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.