If I had a bed, I would be so happy. Every night, when I went to bed, I would slide under the covers and think, Thank God I have a bed. I would remember when I didn’t have a bed. I would turn to my husband, next to me in the bed, and say, Darling, do you remember when we didn’t have a bed? Doesn’t it seem so long ago? Have you forgotten what it was like? And he would say, I remember it was terrible. I am so happy that we have a bed. Then we would kiss, in our bed.

I would dream, and I wouldn’t dream about not having a bed. I would dream about being chased and hounded, but that would not be about not having a bed. When I woke from the dream, short of breath, I would remember our first bed, the bed we bought abroad, at the same time we bought our car. The bed was bigger and more expensive than the car. We walked into the store, we saw the bed, we sat on it, we bought it. It was delivered to our apartment up the four flights of wooden stairs, lit by the skylight, that circled the elevator. We didn’t do this, men did this, men brought it up, sat on the floor in our bedroom and put it solidly together.

When the heat was broken, I lay in the bed. When I was pregnant with Henry, my legs cramped in the bed. After I had Henry, and we brought him home, he lay between us in the bed at night, or he and I napped on the bed, on sunny late afternoons, waking up soaked in sweat. I took his picture on the bed.

Then we moved, and the bed moved with us. Each place it went, the bed lost something—a peg, a screw, a bracket. We knew the bed was breaking. We still slept in the bed. We still kissed on the bed. We still rolled the children around the bed. Until it broke. Now I am sad that our bed is broken, and that we don’t have a bed. All I have to do is buy a new bed, and I won’t be sad about this anymore.

Friday morning I went to Petco to buy Daphne more food. Now that we have a dog, I know that I am a liar. While I don’t lie outright, I don’t run up to people and say the opposite of what I am thinking, I do smile, I do wash and dress myself a certain way, I do try to suggest, by being friendly and through other tricks and schemes, that I am a normal loving person, with such great reserves of love that I can waste it, that I can shower it even upon a non-human, an animal I have taken into my home.

My mother, by the way, is a person who does hold these kinds of natural reserves, and a few nights ago, when she was over at my house she saw our dog, Daphne, sitting in the corner, staring at me. Carey, she said, Daphne is looking at you so significantly, and I looked over and saw that in fact, Daphne, who had seated herself in that strange way she has, with her back legs folded uselessly under her, was staring at me with a look of naked longing, or anxiety. I said that Daphne was probably just waiting for me to give her food, but I worried that she was trying to communicate with my mother, trying to tell my mother that my she should take her home, that I don’t really love her, that I am not as I seem.

So now we have established the ground rules: I have a dog, I believe she is a dog, and not a person, and that there is a difference between the two, and yet, at the same time, I am afraid of her as one is afraid of a ghost, or bogeyman—I am afraid my failings are far greater than they should be, that they will take form, attach themselves to her, and be visited upon me.

At Petco, cleverly, they keep the dog food in the back. To get to it one has to walk past the snack bar, the inanity—isn’t food, to an animal, food?—of which struck me particularly forcefully that day, and through various aisles: I chose the aisle filled with dog toys my dog would rip apart in five minutes and ingest. Then I staggered back to the line carrying my bag, and waited while the cashier rang up two women ahead of me. She was offering them the chance to donate to Petco’s foundation for homeless pets, and as I listened to the cashier talk about the charity, and how good it was, and how little of its money went to administrative costs, and then, also, how the cashier’s cats loved the exact same thing the customer’s cats loved—there was some other stuff in there, too, some just general friendliness towards the customer, and knowingness about cats—I thought, I don’t think I am going to give a donation to this charity.

When it was my turn to pay, the cashier, still cheerful from ringing up the customer before me said, Would you like to make a donation to the Petco foundation? and I said, also cheerfully, as if she had offered me dessert, No thanks! And then, when my purchase had come to some number nine cents short of a round dollar number, she said, Would you like to round up and give your change to the foundation? I said, Oh, that’s all right. I kept my nine cents. And as I signed the credit card slip and pulled on my gloves I felt great satisfaction at doing exactly what I wanted, and being truthful, and true to myself, no matter how ill anyone might think of me.

I Adjust to Autumn

The weather is fine, or it rains. The dog needs me, or sleeps. The children are joyous, or upset. My husband is near, or in Miami.

Music means too much, or is noise. My dreams stick, or dissolve. I am a beauty, but I am fat. My hair is too long, then too short.

My mitten is lost, or is found. I’m doing too much, or not much. I don’t spend a thing, or I splurge. I did, but I don’t have a jacket.

I am soaked, or dry as a bone. The leaves go, but don’t worry about it. We broke our bed, we still have a mattress. I am in love, or I am alone.

