Today in the paper I read a review of a dance production which produced in the reviewer “vague and intermitten boredom.” Of course this idea, this stupid idea of “vague boredom”, which doesn’t exist, sent me back immediately twenty years, to my first high school English course, where I felt not “vague boredom” but an acute, earthshaking, presexual but otherwise orgasmic boredom for the first time in my life. This horribly painful boredom has fixed forever in my mind the position of my seat in the class, the click back of the clock hand before it moved forward, the long gray beard of my professor, and the shining blond hair of the teacher’s favorite student as she passed among us, handing out the papers for her special project—an experiment, naturally, in which her classmates were consumed by the flames of boredom. I was ecstatic with boredom, and, burned by boredom, I came as close as I have ever come to breaking free from all social constraints, to finishing, finally, with the thoughts and concerns and judgments of those around me, to standing, as I longed to stand, as I burned to stand, and screaming a wordless scream from the bottom of my soul. I was so bored.

The lamp in the living room needed fixing, I thought, so I took it to the light store. As it turned out, the lamp worked—it was the light bulbs that were broken—but then it also turned out that the lamp could be rewired and fitted with a harp for a new shade while I waited. I sat down in a chair by the couple who own the store and talked about lamp shades and children and holidays and I pretended that they were my grandparents, whom I miss very much. Everything at this light store is wonderful: First of all that it is a light store, and the ceiling is thick with lights, the walls are covered in lights, floor lamps crowd the floor, and table lamps sit on any available surface; secondly, that the philosophy of the people who own the light store is total shamelessness regarding what can be a lamp, they will turn absolutely anything into a lamp, including an old tennis racquet with a ball stuck to it and a light bulb stuck on it next to the ball; thirdly that there is candy everywhere, in little dishes and desk drawers; fourthly that they fix your lamps quickly and inexpensively, while you wait; and finally that even things that are not really broken can be taken there and fixed.

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.

John locked himself in his room last night. He was on a tear yesterday, making messes everywhere he went, calling people, including his beloved babysitter Jennifer, dumber—I have to assume this word is related to the word dumb—and yelling if he didn’t like, for example, the food on his plate at his class’ Thanksgiving lunch. Take it off my plate! Right now! Well, I immediately instituted a rational system for training him to behave better and he was able to control himself. Just kidding! He continued like this for the rest of the day, including a period in the later afternoon where he ran from room to room trying to lock himself in. Jennifer was able to thwart him in this plan for most of the afternoon but didn’t realize that he had a lock on the door to his room, and so while I was making dinner his efforts met with success.

John’s door fits smoothly and almost seamlessly into its frame. The hinges are on the inside, and the only hardware on the outside is a very small, barely attached brass knob, and a tiny keyhole useless because we have no key, because John had stuffed a stick in it, and because in any case it isn’t attached to the lock mechanism. I know how the door locks, it locks on the inside with a tiny button on the bottom of the black box the knob comes through. I was sweet and calm. I spoke to him gently. His big eye looked out at me through the keyhole and my big eye looked back at him. I told him what to do to unlock the door. Instead he rattled the knob. I tried to tell him again. He kept rattling the knob. I said, John, sit on the floor please and look up at the black box on the door and just move that little button over and he said, I want the workmen to come and break down my door. Then I smacked my hand against his door so hard it turned red, frightening him and making him cry.

Then the crazy period began, in which everyone in the house stood outside John’s door and tried to get him to unlock it and he stared at us through the keyhole and jiggled the knob instead.

We called the workmen and Dom, the owner’s father, rushed over to our house with tools and realized that he had to crawl out onto the roof so stepped out onto the roof and broke the screen over John’s window and climbed in and unlocked the door and everyone was happy. There hasn’t been, yet, an appropriate time for me to take John aside to tell him that if he ever pulls a stunt like that again I’m going to kill him.

Sometimes I think about someone I’ll call Sammy, who sent in on average one poem every day to the magazine where I worked as the literary assistant. This was a long time ago, darlings. Long, long time ago. Before the war. Well, after one war, but before the next one. Before cell phones. One of my jobs at the magazine was to go through the poetry submissions, to reject the bad ones, and to send the good ones on to the poetry editor. The poetry editor looked over the names I sent her, and made sure I wasn't rejecting people she knew.

I was good at rejecting poems, in the sense that I could easily tell which poems were decent, and which were not. I was bad at rejecting poems, in the sense that I used the worst faded, smudged, off-center, copy of a copy of a copy of a form rejection letter and never wrote anything personal on it. I was a soul-crusher. On top of that, Sammy sent in a poem or two every day, and when I started, I thought I had to respond to each of these poems. I sent him how many of those form letters in the first few months I was there? Soul-crushing, multiplied.

Finally, I got a letter from Sammy that wasn’t a poem, or not just a poem. I’m sure there was a poem in there, but there was also a letter, asking me to stop sending rejection letters. He just wanted to send his poems out, he said. I respected his wish, in the sense that I stopped sending him the horrible form rejection letters. I didn’t respect his wish, in the sense that I never after that opened his letters, and put them directly in the trash. I can’t say I’m sorry, either, because his poems were so bad.

Before we had children we went to Sicily for vacation. We left the coastal road between Milazzo and Cefalù, and took a road into the interior, that climbed the hills. It ended, or we left it, at a small town closed up for the midday, with nothing to see. We were here for the restaurant, which the guidebook had mentioned. It was behind swinging beads. Inside sat the entire town.

