day, and when I started, I thought I had to respond to each of these poems. I sent him how many of those form letters in the first few months I was there? Soul-crushing, multiplied.

Finally, I got a letter from Sammy that wasn’t a poem, or not just a poem. I’m sure there was a poem in there, but there was also a letter, asking me to stop sending rejection letters. He just wanted to send his poems out, he said. I respected his wish, in the sense that I stopped sending him the horrible form rejection letters. I didn’t respect his wish, in the sense that I never after that opened his letters, and put them directly in the trash. I can’t say I’m sorry, either, because his poems were so bad.

Before we had children we went to Sicily for vacation. We left the coastal road between Milazzo and Cefalù, and took a road into the interior, that climbed the hills. It ended, or we left it, at a small town closed up for the midday, with nothing to see. We were here for the restaurant, which the guidebook had mentioned. It was behind swinging beads. Inside sat the entire town.

I only remember the end of the meal. They brought us a very big bowl of cherries, and, even though we were past the limits of what we could eat, we started eating them. I think we were supposed to take a few and stop, sated, but we weren’t like that. I remember the spiral staircase to the basement, and I remember remounting, still uncomfortably full. We paid and went out to the piazza, to see if I could feel better there. We sat on a bench and stared into the dusty valley. We got in the car and drove the switchbacks back down to the coast, and then the winding, crowded coast road to our next hotel, where I was quarantined by my fullness to our room. I was so full I was sick with fullness. I was too full to do anything except be full.

The next day I felt better, but my eye hurt and we went to a doctor. Everyone in the waiting room wanted to know if we were there because I was pregnant. Now I see the answer was, We were there precisely because I was not.

I said to David over drinks on Saturday, I had a red drink with a flower on the top, Lately I feel that I am able to connect with a work of art at about the same rate I am able to make friends. He said, That’s a very low percentage!

Good news and bad news, darlings. Take the good news first. If you take the good news first you get a moment of pure happiness. When you take it second you have the taste of the bad news still in your mouth.

Did I just ruin the good news? Anyway: We’re moving into the kitchen today! It doesn’t sound exciting to you? But it is exciting. I’m excited. I’m happy. I want to dance like James Brown. I want to stand on a Chinatown rooftop and Hula for an hour. I want to sing the entire cast recording of South Pacific, except “Happy Talk”. I will almost certainly get drunk. Here’s your pashta, kids. Enjoy.

Bad news: I don’t know that Tyler, our fish, will ever really be able to enjoy the kitchen the way he wanted to. Oh, Tyler. Born somewhere to some other Betta fish by whatever method Betta fish give birth, then ripped from his parents’ loving embrace, stolen away and sold in a pet store to our babysitter, Jennifer, as a gift for Henry’s birthday. Nothing good happened after that, either. First the bowl was too small, then too cold. It pains me to say it, but young Tyler was the subject of verbal abuse each night when he was too stupid to find his food.

The bowl situation stabilized. He was warmer, and less sluggish. David became adept at feeding him. Then, a fateful day when Henry vigorously stirred the bamboo sticks in Tyler’s bowl, damaging his back fin. Or did he? Because where the fin used to be continues to degrade, and Tyler’s looking all eaten up, somehow, and stays basically at the bottom of his bowl. He’s been in our bedroom for this last part of the construction, and David becomes sad seeing him at night. I offered to flush him, but David said No. Still, I don’t think Tyler is long for this world. Tyler will never enjoy our new kitchen, that he dreamed so long about. But I will.

On Monday I got a couple emails from people at Henry’s school telling me about an important meeting with the Board of Ed where we needed to show a united front. Then I got an email from my husband saying, This sounds important. Should one of us go? And I thought, Well, it would be nice to get out of the house. So I said I would go and he could put the children to bed. Sucker!

Oh mes darlings, what a show. I have the urge to make a disclaimer at this point, to say, I really appreciate the work and energy of the other parents and how much they care about their children and I of course care about my children and overcrowding is a serious issue blur bloo blar blur blarb. Fuck it. It was crazy. There was one woman who sat in the front row rolling her eyes wildly and grimacing, as if she were signing for the hearing impaired. There was an angry mother who, in the middle of her angry, forceful speech, used the word “Squozen.” Everyone fell silent. Squozen? Did she say squozen? was the thought that spread round the room. Then she said it again. She said squozen? Is that a word? Really? Isn’t the word squeezed? Is she making a joke? Oh, and a mom stood up and said, I have seen people going the wrong way down the street in front of the school and this is going to end in a terrible, terrible accident. Also prompting stunned silence. Otherwise, throughout, shouting from the audience, applause for a comment by a woman who was counting the number of extra bedrooms going up on her street, and general bloodlust. The dad who got to speak last judged the mood of the room incorrectly when he began his comment with the prissy little phrase, “The thing is, I’m having trouble connecting the dots.” He should have stood on his chair, raised his pencil in the air, and sung something from Les Mis.

Last night we went to the California Pizza Kitchen. I felt that I had been catapulted into some kind of live advertisement for the chain. Is your house under construction? Do you feel bad about work? Are both your children whiny fucking toads? Then come on down to the California Pizza Kitchen where we’ll Pizza your cares away. Warning: Actual pizza is pretty gross.

Oh yes, we Pizza-ed our cares away. Henry colored in his California Pizza Kitchen-themed coloring book and asked if he could keep the cup they gave him (He could! It was his to take home) and I was offered a stiff drink, which I stupidly declined, and even though the California Pizza Kitchen found it was beyond its powers to soothe John into a state of happy cooperation and he spent the twenty (California Pizza Kitchen! You devil!) minutes we were there lolling around the booth, ignoring his food, and threatening us all with his drink, I left the California Pizza Kitchen feeling more hopeful than when I entered it. I thought of going there again tonight.

David and I went to see Michael Clayton on Friday. We left the children at home with the babysitter in a house that reeked of floor stain, for the obvious reason that the floor had just been stained. We are so close to the kitchen being done, if you accept, as I have accepted, that being done means not being done. Being done means being three weeks from being done. And not liking the color you stained the floors but moving in anyway and planning on having them redone at some future point. And promising your husband you won’t say anything about not liking the floor stain color but then blurting it out to everyone you meet by way of greeting. I hate the color we stained our floors! How are you?

Shit, this was supposed to be about the movie. Once in a while you go to a movie that is a movie, by which I mean it was made by people who understand what movies can do and are interested in doing those things. Can movies manipulate time for the purposes of creating character depth? Could you, for example, watch someone prepare for something and watch them do it almost at the same time? Oh, and can movies present the things you see everyday—say a closet, overstuffed with clothes—so that you see them, and know them, for the first time? And in a movie, can you get really close to the actor’s face, as if you’re right there with him, and can you see into his eyes as you see into your husband's when he’s lying in bed looking at you at night? Well, then maybe we should do some of that.

Also all the actors gave a shit about their work. Tom Wilkinson is a fucking genius, ditto Tilda Swinton, ditto, at least here, George Clooney. I used to think that George Clooney was Cary Grant manqué but I’m trying to remember when Grant created a character you knew as well as you knew Clooney’s Clayton in the final scene. Maybe in the His Girl Friday. Yar, yar.

