I thought about John Updike, who died two days ago, as I shoveled my walk yesterday morning. I thought, This is exactly what he would have written about—someone, in this case me, clearing the cold, wet snow from our walkways, stopping every few steps to bang the shovel on the ground to shake off the white clumps that stick to it, shoveling the snow from the path to the garbage cans only to uncover smeared grass and mud, and to realize that the path lay in a different direction.

Inside, the house smells like pancakes. John plays somewhere—I hope it's not with the dog, on whose head he likes to sit, and whose tail he holds as she tries to escape down the back stairs. He is so excited by her warmth and her fur that he needs to have her, to consume her in some way. Now my arm is tired, my elbow clicks, and I stop to rest and watch the snow fly from the front path, where Henry works quickly, more diligently than I do.

Updike’s character would have gotten the salt spreader from its spot under the overhang, as I did, carried it around the house, and started spreading, although I don’t know if he—it would have been a he—would have reached into the bottom of it, grabbed the clumps of melt that had stuck together there, and thrown them on the ground, stomping to break them up. His men were more precise workers, outdoors, than I am, and I wonder whether Updike would have attributed that to my interior, domestic, womanly heart? Would he have noted that I am careful in the kitchen, that in the kitchen I clean as I go, I wipe the counters down, I organize the dishwasher in a specific way, but out here I feel a freedom that is in fact the beginning of a kind of panic, a feeling that things are beyond my control, so I might as well not care?

Well. The rain comes down, then comes down harder. The snow melts beside the paths Henry and I cleared, and floods them with water. By late evening, everything is ice. David slips on the way inside, and goes out to spread more melt. It doesn’t matter. The morning is cold and everything, still, is ice.

David and I finished watching Michael Winterbottom’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story last night. Based, of course, on Laurence Stern's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which I haven’t read, the movie kind of tells the story of the life and birth, which it can barely get to, of Tristram Shandy. In the movie the story of the book is itself barely seen, as the story of the crew making the movie becomes increasingly important.

Appropriately enough, as the subject of the film is, in large part, digression, David and I had had to divide it in two, watching in the hour or so between Henry's bedtime and our own on Wednesday and then Thursday nights. I’m not going to now tell you about that intervening day, which was spent for me, anyway, in some frustration, from the point of view of work and potty training, because I’m not interested in digressing from my discussion of the movie to show you that I know the movie is about digression. Except unfortunately I am, as the movie understands, caught entirely in a web of digressions from which I vainly try to manufacture a linear life, and so I’ve digressed, and each word I write takes me a farther from what I started to say, and will continue to say, once I stop writing this.

I loved the movie and in fact spent part of the day after we saw the first part of the movie specifically in anticipation of seeing the second part of the movie. Thinking, I can't wait to see the end of the movie! But then, in the end, what is funny about the movie, apart from the funny parts, is that even though the movie builds to a conclusion, and in fact was conceived and built to make precisely the point that nothing in life or narrative is as satisfying as the lack of satisfaction one gets from the beginning of things—structure and closure and an ending being impossible, and shitty—even though the movie knew this, and planned on this, the ending still wasn’t satisfying. Intellectually, I was impressed. But I was not satisfied.

There's a connection, in my mind anyway, between Shandy and Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows: Both are concerned with the creation of story from no story. Melville's movie, about a band of French Resistance fighters, starts out sporadically, episodically, a series of scenes without direct links between them. As it continues, though, the links become clearer, and the story becomes, clearly, a story about how the life that seems episodic, scattered, based on chance, is in fact anything but that. The scenes become the story, and the story is that scenes add up, luck runs out, and everyone is killed.

On Friday the first graders paraded around the school in vests cut from paper bags and decorated to look like book jackets, and their parents took pictures of them. Some people filmed. I don't know what the occasion was, but I participated nonetheless, showing up at school with John in tow and calling Henry's name, so he would look at me and I could capture him on film. At the end, Henry handed me his book jacket to take home. I can’t throw it directly in the garbage. But he's not going to wear it again, and we're not going to frame it. So I will save it, in a box in the attic, for an unspecified amount of time possibly including up until my death.

