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.