I really liked the movie. The people behind us were old and loud and, I’m sorry to say, dumb. Dumb. I know, I'll be there myself one day but.... There’s a murder in the movie and the woman didn’t understand what was going on and kept asking what was going on and her husband kept saying out loud what was going on but she still didn't understand. At the end she said to her friend, I liked it, but I missed some of the details.

Then we went out to dinner and everything, including the things we said, seemed very vivid, and when the waiter came to take our order I wanted to write what he said down, so I would have it forever. I want, sometimes, to make a movie myself.

A bee flew into John’s shirt and stung him. He is now lying on the couch in Jennifer’s arms, watching Scooby. Henry is offering him treats that will make him feel better and that Henry would also enjoy, like ice cream at the ice cream and sports memorabilia store. Henry knows all about bees, having been recently stung twice (even though I said he wouldn’t be). He said to me, You don’t even know what a stinger looks like.

I was stung by a bee the summer between kindergarten and first grade. We were in New Hampshire, at my mother’s family’s vacation house, the backyard of which was filled with bees’ nests. (The inside was filled with bats and mice, and someday I may tell you about them.) My bee had stung me in the thigh. Out on the deck, my mother lay me on my stomach, spread a poultice on my leg and read me Little House on the Prairie while it set. That bee sting brought me happiness.

Saturday night I finished Jack Maggs right before bed, but I was tired so I slept. In the morning when I woke I lay there, thinking about the characters, what had happened to them, and what their lives would be like, now that the book was over, as though they were myself. Something that comforts me, even though it shouldn’t comfort anyone, is the thought, We don’t know how the story ends, and in the best books this is as true as it is in life.

I took Henry to tennis. I told him that even if he fell asleep in the car on the way to tennis, like he did last week, he would still have to get up and go in to tennis. I said, Do you understand me, Henry? His eyes were half-closed. We were listening to a Steve Carell interview and a review of two percussion albums. He said he understood. He asked me not to turn the station. He wanted to hear the review of the percussion albums.

We got to tennis ten minutes early. Henry told me to walk with him to the back room and to stand quietly and not talk. I sat down, but he wouldn’t sit down with me. He stood behind me. I had two books with me, so I could read while he played tennis. They were ridiculous choices. One was a study of Japanese people and culture published in 1946. The other was a collection of three short novels by Karel Čapek that I had already read before, but had forgotten I had read. In any case, I wouldn’t have been able to read, because I was worrying about Henry. He stood behind me, silent and nervous. I tried to talk to him, but he would only nod back at me. He had told David that the other boys were mean to him, and that’s why he didn’t want to go to tennis. I was there to stop this from happening. But he didn’t think I could.

Four mothers sat around a table, talking loudly. Each had arranged herself with the aim of expressing nothing personal through her appearance, except wealth. I thought, If children come from these parents, how can I blame Henry for not liking them? My incandescent son. Ten minutes passed. It was time for tennis, and Henry hurried through the door, onto the court. I moved to a chair by the window with my book on Japanese people and culture in 1946, so I could watch him. He stood very tall and silent on the court. He did what the coach asked him to do. I held my breath. He hit the ball. He high-fived the other boys. I had to call David. Henry’s having fun, I whispered.

The kitchen cabinets don’t look white to me. They look cream. The stone looks white, the fixtures look white, the ceiling and the doors look white, but the cabinets look cream. I confronted the kitchen designer on this point when he came to pick up his check. I said, I’m concerned that the cabinets aren’t white, and I threw my sword down at the ground where it stuck, quivering. I shouted, Prove yourself a man! He grabbed the sword and we began to fight. It’s Decorator White, he said. There are lots of shadows in here. He feinted. I said, I looked at it at night and in the day and it doesn’t look white. No one could have made a mistake? I stabbed. He said, No, it’s definitely Decorator White, and I said, throwing my sword from my right hand to my left, You knew my stone was Carrera! He was unprepared for an attack coming from this side and I slashed his arm, drawing blood, which shocked both of us. He fell back against the cabinets, smearing red across them, and I approached, to finish him off. But he was playing, from his supine position he disarmed me, and I was forced to swear my fealty to him, and to Decorator White, and to say that I am happy having cream-colored cabinets, and in fact will call them white from now on, and so on.

Something very sad happened this weekend, but I’m not going to tell you about it. It was warm on Saturday, so warm that we could spread a blanket on the grass at the side of Henry’s soccer game and sit there in the late afternoon sun with our shoes off, watching him play. We had already exchanged Henry’s costume at Target, gone grocery shopping, and gotten the boys haircuts. David had gone to the dentist, my dentist, where he learned that some of his teeth were cracking. I shrugged my shoulders at the news. The dentist fixes teeth. He’ll be fine. Dad joined us at the soccer game, and on the blanket. He was taking the boys back to his house, so he and Mom could watch them while David and I went to the Spoon concert.

The West Side highway was backed up. We sat under the George Washington Bridge for a long time. I saw David’s office, which is filled with pictures of me, including one with my eyes closed. Why is that there? We ate Japanese noodles. I ate too much.

David went to the bar and I stood by myself, watching people meet each other, and the stage, where workers moved things around. On the sound system they played something with a slow rising line and I felt that, standing there, I was at the portal to happiness. When the band came on the bass and drums vibrated through my body and thrilled me. Then the band stopped thrilling us and everyone started talking about other things. We left during the encore. They didn’t play David’s song. There wasn’t traffic, driving home.

Sunday morning the fax didn’t work. We were tired and had to find a fax. We went to the supermarket in my parents’ town and I hit the car door against another car door but didn’t really notice and then a woman got out of the other car and yelled at me but then saw it was all right and waved me away.

We saw my uncles and other people at my parents’ house. Our children were happy, and happy to see us, and we kissed and hugged each other. My niece was there and did something funny and then everyone laughed and then she did it again, so everyone would laugh again, and this was even funnier than when she did it the first time. Then she did it again, and it was just as funny.

We had to get Henry back for a birthday party. John was tired but wouldn’t sleep. We all sat on the blanket on the grass at our house. John whispered David a spooky story. I went inside to get the car keys so I could pick Henry up at the birthday party and heard one of the doorbells ringing loudly and continuously. I pressed the other doorbell to see if that would make it stop, but instead both doorbells rang loudly and continuously. I saw dirt tracks all over the carpet. I called David and asked him to fix the doorbells and vacuum up where he had tracked mud on the carpet. The mud on the carpet was making me anxious. I took John to pick up Henry. When we got home David had shut off the doorbells by shutting off the power to parts of the house, and had vacuumed the carpet. That made me feel better. Now David was anxious. He was dressed but I had to get dressed. I ran upstairs to get dressed. My parents weren’t there. I didn’t have the right things to wear. I ran my stockings and had to find another pair. My parents were there. Henry was mad at my father. My father was hurt. David was yelling at me. I had to hug Henry. I had to leave. David drove quickly into the city. We couldn’t find parking. We tried to pull into one lot but it was full. Another lot was full but let us leave our car parked out over the sidewalk. We went into the building.