One morning last week Henry wore my socks to school. You would think that socks would be, like clouds or waves, anonymous things, too nondescript and numerous to keep track of, but in fact I have some favorite socks and I could tell, just looking at the ankle trim of his socks, that these were they. “Mmmm, they’re so comfortable,” he said. “I really like them.” One day a long time ago, some anonymous day, in fact, unmarked, two gametes joined to produce a zygote, which became a morula and then, of course, a blastocyst. Then, after the proper amount of time, plus, it seemed, a few extra days, a boy. Then the boy started wearing my socks, and waking up at 6:30 on a Sunday morning in the Berkshires to watch the mist, which filled the valley, burn off, and to see three deer eat at the crab apple tree, stooping to pick fallen apples from the ground. “You know,” he said, “these socks are a little tight. Do they really fit you?” And he ran off to class, away from me and John. We are a drag on his great spirits in the morning.

Yesterday I ripped my contact in half and removed half my contact from my eye. Then our bed broke. Then, today, I took the boys and the dog for a walk around a lake. As we walked, and the dog strained at her leash, the boys posed questions to me that all required immediate answers, which then inspired other questions. Their goal, it seemed to me, was to force me into an insupportable answer, or to concede that my rule-making was essentially arbitrary, or to become a tyrant. Can I throw a stone in the lake? You may. Can my brother? He may. Can we destroy lily pads with our stones? I think so. If we can destroy one or two lily pads with our little stones, may we now heft enormous boulders into the lake? May we heft four or five apiece? No, you may only throw one more, each. Fine, two more. Now you may never throw another rock in the lake again.

Tyrant. At the optometrist’s office, after we left the lake, the doctor dyed my eye yellow, and turned my eyelid inside out. I had stared, since I broke the contact, at my own eyeball for fifteen minutes at a time, trying to locate the clear scrap that was causing me so much pain. It was hidden from me, and only the doctor's methodical searching, his light, the thing that you rest your head in to immobilize it, this dye, was able to discover it. When he did, what relief I felt! But even as relief flowed through me, I had questions for the doctor.

I.

David was in Japan, so I took the boys to the Intrepid, hot and crowded on a summer weekend. I hadn’t, previously, focused on this, but one thing I enjoy is militaristic sight-seeing. I visit the places where people killed each other, and look at the instruments they used to do so. I take my children with me, so they can play with the guns that have been disarmed but left for us to handle. We imagine ourselves officers, pilots, bombers, grunts.

What should we do? Should we look away?

II.

Outside the library one afternoon this week, women sorted donated books that had been left out in the rain. They set them up along the wall, in the sun, to dry. Two older folks, a man and a woman, sat sleeping in their wheelchairs while their aides sat behind them on the bench, then walked over to look at the books. I imagined that David and I were there, asleep, in the wheelchairs. That we were out in the sun, in public, unaware of our surroundings, but watched after, cared for, together. This was almost unbearable. I went to my car and drove home. When I came back to the library, after lunch, the older couple was awake, and being helped into a car. The man waved at me, friendly and insistent, as I drove by, so I waved back.

A voyage is a grand thing: It begins with terror, but the terror is not bad, the terror is good, the terror allows you to see everything clearly, to understand that you are at risk, that life is unstable, that some of the yellow flowers growing by the side of the driveway are daisies but that one is not, it is different, it is more beautiful than the daisies, and you don’t know its name.

Then there’s a flight.

You stand on line for bottles of water and margherita pizzas at the food stand at Versailles. You are in the garden but you are hidden from the garden, on line at the food stand at Versailles. Later your husband will say to you, I measure my life in trips to Versailles. The line to buy food at Versailles is long, and slow-moving. You are behind a group of people who eventually notice a wild Polish woman trying to cut the whole line. You are united with them—Yes! Yes!—as they tell her in French—she doesn’t speak French—that she should go stand on the end of the line. She just wants water! She tries to explain. But that is what everyone wants on the line for food at Versailles. Everyone wants bottles of water, because it is hot and dusty at Versailles. She leaves for the back of the line, then comes back to plead her case again to the women in front of you. In the end, she is allowed, because she can’t be stopped, to cut in front of them and order her water. She seems entirely bewildered by the problem for which she just found an effective solution.

At the taxi stand outside the gates of Versailles there is another problem, which can also be solved: the taxis won’t take you the train station, because it is close. They won’t take you to Montrouge, where your friends live, because that’s not what they do. They won’t tell you what they do, even if you speak French and can be abusive in French. But if you ask them if they’ll take you to the Sixth Arrondissement they will take you there, and charge you what the meter reads, which is fifty euros.