I only remember the end of the meal. They brought us a very big bowl of cherries, and, even though we were past the limits of what we could eat, we started eating them. I think we were supposed to take a few and stop, sated, but we weren’t like that. I remember the spiral staircase to the basement, and I remember remounting, still uncomfortably full. We paid and went out to the piazza, to see if I could feel better there. We sat on a bench and stared into the dusty valley. We got in the car and drove the switchbacks back down to the coast, and then the winding, crowded coast road to our next hotel, where I was quarantined by my fullness to our room. I was so full I was sick with fullness. I was too full to do anything except be full.

The next day I felt better, but my eye hurt and we went to a doctor. Everyone in the waiting room wanted to know if we were there because I was pregnant. Now I see the answer was, We were there precisely because I was not.

I said to David over drinks on Saturday, I had a red drink with a flower on the top, Lately I feel that I am able to connect with a work of art at about the same rate I am able to make friends. He said, That’s a very low percentage!

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.

On Monday I got a couple emails from people at Henry’s school telling me about an important meeting with the Board of Ed where we needed to show a united front. Then I got an email from my husband saying, This sounds important. Should one of us go? And I thought, Well, it would be nice to get out of the house. So I said I would go and he could put the children to bed. Sucker!

Oh mes darlings, what a show. I have the urge to make a disclaimer at this point, to say, I really appreciate the work and energy of the other parents and how much they care about their children and I of course care about my children and overcrowding is a serious issue blur bloo blar blur blarb. Fuck it. It was crazy. There was one woman who sat in the front row rolling her eyes wildly and grimacing, as if she were signing for the hearing impaired. There was an angry mother who, in the middle of her angry, forceful speech, used the word “Squozen.” Everyone fell silent. Squozen? Did she say squozen? was the thought that spread round the room. Then she said it again. She said squozen? Is that a word? Really? Isn’t the word squeezed? Is she making a joke? Oh, and a mom stood up and said, I have seen people going the wrong way down the street in front of the school and this is going to end in a terrible, terrible accident. Also prompting stunned silence. Otherwise, throughout, shouting from the audience, applause for a comment by a woman who was counting the number of extra bedrooms going up on her street, and general bloodlust. The dad who got to speak last judged the mood of the room incorrectly when he began his comment with the prissy little phrase, “The thing is, I’m having trouble connecting the dots.” He should have stood on his chair, raised his pencil in the air, and sung something from Les Mis.

Last night we went to the California Pizza Kitchen. I felt that I had been catapulted into some kind of live advertisement for the chain. Is your house under construction? Do you feel bad about work? Are both your children whiny fucking toads? Then come on down to the California Pizza Kitchen where we’ll Pizza your cares away. Warning: Actual pizza is pretty gross.

Oh yes, we Pizza-ed our cares away. Henry colored in his California Pizza Kitchen-themed coloring book and asked if he could keep the cup they gave him (He could! It was his to take home) and I was offered a stiff drink, which I stupidly declined, and even though the California Pizza Kitchen found it was beyond its powers to soothe John into a state of happy cooperation and he spent the twenty (California Pizza Kitchen! You devil!) minutes we were there lolling around the booth, ignoring his food, and threatening us all with his drink, I left the California Pizza Kitchen feeling more hopeful than when I entered it. I thought of going there again tonight.

David and I went to see Michael Clayton on Friday. We left the children at home with the babysitter in a house that reeked of floor stain, for the obvious reason that the floor had just been stained. We are so close to the kitchen being done, if you accept, as I have accepted, that being done means not being done. Being done means being three weeks from being done. And not liking the color you stained the floors but moving in anyway and planning on having them redone at some future point. And promising your husband you won’t say anything about not liking the floor stain color but then blurting it out to everyone you meet by way of greeting. I hate the color we stained our floors! How are you?

Shit, this was supposed to be about the movie. Once in a while you go to a movie that is a movie, by which I mean it was made by people who understand what movies can do and are interested in doing those things. Can movies manipulate time for the purposes of creating character depth? Could you, for example, watch someone prepare for something and watch them do it almost at the same time? Oh, and can movies present the things you see everyday—say a closet, overstuffed with clothes—so that you see them, and know them, for the first time? And in a movie, can you get really close to the actor’s face, as if you’re right there with him, and can you see into his eyes as you see into your husband's when he’s lying in bed looking at you at night? Well, then maybe we should do some of that.

Also all the actors gave a shit about their work. Tom Wilkinson is a fucking genius, ditto Tilda Swinton, ditto, at least here, George Clooney. I used to think that George Clooney was Cary Grant manqué but I’m trying to remember when Grant created a character you knew as well as you knew Clooney’s Clayton in the final scene. Maybe in the His Girl Friday. Yar, yar.

I really liked the movie. The people behind us were old and loud and, I’m sorry to say, dumb. Dumb. I know, I'll be there myself one day but.... There’s a murder in the movie and the woman didn’t understand what was going on and kept asking what was going on and her husband kept saying out loud what was going on but she still didn't understand. At the end she said to her friend, I liked it, but I missed some of the details.

Then we went out to dinner and everything, including the things we said, seemed very vivid, and when the waiter came to take our order I wanted to write what he said down, so I would have it forever. I want, sometimes, to make a movie myself.

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.