This morning I made my way up the narrow steep stairs to my attic office and thought, as I cleared the top and saw no bat shit or mouse shit, How pleasant it is to live pest free. I thought those words and advanced towards my desk, where I sat down. But as I sat down I saw first one, then two flies, house flies, black and convivial. They landed near me, but would not allow themselves to be killed and one, having made several escapes, landed on top of my monitor where he sat and rubbed his arms together, taunting me.

Then I noticed, on the floor, a mass of tiny ants swarming, as ants do when they are devouring something tasty, and then I realized that there was another fly, who had fallen there, and was being eaten. Several hours later, having eating what they could off him where he lay, they departed, leaving his carcass behind.

I used to think that I had infestations, I had a mouse problem or bat problem or ant problem or a roach problem, but only recently, and only thanks to my house, which, over time, is losing its status as a thing apart from me, in the way that my body, as it fails me, becomes my whole self as it wasn’t when it worked and I could do what I wanted with it, without thinking about what it was I wanted to do, have I realized that I live surrounded by teeming and buzzing and crapping armies, they are all around me, they run through my walls and up my siding and they scamper on the roof. Some lie sleeping above where I lie sleeping, although not, actually, while I lie sleeping, but the point is that they are there, breathing in and out, fulfilling their purpose as living beings, as I fulfill mine.

The universe is an infestation.

The exterminator returns this week.

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.

A friend and I went to see Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution a couple of months ago, before it closed. I’ve driven her a few places now, and she always screams while I drive. She always thinks I’m going to kill us. In fact, I am, according to my record, a very safe driver. I don’t have accidents. I never hit other cars with mine. Sometimes I think that’s because I’m living in a dream state in which nothing real can happen. I don’t tell my passengers that, though, since that would frighten them.

My parents live on a bumpy road that ends at a highway. Once, when I was a new driver, I drove down to the highway with an apple, and as I waited at the light I started to eat the apple. I had just taken my first bite, and the apple was in my mouth, held to my mouth by my hand, when the light turned green, and, as I made the hard right turn onto the highway, I had to, at the last moment, remove my hand from the apple to use it to turn the wheel enough to clear the center guard rail, and ended up spitting the apple across the car. Then I tried to reach for it on the floor.

Now that I think about it, none of the art at the show was about driving. Yesterday we passed a boarded-up Gaseteria and I felt a wave of real sadness at this image, and the idea that twenty years from now, or at some point relatively soon, all the gas stations will be boarded up, obsolete, and we will drive by them in silent electric cars. All those beautiful old cars, useless, I thought. I hadn’t realized I was so attached to the internal combustion engine. Since then I’ve wavered between the position that everything becomes useless, so I should stop being such a baby about it, and that everything becomes useless, and that this is deeply sad.

I had a lot of criticisms of Wack!. I thought, by and large, that the artists could have done better. I thought I could do better, even, in the alternate world where I was a visual artist and halfway handy with a saw. I felt a little sad about this, a little betrayed. I wanted the women who made revolutionary art to have done their homework, to have better understood the art that brought them to where they were, and to have worked harder to make art. I’m not talking about you, Judy Chicago, or you, Carolee Schneeman. But Kirsten Justesen, the person who pasted a painting of a woman in a box on top of a box? Yes, you.

I had been watching the Whitman program on the American Experience, and thinking about “As I Ponder’d in Silence”:

As I ponder’d in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands,
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said,
Know’st thou not there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,
The making of perfect soldiers.
Be it so, I answered,
I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight, advance and retreat, victory deferr’d and wavering,
(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the last,) the field the world,
For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal Soul,
Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I above all promote brave soldiers.

And I suppose I felt that Whitman had been concerned with the things these women were concerned about, but had based his concern on thousands of years of history and writing, and had worked on making poems out of this that took his whole life to make. And I felt disappointed in these women, but, at the same time, in myself. Whatever I am, I am not yet a revolutionary. I want us to continue.

I have broken my ankle, and my story was rejected today. John brought the mail to me while I lay on the guest room bed and watched a program on Walt Whitman, taking careful notes. Outside the gardeners were here, and two of them, I could see through the window, were jousting with rakes. Initially I thought they were playing lacrosse. Which would have been safer than what they were doing, but also less likely. The story came in the envelope I had sent it in, addressed to me in my handwriting. But there must be some mistake, because I would never send my story back to me. I would accept it, and publish it to great acclaim.

I can lie on my stomach quite comfortably, with my foot either up in the air or resting on a pillow. In this position I can forget about my foot. I can touch my feet together. I can scratch my injured foot, absently, with my hand. I just can’t stand on it. In other words, while I lie on the bed and watch Walt Whitman, I can do whatever it is I want to do, and I forget that I am injured. And when I send a story out into the world and it has not come back, that doesn’t hurt either. Oh, I am tender, though. I am really tender.

Spring is come. The bees bump into the attic window. I found mouse shit on the back stairs. The magnolia, which I thought was dead, is not dead. Green buds have come out, and in a week it will bloom.

Yesterday in Central Park we watched a street performer juggle and spit water and crack jokes. The boys laughed very hard. Meanwhile, a hawk killed a bird on the little hill facing us. Henry spotted it. We looked back at the performer, and after a little while he pointed the hawk out to me. It was on a branch now with the bird it had killed.

I thought, about the street performer, Who is this person, who does this? What brought him here?

I stood with my hands on the boys’ shoulders and heads.