We went to pick up our car. They sent us outside where a crowd of people was gathered. An elevator delivered the cars to the crowd, one by one. We saw people we knew, and talked with them. They are probably moving to Brazil. We saw other people we knew. Cars blocked the road and other cars honked. Most of the cars that came out of the elevator scraped their undercarriages on the sidewalk. I was determined to avoid this. When our car came out, I did. I drove us to the West Side highway. It was stopped again. We sat in traffic. We couldn’t reach my parents to tell them this. Finally one of them called us.

I wanted them to see the movie they wanted to see, but they were too tired, they wanted to go home. I ate all the chicken salad Mom had given us and was unsatisfied. Both children were too tired, they fell apart near bed time. Henry was too tired to brush his teeth. I wanted to read books with him but instead I said, You win, I’m shutting the door and I don’t want to hear you again tonight. David had a call he had to be on. I watched TV by myself in the dark. This is how it happened. This is how it always happens.

Dearest Darling,

How is the trip? I hope you are having a good time and getting lots of work done. The children and I are fine here without you. What I mean to say is, Don’t be alarmed. Insurance covers most of it. As for the fish, well, there’s no use getting sentimental about him. Especially now. Oh, darling, it’s all going to be fine, and in six months or so you’ll barely remember what happened. Not that you know what happened, if you’ve only read the news reports. They get things wrong, around the margins, usually. Or sometimes. Anyway, it was lucky we’d turned off the gas. Think about how bad things could have been. Right? Everything’s relative, except morality. Wink, wink. One great thing is that the kids love camping. They’re as happy as pigs in shit.

The point is, darling, that I don’t want you to worry. Keep your head in the game! We’ll still be here, when you get back.

Love, etc.

I’m on hold. The music is very beautiful. There are voices singing, and a saxophone. Now I am talking to someone. I am saying, Hello. I am saying, Can you help me with this? He is saying, Let’s pretend. I am saying, I don’t want to pretend. I want you to help. He is saying, That is exactly what I’m going to pretend I am doing.

I am saying, I regret my previous decision. He is saying, Shhhh, little baby. It’s all right. He is saying, Think of a stream of golden coins falling from my hand into yours. I am saying, That’s how I got into this mess. He is saying, Isn’t the sound of coins falling from my hand into yours soothing? I am saying, uncertainly, There are some things money can’t buy.

I am saying, I am unhappy. He is saying, Of course you are. I am saying, Do you understand what I am saying? He is saying, It is possible to be happy in this universe. I am saying, Not with the phone service I currently have.

He is saying, Have you ever been online? It is a marvelous world where wondrous things can happen. I am saying, I am your responsibility. He is saying, Look over there! I am saying, What? What is it? Our conversation is over. I curse his name.

Whatever you fail to learn from us today you will never learn.

This sentence is bothering me. I should turn the page that this sentence is printed on, but I don’t, because I keep thinking that, unlike Proust’s narrator, who passes three trees that say this to him, I will be able to reread the sentence and learn what I should learn from it. I don’t think it’s over, is what I’m saying, I don’t think it’s past, I make sure that it’s not past, by refusing to turn the page. I’m not in a carriage, the carriage isn’t taking me anywhere, I’m here in my office at my desk, the book to my left, lying on my calendar, permanently open to this page, lying flat open to this page, because it has been open to the page for so long. I don’t feel the grief that the narrator feels, grief “as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself,” because I keep myself suspended, on this page, in one place. I think, looking back, that once I did feel this grief, the first time I read this passage I did feel the grief the narrator felt, but that was a long time ago, and now the grief is something else, still grief, but not the grief of losing a friend or feeling something die in myself, but a more shallow and yet more debilitating grief, a grief not of being pierced but being numbed, petrified, even, the feeling that each time I fail to turn the page and travel forward, each time I go back to see if this time I can learn what I want to learn from the trees on the page, I become more wooden, less able to feel things, less able to do what I want to do. You see what is happening, I am not in the carriage, I am not moving on, I am becoming the tree, rooted, wood, waving at the carriage as it moves away.

This is a story about a sink that was too small and a car that whined in the cold, the boy who didn’t want to grow and the boy who learned to read. The boy who didn’t want to grow would only wear old clothes, nothing new, and the boy who learned to read loved to read the word drool, and could spell, when it was spelled out loud near him, the words dump and asshole. They had wonderful times in the house with the bats and the mice and the rats and the spiders, killing things and listening to them scratch in the walls at night, except that the boys slept soundly, on their backs, their arms thrown out, and never heard the mice at night. Only their father, the man who could hear the beating of enormous moth wings, heard the mice in the walls at night. Their mother, who did not hear the mice in the walls at night, did hear their father at night. Their father had holes in his shoes and their mother had one silver hair and an unreliable lower back and had somehow lost her serve, and even though she couldn’t hear the mice in the walls at night she could hear the people on the other side of the tennis court telling each other what they should do with her second serve, since there was so little on it.

But this isn’t just her story, this is their story, the story of the sink and the car and the two boys, one who didn’t want to grow old, but needed new shoes, and one who learned to read, the story of the animals outside the house, which collected nuts, and inside the house, which made noises in the walls. It is the story of the train ride home, and orange cones on the road. It is the story of everything, even of the stories we haven't told.

I used to worry a lot about death. I can’t say I’ve stopped, entirely, but lately I’ve wound it down. I miss worrying about death, actually, because it was such a nice solid unanswerable thing to worry about, and I didn’t have to feel petty that it made me so anxious. Of course it made me anxious, it was death! Death is really, really scary and bad! Now when I’m very anxious I have to admit, as I did this morning, that it’s just about how people perceive me, not getting work done, and feeling that I’ve failed. Which is silly, really. Or at least more silly than death.

Now I worry about my back going out. Yes, there are plenty of things to worry about, but none as satisfying as death.

David just said to me, Why don’t you write the history of our marriage to date? Isn’t he a bold and saucy fellow! And what would he like me to tell you? Is he expecting some kind of paean to his strength and fortitude? A paragraph or two on his warmth and love for our children? An ironic aside about his romantic foibles? Bastard. He’s not going to get any of that.

Or is he being serious, he wants a history? Doesn’t he know that marriage isn’t historical, it is the end of history, that once the marriage begins all is as it should be, and will be forever? I love you, I love you more, I love you always. Is that a history? I didn’t think so.

Yesterday I thought of my grandparents’ house in Great Neck, their second to last house, small, yellow, and oddly built, with steps up to the little sun room, and down to something else, and up again to the living room, with further steps to the bedrooms, where we almost never went. The backyard was a hill that ran down to the street.

The room I always think of, when I think of this house, is the dark dining room, filled with its table, on whose walls were hung several oil paintings. I almost remember one of these paintings, or I should say I remember its setting, a little piece of land in front of a wall, but not its subject. I know why I think particularly of this room: When my mother’s mother died, and her father remarried, his new wife, my grandmother, made an effort to instill table manners in her stepchildren, instructing them never to take food without offering it to someone else first. In a spirit of enmity, my mother and her brothers spent a meal offering each other the food my grandmother cooked, but never actually eating it. My mother told us this story.

Yesterday I realized that this wasn’t the dining room it happened in, that my grandparents had moved twice from that dining room, before they were in the one that I saw, and remember. Then I realized that none of the memories I had of my grandparents’ house, or almost none of them, were memories of things that had taken place there. They were stories my mother had told me, that I had grafted onto an alien place. It was useful to have in mind a house where these bad things had happened.

