In my writing class we are focusing on dramatizing things. Writing in scene, darlings, which is not a bad thing to practice. I was thinking I should try to write my blog in scene, to dramatize my blog. But before I do that I want to just mention that men love to write about their erections. And truthfully this is more interesting than some of the other things they write about. Maybe men should write more about erections. Maybe they should write only about their erections. For a hundred years. Then they should be allowed to write about flowers, and then farm animals, and then cowboys, and then erections again, in a kind of cycle. The female cycle? Sexual awakening at the hands of an older man, flowers, swimming in the ocean, Italian food.

Dramatizing. I can tell you that two weeks ago, at the end of class, snow started coming down quite heavily. The class is on the second floor of a building that looks down a hill to the Hudson River—you can see the river through the window, but not either shore. The building belongs to the Junior League and the rooms are very neat and nicely appointed, if old and ugly and containing a thousand chairs. Still, the bathroom has a filled tissue dispenser, air freshener, and handsoap set out on the counter, and a full roll of paper towels for drying your hands. The oven in the little kitchen is from fifty years ago, but all of its timers and settings seem to work and it gleams. I wander around on breaks and, since I don’t smoke, look at these things. Anyway we had a break and came back to work. There were five of us, including the teacher. The snow was coming down, but I didn’t think much of it, except that I was pleased to see it, since the winter has been so bare and snowless, so unwintry. At this point in time every time it snows or rains or doesn’t snow or rain—yes, that is every day—I worry about the future of our planet. I read the paper and compare the highs and lows for the week with the historic highs and lows and, like a bad bowler, which I am, standing at the top of the lane making waving motions with her hands so the ball won’t fall into the gutter, which it does, I try to wish the highs and lows into the normal range. I don’t want to hear again that we’ve had the hottest year on record, I just don’t want to hear it.

Dramatizing. My phone started ringing. I ignored the first call and it went to voice mail. Then it rang again and I picked up and it turned out that Henry had to be picked up early because after school activities were being canceled, so I had to call Jennifer to make sure she knew this, but I couldn’t reach her, so I called David and left a message with his secretary, which meant that he was going to call me back, which he did, so I spent the next fifteen minutes on the phone in the Junior League kitchen, making sure that someone would pick Henry up. Then, because we live in a town filled with assholes who don’t adhere to the pick-up traffic rules at the school, Jennifer, in the car with Johnny, couldn’t get up to where Henry was waiting and one of the aides took him into the office and called me again, to say that no one had gotten him and someone really should. So I had to call Jennifer again and say, Henry is now in the office for you to pick up. Now the snow was falling harder, if you went to the window, as I did in the kitchen, and looked out, you could see that my car was covered with snow and you might remember, as I did, that you had left the scraper in the other car, and think, Why don’t I just have two scrapers, like normal people? I returned to class. The teacher gave us an assignment to write in class but I hated the assignment and couldn’t do it. It involved describing the room we were in, underwriting and overwriting it, and I couldn’t write a thing, I refused to write it, since I didn’t care about it at all. I was worried about my son, who was, I knew, being taken care of, but who, with his brother, was going to want to eat when I got home, which was fine except I didn’t have any food in the house to feed him. I also hate writing extended description.

You can’t rush dramatization, so don’t try. I asked the teacher if she lived in town, because I wanted to find out if she knew where I could buy groceries, but she didn’t live in town, and I thus unwittingly led the class into an intrusive discussion of her living arrangements and what health coverage she had. I felt bad about this. The other female student told me about some grocery stores she passed, but she came from another direction and I didn’t want to go that way. When class ended, I walked carefully to the car through the slippery white lot. The car on, the heaters burning, I started wiping the snow off with my gloved hand, which became icy cold. The snow was falling still, and I felt the pressure. I had to get to the store. I had to get home.