That’s fine, that’s how things are. You can go to Versailles many times. Your husband has been many times, he measures his life in trips to Versailles. But no matter how many times you go to Versailles, you will never get further than a certain point. You will never see more than three fountains. You will never see the inside of the chateau. You will have to cut things short. Then, one day, either because you have grown old, and your children have left home, or because you are lucky, you will come to Versailles and find you have time enough for everything. You will also find that you have seen everything you wanted to see, and there is nothing left to do. You will be bored by Versailles.

You embark on a canoe trip down the Sorgue. Fat trout hide in the shadows of the Sorgue’s cold water. Fisherman stand in the flow. Your husband is given the back position, because he is stronger than you are. The children sit in the middle, and you sit in the front. When you go down a small rapid, your seat fills with water. You pull over to the side of the Sorgue to dump the water out of your seat. But when you get back in the boat, the current is strong, and you are pulled into the trees that hang over the water’s edge. You lay back to avoid a branch, you try to force it away, but it hits your son in the face. You blame your husband for steering badly. You are ashamed of yourself, then get over it. This will be your favorite part of the trip.

At night your husband drives home from dinner à deux. The road is a narrow twisting mountain road that takes you through the southern hills of the Luberon. The advantages to driving this road at night is that lights tells you other cars are approaching, and that, unable to see clearly what's coming, you never put on unmanageable bursts of speed. The disadvantages are that the other drivers are drunk, that it’s easy to make mistakes, and that you might die.

The flight home takes place entirely during the day time. It is always sunny out the windows, although the window shades are mostly pulled down. You must make eight-and-a-half hours disappear. Eight-and-a-half hours of sunlight, of the same sounds, of the same smells, of the same people, of the same ideas, of the same hunger. Eight-and-a-half hours of eternity. You do it, but you’re not sure how you did it, or whether you could do it again.

I bought myself a bike. It is blue, it is easy to lift, it has a straight handlebar, and a bell. I have a friend in town who bikes, and is nervous, as I am, about cars and even about biking, and she agreed to come by on Sunday morning to pick me up for a very short ride with no hills. Because I was so pleased with my bike, and with myself, for having a bike and riding it, I had David take a picture of me standing by my bike, wearing a helmet and the pants I bought last summer, when David, Henry, John and I were in Vancouver, and the boys had said, firmly, that they didn’t want to ride in Stanley Park, so I dressed for the day’s activities as if we were not bike riding in Stanley Park, but when we got, with some effort, to Stanley Park, everyone decided they did want to go bike riding in Stanley Park, and I had to buy a pair of pants in the running store next to the bike rental shop, so that we could go bike riding in Stanley Park.

Then, of course, I didn’t go riding in Stanley Park. Henry and I rented the bike, walked it through traffic, maneuvered it onto the very busy bike path, and biked almost to Stanley Park, when Henry said, Mom, I don’t want to ride this stupid bike. And because the last time Henry and I rode on a bike together he was hit by a car—he was basically all right, but all of us were shaken—and because I had recently sprained my ankle and was scared of bike riding, myself, we got off the bike and walked it back up the hill to the rental shop. Then, while John and David rode in Stanley Park, Henry and I moped around the entrance to Stanley Park, sitting on different benches and feeling frustrated about the fact that the world isn’t what other people make of it, and even though things seem like they will be nice things to do, and might be nice things to do, they are still things we’re not going to do.

It’s actually funny, really, that I like my new blue bike so much. I love it. I’ve gone to look at it in the garage a couple times, when I wasn’t even taking it out. I held this photo session with David. I'm afraid of certain physical activities, and I mistrust speed, so the only explanation I can offer is that while other people may enjoy biking for the freedom it promises, the speed, and the physical accomplishment, I love my new bike because I know that when things get hard, I'm going to walk it up the hill.

It’s very civilized here. The houses have small lawns, in the back, and the small lawns back onto each other. Sunday we walked down the street to our neighbor’s house for a block party, during which we sat in the back yard on chairs under the trees with a view of everyone else’s backyard stretching down into the distance. Music played, the host passed out glasses of iced coffee sweetened with sugar and milk, and the children shot each other with water guns. This was very civilized, as well. Civilizations make war, of course, but I meant more that water guns were a good way, on a warm spring morning, to cool each other off. And water guns distracted the children, so the adults could talk.

Talk turned to the fox. There was a fox among us, in our back yards, killing squirrels, and causing the dogs down our row of back yards to bark. Our hostess had been feeding her children breakfast one morning when the fox had appeared in her yard, stalked and killed a squirrel, and started to tear it apart. When she opened her back door and asked it to go it picked up the carcass and trotted off. What a nice fox, everyone said. Clean and polite. Not like the squirrels, which eat crocus bulbs by the hundred. Not like coyotes, which live farther north, and will eat decent-sized dogs.