While I was playing tennis today I thought, This is a great story, how strange and annoying this woman is, her dumb jokes (She has Someheimer's, instead of Alzheimer's), the way she immodestly lifts up her white skirt to show me where she keeps the balls, how she constantly name drops (Ivan Lendl?) and brags (I used to win this division every year), and how she knows all the rules and won’t let me leave the court even one minute early, even though she has won one game out of the 18 we have played. But then I came home and for some reason it wasn’t a great story. Why is it that hating other people is rarely a good story? I wonder, because hating people is actually a very interesting activity, while you’re doing it.

The tree that Anne Frank liked to look at is riddled with mushrooms and infested with moths that make its leaves curl and turn yellow. It should be cut down, and a new tree planted in its place, but no one wants to do this.

We are all parents of Anne Frank now, so we will act as mistaken as real parents, and try to please her by taking great care with the things that don’t matter, and doing as we please with regard to everything else.

David said, How do you know there isn’t an afterlife? I said, You could say that about anything imaginary. Even in the course of our fight about the afterlife, I thought, Even though there is no way that there’s an afterlife, it would still be a nice surprise.

Back at the dentist yesterday. We’re friends, now, because last time I was there the doctor said, I have to do an impression, and then I said, Do you do a lot of impressions? And he said, Just one, and I said, What is it?, and he said, Jack Benny, and I said, Well, do it, and he said, Rochester. Then we were friends, and he took an impression of my teeth.

This time he had just hit a deer with his car, or the deer had hit his car with itself, on the Taconic while the doctor was going 70 miles an hour. There was some question at the beginning of the visit as to whether I would need anesthetic, which was settled quickly, and then a variety of terrible tasting things were introduced to my mouth and I thought, I wish that they had, in addition to anesthetic, something that would keep you from tasting anything. When I’m at the dentist I keep butting my head up against the idea of oblivion.

Dear Person I Don’t Know,

Please believe me when I say that you and I are one. We eat the same food, drink the same wine, hum the same tunes under our breath. Remember when the window came down suddenly and crushed your finger the other day? We both say Mother Fucker when that happens. Listen to me: I happen to know that you experience, as I do, transcendent happiness watching someone run for a bus. When it’s time to say goodbye you try to pretend that you’re going to see the other person in a little while. Then you’re able to leave without saying goodbye, or kissing. For some reason we prefer things this way. Wide streets are vertiginous for me. And for you! Neither of us feels any guilt about stealing books from friends.

Nothing is as soothing as spaghetti, for us. We expect to take short showers, but never can. We like it when we’re somewhere we can’t understand what anyone else is saying. We are jealous of the people who work in shipping stores, and as baseball scouts. It’s difficult to keep driving past motels.

I could go on, but I know you're busy, and easily bored. And I know you believe me. How could it be otherwise? Yes, you are me and I am you. Love me. Do what I want you to do.

Yours, etc.

We have two chairs which were given to us by, if I remember correctly, the cousin of an aunt. This cousin lived near us when we lived in the city the first time, had just had twins, and wanted to clear out her apartment. She wanted the chairs to stay in the family, and she considered us family, so she gave us the chairs, with the request that we not sell them or put them out for pickup, but keep them in the family and if we needed to, give them back to her one day.

One of the chairs had a broken arm, which we repaired. One is in the dining room. Where is the other one? Somewhere.

One thing that was funny about this woman, whose relation to me is, as I said, attenuated, but enough that I have her chairs, is that she called me by my mother-in-law’s name, and I answered to it. I was walking up Broadway when I heard someone call, Claire! and I turned, because Claire is both close to my name and the name of someone who is important to me. I turned when she called, Claire! and saw her and said, Hi!, and then I found that I couldn’t say, You got my attention by calling me Claire but that’s really not my name. So I have her chairs and I have been very unkind, because I never corrected her.

At temple on Friday, I was worried that my father would misbehave. Scoff and get restless and telegraph his contempt for the proceedings to the other people there. Mom and Dad raised us antireligious, and inconsistent. Otherwise I couldn’t have this situation, I couldn’t be worried that Dad would misbehave at the temple I joined so that my children will be able to understand what Judaism is, before they reject it.

There was a period in my 20s when I had just married David and my parents and I fought bitterly, and I thought that I would never have the relationship that I wanted with them. David and I moved to Brussels and had a baby, and for this reason and others, things improved. I used to wish that I hadn’t had that period with my parents, first because it was painful for me, and then, more recently, because I hated having hurt my parents. But now, strangely, I realize I’m glad that we had a period of acrimony and grief. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to see my parents as clearly as I do, and love them as much as I do.

At the temple I was worried about Dad. The night before he’d started laughing when Mom said the word bima and at the temple he’d been making jokes as we settled down. I guess Phil Spector got out for this, was one, on seeing a man with enormous head of hair. Also, I had no idea what the service was going to be like, and I wanted everyone to like it and not, if they were my father, think it was stupid and a waste of time. This isn’t a story about God, this is a story about my family, and how, as I listened to the music and read, in the prayer book, about repentance, which is the act of being sorry for what you’ve done and changing yourself, making yourself better than you had been, I stopped worrying about my Dad, because I knew that down the row he was reading the same thing, and that he would feel the same way I did about it.

I walked into the kitchen, said something to Henry, looked at the headlines in the newspaper, and felt a sense of dread steal over me. It’s still here. I thought, by going through everything I looked at and thought about, by doing some detective work, that I would be able to identify the cause and defang the dread, but I haven’t. It remains, and it remains mysterious. I went over the paper, to see if it was something there, but I can’t imagine that the dollar’s descent to parity with the Canadian dollar or even the Mets’ spectacular flameout, unsettling though they are, is responsible for this. It could be the war, of course, but it's not.

We can go a little deeper, we can get personal, it could be my visit with my parents last night, which wasn’t ideal, or my mistaking when Henry’s tennis classes started and causing him to miss the first two sessions, or the fact that I tried to tidy up the house last night and realized that I live in a pigsty shit-hole, or the embarrassment I felt at the end of my tennis lesson, when I almost vomited on the court, or the more private shame of slipping on the bathmat, failing, over several long seconds, to regain my balance, and falling into the tub.

While I try to get to the bottom of this mystery, or better yet, while I don’t, I’ll mention that I’m reading the new Junot Díaz book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. So far my favorite thing about the book is that fact that, with big chunks of it in Spanish and other parts referencing sci-fi stuff I know nothing about, I can barely understand some of what I’m reading. Incomprehensibility, I think, is totally underrated as a literary technique. Not only is it realistic, a tool for representing the life we currently (slang, cell phones, channel-surfing) and kind of eternally (born into history, unable to maintain focus or consciousness) lead, it shows you, again, what writing can do: Writing brings you the pieces, the parts, and you work to make it whole, to solve the mystery. Or you don't.

I couldn’t write yesterday. There’s no excuse for that. I should probably be punished. But perhaps you’re not used to punishing people. You don’t know how, you say. You never do it. While I don’t believe you at all, I am happy to help out. I punish my children from time to time, and I think I have the hang of it. Also, although I don’t generally admit this, sometimes I get angry at other adults and punish them. I actually like it much better than punishing the children. Do you remember the part in Anna Karenina when Levin is angry with Kitty and realizes that he can’t punish her without hurting himself? Unfortunately, it’s like that with my children, for me. So it’s better to punish other people, people I don’t love, if it’s at all possible.

