Difficult

I can't even write this book, and this is ME telling you this, it's not IN the book, because MS Word is behaving in the most shocking and awful manner, it won't copy and paste right, and it shuts down randomly every four minutes approximately, and it's a mess! What the hemorrhaging blazes am I supposed to do about this? The one day of the decade when I decide I'm going to make a fresh start on this miserable thing. I mean, it's fine, because in the difficulty I see that even though it makes a much more dramatic start, I can't have the sister betraying the sister this way.

New Start

The story begins with two acts of coupling. One is pure and infused with love, enacted for the purpose of procreation. This is the one where my highly intelligent sister attempts to fortify her marriage with a child. and this is the one where my rich and beautiful sister shags my rich and beautiful husband. One is carnal and filthy, and this is the one where my rich and beautiful sister shags my rich and beautiful husband. The story begins in the middle of a cul de sac in the most perfect suburb of the most adorable city. The cul de sac is a circular driveway shared by three dwellings. It is a perfect point of departure for those leaving and arrival for those just coming. The beautiful coupling of husband and wife is enacted inside the middle house. The engorged slappery of married man with unmarried art prodigy takes place inside my house, while I am at the library with the children. I have to forgive them. Otherwise they will say snide things to me, and cut me off in the middle of my sentences.

I am writing a book. I wrote another book, before, so it’s not unlikely that I will write this one all the way to the end. I have a lot of determination, and a perfect heart-shaped bottom. I have a secret bit of steel in my soul, which I remember to reference in times like this, when books are about to be written, and people are about to get mad at me. I am taking the time to write everything down for everyone, because with everyone’s really spectacularly busy lives, they cannot be expected to write it for themselves. It’s all to my advantage, that they don’t write. And of course, it’s to their advantage as well. With everyone writing things on separate pieces of paper, you lose the general idea. You find yourself comparing this one to that one, and skipping ahead, and finding that lies have been told. I will probably not get a lot of appreciation, but you know how women are, especially three women who are all sisters. Here is a monument to three sisters who are each older than the other.

Everyone’s story starts at the same place, in the cul de sac. Babe trying to escape it. Kate trying to burrow her way in. Me trying to burn myself alive. All of the men involved are here as well. Lloyd trying to buy up the third house. Leon trying to fill up the third floor. Murray trying to get himself on television more times per day.

Babe Is The Muscle

In Babe’s mind there’s a family that is a body. She’s the muscle. Her mother, Emmaline, is the heart. The heart pumps blood through all the muscles and the muscles pull the body around from place to place. They set it up, fed by the blood, in shapes. They control it.

Lloyd, her excellent boyfriend, is the skeleton. He is, without her, a pile of bones. She is, without him, a pile of jelly. She brings her stringiness, her resistance, and he brings rigidity, no nonsense. She sets it up and moves it around and he supports her and limits her. Her mother provides their sustenance.

Inside the body is the reproductive system. Ronnie is the female reproductive system and Murray is the male. They make children together. Kate and Murray are the brains. They are grey and gelatinous and have to be contained by the skull, which is skeletal, and scalp, musculature, or they are exposed and damaged. Everyone in the body has a certain something to do. Everyone has a critical role.

She is the muscle of the family. If it weren’t for her, they wouldn’t go anywhere. Kate is the brain. If it weren’t for her, they wouldn’t have any angst. Ronnie is the womb. If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be any children. The mother is the heart. If she died, they would all suffocate.

Babe's Paintings

Babe’s paintings are spread across buildings around the country. They are absence art. In each mural is represented the view that would be visible were the building not there. So if one stands at the right place, which is usually marked with a black dot and if possible equipped with a bench, the building seems to disappear. In addition to reflecting what’s behind the canvas, in exactly precise ways, she has always included a chaotic element, like a child’s balloon floating away, or a potted plant just falling off a window sill, a cloud that looks like Jesus. On weather days that do not match the painting, the effect is chilling.

She will paint any building if the price is right, even a barn. She paints them ruthlessly out of existence. At home, on her own canvases, she paints what’s behind the canvas, including the structure of the easel. She sells these for thousands of dollars. She travels the world. She is interviewed and the interview title is “The Invisible Artist.”

I Am Trying To Write A Novel

Will you turn down the sound on that Gameboy? Will you put your own plate in the sink? Will you pick up that carrot? Will you go and watch a movie on television? Will you please go to your room? Will you consult the internet instead? Could some strong person of able mind let the miserable goddamn cat out? Will you please stop asking me? Would you mind not doing that? Does anyone else in this room smell that baby’s diaper? Can you stop pacing? Can you stop reading over my shoulder, every time you pace past me? Can you take your phone conversation somewhere else? Do you really need me for that? Can you stop singing? Can you stop humming? Can you stop clicking?

I do not want to read the email you sent me. I do not want to talk to you on the phone. I do not want to cook anything for you. I do not want to check out The Onion’s riff on the new Pope. I don’t want to be asked anything. I don’t want to report anything. I don’t want anyone to call me or speak to me or touch me for thirty consecutive minutes.

HA HA HA

Murray’s mother said with feeling on the day the pope died that she’d seen four popes in her life, this was the fourth, and now with him gone she’d seen four popes in her long tragic life. And Murray said, Geez, that’s great. Four popes! Well I’ve seen three popes in my short interesting life, so after all your suffering through the long fifties and endless sixties, you’ve only got one pope on me! What did that extra twenty years get you, lady? One more pope? Big fucking whoop! And you know what else is just completely beautiful? Do you? Smugelda Catholica the great collector of popes? When the next pope is crowned, there will be at that time one sweet satisfying hour, one blissful glorious hour when I have had four popes and you have had four popes, and that’s the magic of living on the East coast, mother, so IN YOUR FACE.

Babe's Artistic Motivation

It must be said as a disclaimer that Babe is alone in her apartment a lot of the time. It is a choice she’s made, but it does at times become a little resonant.

Even if you think that DH Lawrence and his hot-talking coal miners are for shit, and even if you think that Freud had his thumb up his butt and should have been sent to culinary school, even if you find the works of Isaac Asimov clunky and laughably mundane, you should be glad and thankful, glad and thankful that these three and others like them and unlike them have filled up tier after tier after endless toppling tier of books for the library. Can you imagine, can you comprehend the clattering echoes of footfalls in cavernous empty spaces if only those people who really should have written books had actually written them? Can you imagine the dearth, the worldwide dearth if only those who could really paint fantastically had painted? Or if even those people, even those rarified few, had only produced their best best work? There’d be nothing to read in the grocery store. There’d be the same forty-seven prints for sale at every framing store. We’d all be wearing very functional overalls and eating corn pudding for every meal.

More importantly, the blackness that encroaches would flood us in. There’s always a wave of language and art that’s cascading over itself, endlessly refreshed by the people who do it, the hopelessly stupid and the brilliant laboring side by side, and it’s washing up against and pushing away the black death of empty space beyond. Bring on more cable channels. Let everyone who has a pen and a piece of paper write as many poems as will fit. Let’s put another wing on the library, another gallery downtown, let’s put another art supply store in the mall and another screen in every movie theater. Let’s make movies, books, sculptures, paintings, recordings, quilts, botanical gardens, interesting footprints, collages, haute couture, ridiculous stilettos, unusable furniture, mechanical compositions, let’s push it back, back, back so we can rest peacefully behind our shouted up wave. We will not be engulfed. Not this decade. Not with Fox Searchlight Pictures on the job, and every angsty teen poet that started a blog this year, and every kid scratching in the dirt with a pine cone, or making a jacket out of a blanket and wearing it all day. The rows and floors of the public library are battlements, trenches, defenses for us. Don’t let the books go away. Don’t let the acres of canvas under the Chicago Museum of Art ever cease to be replenished. Keep taking photographs. Keep singing arias. It’s everyone’s job. The absence is terrifying. The silence is cold and grim.

It should be noted that Ronnie, who hadn’t had a moment alone in the house since before the baby was born, no not a literal actual moment, would have seen things differently. She might have even said, “Bullshit.”

Murray Is Ill

It is his one flaw. Sometimes he gets ill.

At these times he wanders about with his eyes half closed taking his temperature or asking her to feel his head. Sometimes he shudders for no reason. He puts his long legs out to the end of a blanket and dozes in his chair. He would never go to be or remove himself from her sight in any way. She had to practically step over him as he shuffled from cabinet to cabinet in the kitchen asking petulantly if there wasn’t any honey. This the man who planned to circumnavigate the world. This the man who wanted to scale the Peruvian Andes. Whatever.

If the children filet themselves with fireplace tongs while Murray is ill and Ronnie happens to be in the bathroom, they will have to stay filleted.

I can taste my tonsils he says ominously. I think my glands are swollen. Do they feel swollen?

Murray will oppose a trip to the doctor for either of the children for any reason until they are spurting blood out their eyes or have stopped breathing for half a day. Then he’ll sigh and say, “Maybe they should go in,” but he would never take them or go with Ronnie, he’ll just give his approval. Meanwhile if one of his eyelashes won’t line up properly, he’s on the phone to the doctor saying, “I need to be seen immediately.” And with the air of, “Now a true illness has entered the house.” Even though she’s been gutting it out with sinusitis so bad she’s had actual nosebleeds for three weeks. Makes her mad and short with him. Which he notes. And whines about.

Neighborhood Craft Show

Ronnie brought Kate to a neighborhood craft show. This was happening twice a year in the house the friends all called “The Manor House” which was a grand and glorious old house that even the maverick French general Lafayette would even have been proud to call his own. All of the girls in the neighboring cul de sacs and the ones even from the main streets connecting the cul de sacs one to another were crafters. They made jewelry or handbags or knit hats for babies or made cranberry cookies or tiramasu almonds or whatever. Some created aromatherapy. Some created soap.

