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’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?