Two ways that I punish other adults, while we’re on the topic, is that I forget their names or don’t call them back. Those are my main techniques. Does anyone else have another good way to punish an adult you know? If you did, you could use it on me.

Otherwise, you’re kind of stuck with the kids’ punishments. You know, no TV, no dessert, no special thing that you’re looking forward to. You have to find something I really care about and take it away from me. Sometimes, with the children, I miscalculate, and take something away from them that they don’t actually care about. But they usually let me know this right away, and then I find something they do care about and take that away.

You could also give me a time out. I don’t know if that’s really a punishment, though. It works great with the kids, in the sense that everyone cools down and in fact the kids generally forget what the whole thing was about and just start happily playing by themselves, but you may not think it’s harsh enough for me. Remember, there’s no excuse for me missing a day of writing. There are billions and trillions of things to write about and I wrote about none of them, even though I said I would.

Maybe you don’t want me to cry? I can’t promise that I won’t. I cry a lot, although less than I used to. If you’re really worried that I’ll cry and you’re uncomfortable with this, I have another idea for you: positive reinforcement. Set up a chart and give me a star each time I write. When I get twenty stars, let me choose anything I want as my reward.

Henry was stung by a bee today, even though yesterday, when he we told him not throw his water bottle at the trash and he did and missed and then we yelled at him to pick up the water bottle and put it in the trash and he stood there instead and cried that the bee he saw by the trash was going to sting him if he moved closer, I said to him, The bee is not going to get you, Henry, several times. Even though I said this, the bee did get him today.

Yesterday we went to David’s parents’ house for the New Year. His parents are having some kind of discussion with each other about whether they should move from their house, and as part of this, perhaps, his mother had gone through all the drawers in the house and collected orphaned old photographs, which she had boxed and put in the basement. David’s family’s pictures are really wonderful, much better, I think, than an average box of photos, much more interesting, certainly, than my family’s photographic odds and ends, whose pleasure is personal. David’s family’s photos are snapshots, mostly badly taken, but the people in them are iconic, and they stand, as far as I can tell, in front of movie backdrops. If they are somewhere warm, there are palm trees behind them. Apart from the pictures I saved of David when he looked like John, I saved a picture of David’s grandfather in front of a waterfall, holding a newspaper, and one of his parents wearing mustaches. His father on the ground, while David slept in the vee of his legs. His mother, young and formal, posing by a formal painting of another young girl.

Now they’re mine. I had to think of Max Dean’s As Yet Untitled, a robot that removes snapshots from a box and shreds them, unless you save them by putting your hands on the machine. When I saw the work I was impressed by the amount of guilt it was able to produce in its viewer, who had to leave it with the knowledge that there would be snapshots she couldn’t save. But now, going through snapshots, I found myself disappointed with Dean's piece. It doesn't seem to contemplate the fact that the play it acts out is universal, ongoing, and inevitable. Nothing stops it. Certainly not my hands on the machine.

Faucets. Think about them. Please? I do. David does. My mother, to whom I have sent a question-filled email, is drafting a significant work on the subject. We say no to Instant Hot, that’s easy, that’s very, very easy. That’s ridiculously easy. We say yes to spray, but pull-out spray or separate spray? Not so easy. Harder. David wants full spray force, though, and thinks we’ll only get that from a separate nozzle. Darlings, please pay attention. This is so important. This is about faucets. This is about water. This is about life. Separate spray then. We’re all agreed. So what about the actual little things you use to turn them on? Levers? Handles? Now it’s getting hard, it’s getting really, really hard.

Things get hard. Of course things get hard. That’s when you have to get specific, you have to get in there, you have to imagine yourself using the lever, using the handle, spraying the water, cleaning up. But imagination isn’t enough. You have to go to other people’s houses and do their dishes. Yes, you have to. Just knock on the door. Introduce yourself. Explain the situation. They may understand.

We were in Brussels, and I was at the pâtisserie. I was in the apartment, with our new babysitter, watching the BBC. I was walking to buy something, something else, and our downstairs neighbor pulled her car across the street in front of me, to see if I was okay. At that point in time David and I shared a cell phone, we knew where the other was, we didn’t worry about each other, or had only just started to worry about each other a few months earlier, when I was pregnant. I remember at the end of the pregnancy I used to root through my purse to check the cell phone to see if I had missed a call, before realizing, again, that no one would be calling me, I would be calling them.

I want to go back further, more, to see how it was then, when everything was wonderful except for loneliness and, in the winter, dodgy heat. When I went to the salle de kinésthérapie and took my turn on the massage bed and watched the snow fall outside. When the man from the next building over stopped us on the street to explain that he and his wife practiced naturisme, and he hoped we wouldn’t mind. When the car was towed, and we found it.

It was as real as anything else. I can see that now. I wonder if the point of thinking and writing about past things is that by doing this you make them real, and by making them real you promise that someday this will all seem real, as well.

Tennis tryouts. Were you there? I didn’t see you. And I don’t think you’re making it. Sorry, it’s just that the teams are really full this year, and you’re not that good. Also we’re all friends already. It's hard to see how you'd fit in. Please try again next year!

Last night I was thinking about Bonnard, and about the pictures he painted of his wife in the bath, and I thought, I should make David take baths at night. He would enjoy it, if the Mets weren’t on, or the Islanders, and I could sit by the side of the bath and make conversation and meditate on what it is to be a man, which is something I don’t know firsthand.

He could be my muse. And he would be clean.

I’m still thinking about it. Not making him, but requesting that he do it, and then running the bath, so it’s all done for him, and seems inviting. If he didn't want to talk, I could have reading material out for him. I'd still sit on the toilet and watch him, though. He'd have to get used to that.

When my appliances arrive, I am going to be as happy as a woman in a retrograde ad for cleaning products, I am going to load my dishwasher and light my stove and wash my clothes with a spring in my step and, if I could whistle, a whistle on my lips. I can whistle, but it’s a sad little whistle, made a strange way, and I can’t control the note it sounds. I mean, I sound the same note again and again. Anyway, I am going to be so happy doing housework! I am going to tell all my friends how wonderful my new appliances are. Did I already mention that we’ve ordered a microwave that’s a drawer? I hope this is as wonderful as it seems. When the new appliances come, and are installed, and the kitchen has been painted and the stools are at the island and my new sink gleams, I am going to experience real happiness on a daily basis. And you, my friends, will envy me.

First day of school, darlings. Why wasn’t there more to do? Henry got dressed and I put a snack in his knapsack and that was it. John got in his stroller wearing a headlamp on his head, but for some reason my parents always get the kids headlamps, and Henry wasn’t bothered by this. He's used to headlamps.

I forced my way into the classroom, to see Henry’s cubby, but Henry still managed to run off without giving me a kiss. I understand. Sob. He sat next to his best friend from last year, and John and I retreated to the hall, which was mobbed with parents. I peeked through the classroom window to give Henry a crazy I’m your Mommy! wave and smile, which he graciously ignored, but was basically shouldered aside by one of the dads, who was taking a series of photographs. Now give me studious, more, more, yes, that’s it, all right, now pretend you don’t even notice me, you don’t notice your dad standing by the window taking thirty million pictures of you, perfect! Now hold that for a minute.