The soap maker owned the house and set up her table in the foyer. She also was in charge of placing a freestanding sign out in front of the house that said, “Craft Show Today: 2-6” in pink. For two weeks previous, Ronnie had been agonizing over how much to charge for sets of infant hats and boas made of a feathery yarn that was very soft and strange. She settled on twenty dollars. At the craft show she sold three such sets. Then she bought a patchwork handbag, $22, and a set of semi-precious gemstone earrings made by a new neighbor, $38, and a bar of soap shaped like a rabbit and nestled in a pile of raffia, $5. Factoring in the cost of the yarn for her three hat sets, she came out even.

Isn’t this kind of ridiculous? Asked Kate. Everybody here is too rich to be worrying about selling beaded handbags.

Look, she said, it’s not so much a craft sale as a present exchange. And if more people like the presents you brought from home to exchange, then you get to pick out more presents to take home. See?

Like a barter then.

Well don’t put it all icky. Like an exchange and a competition and a show. And putting a price tag on your things let people know how much of your things they’re going to have to buy in order for you to buy any of their things.

Someone who claims to have adult ADD has brought absolutely everything in her house. She’s also brought wine glasses painted with paint. Someone with an enormous mole over most of one cheek has brought several tables of aromatherapy things including varicose vein treatment and sex enhancing lotions. That room is like a damn sideshow and a damn whorehouse, and that’s where the French doors are where Ronnie has hung her little hat sets. Which are out of season. It being spring. Miracle she sold one single set.

In the next room there’s a table in the middle with food and the truly choice exhibitors are here where people congregate and pick at the shredded bagel with sugary cream cheese, or the inevitable brie. Someone brought Ritz crackers, probably the ditz who painted wine glasses. Kate finds herself staring at the wine glass painter and asking her what she’d brought to the show. The wine glasses, she reminded her, and everything else on that table over there. Including lemon pound cake in a fancy tin, which was also laid out for samples on the food table. No one was eating it.

Everyone’s trying to start their own business. Everyone’s using their husbands’ money to make themselves web sites that have color schemes. Everyone’s got little price tags with small prices written in tiny print with a gel pen. The top sellers are the aromatherapy crap, the soap, and the hair clips. It’s a damn day in fancy urban mommy fantasy land.

Mother I Am Leaving You

The mother had always supported everything the girls had ever done and had convinced them separately and collectively that they were geniuses, omnipotent, glamorous, and brave. Therefore, it was expected that she would be an easy sell on the New Orleans move. Babe had moved places before. Bhutan actually. The mother had said, That’s perfect dear. When you come back bring me a pashmina.

Mother, you can’t tell anyone this. Not Ronnie and not Lloyd. I’m moving, to New Orleans. Movers are coming and moving me. It’s already done, because I put a deposit down on an apartment. I can’t live on the cul de sac with Ronnie and Kate, mother, I just can’t.

Where is the apartment?

On Esplanade. The apartment is on Esplanade.

Well you won’t need a car then. That’s exciting.

Milking the Hydra

What’s the phrase, said Ronnie to Murray, for it? It means having too many things going on that you can’t control?
Got the tiger by the tail? He suggested. Too many balls in the air? Burning the candle at both ends? Irons in the fire? Pumping the calliope with both feet?
Something about a hydra, she said, something having to do with controlling all the heads of a hydra.
What’s the relevance? Said he.
It’s how I feel all the miserable goddamn time, she went on, with chasing this and that, and filling up this cup and emptying that one, and rolling this twice and subtracting that and driving here and there all the miserable goddamn time. What do you do, Murray? What do you do? You go to work, and you come home, and you have your lizards, and you play with the children, down on the floor like a good dad. I am fucking drowning in Tide with Bleach Alternative, and my last gulping gasp is supposed to contain the 75,000 words of a medium sized novel? Are you fucking kidding me?
She is doing what they call venting which means he doesn’t have to listen. Or, if he listens, he is only allowed to respond with purring noises.
My writing, she said, is like a crate of ducks. And my life is like a crate of river ducks that’s been thrown into the river. And when the ducks go down to the bottom and drown it’s not exactly a surprise, because of the nature of ducks, who are birds, and the nature of rivers, which are made out of water, and the nature of crates which sink to the bottom.
Don’t you think, said Murray, that if all the ducks took a deep breath just as they hit the water, the air in their lungs could create enough buoyancy to keep the crate afloat?
It’s a metaphor for my writing career, ass. Are you suggesting I should have smoked a bunch of opium just before I got pregnant with Bubber, to inoculate myself against wearing coordinated pantsuits and attending church?
Maybe you should call your book, The Silence of the Ducks, he suggested.
If any one element were different, if the ducks were fish or if the crate were a boat, or if the river were dry, the ducks would live. But all these three elements in concert make for a crate of dead ducks at the bottom of the river. Not that it isn’t comforting to know that there once were ducks, or that they once swam around and chewed on weeds and quacked, or that if one really wanted to, one could scuba down and view them in their chilly tomb, skeletons picked clean by the monk fish, and say, I used to know these ducks. But they’re going to die. It’s the nature of the situation!
The truth was at this point she didn’t yet see her writing career as a crate of skeletal ducks. She saw it still at this point as a heavy box of exotic jewels. Still at the bottom of the river, but accessible, reclaimable, and beautiful.

Simultaneous Life

Ronnie had the kids at the pool at the YMCA again. She was standing on the wheelchair ramp looking down at the baby who had a small plastic frog. The frog was jumping on and off a small swim float. Ronnie’s skin was cold because she’d been in the water which was eighty-six degrees and now was standing under one of the giant vents in the giant air circulating pipes. In fact, she froze. The baby, bless her, was good for about thirty minutes in the deeper water, riding around on Ronnie’s hip and being splashed about and playing with inflated balls and diving rings. Then she wanted to get her hands on the railing of this very convenient ramp and wriggle her laughing, charming way up and down it, ending up in the shallowest bit where she could sit and play in the water, very nice for her but cold. If Ronnie sat and tried to get more of her skin into the water, the baby would stand up and go just enough steps away that if she were to fall over and crack her head open, Ronnie wouldn’t be able to reach her. So she stood, shivering.

There had been a time when she would have tried to convince the baby to return to the water before the baby was ready to do so on her own. She would have cajoled her with toys saved for that purpose, and she would have maybe even dragged her crying into the water. But then she had written onto her flesh the true meaning and purpose of her life at that moment, which was to watch over the children, who were enjoying the water, and make sure they didn’t die or have bad experiences. All she had to do, at that recurring moment in time which was from about one o’clock until about two o’clock on Tuesday and Thursday, was to tend the children. Did she have to be comfortable at this time? No. Did she have to enjoy the water? No. There were many times in her life when she had been comfortable and had enjoyed water. Now was a time when she was protecting her children and promoting their happiness as the pool enriched their lives and developed their minds and bodies. So why cloud that with her comfort or discomfort. Who really cares? There are people walking around with no limbs, or whose children have fallen out of buildings and died, or people who can’t come to the YMCA because they live in some godforsaken rural hellhole. In the face of their suffering would she really cut short the very happy, shrieking, laughing playtime of Bubber and the baby over a little chill on her shoulders?

Eventually, the baby would get cold and want to be held. Then Ronnie could take her out into the deeper water and she’d go to sleep on Ronnie’s shoulder. Eventually even Bubber would get tired of the water and whatever friend he’d roped into playing with him would leave and they’d all get out of the pool and go take a shower and go home and they’d do whatever Tuesday or Thursday required until Tuesday and Thursday changed into some other thing and then they’d do that. This right now, coldness in the pool, was a tiny, hissing blip on the long beautiful stretch of her children’s lives, and of her life too. Wasn’t she going to be warm in a minute? Wasn’t that as good as being warm now?

Lost Girls

My girls are all lost, said the mother, in her head, underneath the life support equipment. I’ve done a terrible thing bringing girls into the world and then losing them like this. I can’t die and go to heaven because my girls are lost and they’ll never find each other without me. I have to stay right here with a sore on the side of my mouth because they are all three stepping around like cats in socks and blinders. They’re shaking their feet and running into walls.
What was going on in the room around her, in the actual world where most people could breathe without a ventilator, was that a tape was on endless repeat of her oldest grandchild reading his primers. Very endearing. It made all the nurses cry.

Losing Memories

The terrifying thing about losing memories was not the loss of things in the actual past but the reality that things in the present would be gone if not recorded. No one can record actual histories except with their minds in what’s called a memory. A memory can truly record an event like a historical document cannot, like a photograph cannot, like a vial of somebody’s extinct perfume absolutely cannot. Only a memory itself can be, essentially, a memory. Everything else is like a poem about leaves. Stupid. The nice thing about poems about leaves is that they can be written down and filed and at a later date they can be accessed in their entirety. Meanwhile Babe cannot accurately remember the layout of her large college town, even though she only graduated four years ago. Things of the past fill her with fear. In college no one ever had a car. She could remember that. Thing of the past filled her with fear.

Houses Are Caps for Sewage Pipes

When I fly out of here on an airplane, said Babe, it always makes me shudder. Row upon row of houses in grids, or at angles, stick out their driveways to meet up with their streets, and meeting up with other streets they all pour into the same freeway. There are endless stretches, you don’t realize this when you’re driving around, but there are endless stretches of “residential areas” that are just warehouses, they’re warehouses for humans. Planned communities with white streets. Everyone has their own cabinetry. Everyone has chosen their own bathmat. Their own awning color. The shape of the window in their front door. Everyone has decided if they want to plant a plum tree in the front yard, or if they don’t. People spend hours in Home Depot deciding on paint, on moulding, on doors. Not just to get a door, so you can close it, but to have a specific and exact door that is the door you chose, that you painted a kite on, with a glass door knob you found at a junk sale.