Once David almost died. He had appendicitis but it went undiagnosed, and his appendix had burst by the time we got him to a doctor. When they operated on him to remove the appendix they didn’t clean him out well enough and he remained very ill and they had to operate again, and then he had to stay in the hospital until his temperature went down and they could be sure there was no risk of infection. We were in Brussels, I was eight months pregnant, and the whole period was very horrible, but we remember it fondly now that it’s over. We talk about it all the time. We never want to forget it. If you want I’ll tell you the story again.

So here we are in “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!” I thought something like this at the Chinese restaurant two weeks ago, while I waited for my takeout. Staring at the sad live fish just lying around the tank, not doing anything, not really enjoying themselves, I thought, Listen, fishies, this is it. It’s not going to get better. Make the most of it.

Wordsworth said it better, if in a slightly different context.

Our own fish, Tyler, has left us. Well, he hasn’t left us, left us. He’s still lying under some rocks at the bottom of his bowl. But he’s dead. I’m feeling squeamish about the actual flushing. I want David around for this.

We saw a fantastic movie the other night. I don’t know if you’ll ever see it, since it is French and obscure and was only on TCM for a Louis Malle festival they had a few weeks ago. It's called Place de la République and in it Malle took a small crew to the place and asked people questions and filmed them. You could look at the film as an argument that every day everyone, by which I mean me and possibly you, should go out and film a stranger. The people he talks to are so happy to be noticed, to be captured, to be made monumental. And shouldn’t they be noticed? Shouldn’t they be made to feel even as they loiter, buy lottery tickets, worry about their illnesses and mourn the people they have lost, that they are important? Sorry, I’m back to Wordsworth again, to the idea, which Malle is working with also—at the end, over footage of a woman who has lost her mind, he runs a quotation, not Wordsworth, about enjoying the life that can be taken from us at any point—that existence is valuable in itself, and that a radical purposelessness, a failure to make of things more than what they are, is in fact a great success.

Good news and bad news, darlings. Take the good news first. If you take the good news first you get a moment of pure happiness. When you take it second you have the taste of the bad news still in your mouth.

Did I just ruin the good news? Anyway: We’re moving into the kitchen today! It doesn’t sound exciting to you? But it is exciting. I’m excited. I’m happy. I want to dance like James Brown. I want to stand on a Chinatown rooftop and Hula for an hour. I want to sing the entire cast recording of South Pacific, except “Happy Talk”. I will almost certainly get drunk. Here’s your pashta, kids. Enjoy.

Bad news: I don’t know that Tyler, our fish, will ever really be able to enjoy the kitchen the way he wanted to. Oh, Tyler. Born somewhere to some other Betta fish by whatever method Betta fish give birth, then ripped from his parents’ loving embrace, stolen away and sold in a pet store to our babysitter, Jennifer, as a gift for Henry’s birthday. Nothing good happened after that, either. First the bowl was too small, then too cold. It pains me to say it, but young Tyler was the subject of verbal abuse each night when he was too stupid to find his food.

The bowl situation stabilized. He was warmer, and less sluggish. David became adept at feeding him. Then, a fateful day when Henry vigorously stirred the bamboo sticks in Tyler’s bowl, damaging his back fin. Or did he? Because where the fin used to be continues to degrade, and Tyler’s looking all eaten up, somehow, and stays basically at the bottom of his bowl. He’s been in our bedroom for this last part of the construction, and David becomes sad seeing him at night. I offered to flush him, but David said No. Still, I don’t think Tyler is long for this world. Tyler will never enjoy our new kitchen, that he dreamed so long about. But I will.

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.

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.

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.