I can’t wait to pick him up and ask him questions and get evasive answers about everything. I mean it! I can’t wait.

Last week I wasn’t myself. David’s parents took the kids for two nights, which left me three days where I wasn’t a mother, or was only barely a mother. I went into the city. My skirt had been ripped into pieces by the train so I had bought a new skirt at Grand Central, and this was the skirt I wore for the next three days. It was tight, and hard to walk in, and I wore it with high heels. I didn’t feel like I looked like a hooker but there was whistling.

I went to the Benglis/Bourgeois show I’d wanted to see. Bourgeois is a genius, she sculpts in some kind of language that is entirely invented and completely transparent, to express feelings that you have, but that you didn’t know you had. These feelings were mixed up for me with the fact that there were people working in the gallery who wouldn't acknowledge that I was there. I said, Hello, and they looked away. I searched up and down Ninth and Tenth Avenues for the book store I liked but couldn’t find it anywhere. I hailed a taxi.

I met David for dinner and he brought me roses, which I also experienced as not normal, not for me. The food was spicy and my nose ran. We walked back up to our hotel and my legs rubbed together and chafed and in fact I was in some pain. At the hotel, everything was dim, faded, ugly, cheap and old, and the anonymity that I normally love in hotels joined in the general assault on my self. In the morning David left before I got up and I didn’t want to leave the flowers in the room. I knocked on the door to the staff hall and offered them to the people there, who had been laughing and happy. When a woman came forward to take them I said, Happy Valentine’s Day, early? Or late? And she laughed and hugged me.

Crap, I felt weird. I couldn’t write in the blog, I couldn’t shape myself into anything, and I still wonder if I am shapeable, if I am a thing, or if I'm something less defined than that.

But the children are back, which helps. And I know what I am going to write next, which also helps. Tennis team tryouts are next week. Our kitchen has windows and doors. Everything will start to appear orderly again, and I will know my place.

I am going to take one more break this summer. I should be back after Labor Day.

It’s not that I’m not doing things, I am doing things, I am doing a lot of things, I’m taking trains into the city and ripping my skirt on the arm rest so that my underwear shows and I have to run into a store and buy a new skirt, I’m meeting my youngest sister for dinner and getting schmackled on a bubbly red, I’m walking home from the train station at 11 under a full moon, I’m reading the entire New Yorker in bed in the morning while the men hammer and bang things somewhere else on my house. The house! I’m driving to Stamford to look for wood flooring, I’m agreeing to expensive additional procedures for the renovation, I’m calling the tree man in for a consultation, I’m talking to our contractor about our progress and handing him an enormous check, I am in pursuit of the perfect front door.

I'm reserving a room at a midtown hotel, where I'm planning to meet my husband tonight, I'm holding an appointment for a haircut on Wednesday, before I head to the Open with my father. I’m slowly making my way through Saturday, although it’s overdue, I’m going through the children’s papers for the first day of school, I’m following Gonzales’ resignation, and the arrest of Larry Craig. I'm eating breakfast, and I'm even doing the dishes.

The children are gone, is the dramatic way of saying that they are at their grandparents’, and happy, and that they slept through the night. I had so many things to do in their absence, but I didn’t understand how I would feel, doing them.

Saturday morning John and I sat on the bathroom floor, me in my bathrobe, him naked and wrapped in a towel and waiting to vomit again. I was sorry he was vomiting, and he was really sorry he was vomiting, but at the same time it was cozy together on the cold tile floor. He knew I loved him, and I knew I loved him, too. Later we both fell asleep in the playroom and were woken when he vomited on my chest. This is the easy part of being a mother.

I’m letting the children watch TV every night this week, and not just good TV. Bad TV. The fourteenth in the Air Bud series, in which the dogs are puppies and talk and you want to throw yourself against a wall so you don't have to watch anymore. Last night the boys settled down for a remarkably (I’m finding putting John to bed tiring, so I put it off) large part of Angels in the Outfield, a film that forces you to explain to your kids how parents can legally relinquish custody, and endorses cheating. And has angels. Freakish, smiling, cheating angels.

We watched part of Time Warp Trio on Tuesday. I actually consider this good TV—I learn so much!—except for the ads, which are targeted at broke grown-ups or young children, or both (McDonald’s). And yet I love some of the ads. Henry and I share a fascination with both the rocket blaster fishing gun, and the one for the cake decorating kit with three thousand attachments, all of which, except for the grass-making one, seem wonderful to Henry. When he saw the grass-making one spewing fake green icing grass onto a cake, he said, Okay, that one’s gross. But the rest are so cool. Can I have it? Please? I’ll pay for it with my own money.

He loses two more teeth and he’s got enough. Speaking of which, I had somehow forgotten I had the dentist today. Partial crown: mother fucking shit and piss. I’ve given up on the idea I’ll be able to watch TV there. If anyone has any ideas of what I should think about for the ninety minutes that I have to keep my mouth open, let me know.

Henry and I went into the city together, today. We were going to the Shake Shack and then I thought we’d like the Rudolf Stingel exhibit at the Whitney. As it turns out we did not, we wanted to leave almost immediately after he wrote “Star Wars” and I wrote “Carey and David 10 Years” on Stingel’s foil wall, but we did like the Shake Shack and the train ride and I think some of the walking around was okay.

It was strange today not to know, exactly, what my relationship with Henry was. Well, obviously I am his mother and he is my son and I am 35 and he is 6, but apart from that, I was a little adrift. Should I make conversation? Should I bring up topics of interest? Should he? And what would be topics of interest for us? Because most of the things I talk about he considers a little naggy on my part, and most of the things he talks about involve gas or the toilet, which I’m not supposed to be interested in. (Although I am.) In fact, one of our conversations today went like this:

Me: Which was your favorite thing at the Shake Shack? The burger, the fries, or the ice cream?

Him: The burger, definitely. Speaking of which, can I go to the bathroom now?

He really did need to go to the bathroom. The point is, we’re not making witty repartée, for the most part. We don’t drink martinis together and he doesn’t accompany my singing on the piano, either. Sometimes I tell stories, which passes the time, and sometimes Henry pursues a line of inquiry that interests us both for a little while. Who was the first person? That kind of thing.

Today I learned to be quiet, and I got to hold hands. We held hands in the crowded city for almost an entire afternoon, and I will be jealous of my old self for that in the very near future.

You want to know more about vacation. It’s not enough that we caught a fish and it lay dying in a metal box at our feet and then we ate it and it was delicious. Even if I had told you that its gills were “frightening ... fresh and crisp with blood,” like Elizabeth Bishop said they would be, that wouldn’t be enough. How was it really, Carey? Did the children have fun? Did you eat lobster? Did you play tennis? Did you get some sleep? Tell us how it was, how it was, how it was.

You guys have a crazy idea of vacation.

Elizabeth Murray died while we were away, and I didn’t know it until yesterday. When my Nana died I expected to find her death in the papers, and for Murray’s death I expected to be called and told. I didn’t know Murray, of course, but I loved her, and shouldn’t I have been told?