In the city it’s more honest. You look at Chicago. All the high rise apartments up along the waterfront. In the morning, those buildings empty out, and the office buildings downtown fill up. If there were gauges on the sides of the building, you could see the one level going down while the other went up. Those apartment buildings look like nothing but warehouses, holding tanks. And yes, while everyone does choose their draperies and their dining room tables, there’s none of this careful landscaping and choosing between marigolds and pansies. It’s more honest in the cities, more overt. You’ve got to have people to fill up those office buildings, and you’ve got to have a place to put the people when they’re not working. So you have apartment buildings. Here where I live though, there are these residential areas. Pine needle mulch, or cedar chips? There are professionals running around who will make an effort to help you define your personal style, but from a mile up in the air, it all looks like geometry anyway.

Take the truth. You need a house for a place to sleep, a place to store and eat your food, and a place to take a quiet poo. All houses have beds, refrigerators, stoves, and toilets. There are like 20 total refrigerators available for purchase in this whole and amazing world, so everyone’s got one of those. Well you can eat in a restaurant, and you can sleep at a hotel, but everyone has a home toilet on which they feel secure. This toilet has a spout, a very important element of it, that leads down to a pipe in the ground where everyone’s waste mixes together and is carried away. The fundamental quiet poo is the most basic function of the house. So, you need a box with a door you can shut and a toilet inside and while you’re at it a stove and a bed, and four walls for everyone, a place to store your car out of the rain, and a sidewalk to get from here to there, line them up, one after another, until there’s no one left pooping in the woods, and then set to decorating, kids! Yellow and blue together make ocean foam!

Pregnancy Nausea

On her 50th day of pregnancy Kate had thrown up so many times. There had been mild nausea and there had been persistent nausea. Leon had bought her a handheld video game player. Now there was a hard core of pregnancy nauseating her down in a tornado hot around her innards. There was nothing she could do except be sick. She threw up endlessly and without relief. She would choke and wretch miserably over a plastic yellow bowl and cough and then three final heaves would bring up some sort of awful yellow crap, and she’d go back under the blanket. There wasn’t reading or TV. There was a pretty blue chenille throw that weight about twenty pounds and there was the hot core of shaking, quaking orange grief. It was behind and around her teeth and down her sternum and into wherever it really was down in the belly. The baby, an orangely greasy, gruesome thing, was rolling like a larval sausage in its own fatty parts. A poisonous child, ugly insect, pulsating with hormones, ungendered, horrifying, oozing its garbagy TCH into her bloodstream. It was worse than seventeen tumors. She wanted death. She wanted to go back and not be pregnant anymore. There was no time of day, no position, for her, that was any better. The only time was in between heaves when she was collecting herself to expel another stream of the baby’s poison, that she felt any better. It was no way to live.

People said that it would go away in ten days, or twenty days, or that it would go away and come back later, or they would say they had spent their entire pregnancy in exactly the same situation and had published a newspaper at the same time and had had six kids. Most people thought she was urping up in the morning and then making a big deal about the rest of it. That was stupid and she hated those people. At least she hated them with everything she could muster while wearing the same pukey t-shirt for five days. She didn’t go out or talk on the phone mostly. She was waiting for something to happen that would change her situation.

Pregnancy Nausea

On her 50th day of pregnancy Kate had thrown up so many times. There had been mild nausea and there had been persistent nausea. Leon had bought her a handheld video game player. Now there was a hard core of pregnancy nauseating her down in a tornado hot around her innards. There was nothing she could do except be sick. She threw up endlessly and without relief. She would choke and wretch miserably over a plastic yellow bowl and cough and then three final heaves would bring up some sort of awful yellow crap, and she’d go back under the blanket. There wasn’t reading or TV. There was a pretty blue chenille throw that weight about twenty pounds and there was the hot core of shaking, quaking orange grief. It was behind and around her teeth and down her sternum and into wherever it really was down in the belly. The baby, an orangely greasy, gruesome thing, was rolling like a larval sausage in its own fatty parts. A poisonous child, ugly insect, pulsating with hormones, ungendered, horrifying, oozing its garbagy TCH into her bloodstream. It was worse than seventeen tumors. She wanted death. She wanted to go back and not be pregnant anymore. There was no time of day, no position, for her, that was any better. The only time was in between heaves when she was collecting herself to expel another stream of the baby’s poison, that she felt any better. It was no way to live.

People said that it would go away in ten days, or twenty days, or that it would go away and come back later, or they would say they had spent their entire pregnancy in exactly the same situation and had published a newspaper at the same time and had had six kids. Most people thought she was urping up in the morning and then making a big deal about the rest of it. That was stupid and she hated those people. At least she hated them with everything she could muster while wearing the same pukey t-shirt for five days. She didn’t go out or talk on the phone mostly. She was waiting for something to happen that would change her situation.

Babe Has A Revelation And Then A Dilemma

It occurred to Babe at around this time that she needed to move away from Lloyd or she was going to marry him and move to the cul de sac. The way he was built, the way he operated in his life, and his estimation of her; all of these indicated that marriage was imminent. Her sisters wanted this. Lloyd wanted this. Her sisters’ husbands’ desires were unknown but they probably in a vague and obedient way wanted this also. She knew that if she expressed her desire for escape to her sisters, they would redouble their efforts to chain her to them. They would smell her fear and interpret it as weakness. If she expressed this to Lloyd, he would take it as a cry for help and immediately propose to her, feeling this was what was expected of him. Perhaps wanting her to cry and fold up and say it was what she’d always dreamed. What she really most wanted was to continue being Lloyd’s girlfriend forever and have sex with only him. She also wanted to continue to be pals with her two sisters and watch them lovingly from another part of the city. But she wanted to live at her own place and not have a joint checking account. She wanted to wear holey underpants and an Atari t-shirt around the house without some family member showing up on the doorstep because their kids want to watch her plasma TV. In short she wanted to enjoy the benefits of commitment while avoiding the inconvenience of constancy. She could not, in fact, move to the cul de sac. It could not happen. It would kill her in her soul. It would murder everything in her that was gorgeous to look upon. She had to get away, and yet moving to a new city without telling anyone where she was going was burning more bridges than she cared to, plus it was too much melodrama, and she was pragmatic about things. Like the way she picked a city to move to. New Orleans was sexy and old, and she knew no one there. So she would move there.

Finally she realized, she could tell her mother.

Minivan

If she rides facing backward in the passenger side of the minivan, she can have a splendid view of her gorgeous children, and she’s also in a perfect position to hurtle through the windshield and into the pavement, should Murray decide to intimidate a guardrail. She would be a Mom Torpedo, waving and splatting.

Categories

People can be divided into three categories based on how recently they have recited the alphabet.
Yesterday or this morning.
Sometime long time ago when I was five or something.
Never.

People can be divided into three categories based on how they behave with celery.
I buy celery and when I get it home I cut it up ready to eat. Then I eat it or use it in recipes. My children eat celery.
I buy celery and it sits in the bottom of my refrigerator until I feel guilty enough to cut up what’s not rubbery and use it as “the vegetable” at dinner. Once, I used celery instead of lettuce in soft tacos because I didn’t have any lettuce. It was actually pretty good and that was innovative.
I see celery on my plate at restaurants. If it’s in soup, I avoid it. If it’s in raw spears, I eat it.

People can be divided into three categories based on how they view partial glasses of water.
Glass half full.
Glass half empty.
Cold water is good to drink.

I'm No Dummy

Someone at Sea TV 13 decided that instead of buying Jeopardy, their network would produce its own game show to lead up to the nightly news. The host of this local show had to be a powerful and charismatic figure, preferably well known in local circles. Possibly an AM radio talk show host or the weatherman. Local carpet store owner who had done a lot of commercials. Something like that. Murray was chosen as the host after one audition because he was a memorable character with a lot of charisma. He was charming and perfect. Smooth. Confident. Brightly orange colored in the head. Plus he had a good idea for a show. The show was titled “I’m No Dummy.” Three contestants compete in each episode. One is a person of low intelligence. The other two have a similarly high intelligence. During the first round, trivia questions are asked, specifically geared to the knowledge possessed by the stupidest person. For example, if there are two rocket scientists and one retarded football fan, then almost all the questions in round one are about football. You get the idea. At the end of round one, the person with the highest score can kick off one of his or her competitors. Then the remaining two battle the second round over questions of general knowledge. In the final round, the last person standing has to pass a test. If the person passes, they get $10,000. The show was interesting to the network for several reasons. First, the final test was to rank ten people, including at least one local dignitary or infamous scoundrel, in order of IQ. The ratings potential was electrifying. Second, all the contestants were locals. Again, ratings bonanza. The show was an immediate and shocking hit. The network never ran out of idiots who wanted to prove they could lick the smartasses, or brainiacs who thought they could take home an easy ten grand. There was talk of national syndication. The parent network was thrilled. Discussions were in progress. Life was good.