That was Sunday, and on Monday the four of us got into the car to drop Henry at school, then David at the train, then Johnny at school. Henry’s school is close by, almost directly behind our house, and as soon as we dropped Henry off we heard crows yelling and saw the fox, our fox, brown and silver, being chased by three crows. We were running late, but we stopped to shoo the crows off, and to offer the fox a ride. The fox accepted, hopping into the back and riding along as far as the little woods that runs by the parkway, where he said goodbye. I do hope we see him again. The crows are a nuisance, and do terrible things to the tomatoes, but as far as I’m concerned, the fox is a friend.

The boys had haircuts on Saturday. Should I cut their hair myself? My mother used to shampoo us, pin a bath towel around our necks, lay newspaper on the floor and have us climb onto the kitchen stool in the center of the paper. Then she stood behind us, measuring, or, once, across the kitchen from us, taking a photograph. Somewhere there is a picture of my sister, eyes and hair dark, sitting on the stool, waiting for the scissors.

We had to sit still, and stare at the oven clock. Time moved slowly, but not, it turns out, as slowly as I thought it did. It is unlikely that I will start cutting my own sons’ hair. I’m not going to make their clothes, as my mother did for us, or even their Halloween costumes, or teach them to ski. I have to offer them something else: I will tell them true stories about the old times, long ago, when life was different, but not very different from how it is now. I was them and my mother was me.

Obviously there’s a point, when you’re watching your son play baseball, and his team is getting shellacked, and your husband, who is a coach, and so pitches, at this level, to his own players, strikes out his first-born son, and the ball falls between three players, and they all chase it around like hens, and then no one picks it up and throws it anywhere, and the bottom of the first inning is called because the other team has made six runs and there is a mercy rule, that you worry for your son, and the sons of the people around you, and imagine that they are undergoing some kind of searing experience that will scar them. But this moment passes, it passes quickly, and when you look down to the playground and see that most of the lineup has climbed the jungle gym and is going down the slides, oblivious to what’s going on out on the field, and when you look into the outfield during the bottom of the inning, and see three of them moving their arms around strangely, and either carrying on a conversation or maybe each just talking to himself, out loud, and then the next time someone does something particularly boneheaded on the field you and some of the other mothers laugh, kindly or unkindly—both and neither—you realize that you are not watching a game, or even a representation of anything, you are watching a thing, that thing is irreducible, it is physical and non-physical, it is plastic, it is small and it is large, it is love and the absence of love, it is baseball and it is most certainly not, I repeat, not baseball at all.

I went to the cash machine Friday, the one in town that charges me three extra dollars to withdrawn my cash from it because it is not my cash machine, and do you know what? I’m glad it’s not my cash machine, because I hate it. At the last bank where I used to stand regularly in line to deal with a teller, more than a decade ago, one of the tellers was a very beautiful woman, tall and slender and with a noticeable patch of hair on her chin, long dark hairs which she did not pluck or shave. This little beard ennobled her. I think of her, pretty and bearded, particularly as I grow hairier with age. Anyway, there was a line at the cash machine I hate, and I saw this and went and left the groceries in my car, but when I came back the line was exactly the same as it was when I passed by the first time. I took my place at the end of the line. There was only one machine in the room, and the woman at the machine was speaking loudly while she banked. She was saying, “One small container of creamed spinach. One small container of orzo salad. One small container of roasted potatoes.” And so on. Eventually, and slightly before completing her order—she went over to the little banking table and stood there, fitting her money into her wallet while she continued to order, then brushed past me holding the phone to her mouth—she left us. I was hoping that at this moment the woman in front of me, a stranger to me, and I would cross the line that separated us entirely from each other, and share an eye roll. In fact I expected this, and waited for the woman to shift a little and initiate the eye roll with me, but she did not, she stared straight ahead, and waited her turn at the machine. The woman ahead of her went, then she went, then I went. The reason, by the way, that I hate this bank machine is that the machine never allows you to chose Yes or No for your answers. You can only chose Sure, or No Thanks. Would you like to see your balance? Sure! Do you need a receipt? No Thanks!

I would never say Thanks to a machine. The machine can say Thanks to me, if it has to, but that is where the politesse should end. Another thing I think about this machine, and I do think about this stupid machine, is that if someone were going to program a bank machine to speak, so to speak, in the vernacular, why stop with Sure? Why not go all the way to Hell Yeah? This bank will charge you three dollars in addition to whatever your bank is going to charge you for this transaction. Do you want to continue? Fuck No should be a choice. Oh, I know that it was a person, somewhere, who programmed this irritating machine, and so in the end, it’s not the machine I have issues with, it’s people. Yes. It is. Machines are empty, binary, useful things. People wear beards, or should.

While courting, my love and I used to drive to the top of a mountain whose name I have somehow forgotten. You could hike up it, at least partway, but we didn’t have time for that. At the top we lay in the sunshine on the flat rocks and looked down on the brown and yellow shapes of the fields, and the shine of the river that cut through them. Breezes blew over us. We moved, without moving closer to each other, closer to consummation.