Murray was a real artist, she addressed directly what art should be and what art should be about, she took me to school, and I’m sorry she died. She was young, and still painting. In fifth grade she sold erotic drawings to her classmates. She understood sex and babies and the way the daily stuff is eternal, and she made paintings that embodied all of this. Another way I've been thinking about this is, She understood that everything is a problem, and she loved that about everything.

As for Nana, well, she was the most important person in the world and I’m still surprised so few people knew it. When she got into the back of a car so that she could lie down comfortably for the ride somewhere—she was old, her legs troubled her—you knew that she lay in the back of the car with her feet up as a full person, as a mind that never rested, always pushing and thinking and loving.

We went fishing in a hired boat, with a hired captain and a hired mate. They took us out of the harbor along the submerged jetty, out past Great Point to a spot where two currents came together. There was a line running down the water: on one side it was glassy green and rolling, on the other it was dark chop. The mate set up a line for Henry, and he got an immediate bite, a hard pull on the line that you could see was something big. He reeled the fish in and the mate caught it in a net. It was a 34-inch striped bass, good eating, and relatively rare. It was a prize, so we kept it. The mate dropped it in a metal box at Henry and David’s feet, where it thrashed and died. We would eat half of it for dinner, and give the other half to the mate.

The boat circled around, crossing the currents, for another hour or so, and we caught bluefish for the rest of the time. They’re very oily, and my family doesn’t like to eat them, so the mate threw them back. After that there was just the pleasure of repetition, of letting the line drag, the boat turn, feeling the fish bite, reeling it in, then watching the mate catch the line and use a metal piece he had to free the fish from the hook. We were never sick. I thought we might be, but we were too busy reeling in fish to be sick. The captain called down from his seat above us, encouraging us to catch more, showing us where the blues were making the water virtually boil, from their numbers. On the way in and way out you couldn’t hear anything but the wind and the motor.

The fishing was stupid, it was fishing for stupid people, but it was still something I did with my family, somewhere beautiful. We killed something, and we ate it. Now we’re back.

I'll be back soon, I promise.

I was trying again, but now everything was wrong. The sun was too strong, the trees were overgrown, the bridge was closed and I had to walk around. Cars were parked where they shouldn’t have been. I couldn’t find the House Where I Went To My First Party (Not Really), or I didn’t know which house it was. The Murakami House’s hedge was too high. Then I turned and went completely the wrong way and didn’t realize it for a quarter mile, somehow. I hadn’t noticed that all the houses were wrong. I had to backtrack. I felt shy about taking pictures of people’s houses. I thought I was going to be yelled at or arrested. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind. The pictures I wanted to take weren’t there, they were somewhere else. Maybe I should just be taking pictures of my parents’ house, I thought.

So you have words. Not pictures. I’m glad, by the way, I failed. I was being stupid, but sometimes being stupid is correct. I had thought, I’ll walk and catalogue as I go, but you can’t catalogue. I remembered: You have to create. If I were really a photographer, I wouldn’t have taken the walk, I would have just gone to the parts of the walk I cared about, I would have arranged things, I would have planted things, I would have waited until the light was right or I would have fixed the light how I wanted it. I would have waited at the Home Invasion house until someone passed in a truck, and I would have caught the end of the truck as it went by, or I would have hired someone to drive by. I’m no Gregory Crewdson, with a totally controlled sound stage filled with props and actors, but maybe I should be. He’s not wrong.

I’m glad I failed, because I want to write. I thought I might want pictures, but I don’t. I ran home from the 2005 Elizabeth Murray retrospective at MoMA in a fever of excitement because I thought that I had seen into the heart of things. I knew, because the paintings had told me, that Murray had spent her time as an artist identifying, and then loving, and then trying to solve the problem of painting, which was that art was about movement, and paintings, of course, are static. So, I mooned, What was the thing that writing didn’t do that it had to do, what was the problem that I had to solve? I ask myself this question, still, every day. My problem is that all I see is what writing can do, because writing never ends, it keeps running down the page, I can keep writing and writing until I put my finger down precisely on the spot.

For the first several days of any vacation, I think, What’s vacation for? That’s how much fun I am to be with.

But I’m even more fun before vacation starts. Five days, maybe six, if you’re lucky, and sometimes people are very lucky, I know my husband considers himself (he’s said this) the luckiest man on the face of the Earth, before we leave I become, what’s the word? totally anxious about everything that I ever had to do or will have to do until the end of time. What about the children? is a thing I think to myself. They will have school in three weeks. What am I going to pack for Henry’s lunch? How will I ever get the doctor to sign their medical forms? How will I convince her to do this? And money! We might not have enough! David, do we have enough money? He says What? and rolls over. Also: Did I really graduate from law school? I never got my diploma in the mail, it’s true. On the other hand, the school communicated with the Bar and I couldn’t have passed the Bar if I didn’t graduate and I did pass the Bar. And yet those dreams that I have another paper to write are so convincing. Speaking of dreams, and writing, and all that, all that good stuff, Did I spend the last six years writing a shit novel? I hope not! Body hair. I must have it removed. Am I inappropriate with the children? Was Mom tense on the phone with me? What did Dad mean when he said that thing the other day? And what about the laundry and I have to get to the drug store and are we renting car seats? Aha! That’s it! Those things are vacation things. I’m tense about vacation! Relief floods through me, my husband is grasped around the middle and lifted into the air, the children are kissed all over their ears, because they've turned their heads from me. Vacation! Not my whole fucking life. Thank God. Now I can go lie on the sofa and put off packing until the last possible minute.

I’m not leaving tomorrow, by the way, I’ll be here tomorrow, but after that you’ll have to win your own round-robins and threaten your own children and wish you were somewhere else, on your own. You won’t have me to do it for you. You’ll have to make your own half-assed references to other people’s art. Maybe this will be good for you. Maybe this is just the kind of thing you need. I think it is, actually. You’re lazy, and you’re soft.

In my imaginary world I am holding the askos that the Getty has to send back to Italy in my hand, stroking it, I am at the Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois show, feeling it, I am in Edinburgh participating in that play that you act in, on instructions fed to you through your headphones. I once cracked open a Walter Benjamin book and read ten pages in it (I meant to read more, I wanted to read more! but I didn’t). I’m not bragging when I say I have no idea what Benjamin wrote, except I remember a story he said he had read once, himself: the story of a man who goes into a book store and sees the titles of all the books he can’t buy, and so sets about writing books to go with the titles he can’t afford.

Darlings, you are looking at the winner of the Ridgeway Golf Course Play for Pink tennis round robin. Or not looking at, but thinking about. Or not thinking about, but ignoring. No, if you’re reading this you’re not ignoring me, you’re interested in me, you want to know more about my tennis triumphs and even, should I say it? my tennis failures. You were there for me for my defeat to Joyce in the semifinals and you’re here for me now.

How did I do it? I played ad side and poached a lot. I put a lot of pace on the ball. I came up to net on deep shots. It goes without saying that I stayed focused, and didn’t let the bad points get me down. That’s key, not getting down. Not letting the stupid shit decisions you sometimes make on the court get into your head and affect how you think about yourself. You are the point you are about to win, not the point you lost.