You want to know more about vacation. It’s not enough that we caught a fish and it lay dying in a metal box at our feet and then we ate it and it was delicious. Even if I had told you that its gills were “frightening ... fresh and crisp with blood,” like Elizabeth Bishop said they would be, that wouldn’t be enough. How was it really, Carey? Did the children have fun? Did you eat lobster? Did you play tennis? Did you get some sleep? Tell us how it was, how it was, how it was.

You guys have a crazy idea of vacation.

Elizabeth Murray died while we were away, and I didn’t know it until yesterday. When my Nana died I expected to find her death in the papers, and for Murray’s death I expected to be called and told. I didn’t know Murray, of course, but I loved her, and shouldn’t I have been told?

Murray was a real artist, she addressed directly what art should be and what art should be about, she took me to school, and I’m sorry she died. She was young, and still painting. In fifth grade she sold erotic drawings to her classmates. She understood sex and babies and the way the daily stuff is eternal, and she made paintings that embodied all of this. Another way I've been thinking about this is, She understood that everything is a problem, and she loved that about everything.

As for Nana, well, she was the most important person in the world and I’m still surprised so few people knew it. When she got into the back of a car so that she could lie down comfortably for the ride somewhere—she was old, her legs troubled her—you knew that she lay in the back of the car with her feet up as a full person, as a mind that never rested, always pushing and thinking and loving.

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.

The Ocean Wonders Aquarium has resurfaced. Johnny carries it around with him like a boom box, playing the music. Or I have to carry it, since it takes thirteen batteries and weighs a ton. It’s supposed to hang on the side of a crib.

There are three or four different songs. They are all formless and basically unsingable, but haunting. In the car the aquarium rides between the boys, set on continuous play, with the volume up. Johnny likes its mournful tone. On the way to ice cream tonight, he said to me, “This song is sad.” I said, “But you’re not sad,” and he said, “But the song is sad.”

And strangely enough, today I was sad. A friend of ours is ill, in the hospital, awaiting surgery, and last night I dreamed that I was with my Nana again. I was in her house, which after her death was sold to a developer who pretended he wasn’t a developer who was going to tear it down, who then tore it down and replaced it with two houses. No one in my family will drive by them, although they are more than willing for you to drive by them. They want you to drive by them, to tell them how bad it is. In the dream I was in her house and we were all going to her unveiling. I guess she was there and not there. I went to the bathroom and gave birth.

Yar yar yar life and death. And ice cream. And hide and seek. Real estate and parking lots and swimming pools and baseball camp. Hospitals. Apple sauce. That fucking aquarium. A few years ago, when a friend of mine had a son who was also under its spell, we used to call each other and try to sing the songs.

The second phone line was broken. I waited around the house all yesterday for someone to come and fix it, but no one did. The day ended in a frenzy of recriminations and being put on hold. This morning a repairman came and told me that the alarm system had taken over my second line, and I asked him if he could route around it, and he said he could, if I didn’t mind disabling the alarm system. So we disabled the system.

At first I was happy that my problem was solved and that it didn’t involve someone telling me that mice or rats had chewed through the lines, because we have mice and rats in the house and they make me crazed and ashamed. Sometimes the mice and rats die in the walls and smell and once I am sure that the dead thing is in the wall and nowhere I am going accidentally to find it I am pleased by the smell of something rotting, because I know that at least one of them is dead. I found out recently that the previous owners had five cats and I feel ashamed, as well, that we can’t have cats, because we are allergic to them. I thought briefly about the new crazy hypoallergenic cat, but you don’t know you’ll get a good mouser, and they cost $6,000. And there’s a waiting list. And ideally I would want more than one. I also thought about a terrier, because some terriers are good at killing rats. Right now we’re using a lot of poison, but I feel like these other methods would be better. I don’t know why I think that.

Anyway, then I realized that we don’t have an alarm system anymore and someone I don’t know, the technician, knows that we don’t have an alarm system anymore, and I became worried for our property, and for our future sense of security at home.