There is a certain peaceful feeling that accompanies the attainment of great heights, even if they are reached by car, or elevator, or are not particularly great. The first two apartments we shared were graced by communal roof decks to which we clumsily transported drinks, and dinners, and once a poorly timed party, which then had to be moved, quickly, back down. On the first roof deck there were periods when the building’s air conditioning blew hard, and we had to stop talking and wait for it to be done.

On vacation we are perpetually climbing things, and we are not alone. A few weeks ago, in Mexico, we climbed to the very top of the house and could see, in one direction, a blue and gentle ocean, calmed by the white breakers about a mile out, and in the other, a white, female tourist, who liked to read in her bathing suit and shorts in the shade of a palapa. We climbed also the ancient palace of Ek’Balam, a Mayan city built three thousand years ago in the Yucatán jungle, and only recently excavated, and rebuilt. Originally, the city was paved entirely with a white stucco, and was probably, from the top of the palace, blinding. Now the ground between the buildings is covered with grass, and populated by hot, black dogs. Our guide was loyal to this place, and jealous of the special attention given to Chichen Itza, where the steps were narrower, he said, than the steps at Ek’Balam, and where the people had polluted the pure Mayan with the Aztec by introducing the practice of human sacrifice. Also, he said, the souvenir vendors at Chichen Itza were impossible.

We got there early, but as the day grew hotter, and the dogs sleepier, groups of people arrived to climb the palace steps after us. It is possible to define all this climbing as an hysterical response to the rigors of vacation, in which nothing must be done, except to create a new purpose for one’s existence out of this nothing. On the other hand, and this is what I believe, what is a better, higher use of this empty time than the attempt to attain the peaceful feeling, accompanied by breezes, that one only gets, for some reason, at the top of one thing or another?

Spring is for waiting, and watching. Here in New York, our magnolia tree, which bloomed only the month the gardeners planted it two years ago, and last summer stood as an extravagant stick in our front yard, is showing fuzzy green buds. In Seattle, our friend sits in the hospital, after a bone-marrow transplant, watching his white counts go down to zero and back up again.

His wife has been my best friend for the last twenty-five years. We are usually physically distant; we don’t always talk; each has parts of her life the other can't comprehend. It doesn’t matter: We see the other as she would be seen, as she sees herself.

My parents offer to buy me a plane ticket to Seattle with their miles, so my father and I are now, together, on hold. When the woman comes back on he encourages her to help us. I know you can do it, he says. You can do this. She puts us back on hold while she transfers us.

In Seattle it must be spring, too, cold spring, damp spring, spring before anything has happened, spring that might as well be winter, except for a few small signs. The secret of early spring is not that warmth is here, or growth, or ease, but that it’s possible to imagine these things again, and to want them very badly.

Last year my mother needed me to pick her up at her medical group, because she had had a routine procedure that they wouldn’t allow her to drive home from. I found her in the bed, pink and healthy-looking in her gown, as surprised to see me as I was to see her. I still imagine myself to be young, no more than eighteen, with all my life ahead of me; what’s more, I know she imagines herself the same way. This is why, even though we know and love each other, we sometimes find the other incongruous, and out of place.

When we lived on East 96th Street, our neighbor had a form of dementia, and cats. When I brought Henry home from daycare she often came to the door, and invited us in. Now let’s see, she said, every time, Where have they all gone? Here’s Snowball, and here’s Smokey, and I think that Fire has hidden under the bed again. And she called Fire, and asked us to follow us back to her bedroom, and peered under the bed for Fire, and we spent most of our visit calling to Fire and looking for Fire under things.

But Fire did not come, and even though I got down on the ground, sometimes, and looked under the bed, where there were bowls of cat food, I did not see Fire, and I suppose I imagined that Fire was dead, and that this fact had been forgotten. Sometimes, though, I worried, because things were a little unbuttoned at our neighbor’s apartment, and the smell from the cats was very great, and of course because of her dementia, that if Fire wasn’t dead, Fire was in trouble, and that one day little Henry would, while helping our neighbor search for Fire, find him, and that this would be worse than Fire having died some time ago and our neighbor, who loved Fire, having forgotten this. From our point of view, if not from hers.

But in fact Fire was alive, and under the bed, exactly where our neighbor thought he was. Fire was very shy, but one day Henry and I met him, briefly, before he yowled and ran desperately from the room. Our neighbor wasn’t mistaken about this. And our neighbor was herself, and not my grandfather, who had had Alzheimer’s, and whose body, seated loosely in a chair in his living room, was a figure of dread in my youth. She was a nice woman, someone else’s mother, and I could like her and take my son to visit her and offer her, one hot day, our fan, without feeling that something terrible was going to happen to me, and that I knew what it was.