I tried not to serve on a bad toss.

For lunch I had poached salmon with a subpar green sauce, shrimp salad, hearts of palm and artichoke slivers in balsamic vinaigrette, and several Arnold Palmers. I didn’t waste time with the low-cost buffet items. I finished up with a few cookies and a piece of pineapple. The served dessert was banal, and I ignored it.

The goodie bag included socks, pink tennis balls, and a bottle of perfume. I don’t know yet what my prize was, because I left the luncheon early. Amy C. is going to drop it by later.

So congratulate me!

I’ve been thinking a little about things that are perfect, as a category of things. The library I used to work in, and certain hotels, and Leonard Sciascia’s book To Each His Own. Train stations, and some pop songs: closed systems that achieve every goal that is set for them.

But then I think about Anna Karenina, which is imperfect, and better than most other things.

Which should I go for? Being perfect, or being great?

I gave blood on Friday and then went to see the Bourne Ultimatum. I should have something substantive to say about the movie, but I don’t; watching it by myself on a summer afternoon was like getting a shot of something: instantaneous, icy. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of pleasure, which is that it numbs. On Saturday David said I smelled like chlorine and gin, and I said, Isn’t the point of gin that it doesn’t smell? and he said, Then tonic. He meant it as a compliment. We drove into and out of the city with the windows down and the music up and I said, We are a Pleasuremobile.

I’m going to give blood today, so I reread Updike’s “Giving Blood.” It begins, “The Maples had been married now nine years, which is almost too long.” I’ve been married almost ten. The Maples are in their thirties, living in the suburbs, with children, and guess what? So am I. I bought the book this story is in, Too Far to Go, when I was nineteen, for a class, and I marked passages faintly in pencil. What’s funny to me now is not that I didn’t understand my future when I was nineteen, but that I felt it so intensely. The cruel things he says to her, the part where she tells him, “Now you’ve said things that I’ll always remember,” struck at my heart when I was younger, unmarried, without any children or even a concept of myself as a wife and mother. Now I read the story for the funny parts, the technique, and the ideas behind it. If my younger self hadn’t marked the way faintly in pencil, I probably wouldn’t remember that I came to it emotionally, first.

I’ve given blood twice before, and both times I felt I had to. Everyone was doing it. Yesterday I sat in the ice cream shop as the kids ate in silent dedication and read a sign on the window, backwards, the letters reversed. Blood emergency, I read, and then when I saw the date for giving donations, I thought, Yes. Is this further proof of my new, old cold-bloodedness? That I no longer fear the needle and a dizzy spell? What won’t I be afraid of next?

Last night sometime in the wee hours I was woken by my husband saying, What the fuck is that? He heard something in the bathroom. He turned his light on. He picked up the yardstick that the previous owners left in my closet and that the children like to whack things with, and advanced, cautiously. He still heard it. What could it be? Could it be the beating of the wings of an enormous moth? It was. When I woke up in the morning the first thing I said to him was You’re part of the conspiracy, by which I meant the conspiracy to wake me at least once during every fucking night, but which probably sounded crazy. Well, I was crazy. When it was time to go and John started whining for a Starburst, because we have a bag of Starbursts on top of the fridge that started as a rewards system for using the potty and which has mutated into a fountain of bribes, I said, You are getting to the door by the count of three or the Starbursts are going in the garbage, and held them over the garbage like someone in a Neil LaBute play.

The thing about Crazy Mommy is that Crazy Mommy wins.

I don’t like Crazy Mommy. Yesterday I played tennis with some women I don’t know very well but who know each other fairly well and felt stupid and smiley and wasn’t playing very well because I wanted everyone to like me, but of course not playing well doesn’t make people like you, does it? It is at these times that the advice of my husband, who, despite (because of?) his tendency to listen for the beating of giant moth wings, is intelligent and perceptive, comes to me, and I think, I don’t give a shit if these people like me. I’m here to play tennis. And then I played well and in fact won. Later in the day I was reading Ian McEwan’s first book, the first story of which is a first-person account of a boy’s rape of his little sister, and I thought, It’s just like tennis. You have to not give a shit about what anyone thinks about you in order to play well.

I haven’t read all of The Sheltering Sky, or even half of it, but my first impressions were, I’m afraid, of a commercial and self-pitying nature, i.e., No one will let you write anything this boring anymore. No one’s interested in your worlds, with their ambiguous types and specific moods, no one wants you to nail something that was out there but never captured before, no one wants you to create a thing out of the nothingness around you.

If I can't bore the pants off of everyone, how am I going to make great art?

I felt simple as a milkmaid yesterday, walking to the library. It was so quaint of me! But the car was blocked in and I wanted to go to the library and get some books. And the library’s not that far. And it wasn’t that hot.

I had my camera with me, so on the way I tried to take pictures, but the truth is I never walk to the library, and there’s nothing meaningful on the way. A couple of dogs with electronic collars on stood at the boundaries of their electronic field and barked, so I took their pictures, which drove them wild. I passed the spot where a house I liked has been torn down and replaced it with something huge and corporate, but how can I take a picture of what’s missing? You’d just see a three-car garage. At the library I found a number of things I wanted to read, including The Sheltering Sky, and sat in a chair facing out the big picture window. I thought about taking a picture of the view there, but it wasn’t a very good view, the big tree was lifeless and there was too much grass and road.

When we lived in the city I worked at a private library that was probably a perfect place. It was old and very pretty and had a large collection, and upstairs there were lockers to keep your computer in and a room with desks where people could write books. If you needed to, you could go into the stacks and look for things, and if you found things you wanted to read you could go down to the big reading room, where there were little writing tables and couches and often an old man, snoring. It was always the same old man, and his snoring would grow loud and quiet again, without him waking up. There were very few bathrooms and only one place to make a phone call, which led to tension, which interested and distracted me. Another old man, not the snorer, used to occupy the ground level toilet from 12:30 to 1, the last solid minute of which was taken up spraying Lysol. I knew this because I could hear it from outside the door, and because when I entered after he left I breathed in great billowing clouds of it, and almost choked to death.

When I couldn’t write my book in a temporary way, I sat at my computer and typed in things about all the other people in the room, including my thoughts on the likelihood that they were sitting at their computers typing things about me. There was one woman who was incredibly sensitive to sound, or very bad at concentrating, or very good at not doing her work. The sound of work being backed up on a floppy disk would drive her absolutely crazy, she would start moving in her seat and breathing dramatically and looking around to make eye contact with other noise haters and finally, if it went on too long, would stand up and ask the person to stop. She didn’t like clicking, either, and typing could upset her. I wondered who was better at not doing her work, her or me as I watched her. Then we had a run-in at the phone booth which ended when she shouted “Shit!” at me and ran down the stairs, and I realized her problems were larger than procrastination. Another woman, whom I idolized for her profound bosom, professorial clothes, and air of extreme competence, was writing about Anne Frank. I don’t remember the men so well, although I could of course check my notes about this. The library was a seventeen-minute walk from my apartment, which was also perfect. In the winter the sunny side of Park was five degrees warmer than any other part of the city.

In The Chateau, William Maxwell writes that people often underestimate the perfect, or at least that’s how I remember it. I can’t find it anywhere in the book.