Dinner Table

Murray taped three shows today. Someone did the honorable thing, which never happens. Led to an interesting showdown. Ronnie took the car in for the recall stuff, found a Honda umbrella for Bubber at the parts window. Bubber does not want the spaghetti. The baby is eating a lot of spaghetti and putting it in her diaper also. Bubber has to put his feet down. Ronnie has discussed Bubber’s performance with her mother and her mother was gently recalling the fact that Bubber is five and no one had expected Murray to be perfect at five. Murray wonders how Ronnie’s mother knows what was expected of him when he was five years old, and Ronnie thinks she may have extrapolated. Ronnie coughs. Murray shivers. Bubber has to put his feet down or his supper will be taken away. Bubber will not eat the sauce, will not eat the meat, does not want anything to be touching his noodles. Murray has a little makeup still on the side of his nose. Murray has to get a haircut soon. Murray should never wear that purple tie again, it is hideous and should be taken out and shot. What was everyone thinking? The baby would like a drink of juice. The baby is done eating and is covered in spaghetti sauce. Everyone is done but Bubber. Bubber will never be done because he is peeling the sauce off his spaghetti, elbow by elbow. Bubber can jolly well stay at the table until his plate is clean. If his tummy is full he can put his plate in the sink, but no chocolate egg. The baby waves red saucy arms and legs on her way down from the high chair. Bubber sits like a malignancy. Bubber’s shock of orange hair and Murray’s shock of orange hair are in adjacent places at the table. Ronnie’s sheaf of dark hair is across from Murray. The baby’s orange fuzz is crawling around on the floor. The parents will wait until the child has finished his food. The child’s chair is on fire. He can’t sit still. He needs help to eat. He doesn’t want his plate taken away. He wants to eat the odious spaghetti and get the chocolate egg. Ronnie eats a chocolate egg meditatively in front of him, gives the last sliver to the baby. Murray and Bubber are Murray Sr. and Murray Jr.

Venn Diagrams

You could say that most people who try to create Venn diagrams don’t know what they’re doing, or you could say that most things don’t lend themselves to diagramming in exactly this way. If you don’t know how to use a logical tool, then leave the tool on the shelf and go on with your difficult life. Find some other way to manage. In truth, if perfect honesty is required, the only subject matter that has ever lent itself perfectly to the application of the Venn diagram, since the man Venn was born, bless him, in 1834, and went on to establish this godly triangle which people can use to decide what they really want in life, if they’re willing to take such a majestic instrument and subject it to such a destitute application, the only topic that truly merits diagramming in the Venn way is the Fielding family. So. If for example you’d like to outlines the similarities and differences between dolphins and porpoises, you need to find some other way to do it, because using a Venn diagram will just make you look retarded. If you have got three goals in life and you want to figure out what things you can do to promote these goals, preferably two at once, then a Venn diagram is a stupid way to plan your day. If you want Love in the middle and Relationships in every overlap, then you’re a big mess and pointless too.

Leon

Of spare build, he was throughout his life a fine walker and mountain climber, a keen botanist, and an excellent talker and linguist. Having narrowly missed becoming a priest, he made his fortune as a software developer. He had actually been ordained as a priest in a protestant way, in an Anglican way, but in his reading and mind he became more interested in the study of logic, mathematics, and holy history, than in the actual worship of god, or any petitioning of god for favors, or wisdom. He in fact became officially atheist in a rather electrifying transformation that quite literally killed his priest father, though his saint mother survived unscathed. Poor thing, it only gained her a spot in an evangelical retirement home in Palm Springs. This explosion in the family had only strengthened Leon’s resolve. He became a moral scientist, or philosopher. He became a reader.
For a logician, the only obvious field, if one means to be lucrative, is computer code, and this he assailed with the earnest deadly zeal of one uneducated in the proper way to do things. Since he was completely clueless, applying Keynes and Boole and John Stuart Mill to the problem of generating strings and schemas for rapidly became a functional AI model, for finance, for international finance, which is a very lucrative field. If you can make a tool that can help other people can make money more easily and more legally, you can expect to be well paid. You can expect your phone to ring constantly. So it was with Leon, a one-man code machine.

An Illustration

There is a woman in the middle circle. Around her are her three daughters. They are three circles of their own that overlap the mother and overlap each other. In the parts that overlap there are words written, and in the parts that don’t overlap there are also words. You have seen one of these illustrations with cyan, magenta, yellow circles overlapping to form blue, red, and green, and in the middle black, and all white around. In the middle circle is a woman who is the mother. Then around her are Babe, Ronnie, and Kate, the daughters. Where Babe and Ronnie overlap there is art. Where Babe and Kate overlap there is street cred. Where Ronnie and Kate overlap there is marriage. In the part where Ronnie is all by herself there’s a baby in a denim dress carrying a cold plum and eating it. In the part where Kate is all by herself there is a fetus. In the part where Babe is all by herself there is a self portrait painted across the Chase Manhattan building in New York.

The History of Virginia

Virginia has a long and important history. Many times in the past, in the past so far distant that there are few now who remember it, most of Virginia was underwater. It was flooded by an ancient Virginian sea. When the earth began to shrink, in about 1382 during the time of the dark ages, enormous folds of the rocky layers of earth were squeezed up into the air, and formed the spine of the mountains that now streak across the western end of the state. At least, this planetary contraction raised the first incarnation. Wind and rain shook the mountains down, and wore them out, and ground them down to the ground, and they were raised up again, these Virginian mountains, three times over the course of the millennia between then and now, by the flinching of the earth. This is literally true. On an average year here it rains about 45 inches, or 114 centimeters.

Long after that, in eighteen-sixty-cough, Virginia was a central player in the War of Northern Aggression. It was brother against brother. Man, it was intense. Many battlefields received weathered plaques as a result of this. Later, the earth began to shrink again, this time metaphorically and in the service of capitalism. Virginia became a red state and a military state. It became a state that borders on the north, but is still in the south, a state that borders on the capitol of the country, but is still politically mentally retarded. A fine state to be proud of. The state between Maryland and North Carolina.

Silver Stars

You can receive a silver super star award for completing any of the following tasks.
Children eat green vegetables every day for 14 days.
Children are bathed before bed every day for a month.
Pull out and put back one closet and deliver cast offs to charitable organization.
Choose the diet Slurpee.
Put away two baskets of laundry.
Organize toy bins.
Give handmade present to any of the children’s teachers.
Make full breakfast with fruit and choice of beverage.
Walk up all the stairs and back down 20 times.
Write a novel.

You must remove one silver super star after any of these transgressions:
Arrive late for violin class.
Drink the children’s chocolate milk.
Smoke a cigarette.
Use a baby wipe to clean the kitchen.
Allow a phone conversation to interrupt math.
Leave completed projects lying about for more than 3 days.
Miss the deadline for photos with mall Santa or mall Easter bunny.
Swear in church.
Unleash sarcastic backchat on husband in presence of children, harpy.
Grieve over something stupid and insignificant and irrelevant to your life.

It’s never happened that Ronnie has had to resort to #10 on the DO list, to fill a star chart. And as for #10 on the DON’T chart, isn’t it there as more of a warning than a threat of censure? For what witless ass would do something silly like that, and waste good child-rearing time on cheap regret.

Ronnie Achieves

Ronnie was on the phone with Babe when it happened. Babe was talking and the achievement happened while it was Babe’s turn to talk. Ronnie quietly achieved this, and then the next thing she said, when Babe had finished, was this:

“I did something spectacular just then. Do you want to hear about it? Do you want to hear the spectacular thing that I just did?”

It must be admitted that Ronnie said this with some degree of withering sarcasm and the words were laden with meaning behind the actual question of whether Babe wanted to hear what had just happened in the room that Ronnie was in. In the repetition of the word spectacular we can interpret a certain cynical assessment of the gap in spectacularity between the things that Babe was doing and the things that Ronnie herself was doing. Also by pressing the question, “Do you want to hear?” Ronnie is laying the blame on, laying the onus on, with a trowel.

“I was standing here watching the baby. She had just dumped ice water down her front and it got in her diaper and made her understandably irritated,” said Ronnie with the air of someone embarking on a breathless crescendo, “So she was without her diaper and she’s way way over there across the room, looking out the window, right? And I saw a poop coming down, unfurling itself if you can imagine it. Right away I didn’t know what the poop was,” said Ronnie, maintaining her absolutely mouthwatering sarcasm, and practically biting each word down its bird spine as it came out of her egg mouth, “But then I figured it out! And I actually was able, with my good abilities, I was able to grab a diaper and capture that poop, before it hit the carpet, which is ivory, and unforgiving, and here I am wiping up the baby and giving her a new diaper, and that, my friend, is amazing.”

Babe probably made applauding noises or said uncomfortably that it was amazing. Who cares. The point is that Ronnie was dangling over the depths, and I don’t mean of profundity, I mean a real personal cravasse.

Cul de Sac

In a neighborhood on the Virginia coast there is a cul de sac with three houses on it. The cul de sac occupies the needle tip of a small peninsula jutting out into the Lafayette river. On this peninsula, the pines are tall and the roads are winding. None of this neighborhood nonsense and old home week with the doors open and the children riding big wheels on the sidewalk. Yards of pine needled river grass, stately homes well set back from the road. Lawn furniture in the back yard, where you can see the boats go by, or watch the pool. The Lafayette river was named for the Marquis du Lafayette who was apparently a US army man though French. If you’re confused about this please to remember that he was instrumental in defeating Cornwallis at Yorktown. If that information doesn’t cause you to pipe down, nothing will. Do you remember 1781? You can thank your lucky stars somebody does. On the beautiful cul de sac on the river named for Lafayette, 1781 is a distant memory. The Indian king, Powhatan, is a street over in Larchmont, the third street from the water, not even a very good one.