My in-laws have a house in Florida, in a gated community that is home, or second-home, they told me, to 3,200 families. It is a colonial outpost in the midst of a colonial outpost in the midst of a colonial outpost and as such, is not only garrisoned, but protected within, from the individually destructive tendencies of its inhabitants, by a comprehensive series of rules governing the appearance of every house and person on its grounds.

So much of the earth is under our control here. Not the clouds, which pass, unpleasantly, before the sun, nor the fire ants, which hide and wait in the ground, nor death’s harbinger, incontinence, which is precisely a lack of control and should not, signs beg us, happen in the pools. Everything else has been, within the gates, manufactured or altered to exact specifications. Plant height and placement, water temperature, the grade of the paths, the ducks on the pond, which are fakes, the warm towels, hair salon, nail salon, massage palace, places to drink, places to eat, the outside impermanent movie theater and some wandering drinks bringers, not to mention the four golf courses and thirty tennis courts, built in a crescendo of control over the elements, and maintained in this ecstasy, are there for us, when we want them.

Since I was there last, my father-in-law tells me, twenty-six million dollars have been spent improving the facilities, a project that has just been concluded. For the most part I couldn’t tell, without him pointing it out to me, what had changed. Poverty could destroy this place, or a natural disaster, and individuals will of course pass on from it, individually. It is possible to imagine, though, that the members of this community, united in the interests of pleasure, comfort, and financial well-being, have created an example of human achievement that will last almost as long as a poem lasts, or a book.

I was married in the backyard of my parents’ home, beyond which stretches a small wood. The wood was big enough, when I was younger, to imagine it endless, but small enough that I could find, easily, within it, the man-made ponds a neighbor had put in, to drain, I now presume, his land dry. The ponds were very close to each other and one wasn’t much more than the a muddy hole. The other, however, was a small circle of unnaturally bright blue, the very beautiful blue, tinged with green, that water is colored in children’s picture books. This pond was my thing, the thing I found in the wood, and the appearance, at one of my appearances there, of the owner of the pond, wearing elegant, alien jodhpurs, only served to reinforce the idea that this place was special, that meaning was attached to it, that things would happen around it. He told me I could come back whenever I wanted to.

All the great fairy tales take place in the wood. Our breakfast table sat beside a large picture window, through which you could watch deer move in and out of the brown depths and where I once saw, after a snow, a fox slide by. In the summer, the smooth mowed green of the lawn was set off by the wilder bushes, then the trees behind them. The tops of the trees were very high, and seemed to me years later, as I lay on my back in the yard, sunning myself, to form some kind of fence. But when I was younger, when I regularly read fairy tales, I looked into, rather than up at the trees.

What I wanted from the wood was a place to locate my imaginary activities. The wood should have been perfect for this: it was too small to be a real wood, and I couldn’t get lost in it. Even so, it was more real than I imagined. The deer, whose appearance in the backyard seemed romantic to me, and who were symbolic, although I didn’t know this, of the unseen existence of other things, were also real deer, and there were too many of them. They were stripping all the plants and still starving in the winter. Archers were allowed to hunt them during the season—I knew this too, I saw the trucks parked by the side of the road. Still, I was startled on a walk one fall, by hunters I couldn’t see. Do you want to get your dog shot? someone shouted, from his blind. They warned me to go home.

My parents still live at the same house, and the wood is still there, largely unchanged and undeveloped. The house, though, has grown, and extended its influence. Just before I went to college, my parents took out the apple trees and put a pool in—another man-made pond, a different blue-green. Then they had to install fencing around the property to keep people out of the pool. Later they put in higher fencing and even a gate at the bottom of the driveway, to keep out the deer, who, despite the hunters, multiplied, and ate all their plants. When I drive up with the David and the boys, a sign tells us to wait at the bottom of the drive for the gate to open out. I know some people miss the innocence of their youth, the crazy things they did, or the promise they felt that life held for them then. If I miss anything, I miss the porousness, the lack of definition, the bleeding edge between what existed in my imagination, and what was real.

The very crappiness of the sandwich comprises its appeal: the soft and pillowy bread, tasting only of sugar and air; the pink, slippery meats, flesh compressed; the pale, sweating cheese, soft and fatty; the pale pink tomatoes, oozing water; the lettuce shredded, so that it has lost all its juiciness and bounce. Imagining the sandwich there, in front of me, I sniff the scent of fleshly happiness, and, more faintly, a belch. When something is an object of lust all that is disgusting about it, all that is second-rate, vulgar, and careless, becomes part of its potent charm. In this way lust, whose interest is wide-ranging, seems to enjoy an advantage over love, which is attracted only to what is beautiful, and good.

