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.

I’m getting mixed up in a tough tennis crowd. I was playing with nice people before, but now I’m playing with the kind of women who will cut you as soon as look at you. I’ll cross some line—show up late a couple times, forget to bring balls, double fault—and I’ll just disappear. But that’s okay. I’m going in with my eyes wide open.

I’m trying to explain the mood to you, the mood is entropic, the mood is about disorder, dispersal, and I’m not going to wake up from it until the Fall. I’m failing to resist the impulse to find the way the house is breaking down reflective of my own internal life, because the house is being taken apart and then the parts of it that are not being taken apart are falling apart (there is a hole in our shower and the afternoon heat releases some dank foul smell from somewhere in our house and it blows up and out of the hole and into our bedroom, plus a leak elsewhere, plus John’s bed, which had been my bed, cracked and fell into pieces last night while I was lying on it with him reading him a book, plus the very computer I am typing this on is riddled with viruses and can’t be shut down because it might not start up), and all I want to do is hide out in the play room, which is also the TV room, and which is almost the only room that has been untouched by construction and disrepair, and watch shitty TV, even though Cynthia Ozick would never do this because she lives to read literature. Richard Serra also wouldn’t do this. But you know who would do this with me? Werner Herzog. Then he’d cut off one of his fingers or get shot with an air rifle. We’d have a big fight and I’d ask him to leave.

Maybe Herzog and I should play tennis together sometime.

And how are the children? you ask. Wonderful. Henry woke last night at some point and came in crying that his bug bite was hurting him and we groaned, You’re killing us! and he yelled, I’m getting myself a Band-Aid! and we said, Great! Shut the door! But he didn’t shut the door. Then at about six this morning John got up and took off all his clothes and put on a plastic green bowler he was given on St. Patrick’s Day and ran up and down the hall trying to wake the house. David left for work, Henry slept, and I slept, off and on, for another hour and a half. I love how the children are getting older, you know? And can take care of themselves.

They are getting older. Last night Henry lay on the couch across from me and did his Great Undersea Search book while keeping an eye on the Mets game. It is almost impossible to understand that the person who does this is someone I gave birth to. I think it’s strange, sometimes, that although I love the children more than anything else in the world, they’ll never really know me, and we’ll never really be friends. How can it be otherwise? As their mother, I have to tell them the claptrap that mothers tell their lucky children: that life is orderly and meaningful and that people only die when they’re very, very old or very, very sick, and don't worry, darling, it was just a dream. I have to, so that they’ll be able to enjoy their youth and fall in love and work hard and have that feeling of purpose that, together with love and memory, allows one to be purely happy, from time to time, as an adult.

But someday soon they’ll be old enough to understand what I have done, and they’ll realize that either I lied to them or I didn’t understand everything I said I understood. They’ll feel like they don’t know me, like they can't know me. They’ll probably also feel as if they should be telling me things that will make me happy, regardless of whether they are true, since this is the template I laid out for them. And so it will go, the not-knowing, until I die. That's what it is to be a mother. You make false worlds.

At night I’ve been watching the crappiest of crappy crap crap. True Hollywood Stories of Rock Star Wives. Fifty Most Expensive Weddings, which should really be called Creative Math. A My Life on the D-List marathon, sadly cut short by the need to make Henry’s lunch for the next day. I read somewhere, although I can’t find where now, that Cynthia Ozick’s heaven would be to sit under a tree with a pile of books, reading a book and then picking up the next book, for, of course, eternity. Oops. I’m not going to valorize my choice. It’s worse than hers.

I went to the dentist yesterday. My mother had told me she liked the hygienist, and I said, "Really, why?" And she said, “I don’t know, I like talking to her.” So I decided that I would try to like the hygienist, too, and would ask her about her family and not ask her to turn the television on, which had been the source of tension on previous visits. On previous visits I had looked up hopefully at the television hanging over me while she told me about how wonderful her neighborhood is, all the kids just run from house to house and everyone looks out for each other (a story I hear from time to time, and which I never believe, but which I always have to say How nice about), and then when she took a breath I had asked if she could turn the television on and then she had been offended and grown silent and searched for the changer and then she had pretended she didn’t know how to turn the television on, or, once it was on, how to change the channels. She had called someone else in to help. Then there had been nothing on I wanted to watch, anyway. Ellen was never on while I was at the dentist. Anyway, this visit I would try to enjoy the hygienist for who she was. I would try to know her a little. I wouldn’t treat her as a delivery system for pain and boredom which had to be circumvented or ignored or just gotten through.