Popsicle

The baby has figured out how to eat a Popsicle. She can now be given a Popsicle in her high chair and counted upon not to choke herself or scream in frustration. She can eat it down to the point the stick is poking her in the throat and then turn it over and tap, tap, tap it on her tray to make the remaining bits come down to the end of the stick. This is remarkable. This is astonishing. Watching a smart baby with a physics problem like this one is better than TV. Bubber hadn’t gotten any sugar to eat until he turned two years old. However, when the baby sees Bubber eating sugar, she does get peeved. So, it’s different with child number two. No one is surprised by this. Everyone accepts it because it’s normal. Bubber would never be put in a high chair with a Popsicle and then watched from across the room. Bubber’s taste buds would spend two years being ignorant of the wonders of ice cream, chocolate, cookies, and other childish delights. Child number two gets bites though. Either Ronnie has decided that a Popsicle won’t kill her child, or she’s decided that it won’t kill her immediately enough or fully enough to warrant the fuss.

Gift of Ponies

Child, I’m going to give you these ponies, but I’m also going to give you a box to put them in, do you see? And I want you to keep these ponies and all their possessions shut up in this box when you’re not using them, alright? All the plastic saddles and the jump standards and the pretend cowboy hats for the bow legged riders need to stay right in this box unless you are playing with them, okay? Because I don’t want to be finding one red sweat sheet under the sofa, velcroed to a blue leg wrap.

Secret Tumor

In the springtime of the year, God put a secret tumor into the mother’s abdomen somewhere. It was very small but it had a lot of nervous energy. The mother had had a lot of abdominal pain which was attributed by all to her chronic disease of the gut. There had been problematic pockets in her gut which if filled with for example raspberry seeds became quite inflamed and problematic. Many times, a certain diet and some antibiotics would cure the inflammation and the pain. This was not one of those times because while there were in fact a few pockets full of seed there was also the other thing which could be controlled by neither diet nor medicine, especially because it was a great big secret and nobody knew.

Ronnie said to her mother, “Everything that is wrong with you would fit into a walnut. You have to get yourself together.”

Because nobody knew about the secret cancer, the summer plans proceeded as usual. The mother had been frail for years. Who would expect her not to be frail after the life she’d led? She hadn’t driven a car, hadn’t canned jam, hadn’t started a fire in the fireplace, for years and years. This year was initially different in that she was complaining a bit more about the seat belt when she was taken to the bank. Eventually came a bit of catatonia and something black coming out of her that wasn’t natural. But it all bled in together, each thing into the next thing, and no one knew how serious life had become until it was very nearly over.

God's Will

The quickest way to closure is God’s Will. Fighting tooth and claw with every legal and medical weapon available, and seeing death still close its withered hand, the person says, “It is God’s will.” Inconsistency is better than a lifetime of bitterness. It’s better to say, “I was trying for the wrong thing, and now I’ll try something different” than to say, “Nothing ever works out for me, I failed, I’m unsuccessful, I’m a failure.” Especially when it comes to death, which is so damn final, and total, you can’t blame yourself, you can’t keep worrying about it, you just have to move on. God’s will is the road ahead. Clearly, obviously, everything must be God’s will that happens, because God is God, and his will is inexorably done. Do you think anything has ever happened that was not God’s will? Do you think God ever let one slide? So, if you fought tooth and claw to prevent someone dying and they died anyway, then the fighting is God’s will and the dying is also God’s will. God made you fight, and God made you lose. You probably became a better person or something. You probably learned a good lesson. Go forth and do more things that are God’s will. If you ever achieve a level of frustration that so exasperates you that you cannot, at the end of a bitter, miserable failure say, “It is God’s will,” if you cannot push those words from your mouth and salve the horror of your losing, losing, losing, then that is God’s will also, and you’ll also learn a lesson from that. God has everything all planned out and it’s your job to carry on and learn lessons and follow the path that God has laid out all the way down to your death. Which is God’s will.

Ronnie Receives a Series of Packages

After a while, it kind of developed into a ritual. She would sit with it, neglecting the children, all day. Periodically she cried. When a package arrived, it was like a phone call from beyond saying, “Hey, how are you? Everyone you know is kicking your ass. Enjoy the diapers and the oatmeal! Bye!” One by one her friends all published novels with varying degrees of seriousness, with varying degrees of remuneration, and after hearing the very exciting news she would eventually receive a package in the mail, a thick hardback in a padded envelope or a pretty volume in a lavender box, and the rest of the day was spent shoving it under her fingernails, pulling it out her ears, and in other ways digesting the many glorious levels of it, from the shitty grip of personal failure to the inevitable small warmth that any reflective surface experiences, given the presence of enough light.

Let Bubber play video games all afternoon. Let the baby sit tucked into her armpit and not have any enriching activities at all for one whole day. Another book had arrived in the mail, and she let it all go to hell while she read. Once, it had been a complicated psychological thriller. Once, it had been a southern drama. Finally, it was the memoir of her childhood friend, which included a scene in which she herself was featured as the drunken whore with no soul and no underwear. This memoir was published by a fine New York house and would no doubt prompt an uncomfortable number of phone conversations in which the question was asked, Gee, did she mind? Was she okay with it?

She could go three days with a sinus infection without anyone knowing it. She would wake up in the morning with a sore throat, blow her nose many times, continue making waffles, pressing on her forehead now and then, pressing on the sides of her nose, feeling bacteria working their magic on her membranes. It would take about three days for her to get outside of another installment of everyone else’s ultimate glamorous life. For a day she would read, and then that night she’d eat as much spicy Chinese soup as she could choke down. The next day she’d walk in a fog and then after that she’d settle down to really clean the kitchen, excruciatingly clean, to really educate her children, until they shone like a thousand suns, and to be better, bigger, brighter in all the ways she could manage. This is not a pity party, or a cry for help, or anything, it’s just that the nicest thing that can happen to anyone is to be given tea and a graham cracker and be told they should take it easy. She could never take it easy unless she had a lot of self-loathing to do. For that she could free up as much time as ten trips to the head doctor.

It was with the childhood friend’s memoir in her hand and a host of bacteria in her forehead that she sat on her very charming sofa underneath her immaculately cut hair and inside her chenille dressing gown and cried all day, letting the children run wild and their brains go to seed. On this sofa she should be sitting in her glorious pantsuit anticipating thirty more wonderful years of marriage and a quiet death. Not to mention high school and college graduations of her two incredible children, their weddings, the birth of enchanting grandchildren, a retirement home on the water, all on one storey. Instead she was thinking sad thoughts. She was having an encounter with the possibility. Had she been only a walk on in the memoir of a truly important person? Had she not been splashed across the pages of a very important work? Was her life this close to over already?

New Attempt

Here begins the new attempt at the novel, and everything on top of this was written in the fifty day challenge in April. Which lasted for twenty days.

Eyeball Surgery

She heard that Ronnie was in the mother’s parlor having a conversation. She came through the heavy wooden front door and stood in the entryway, with the coat tree and bench, the stairs, the long floor covering. She kept the door in her hand, the door of childhood, of teenage slamming, the door over which threshold boys had been kissed her first kiss right there on that line.

In her mother’s voice she could hear her mother’s smile, snaggletoothed, the product of bad dental care early on. A smile of great magnitude for its beautiful ugliness. When it came out forcefully there was the sound of the tongue pressing spit against the back of the teeth – a popping sound of little bubbles. She associated this with social occasions, where the spit-popping smile might be followed by an exaggerated grown when the person was gone or looked away. A muttered comment under the breath. In Kate’s child mind, the popping sound was the smile sparkling. When the mother received a compliment. Then there would be a completely insincere “aw shucks” moment when the mother would call herself an ugly old woman, then the smile would be, like a wink, there to acknowledge she knew she was the best. The mother talked through a smile when she was reassuring her children. Kate herad the sound of her voice, low, melodious, prompting Ronnie. And Ronnie expressing some sort of distress.

The mother was going on this day to have surgery on her eyeball. She was going to have an eye patch. She was going to be saved from going blind which her own mother had done at the age of ninety-three. The grandmother was a grand old mother, striking the most matriarchal poses, like a garden chair among violets, an apron full of sugar peas, yes an actual apron, and a blind smile for the granddaughters at her matriarchal knee. The granddaughter obviated the mother as the mother now obviated her daughter – without thinking, without effort – the oldest generation with wisdom and quilts, the picturesque gifts abstract and concrete. The next generation by making bathtimes more fun, by giving sugar, unsafe toys. And there was Ronnie, the youngest mother, pushing granola bars, demanding to be thanked.

As it turned out, Kate discovered, by listening intently and holding her breath, Ronnie was only considering getting new glasses herself, while her mother was getting the surgery. She was going to let the doctor see what he could do with her astigmatism, she said. Not a word on if she had or hadn’t trusted Kate to be the one to ferry the mother to the doctor. If the mother would wake up and say to the nurses, “Oh, my daughter Ronnie brought me here, can you get her?” or if she would say, “This is Kate, my middle daughter, and she brought me here today,” or if she would forget who they were entirely and call them both Babe or Frances or if she’d ever wake up at all. Just Ronnie making a plan to get some glasses. Kate shuddered and went in.

Proof Kate is Becoming a Better Person

Kate was doing Ronnie another favor because the baby was so new. When Bubber was new, she hadn’t at all cared. This indicated to her that a change was taking place. A ripening of her female organs. She was becoming a good daughter, a worthy spouse, a loving sister. Could she not from this extrapolate to a point in the future at which she was a fine mother? Photographs and knick-knacks, which she hated, notwithstanding.