We pushed through crowds, the park was crowded. On the way out we passed portrait artists sketching the pictures of seated people. Crowds gathered to watch them work. On 59th Street someone sketched two girls. One of them had a difficult nose to draw, and he drew it wrong, but not wrong, so that she looked as ugly in the picture as in real life, but with a slightly different nose. Then I realized that the portraitists we’d passed before had all been skillful at making their subjects look good. By one portrait, her portrait, stood a woman with long hair draped around her shoulder. It took me a second to realize the picture was hers, because it was more beautiful than her, but then they looked exactly like each other.

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.

We’ve had our laughs, haven’t we? And our cries, too. Of course, there were always things we couldn’t say to each other. Maybe they were things we knew, things we didn’t have to say. I’d like to think that was the case. I’d like to believe that explanation.

I miss you already. Your shining face, your occasional supportive comment, the fact that you were there when I was here. We had this moment in the ether. It was ours.

I won’t stay away forever. I couldn’t. There’s something I have to do. But I’ll be back.

Maybe in a month or so.

I took Henry to the big-city style magazines and smokes store today, so he could get his Pokémon fix. They have the Pokémon packs stuck to the window with numbers on them, so you have to stand outside the store for a little while, while Henry studies his choices and picks a number. Then you go in and say, Number 28, Please and the man behind the counter silently reaches back and hands you a Number 28 with the manner he must use on the people buying dirty magazines. We also bought a pack of Lifesavers, one of which disintegrated into powder in my mouth. The Lifesaver I ate was so strange that I actually took the pack back out of my purse and studied it carefully, to see if I’d bought some variation on the normal Lifesaver—Now More Crumbly! Now Older Than Ever Before! Short-Lasting! Worse!

I don’t know if you noticed this, darlings, but yesterday was my one hundredth post. David said we should celebrate with Champagne, but I said I still had a head cold and would rather not, and we paid bills and then watched reruns of The Office with little half-smiles on our faces. So celebrate however you would like.

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 haven't had an interesting thought in my head for two days. I'm filled with thoughts, of course, as I am, for better or worse, a consciousness that cannot be turned off, but they are all stupid. It's icy in the driveway. Don't hit it to her forehand. There's nothing good on television. I wish my head cold would go away. Our kitchen is nice. I like sugar.

I can go on, if you'd like. No, really I can.

For relief from myself I picked up Quentin Bell's biography of his aunt, Virginia Woolf. He wrote, about a Woolf forebear:

He was known as the greatest liar in India; he drank himself to death; he was packed off home in a cask of spirits, which cask, exploding, ejected his unbottled corpse before his widow’s eyes, drove her out of her wits, set the ship on fire and left it stranded [darlings, wait for it] in the Hooghly.

About another relative:

He was, I believe, the author of One More Passionate Kiss; this embrace was reserved, however, not for his beautiful wife but for the second footman.

However real life may seem, says Bell, it is a story, and not only a story, but a joke.

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.

I went to the second most horrible children’s birthday party ever, but it’s not nice to talk about it. It made me sad. I think I hit the car on something on the way out. I pulled over—it was raining—and put on the hazard lights and went out to check the car and then was like, I must leave here now. Got back in the car and drove John home.

I’m too susceptible, I realize, to other people’s situations. I get uncomfortable in, for example, expensive houses that are poorly decorated. I feel like there are no values in the world. This house had an enormous basement covered in yucky carpeting and I thought, These children are going to smoke pot here later. I will not let my children come over. All of which is ridiculous. I will say that no one, including the little birthday girl, face buried in her father's neck, liked the clown they got. John was initially critical because she didn’t have a red nose. She was otherwise dressed from head to toe in extremely distinctive clown gear (right before I did or did not hit the car on something I watched her drive away in her car still wearing the wig, the hat, the makeup and the shirt), but he felt the lack of nose was significant. Darlings, why can’t everything be nice in the world? Alternately, Why must everything have meaning?

The children are fighting downstairs. I can hear them thudding into the walls. Early this morning I thought that one of the children was upstairs, dropping marbles on the floor above my head, but it was squirrels dropping nuts in the gutter, instead. The children were asleep in their rooms.

Now the children are fighting downstairs. Henry has a friend over and I’m sure this is part of the fight—John would like to be included in the play date—but the boys don’t need something to fight about in order to fight. They have all of childhood and adulthood to fight about. They can fight about the possibilities of outer space and endless time.

Yesterday morning David left for work and the children woke and came into my room. I turned on the bedside lamp and everything was cozy and nice. You’re warm, Henry said, getting under the covers. John sat on the floor reading. Then I went to the bathroom and closed the door and they started hitting each other. On the phone later David and I imagined what happens when I close the door. The children turn to each other. What should we do? one of them asks. I could hit you in the head, says the other. You hit me in the head last time, says the first one. Anything else? Naw, all out. All right, all right, hit me in the head. Then, cooperatively, lovingly, they hit each other and cry.

I made a lot of lists last week, and I ran a lot of errands. I chopped a lot of vegetables. I chopped so many vegetables that I became seriously fatigued, and, as I watched my hands chopping vegetables, some of my fingers holding the vegetables down and then four other fingers on the handle of knife, which wasn’t as sharp as it should have been, I thought, I am so tired but I must focus, so that I don’t cut off my own fingers. Focus. And I did focus, and I cut all the vegetables into very thin batons and teeny tiny little mince and I did not chop off even one of my fingers, not even one.

Lately I am estranged from my own hands, I look at them on the steering wheel, or taking off their rings to wash the dishes and am interested by them in a friendly but, given that they’re my hands, kind of distant way. Of course this is because they look like my mother’s hands, as they were when I was young, and they are doing what her hands used to do. And they are glamorous as my mother’s hands used to be for me, bony and veiny and useful.