The baby—we didn’t yet think about him as someone with a name—was a week late, then more, then more, and when I went to the doctor’s office to lie down on her little cot with a view of the back garden and read decor magazines, the little monitor on my belly said, Nothing doing! So I went into the hospital and they put a little pill on my cervix and said, This is to soften your cervix. In the morning we’ll start the pitocin and then you’ll have a baby. I had gone into the hospital with a hilarious assortment of things, hoarded crossword puzzles and a mix-tape I had made years earlier to listen to while running, a book of Elizabeth Bishop poems for David to read to me, and bottles of water. Pillows, changes of clothes, a journal. One thing I didn’t have, though, was snacks, and as I lay there in the hospital and nothing really seemed to happen in the fifteen minutes after the pill was administered, David became hungry, so I said, Why not order a pizza?

He ran out and got his favorite pizza, which had breaded and fried eggplant on top. It smelled so good that I asked him if I could have a little bit. And it tasted so good that I had a little more. Then my contractions started.

Hmm. Maybe that eggplant pizza was an error.
Hmm. These crossword puzzles aren’t holding my interest like they used to.
Hmm. Could you please turn that fucking music off?

The pain was neither a hum nor a whine nor the beating of a drum, it was my whole body grinding into itself, breaking itself apart.

When they came to the door to see if I wanted an anesthesiologist, David said, as per our prelabor, earnest, hopeful discussions, that we were going to wait and see how things went, and I said, Get the nurse back and tell her I want the anesthesiologist right now. By the time the dapper male French anesthesiologist arrived, I was sitting in my old black camisole, pantsless, ready to do business. I leaned forward and he found the space between my vertebrae. We chitchatted a little. I lay down.

Then David and I entered the very nice period, during which we both dozed, on and off, and David read me some Bishop poems. He may have read “Little Exercise,” which starts:

Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling.

It’s not one of her saddest poems, not even close, but as David read, each word sounded like a bell whose tone grew deeper and sadder with each stroke. As I listened, I felt a kind of vertigo from the depth of sadness I was able to feel, as if I were standing at the edge of something, looking down, not seeing the bottom. At the end of the poem I said, It was beautiful, but it is too sad, and he put the book down.

The story continues. It can’t stop! The doctor came in, wearing a short red dress. More people came in, crowding the room. I left the room for another room. I remember even the hallway, I remember being wheeled through the hall. The blood, the pain, then, afterward, the bureaucratic calm—I remember it all, even though I’m not, for various reasons, going to tell you about it, now. This is the story that is closest to me, that is most part of me, even though you might think, reasonably enough, that this story belongs to someone else.

When Henry was born the nurse said, Drink lots of water so the milk will come in and I did, I drank liters and liters of water. I drank beer, too—we were in Belgium and everyone believed that beer was good for milk, and I drank Champagne—friends brought some to the hospital room, since everyone knows that Champagne brings your milk—and after all of this my breasts filled like balloons and felt as if, like balloons, they might burst.

Henry was, for his part, a very hungry baby: He ate frequently, seriously, until my nipples bled and I cried while he ate and cried thinking about him eating. Even after this period was over, when I could feed him comfortably and my breasts were merely enormous, they were enough to inspire a man passing me, as I carried Henry in his Baby Bjorn down the Chaussée de Waterloo, to shout after us, Il a la chance! I shouted back, in French, What? He repeated himself, and I understood that he meant that my baby was lucky to be lying there, resting on my breasts. Then I knew that the things happening within my body were not there for me, or even for my son, but for the interest and education of the world.

dog Pronunciation: \dȯg, däg, (regional) dawg\ Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Old English docalakadoo Date: before 12th century. Definition: Mythical beast well-loved by everyone, useful, bringer of pipe, slippers, Freudian in concept, embodiment of the id that draws forth the superego; also can be seen as an abyss of neediness filled with shit, covered with hair. Adorable. Loves chewing on things. Four legs, tail.

What we know about the dog:
She is hairy
She wants love
She eats snow
She shits all the time, or three times a day, depending on your perspective
Nothing is ever enough for her
She will jump on you
She will follow you home
She will eat your dinner
She will lick your toes or your socks or anything salty, so watch out
If something drops on the floor and you don’t want to pick it up and it is edible, she has her uses
She can be killed by a chicken bone
She pisses on her own bed, then slinks off to avoid punishment
Some children are frightened of her
She submits
She is not a person
She doesn’t understand
She will never read a book, even a simple book
She is dumber than a chimpanzee
I don’t believe she is capable of the creative act
She is my responsibility
I can lock her in a cage
She likes her cage
She doesn’t hold grudges
She snores

What we don’t know about the dog:
What her purpose is
The meaning of her
Whether or not she is preposterous
Why she pissed on her bed the other day and what will stop her from doing this
How much we would spend on her medical care