It was the mother’s birthday. In her life, Kate had usually remembered the mother’s birthday at about 4:30 in the afternoon. Enough time to make the birthday call but not enough time to send the birthday flowers. Living, as she had, away from the hometown for most of her life, there were no visible reminders. Now there was Ronnie making herself visible. This was a birthday for which Kate had been able t prepare, and yet the impossibility of buying the mother a present was as real now as it had been at Christmastime. So now, as then, she had crocheted a hat. The good thing about her mother in this situation was her sincere indifference to gifts of all sorts and her ability to genuinely communicate that. Everyone else’s mother was all about guilt – not Kate’s. With this mother it was possible to start each day a new record, and have the old blotchy one truly forgotten. Kate held her shapeless oatmeal-colored hat before her and went in.

She felt like saying, Mother, do you love Ronnie the best because she’s so good or do you love Babe the best because she’s so bad?

Kitty, I love you the best.

Why Mommy?

Because you’re so pretty.

The Mother's House

The mother’s house was a brownstone in the downtown. Here they had all grown up. Picking her mother up at the brownstone involved coming straight in between concrete urns into which she had folded herself as a child when playing dramatic hide. She would sit with her bony butt down in the base, thiking someone would come and make the urn into the flowerpot it had always meant to be. She would fertilize pansies. The mother had at some later point put dirt and ivy into the urns and as Kate walked through, they were spilling down the brick steps, looking very respectable.

There are layers to a home décor that has evolved over the lifetime of children who are grown. Layers most clearly manifested in photographs and rugs. Carpet gets itself replaced, but throw rugs can become elaborately multiple. And photographs, too, if a classic frame is always chosen. The moterh had little tables, ornamentation on the house’s several carved mantels, and rugs from actual foreign lands. Then there were the mementoes of genuine travel. Next to the brownstone, Kate’s new house looked ordered fully stocked from a status catalog. And it had been, down to the real wood doors that slammed with a bang, not this luon shit. Not this parcticle wainscoating. Real like the mother’s house.

The Mother

The mother of the sisters had begun dying in June, although they were not aware, and thought she would be able to creak along for another twenty years having a bad gut. They would be visiting her in a smelly retirement home which someone’s husband would resentfully pay for. She had however got secret cancer.

Look, said Ronnie to her mother, everything that is wrong with you would fit into a walnut. If you would stop with eating the wild blackberry jam, you would be healthy again in a week. This is what the doctors told Ronnie, that it was a sort of an abscess. Thin walls, seeds, inflammation.

Kate had always felt suspicion there was more danger there. She had not until this point been interested in taking her mother to the doctor but now she felt it would be the proper thing to do. Babe had never been intereted either – it had always been Ronnie. Now it would be Ronnie and Kate. They would alternate. The doctor would know that the mother was well-looked-after by multiple children, not just slaved over by one dutiful soul.

Struck Pregnant

Kate felt she had been thwarted, eternally. She would forever be that disastrous person under whose watch the ship goes down, the baby gets kidnapped by a piercing artist, the dog eats candy, and ancient civilizations clash over peanut brittle. She would leave havoc and destruction always behind her. She would never be able to put an apron on and fix up supper. She could dirty dishes but not wash them. She could operate a sledge hammer but not a drill. She looked around herself at the destruction of a lovely Sunday, and despaired. Then, into all that madness, a spear emerged. A spear shaped like Ronnie, in a black pantsuit, cutting through the milling parishioners, hair perfect, back from the doctor. Ronnie had fixed one thing, now turned to another. She found the key, now turned to the box. She knew the code. She turned off the alarm. She and the fire chief practiced roleplaying with Bubber about safety and how not to pull an alarm. “Unless there’s a fire!” said the fire chief, elongating his words for Bubber’s small ears. “Then you pull the alarm right away!” Kate had been thinking of duct taping it shut. Kate was sitting on the Sunday school stage when Ronnie finished wiping everyone’s nose and restoring them to their rightful places. The elders went to the eldering room, the nursery workers to the nursery, and the children back to their parents, and then Ronnie came over to Kate and said, “Are you alright?” “Why,” said Kate. “You threw up? You fell down? Is something going on?” Later, she would tell Babe that this was her Paul on the road to Damascus. And that instead of blind, she had been struck pregnant.

Fire Alarm

One of the church people went tapping by in the hallway, bathed in the strobe light, with a cell phone pressed to her ear. She was saying, urgently, “But what I want to know is, do you dispense a fire truck automatically? Do you dispense a fire truck when the alarm goes off, whether we call you or not?” Kate caught her by the arm. “Dispatch,” she said. “The word you want is dispatch.” The lady hung up the phone and said, “The 911 operator is telling us to get out of the building. We all need to get out of the building right now.” Over their heads the light flashed and the alarm blared, presenting a compelling case for evacuation.

Outside, the leaves were swirling around the parking lot. The grey sky threatened rain and an odor of gasoline floated in from somewhere. People stood in clumps, pastel skirts matching pastel bolero jackets. Dark grey suits matched grey and navy striped ties and matched black shoes with tassels. Comb-overs flopped gaily the wrong way, jutting themselves into the breeze, being slapped at by the old men. In the distance, sirens began to scream. “That’s them coming,” said Kate to Bubber meanly, “Because you pulled the fire alarm.” Bubber looked cold and pinched in his blue oxford shirt and his discreetly combed hair. He looked distracted and unconcerned. He vaguely held to her hand, but it was because of a parking lot rule, not because he was alarmed. Everyone had reduced to their clumps, and Kate, not being part of any clump, was clumped with the impossible Bubber, whose glowing orange hair and pallid face made him practically a beacon for trouble, a flame to lure the firemen in, where there was no other fire, no smoke, not even a warm oven.

People told each other that the fire trucks were coming. It seemed an impossibly long distance between the fire station on Granby and the church on Colonial. Judging by the rate of the sirens’ approach, the fire trucks were being pulled by mules. Patient mules. Every time someone caught Kate’s eye, the person smiled warmly. Kate felt like stuffing Bubber in a bag and jumping into her car. “Goodbye, church!” she would say, “I’ll just take my bag of Bubber and be on my way!” But Bubber would glow from inside the bag. He would radiate a fiery energy all over the place. The fire trucks would follow her home, to the source, to the point of alarm. Might as well stay here.

Descent from the Ladder

Kate at this time fell backwards off the ladder. When she awoke she was so violently nauseated that she had to immediately vomit. It occurred to her that of all the places she had expected to someday wake up in a pool of her own sick, this was the least likely. Tumbling from Mt. Sinai was not the end she had imagined for herself, especially clutching several unrevealed commandments on posterboard tablets of stone in her goddish fist. She opened her eyes to see the nervous helpers clustered about her, clucking and tutting. One offered to fetch her a glass of water. One was tapping at the ladder hesitantly as if it might close on her arm or hurl her off its peak unexpectedly.

Kate looked at the three helpers with new eyes. These were kind and gentle people. The kind of people you’d want to call and say, “Help, I’m sick!” and have them come and bring you things. She wanted to somehow show them, reach out to them, separate herself from this unholy sister of Ronnie, with her skirt around her waist and her panties a shocking hot pink and an immodest puddle of bile beside her cheek. I could be one of you, she thought. I could be the best one of you. I could rule you. You haven’t got a prayer against me, if I decide to go Jesus on your asses. Kate could see them as her posse. Her Jesus-y army. She could see their phone numbers on her fridge. Her second fridge.

It was a shame that circumstances prevented any further revelations in the Sunday school. But no one had been watching the children. And Bubber had quietly, unassumingly, helpfully, graciously, pulled the fire alarm.

What Kate was Thinking Deep Inside

She was thinking, It is damn convenient. It’s so convenient! It’s the absolute, the ‘because I said so,’ the need-to-know basis. It’s a package for morality, that’s all. It’s a bundling method. And what is so damn awful wrong with that. Kate thought, in her head, about all the activity going on around her in the church building. The suppers being planned for the local firemen. The cards and Christmas ornaments being fabricated for the old folks home. All the people and their hugging and hand shaking, and their sitting in orderly pews, and their accountability, and their respectability. Humanist, were they? Or Christian. They had a damn good set of rules. And a fine, useful package. So that’s what it all was, at the end of the day, so what? Does it make people sit still and not fuss at each other, and does it opiate them and does that mean it satisfies them? So what? No common community church is feeding dying miners a line about keeping their nose in the coal dust and gaining a mansion in paradise. These are just fat middle class people looking for a reason to behave themselves.

Later in Sunday School

At the top of Mt. Sinai, Kate had a return of the icky stomach feeling. She was trying to distract herself. She felt that if she allowed herself to speak freely to the little children in the patent leather shoes and the vests and untucked shirts and the hair bows, that kept climbing up the ladder she was sitting on which was Mt. Sinai to get another one of God’s laws, she might let something slip. She might say, Gee, these are all good rules. Furthermore, she might imply, somehow, that the rules were written down on the tablets by Moses himself, with an eye to maintaining a civil society, and not inscribed by the finger of God at all. She might say, Gosh, religion is excellent glue for a culture. Very convenient. Very carrot-and-stick. Very useful. Don’t lie, don’t kill people, don’t dick around with someone else’s wife, don’t flip off your parents, take a day off once in a while, don’t be stealing things. Who wouldn’t want you to follow these rules? Can you think of anyone? She might say something Marxist like that. Someone might fall off the ladder.