I was a stranger to the grocery store. I wanted to speed through the aisles, but they were crowded with people and empty of things I wanted to buy. From behind the deli counter floated a nauseating smell I couldn’t pinpoint. I still ordered deli meat from the pimply youth behind the counter. As if he doesn’t have enough problems without being identified, for ease of memory, as the pimply youth. With the little deli hat on. The fruit was rotten, or underripe. The cocktail franks weren’t Hebrew National, and my children wouldn’t eat them. I don’t, actually, know what I bought to make dinner that night. All I know is that I brought four bags of it out to the car. It was covered with snow again. On the way home I thought mostly about something I read that our teacher wrote. A scene she wrote about a man who is gardening outside his house when a car pulls up. I wanted to know what I should take from it, and what I should leave.

One thing that interests me is that I can remember everything that happened beforehand, my thoughts before the accident are like little footprints cast in stone—I thought Go and then I thought No, don’t go, and then I thought, They’re stopping, and so I went—these thoughts are indelible, they will always exist, and even the things I saw and felt and thought a few minutes before the accident are stuck with me forever, I won’t be able to forget, for example, the yellow sunlight, or the way Henry sounded behind me singing the chorus from the Ship Titanic—So sad, So sad. I have this wealth of memory, is what I’m saying, fertile ground for regret, up until the moment I heard the car crash into the back of the bike, where Henry was. After that I remember nothing orderly until the paramedics told Henry he could stand and we went to the ambulance to have his back washed off and a bandage put on it. David tells me I was with Henry, where he lay by the side of the road, but I remember him further off, in the bushes, each of us alone, David floating somewhere, Johnny distant, in the hands of other people.

Henry’s fine. Scrapes on his back and shoulder, but he was wearing his helmet and the car wasn’t going very fast. They couldn’t see us in the yellow sunlight I was talking about, and when it looked like they were looking at me they were peering ahead, trying to see through the windshield, which they had just cleaned. We’re still lucky, if you want to put it in those terms. Nothing bad happened. Something bad almost happened, but almost happening is the same as not happening. I know this, but I don’t believe it, even though the proof is here, even though Henry woke up this morning and came into my room to tell me of a “good dream” he had last night, in which different fish and sharks lived together in a pool and he could go in it and nothing would hurt him.

I have a persistent head cold and just under my right breast I have enormous pain when I cough or move. I was hoping that I’d broken my rib because I thought that if I had broken my rib I must have done it three weeks ago, when I slipped on the kitchen floor and fell hard against the decorative knob on the stool back, and if that were the case, that I had broken my rib three weeks ago, then it would have to be admitted as a general principle that I was very brave and strong and never complained, because it was only in the last week that I started noticing that I was in an extraordinary amount of pain, and telling other people about it. If I had broken my rib three weeks ago, as I thought, really, I might have, then I might also take some of the sting out of the recollection of my very convincing loss to Tris at singles this past week. Even though at the time, technically, my rib hadn’t hurt.

David acted out the phone call where I called Tris to ask her to sub for me this week and delicately let slip that I had in fact had a broken rib when we played. Don’t, I said. It hurts when I laugh.

And just generally speaking and as I was saying, everyone would have to admit that I was extremely brave and strong and never complained.

But no broken rib, at least according to the doctor on duty Saturday, who told me he was valedictorian of his high school class. I should have said, Me, too! He has no way of checking. I should lie more, I should make more things up. As an exercise. I had marched through the halls of the medical group braless and shirtless, barely covered by a little gown designed so that only ceaseless vigilance kept both—but why would you want to keep both?—of my breasts inside it, to the X-ray department, where they put a sticker on me and had me raise one arm and lay it over my head, then hold my breath. I suppose it’s silly to care if one’s breast comes out of one’s gown while one's being X-rayed, but one does. I did. Anyway, the doctor said it was possible that the X-ray would show something if they blew it up but what was the point, when in any case he could give me some very nice drug samples he just happened to have around? Some nice little antibiotics and maybe a top-notch topical pain killer? Hmmm? Now didn’t that sound nice? And so the weekend went on and I didn’t have a broken rib and I’m not brave and strong and I do complain, I actually complain a lot.