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Then he picked up his rain coat, turned around, and went to hell
Wasp-waisted island off the coast of Maine. The point in the afternoon where the heat has gathered itself up in folds. Independence Day, which feels, this year, like a sour joke. I’ve stolen away to the third floor of the old, expansive house where we are staying. To write, I have a blunt pencil and a notebook, ostensibly mine, though seventy-percent full of patriotically-colored maps, courtesy my older son. The maps are loop-de-loops, whorls. Not recognizably places, though mostly contiguous. The fury within me — it might, if I tried to draw it, look like these maps. Or it might be a scrawl that builds upon itself until the off-white page becomes inexorably minked, along with the pinky edge of my hand.
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Put the circle back
I was in New York this week; I had gone for a run along the Hudson, a run in which I surprised myself by holding onto a sub-8 minute pace for eight miles, double the distance I’d done since my aborted half-marathon training last fall; I was hobbling into the dim lobby of the hotel, […]
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Elegy for a Pool
The other week, an old friend texted me a link to a story in one of the local papers. The pool where we’d spent so much of our childhood would be closing, permanently, at the end of the summer. The engineer who’d been called to do the evaluation determined that the structure was, essentially, irredeemable. […]
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a turn towards the periphery in order to reach the center
My father in law belonged to the camp who write to know what they think. (Joan Didion, also recently deceased, was, famously, a member, along with Flannery O’Connor and E.M Forrester. (Make what you will of my not having quickly unearthed any famous male subscribers.)) I didn’t know this until I read so in a […]
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They march on their soles up Main Street
This cannot be how I spend the final minutes of my final maternity leave: tidying. Emptying the compost. Ferrying laundry. I should fix the screen door, I think, as I gather up the scythe and the loppers under a sherbet fantasia sunset. I look at the sofa pillows on the playroom floor (earlier, my home-from-school-again-again-again […]
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Goodness, Deconcentration, and the Great Concavity
Easter, 2014. I put on a chartreuse dress and lilac suede sandals and Brady and I go uptown to my great aunt’s where we eat mille feuille from Lady M and drink probably too much white wine out of small, weighty hock glasses. On the way home I get off the subway two stops early […]
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Just a chapter and not the story itself
A second birthday, a third maternity leave. A second August and most of September in our new old house. Great rains sometimes fall / evening cicadas sing /dew glistens white on grass / swallows leave. This is the week that thunder ceases (more is expected this weekend). Like that, the baby is two months old. Like […]
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Matters of the Heart
One of the great, enjoyable mysteries of any pregnancy is what the baby will look like. How strange, then, to know my daughter’s interior so intimately months before I saw her face.
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Inaudible as dreams, or: thoughts on discursion and A Life’s Work
The first thing that occurred to me, as I watched the woman strike the child, was that surely I was not the only witness. A limpid, early summer evening, on a cul-de-sac of tightly spaced houses — surely other families were watching, from their back patios, their screened porches, their postage stamp front yards. At […]
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Sometimes It Blows Shut and Sometimes It Blows Open
What was the name of the game we played as kids, where we’d crawl into our sleeping bags head-first and then, upright, attempt to topple one another? Caterpillar? (But those are horizontal.) Whatever it was called, I could never manage more than a few seconds of it. The bag would close in on me; my […]
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