“God wants you to always tell the truth, even when you don’t feel like it! Even when you’re scared of what might happen to you because of something that’s true that you did! God wants you to never ever make up stories or lie to your Mom and Dad!” Kate used a tone of voice she felt was appropriate for disseminating God’s word to little children. That is to say, she used a fake and fatuous tone. Hadn’t she been to Sunday school? Didn’t she know the routine? Kate felt like standing up on top of the ladder, all perilous in her inappropriately sexy heels. She’d say, “I AM GOD AND I WANT YOU TO TELL ME THE TRUTH, ALL YOU DAMN MOSESES.” And the little children, standing on the yellow tape on the floor beneath her, would nod and write on their tablets. “I AM THE MOUTHPIECE FOR YOUR OPPRESSORS,” she’d say. “IF YOU DON’T DO WHAT I SAY, I WILL THROW YOU IN THE FIREPLACE! YES, EVEN BUBBER!”

Ronnie Makes the Call

The call came at about 8 on Sunday morning and was for Kate. Leon lay in a perfect Z shape beside her and slept peacefully through the phone ringing. Leon could sleep through a giant scorpion lifting the roof off and carrying Kate back to its desert lair. She reached over and picked up the phone from the bedside table. She said "Hello" in a sleepy voice. Ronnie in the telephone was breathless and anxious.

“The baby is sick, we are taking her to the clinic right now.”

“Okay.”

“I need two things from you Kate. I need you to take Bubber straight to Sunday school, and I need you to teach the Sunday school.”

Kate sat up in her deep bed. “You can cancel the Sunday school.”

“No, I can’t.”

Sunday school without Ronnie would be like a parade without drums. Because in fact it was Ronnie’s unpretentious and brutal hands on the piano which drove the students to their stations, made their mouths open and close and their throats produce songs about Jesus, opened the morning, closed the morning. It was Ronnie’s hands on the piano that turned on the lights, arranged synthetic jewels to be glued onto glass bottles, forced small and belligerent people into lines, drew scripture from their mouths, lifted them off the ground, and set them back down again.

“Gotta go,” said Ronnie. “Bubber’s on your porch.”

Kate slid out of bed. If she shook Leon’s shoulder, his tawny eyes might open. They might dilate and contract, and then he might shake his head and communicate that he could not be counted upon to teach a Sunday school in her place. He certainly would not put on a tie and go, and leave her under the bed with the faux-feather duvet pulled down around the edges and the old violin case blocking the exit. That would not happen in this lifetime. Golden-tongued bounder, she thought.

Padding down the hallway, her feet on the bare floor didn’t feel like Sunday school teacher feet. They felt like lesbian communist witch feet. She scampered down the stairs, white cotton nightie billowing behind her, and threw open the front door. There was Bubber, sitting casually in his car seat, hands in his lap. Ronnie’s face was pressed against the passenger window of their white minivan, apparently waiting for Kate to appear. As Murray pulled away, all smiles, she could see Ronnie mouthing some words. Maybe Ronnie was mouthing the words, “Never mind about Bubber, just have a cocktail and relax.” But probably not.

Kate First Vomits

Bubber and Kate were enjoying a quiet trip to church in Kate’s little car. Kate was feeling like vomiting into the toilet, and Bubber was remonstrating her on having unlocked the doors and buckled the seatbelts, when that was “Bubber’s job” and “You can’t open the doors when I’m opening the doors and that’s just making me sad.” Kate felt violent heaves of nausea overcoming her. Emerging from the sheltering oaks of her neighborhood, and vaulting onto the boulevard across three lanes of opposing traffic, she felt her throat catch and her eyes water. She felt a thick core of nausea under her sternum, rotating down into her abdomen, piercing its way up into her throat. She knew it was no lie. In the parking lot of a Hardee’s, she let loose in her makeup bag, and horked up a solid cupful of yellow stomach contents over the span of a hundred raking heaves.

“Oh, Auntie Kate, are you throwing away?” said Bubber.

Kate lifted her eyes to the backseat and saw through speckled glasses that Bubber was concerned. “Aunt Kate is okay,” she croaked.

“Bubber’s got to throw away too,” he said. Then he was coughing and making urp sounds and holding his hands under his mouth. For a deadly moment she thought some sort of copycat nausea had occurred. Hadn’t it occurred many times between Kate and his reverend mother? Hadn’t they called it Ping Pong Puke? You vomit, that makes me vomit, which makes you vomit yet again. All very hilarious until suddenly, you’re grown up, and not on a road trip, and not laughing yourself into a gag reflex, and there is a three-year-old in a carseat with no extra outfit and a Sunday school to be taught. But Bubber was all for show.

“Rrrruuup!” he said, “Wow, you really throwing away. Can we listen to the sounds? Thank you.”
“We’re all done throwing away.” Kate tossed the makeup bag out the window and picked her lipsticks and other appliances up off seat where she’d dumped them out. She put them down deep in her main bag. That’s right, she told herself, I’ve left my anxieties floating in a little bag of bile in a parking lot on the boulevard. After all, what is this? Jesus loves me, God made the armadillos, don’t tell your mama and papa nasty little lies, and let’s hold hands with the poor people. She pulled away overcome by a thick wave of physical relief, knitting firmly her mental anguish to her stomach’s recent trauma. If she felt better, then she felt better unequivocally.

Ronnie and Murray on the Boat

On their first trip out in the boat they saw dolphins on the Atlantic ocean, so that was probably enough for Ronnie right there. The sight of Bubber pointing and shrieking LOOK MOMMY THE DOLPHINS ARE SWIMMING RIGHT OVER THERE! After he had worried about docking and tying up and stopping for fuel and the rest of it, it turned out Murray could do all of it flawlessly, effortlessly. Even navigate the shipping lanes in the Chesapeake and drive under the bridge to the Lynnhaven Inlet which Ronnie found, frankly, terrifying. It was all deliciously deft. She had learned it was safe to reassure him.

“But this isn’t about a staggering intellect; it’s about experience and repetition,” he had said, “which I don’t have.”

“It’s all about staggering intellect,” Ronnie had said, “It’s always all about staggering intellect.”

The baby, bless her, slept in the cabin until they hit a massive swell in a perpendicular way and bounced her awake. Then she put on her ridiculous bright orange life jacket and came up on deck to have her picture taken and sit in the sun in her floppy hat. At one point, Ronnie was holding the back of Bubber’s life vest with one hand, clutching the baby, all puffed up in her other arm, and her safe self was jammed between two seats and resting on her knees and tailbone. Getting the hell banged out of her. Screaming WOO HOO!!! along with Bubber when Murray was making turns.

When they saw the dolphins it was unexpected and she was just going in to check on the baby. “PORPOISE!” screamed Murray. She tried to take pictures but she was mostly just trying to look at them, and it was very exciting.

“I wish my sisters could be here,” she said out loud.

“Why,” said Murray, “So you can say, ‘Look I have a boat and you don’t’?”

She laughed, but in her miond it had been genuine desire to see them laughing and happy about the dolphins. This is wealth, she thought, clutching her babies, it’s experiences for the children. Was I on a boat at age four watching dolphins and lighthouses and leaping through the surf in a very expensive powerboat? No, I was schlepped to the beach along with two sisters and a pack of neighbor children in a Plymouth station wagon, air conditioning not included. How far they had really come. And here was the proof. Afterward they stopped at Dairy Queen and Ronnie had an orange sherbet push-up out of reverence for the dying.

Kate Understands Ronnie's Little Family

The sister Ronnie was a Sunday school teacher. Sometimes Kate felt she might want to be a Sunday school teacher too. She might want to stand and deliver in that way. There would be runs back and forth to church for juice boxes, for extension cords. She and Ronnie could be partners, instead of Ronnie doing everything, always, all the time, for all ages and seasons. Ronnie tapped around on heels on Sunday mornings. On Saturday afternoons she went over to the church in Keds to prepare herself. She wasn’t one to teach from a package of materials. She was one to scorn that kind of thing. As a result, Saturday entailed a lot of rushing around and compiling. Hole punching, stapling, mixing, cutting out, and arranging. Often Kate helped to keep track of Bubber while Ronnie was standing on chairs and stapling up trees.

Bubber was a throaty and abrasive child, age four. The kid had a lot of soul. Kate respected Bubber for his unfaltering dignity. He could even make pooping in his pants seem like a state function. Bubber was not allowed to go to school yet. The words that Ronnie had used were these: I am not sending my child to a germ repository only to be taught the value of the F word and the insignificance of phonics. In his invulnerable state, Bubber was kind of majestic. He was also striking in appearance, due to his shocking orange hair. It was cut into a neat bowl shape. This red hair was a result of Ronnie’s having bedded Murray instead of someone with a less spectacular exterior.

Murray was not unappealing. In his gently unfaltering, stunning appearance, and in his hypercorrect diction, in his tall, flexible skeleton, he was attractive. Just his orange sheaf of curly hair was a thing you couldn’t ignore. He was, it seemed to Kate, a fine man, in the sense that some things are vulgar and some fine. Don’t talk to me about fine, a distressed Ronnie would say, I’m either going to marry this man or I’m not, don’t evaluate him on terms you would use to evaluate chicken broth. Ronnie didn’t understand “fine.”

Since Leon and Kate had moved to the cul de sac, the two couples had been spending the evenings together a lot. On one of these occasions, when they were alone, Murray had said to Kate, “What is it like to be female?” Kate, assuming he was going to compliment her ability to create life inside her body, which was trite but perhaps obligatory, found herself shocked when he went on, “To always know there isn’t any hope of being the Messiah. Because, you know, if you’re female, there’s just no way you could possibly be.”

At that moment Kate understood the young Bubber as never before. She wasn’t appalled. In fact, she thought it was a little beautiful to raise a child in such a glow of grace and privilege, with such happy expectation of what might be true. If it made him eventually into a prattish egomaniac, at least he would enjoy the golden years before the age of 10. Nine year olds (or younger) who thought they might be Jehovah’s only son were less obnoxious than endearing. At ten the grace period ended, and some humility was required. Which is why Murray, while gorgeous to look upon, was pretty intolerable at the dinner table. "What's it like not to be Jewish?" she might have said to Murray at the time, but she didn't. Knowing the answer all too well herself, she thought it would be mean. Anyway, Murray was past 33. So it was all moot.