Someone came to get me and lead me to the chair, the reclining smooth chair of horribleness, and I thought I was going to get another hygienist but I didn’t, which I actually deep down knew would be the outcome because they always bait and switch like that at this dentist. People dressed in scrubs take you to your seat, only to disappear into the depths of the office never to be seen again. I don’t want to know what they do back there. Although I may find out, since I have to have a partial crown in a month and a half. I didn’t know that at this point. The television shone above me, its screen gray, blank, opaque. They were watching soaps in the reception area, by the way. While I waited for the person to come lead me to my seat one of the characters had said, “I feel like I don’t know you anymore.” I can’t decide if I like it better when, on a soap, someone says something that must have been said millions of times on a soap, or when someone says something that has probably only been said ten or twenty times on a soap, like, “But she didn’t know at that time that you were only pretending to be a nun.”

Are you following me? So now the real hygienist, the hygienist my mother likes as a hygienist and as a person, came in and said hello and I felt the very strong desire to leave the dentist’s office. As it always does, the sentence, “I don’t have to stay here, I’m a grown-up, they can’t make me,” jumped to the front of my consciousness as if there were two of me and one of me had just shouted that in the other me’s ear. I restrained myself, I put my magazine down in my lap and asked, nicely, “How’s everybody?” The hygienist was pleased to be asked, and we put off the business of picking plaque off my teeth while she answered my question and I asked follow-up questions and I found out a little bit about Hersheypark. And then we put those things in my mouth and the lead apron was draped over me and she kept talking while they X-rayed my mouth and then took the things out of my mouth and we chitchatted right up to the point where the cleaning began. I didn’t ask for the television to be put on.

Now she was cleaning my teeth, really cleaning them, and the room was silent, except for the music, the first song being “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain.” If you are having your teeth cleaned while this song comes on all you will hear is the word “pain.” Carly really lands on it. But then that was over and the teeth-cleaning continued and the hygienist was silent, working, and all I could do was stare up at the lights and watch my own mouth and tongue and teeth in the reflection on the metal frame that holds the lights and try, while I lay there, to increase my understanding of the universe.

It’s rainy, the back of our house is roped off with Caution tape, and I wish I were somewhere else, writing about my travels. If you’re stuck in Istanbul with nothing to do, make your way to the covered bazaar, where you will find, in the third row of stalls, a man whose family has been making paper airplanes for three centuries. He will sell you one for five to ten cents (don’t forget to haggle) and invite you to his home, which is on an island and only accessible by boat. By the time you are halfway there you will wish you hadn’t accepted his invitation.

In Brussels one must not miss the Mannekin Pis.

Few visitors to Goa know the legend of Mary Mary, who led sailors to their deaths.

In Venice, actually, David and I lunched next to a couple who invited us back to their palazzo, an invitation we, our eyes meeting, accepted. I don’t know if I had already read Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers, in which a young couple visiting a city just like Venice is stalked and killed by a friendly older couple. Once we got to the palace, or really the half-palace (subdivided), we were separated, and I was shown their bedroom. One of them wrote poetry, and I remember there was some kind of evidence of this around, although what could it have been? We admired their house, and went out again into the street. This was the kind of thing we thought you should do while traveling, meet people and have little adventures.

Tonight I am taking my husband out for my birthday, but he doesn’t know where. Do you, darling? The urge to get all Smoove B about it is overwhelming. Baby, let me lay it down for you. Tonight, baby darling, I will pick you up at your office wearing the sandals that are both cute and comfortable enough for walking moderate distances, and an outfit I think is really appropriate. I will yell “Taxi” in the lustiest fashion possible, and will push ten to fifteen people out of the way to make it happen. Mmmhmm, you know I will. Then we will drive the most freakishly nauseating of rides to a totally undisclosed location, where I will bite my lip nervously and check my watch. Ohh, yeah. What happens next cannot be divulged to you, my sweetest of candies.

Oh, Smoove, it’s not as easy as it looks.

Yesterday, or else the day before, I called in to a number where they’re recording people’s fantasies about what they would find behind a secret door in their apartment. (You don’t have to have an apartment to call, just a fantasy.) What kind of extra space would there be? In my best public radio voice I said that behind my secret door I would want to find a smaller version of my apartment, with its own secret door that led to a smaller version of that apartment, and so on, smaller and smaller. Now I wonder if this is in fact a blueprint for all my fantasies, that they are smaller than the reality they started from, and get smaller as they go on. I had always thought it was the other way around.

Yesterday I went and had my toenails done. With a ten-minute massage added on, but no spa pedicure. I hate the spa pedicure.

My last pedicure had chipped, and the back of my heels were rough and cracked. I read People during the pedicure and it was as if I were dead, in the sense that time was suspended and I took in almost no impressions from the outside world. I paid almost no attention to the woman who was touching my feet, while she was touching my feet, except when she hurt me. I thanked her afterward. I tipped well.

Sometimes I want this feeling of nullification. I want to cease existing and have beautiful toenails.