What we sometimes imagine about the dog:
That she sits in judgment upon us

Henry had a piano recital this Saturday. It was his first, and for it he wore a shirt that wouldn’t stay tucked in and a visage that said, Please don’t talk to me I am very close to vomiting. I should mention that on Thursday morning I slipped on the ice of my driveway, banging my head hard against the ground. I got up. I went inside. I felt all right. But then, in the kitchen, putting the dishes away, I started noticing little fragments of thought, little pieces of memory, little familiar ideas, or dreams, and couldn’t figure out where they had come from. I wanted to follow them up, follow them to where they had started. The light was gray in the kitchen, cold and dim, and I suddenly realized I was standing there, frozen, trying to make my way through my own brain. At the hospital they took a film of my brain and the neurologist, the next day, said I had suffered a minor brain trauma. I was better within a day.

Still, or so, there was a crystalline quality to Henry’s recital that I have rarely felt anywhere. The room was vivid, the colors intense, the light golden and warm, in contrast to the darkness outside. The children who were performing sat in a section by themselves, away from us, and so I could only see Henry from a distance, and I felt him strongly there, away from me. David and John and I sat with Henry’s babysitter and her husband, and my parents, and my youngest sister and her boyfriend. My childhood friend and her family were there, also, to hear her older son play.

Most of the children were unknown to me, but as they took the stage and played their pieces it seemed that they were saying something important about themselves. My friend's son, one of the youngest, played simply and well. Henry played seriously, making a line out of the music, as his teacher had told him to do. One little boy, dressed neatly, sat down and played some crazy Romantic rhapsody badly, but with such enthusiasm that you knew something within him had been waiting for this music. A little girl had so many problems with her Clementi that I felt my father, sitting behind me, grow worried, and sad. The last girl to play, the oldest player there, played two pieces flawlessly, so beautifully that it pierced through the lights, the colors, the darkness outside, through the skin of the evening, and into its heart.

When I was younger I gave little thought to maintaining myself, keeping track of myself, keeping myself together, because I had no idea that I was dissolving, and that I would find, thirty, twenty, fifteen years later, that this younger self was an apparition, familiar to me because we shared memories, but otherwise increasingly, unknown. I should have written everything down, is one thing I think today, is one thing, in fact, I write down, but maybe seeing my younger self on paper would have increased my distance from her. Maybe it would have embarrassed me, and made me turn away. In any case, part of younger self’s charm, don’t you think, is that she hadn’t yet thought of these things? That she was so dreamy? That she imagined life as something that would happen to her, and that she imagined she would drift through this happening and find herself essentially unchanged on the other side?

My grandmother didn’t die suddenly, but I was far away, and very pregnant. I found it hard to let go. When my son was born I believed, privately, and without any system of belief, that she had been reincarnated in his form.

My son had curly hair and a head that, at least early on, drooped forward on its slender stalk.

In my dreams I changed my grandmother’s soiled pants.

They both loved me.

I’m not suggesting these things are evidence. There was no evidence for the belief, nothing that couldn’t be explained easily, gently, plausibly by my own psychological needs. Once, crossing the Chaussée de Waterloo after my grandmother’s death, but before my son’s birth, I passed a woman I was convinced was her spirit. She didn’t even look at me. It didn’t matter.

Now we’ve moved to a very old house. It was a farmhouse, and then a school, and then a private house again. It is porous, open to pests, and sometimes because of this and sometimes for other reasons, it creaks and rattles. The doors are blown by empty breezes. We moved here when our younger son, who is not my grandmother’s reincarnated soul, was less than one year old. He started talking soon after we moved in, which surprised us. One thing he liked to say when he and I were in his bedroom was that he saw people, sometimes behind me, always when there was no one there. At first I was, against my will, alarmed by this. It was nonsense, I told myself. I would not allow myself to imagine anything. But later, after I understood to what extent our house was infested with animals, I welcomed ghosts. I wanted to believe in them. I prefer ghosts to things, and to nothingness.

I am a dog I am a dog I am a dog I am a dog. I am an old dog, so old I died three weeks ago. They didn’t want me to die, they didn’t want me to go, so they took me to the veterinarian. The veterinarian couldn’t say, "Put him to sleep," or they couldn’t hear him, so they gave me steroids, and steroids are amazing things. They couldn’t bring me to life but I do walk around now, lifelike. Skeletal. My fur is soft.

This is from before my time—there is no reason I should know this—but when the hamster died they didn’t bring him back to life, they laid him in a box, they took the box outside, and they tried to dig a hole to bury him. The ground was frozen and they couldn't. Then they became distracted by something and they put him on a fence post and went inside. He sat in his box on a fence post until spring. I will die before spring, and they will burn me up. Salt sticks in my paws. I am gone, or almost gone.