Afterwards I went to Starbucks and read one of Waugh’s war stories while I drank a tall skim chai. I also wrote in my little journal about the other people there, and other things I hadn’t been writing in my real journal, because I have been lazy. I remembered that when I had driven to the supermarket the other day, everything had seemed very beautiful, including the tall pink plastic inflatable flippy thing outside the T-Mobile store. One crazy thing about the suburbs is that the physical spaces you drive by are pretty or ugly but never beautiful, and over this runs the songs you hear in the car, telling you about sex and longing and death and fun. Being beautiful.

Then our babysitter called to say she and the children were locked out of the house.

I went to the movies last night. Gasp and throw things wildly in the air, readers, because it is true. (Now pick things up and put them neatly away.) You Kill Me. If I had made the movie, I would have done it a tiny bit differently. If I tell you how, it may spoil the movie for you. Oh, you want me to tell you anyway? Very well, if you insist.

Ben Kingsley plays an alcoholic hit man whose condition is adversely affecting his work. For no reason I can tell he is sent to San Francisco to dry out. He works at a funeral home making dead people look nice, which is cutesy but I let it slide because there he meets Téa Leoni, with whom I have been in a fight since Spanglish (plot summary within a plot summary: My wife is powerful and independent and so very mean. I want a woman who doesn’t speak my language and is my subordinate. Oh, Spanglish, I love you) but who begs for my forgiveness by being very good in this movie, and so is forgiven. Let’s never fight again.

Fine, so they love each other and he needs to dry out so he can get back to killing people but then should he keep killing people? Montage of them practicing knife work on a watermelon together. What I’m saying is, one starts to hope that this will turn out to be like Trouble in Paradise, in which two people meet and realize that each is at heart the same kind of criminal, and then love each other madly and commit crimes together. But while Leoni helps Kingsley wrap things up via knife and gun, there’s no indication that they then kill people together into the sunset. So in the end it’s a good movie, when it could have been better than good.

There are very few things I couldn’t improve.

How to disagree with people in the suburbs?

Stop smiling.
Call the buildings department and anonymously report them for an infraction.
Express disagreement, then immediately backpedal.
Be just as friendly as ever but don’t mean it (not that you ever mean it, it’s always an act, life is an act, don’t be so naive).
Write in your blog.
Throw bottled water directly in their faces.
Challenge them to a duel.
Gossip about them behind their backs (do I even have to write this down?).
Tag their houses with graffiti.
Leave rotten eggs in their mailboxes.
TP their houses.
Slash their tires.
Lose at tennis.
Get a nicer car than theirs.
Give more money to the Mittens program than they did (long story).
Duck out of sight in the supermarket.
Roll your eyes.
Tell your husband on them.
Eat dessert.

Have I left something out? I don’t want to leave anything out.

Henry and I played Marco Polo at the town pool on Sunday. Last night I said to David, You know, it’s kind of dangerous, Marco Polo, because you can end up grabbing some kid’s dad’s balls, and David said, Oh, that’s who you’ve become, the mother who swims around with her eyes closed grabbing men’s balls.

I spoke too soon when I said I wouldn’t bore you about the renovation.

I’m going to leave that hanging there, like a threat. They’re pulling walls down today. That’s all I’ll say, for now.

Yesterday I tried to make a slide show of the loop I walk for exercise, which for some reason obsesses me. I know why it obsesses me. It obsesses me because it is saturated with crazy meaning only I know. There is the Murakami House, and the place where I saw Flowers in the Wilderness and the Dangerous Curve Where I Will Be Attacked and the House Where I Went to My First Party (Not Really) and the Road To Alien Abduction. Oh, and the Brothel. So, my imaginary world, as it intersects with the real one. I thought you should see it.

The camera batteries are charging.

On the one hand, I feel that I am in the grips of some kind of compulsion that comes from the deepest part of me, and on the other I am undoubtedly under the influence of Sophie Calle. It bothers me a little that when I wrote “I mean, why is no one interested in writers performing? And why aren’t writers interested in being somewhere and writing at some particular point and seeing what comes from that?” I had already read Calle, and read about Calle in Grégoire Bouillier's book, The Mystery Guest. Calle is a performing writer, when she’s not performing other things. In The Hotel, she was hired as a chambermaid in a Venice hotel and used the job to photograph the rooms she cleaned, glean personal information about the inhabitants, and make up stories about them. I haven’t seen The Hotel in person, but as a plan of action this seems to me to be brilliant. She also had her mother hire a private investigator to follow her around, while Calle herself recorded aspects of her life.

I wonder if her mother enjoyed that.

Mine would. If I have a problem with Calle, it’s that I think she’s too satisfied with the punch that aggregation and surfaces can provide. But I love that she makes things up. I love that she takes real things and lies about them.

There are four flies in my office right now. One just flew into me and then fell down dead.

We were almost hit by a car on the way to Henry's camp. When I was younger I would have welcomed a car crash as a way to get out of going to camp for the day. I also wanted to break my leg so I wouldn't have to ski and I forget what I thought would get me out of law school.

We are sending the boys to such shitty camps. Yesterday Henry’s counselors played a version of running bases in which they threw a soccer ball at the campers. Henry was hit hard in the back and cried and went to the nurse, but they waited until they pegged another camper before they stopped playing with the hard ball. When Henry told me I laughed because he told it funny. Then when I told David about it and he was shocked and upset I felt a fleeting dismay at my lack of maternal instincts.

John’s camp sucks because his counselors just stand there with vacant looks on their faces. Today a boy was screaming and trying to run out after his mother and I could see John thinking it over. Not a bad idea, he thought, but then he went to circle time instead. I’ve decided to go all retro and not care if things are substandard. I’ve decided to think that this will be good for them. Why should they always have caring, engaged caretakers? Won’t they get the wrong message about life? Etc.

I always found camp to be a time of great loneliness and unhappiness. And if I didn’t have that suffering to fall back on, where would I be today? How would I ever make art?

Maybe a year ago, I felt so much love for my husband that I thought the sentence, “I must get a tattoo to commemorate my love for him.” Obviously, the flacks at the tattoo lobby have been doing their work. I accept that at least half of my thoughts have been planted by people with a commercial interest in me. I am grateful for this, because otherwise I would spend half of my time not thinking anything at all.

Oh, I don’t mean it. Do I? Lately I have instituted a new program of not buying things, so that we can pay for the kitchen, which is going to be, of course, more expensive than we thought. Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you about the progress of our renovation, a subject only slightly less deadly than the topic Why I’m Late to This Thing I’m Late to. [And slightly more deadly than The Dream I Had Last Night That I Don't Understand (But You Will, Because It's Transparent).] I’m not doing anything drastic, of course. The program is just that, when I think, Should I buy this thing? I then think, No, I’m not buying anything. Then sometimes I don’t buy the thing.

I’m not crazy, like some people.

Anyway, I passed some time thinking about tattoos. I wanted a classy tattoo. I wanted an upper-middle-class tattoo, a tattoo that would signify taste and knowledge at the same time it communicated undying love for another upper-middle-class person. Also, I wanted a tattoo that would look nice as my body deteriorates.

David’s father gave a beautiful toast at the wedding. He told us how much he loved us, and how much he already loved Jess, Dan’s wife, and how happy he was that she was now a part of our family. It wasn’t original, maybe, but it was felt, and it was wonderfully said. One thing I love about toasts is that they allow normal people to step forward and rip off their workaday clothes and throw their glasses away and say something beautiful and profound.

I’m afraid I’ll bore you, if I go on saying that things were truly wonderful, and beautiful, and that everyone loved each other. Sometimes it happens.

We were in Oregon. Out west. Before we went David said, Maybe we can take the boys to a rodeo and I said David, it isn’t the West, it’s the Northwest. Rodeos. Please. And roundly abused him for this idea. Meanwhile, there are rodeos everywhere in Oregon. We didn’t go to a rodeo, though. We went to a very depressing aquarium, where a dead shark lay on the bottom of the tank. The aquarium is also where, because of displays about the giant squid, John became obsessed with the dream of seeing a giant squid. Which has never been captured alive. Someday, maybe, his dream will be realized, although one hopes not at this aquarium, which needs to feed its fish or change their water or something.

We also went to the beach, where everyone set off firecrackers around us while we built a fire in the sand and handed the children long sharp skewers for roasting marshmallows. This was my quota of dangerous activities with the children for the next year or two.

Nothing bad happened.

I am very tired right now. I am so tired I shouldn’t drive, or heat things over a flame, although I did drive this morning, I drove the boys to get bagels, for breakfast, and to replace Henry’s sneakers, which were worn into a creek and had to be thrown out, and then I drove us to the supermarket and then home. I haven’t hurt myself yet, but in the supermarket I accidentally knocked John in the head with the cart. He only cried a little. He’s tired, too, too tired to maintain a particular attitude towards anything for any amount of time. In the supermarket he and Henry ran around and around and around and when I said, Boys! You can’t do this, other people stopped me to say that even though my children were running down the aisles yelling, they (my boys) were still very polite and careful and let people pass. And then I tried to say, Oh, they’re very good boys, I know it, it’s just that we took the red-eye and we’re so tired but there’s nothing in the house and so we had to come to the supermarket and their Dad had to go to work and our babysitter is at a stress test for her heart and our kitchen has been ripped out, and then the people who were trying to be nice to me, the strangers who liked my children while they misbehaved, stared at me and I realized I was too tired to be speaking to people but what could I do? I had to speak.