Ronnie Had Once Been a Writer

She wanted so desperately, so earnestly, so shockingly to be a good mother. Mostly she wanted to raise a fine crop of children, noble children. In a way the blinding success of everyone around her was therapeutic. In a life as divinely perfect as hers, some pain was welcome as a break from the relentless ecstasy of being her. She looked like a woman. Someone ten years younger than she, who looked just like her and in fact was her but ten years younger and not having filled up her uterus twice with little children and the associated placentas, would have said she looked like a breeder.

In a book she had written ten years ago was a scene where she portrayed her childhood best friend, sorry a character based on her childhood best friend, as a passionless bitch, and rather dull. Now, this friend, in a book published by a fine New York house, a book highly recommended by Elle magazine, had rewritten the same scene to portray Ronnie as a soulless whore, and rather stupid. She tried to be philosophical. Tried to joke, lightheartedly, that a new rule of literature was born – every subsequent book written by either of them had to include this scene, or reference to it. Your turn. But the joke on her was that her friend was holed up in an apartment in New York with a doting husband and a view of harbor. No children. Writing like mad. Whereas Ronnie was not. Writing.

She was married to a real comedian. Up in the night, for the third time in three hours, listening to the baby turn from awake to mad, she was scratching her head. Okay ferociously and with both hands. Her husband, Murray, waking abruptly and miraculously, said, "Are you still scratching your head?""It's a good thing, Murray" she said, "that you always know just the right questions to ask. When I'm burning to know just what am I still doing? It's you that comes through with the insight, Murray, with the correct and accurate summary of the situation -- I'm still scratching my head. Thank you."

Who but a nocturnal head-scratcher could understand the true liberation of glowing success in the life of every one of a person's peers, every acquaintance down to the last childhood friend. They were all playing fiercely at the top of her game, right down to the childhood friend who in fifth grade had only been the person she roped into being in drama club with her, a club with a roster of two. Ronnie understood that her life was nolonger hers, had been taken over and lived to a richer and fuller extent by her friends and acquaintances, while she became the object of sentences like, "It'll happen for you!" and "You just have to keep believing!" This was odious for her. Made her want to become a killer, a stalker in the night. Instead she was a fine, fine mother. Not a soulless whore at all, friends’ books notwithstanding. Not stupid, just dormant.

Ronnie at the Swimming Pool

Motherhood, Ronnie realized, was a profession whose practice afforded one ample opportunity for contemplation. Driving around. Watching, for another example, essentially the same swimming lesson one had watched three times a week for the past two years, one could hardly maintain any sincere level of interest. And yet one could not look away. The parent of a swimming student sits sphinx-like at the side of the pool, thinking. But she cannot, say, for example, write a novel. Due to the watching. Lifeguards get a lot of play due to being inscrutable and all. Maybe they are all just trying to stay awake.

Ronnie had swimming lessons as a child. They all did. The mother’s firm belief was that every child should learn to swim, ride a horse, and play the piano. While Kate had never seen the mother on a horse, there were pictures of it. What had occupied the mother’s mind during those long lesson hours? When Ronnie had been occupied with the strain of treading water for three minutes, getting shoved off the side with the net, her skinny ass hollered at by the big high school swimming coach. Was the mother sitting there? She couldn’t remember. Thinking about her? Comparing her, to her extreme disadvantage, to the other swimmers? To the other daughters? Mother had been a diver. Had spoken French. Had graduated at the top of her class. Ronnie had been a mediocre swimmer, had spoken very poor German, had changed her major four times.

Bubber was playing wild horse and calm horse in the swimming pool at the YMCA by himself. Betimes, his horse had been motored and operated by his father. Bubber sat astride his swimming noodle and his father holding both ends propelled the horse boldly up and down and all around (wild horse) or in a smooth circle (calm horse.) Now Bubber played a more sedate version alone. A child playing with its father screams louder, laughs harder, jumps more eagerly, puts more faith in everything. A child playing by himself is hearing an internal dialogue, and has a listening look, even when shrieking. “I’m playing wild horse and calm horse,” said Bubber to a child who didn’t understand what was being said to her. That’s what it’s like to be Bubber, thought Ronnie.

Kate and the Libertines

It thrilled her that twelve young and flawlessly healthy libertines were coming over RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT to make party in the house. Libertines have no regard for the law or custom. Libertines could be counted upon to drink shots out of a bell pepper and leave sunflower seed shells in the sofa. Whatever had happened before or after, whatever had transpired yesterday or would recommence transpiring at dawn, the final crumbling spire onto which she could hang her dilapidated flag was this: she still knew a dozen libertines. A pack. While they smoked she would suck a dill spear. Incontinent and lecherous.

She moved through the house turning off lights. When she had traveled the extent of it, she felt she hadn't turned off enough. The stenciling around the chair rail was looking earnest. The houseplants looking too healthy and plump, not exotic, not debased. Even with the house in total darkness, it was a peachy darkness, a pleasant and moderate darkness. It wasn't the wealth. Wealth was hearty corpuscle to the libertine plasma. So, she decided it must be the husband. Nothing sets off a debauched evening in its infancy like a husband in the library reading the daily news.

She cracked the heavy door to the library and there was the back of his head. Which was framed in a newspaper spread wide apart. Which was framed by the bookshelf opposite the door. She let the door fall shut again and she could see the rectangular outline of his bright light around the whole door. Might as well turn on all the lights in the house and call up a man who makes balloon animals. Strawberry bundt cake with pudding in the mix. But knowing them, the dearest of sybarites, they could construct even the finest epicurean squalor around a balloon in the shape of a giraffe, and blueberry muffins.

She had wide, flat tape and she used it on the door to his library, just enough so that the fluorescent glow was not leaked into the rest of the house. Then, satisfied, she lit smelly candles. She lit her candles like beacons for Bacchus. It's so wretched, and dull, she thought, having candles all over the place. With colors and scents making them especially painful. With all the lamps coming in a unified set from Restoration Hardware and not a single one missing or bent or beaded or what you might call eclectic. This is how she had prepared herself for life. An army of unified lamps standing sentry over miles of stenciled chair rails.

Outside the party bumped through the oldest neighborhood in town, past two hundred year old trees and little insufficient gutters in the cracked pavement. The party rode in dual SUVs, silver and black. The party was seeking out Kate, their friend, so recently moved to the cul de sac, and the ancient Georgian house, which given its sash windows, the paneled front door, the crowning fanlight, could also within reason be termed a stately home. The party loved rich relations. The party loved fine digs. Yet the noses that had previously been up her ass about every little thing, and wanting to sniff and see and participate, were now turning, it must be admitted, somewhat to the north. All very diverting to have a tree cathedral in the backyard. But for the libertines, the Italian Renaissance wasn't something to live in, or decorate with beds.

Still, they arrived at the cul de sac in the highest of spirits. If Kate was transitioning from comrade to patron, it wasn't ruining anyone's day but hers. Pouring out of the trucks like a black and nickel spill, they came adorned and braided, booted, eyelashed, high-cheekboned, and severe. Kate answered the door in a ruby shift, her bisected arm muscles white and thin and straight under each arm bone when she stretched out her arm like a wing to say "hello!", which naturally isn't stretched. Feet in a pair of little slippers. "Well, come in," she said, "You know where the kitchen is."

Alpha and Iota were a couple. They were a married couple. Mu was a lesbyterian. Beta and Zeta were gay but not involved. Lambda was a spiritual leader of a church downtown where they played rock music and invited hobos in for brunch. Asexual, or, it never occurred to anyone. The rest of them were straight and single. They knew how to spread out in a house. Nobody was standing in a line in the kitchen and nobody was sitting in a line on the sofas and there weren't any lines for the bathroom or lines waiting to talk to Kate because they really missed her on the scene. They could drape over any surface and expand to fill their container like a decent and noble gas.

In the kitchen, a thick and heavy butcher block table was scarred and pitted. Underneath there was monastery floor. On the hallway floor, a long rug was not wine, not burgundy, not maroon, but brick red, and hand-hooked. On the wall, color of tea, iron sconces. Long leather sofa with upholstery nails in a display of studied asymmetry. Tile counter tops, every other tile a picture tile. Picture tiles of weathervane roosters. Someone was mixing martinis in a retro repro set. Someone appeared to be turning over in his hedonist head what could really be done with a second refrigerator. From the tilt of his nose and the lay of his hair, he was labeling. Conspicuous consumption.

"Look at Kate," said Epsilon, her long black legs draped over both arms of the local husband's buster chair, "She looks like she's hiding something. She looks like she's keeping something from us."

"Yes," said Mu, "And what's this aura of virtue surrounding her. She's a vice free zone. Five minutes ago I saw her move away from Beta on purpose, who was only smoking cloves."

"Appalling number of leafy vegetables in the fridge," offered Beta, "Maybe even wheat grass. Have we enforced an important lifestyle change, little Kate? Have we forgotten our warfare against the body?"

Kate sipped nonchalantly at a tumbler of water. Tried to look the inveterate nihilist. Said, "My sister just had another baby.”

The libertines took a moment. “So naturally,” said Mu, “The wheat grass…”

Kate studied the pen cabinet. She’d had a thought recently that if she could drain all the blood out of herself and replace it with whole milk, she might do better in life. Doing better in life was important, and whole milk would most certainly not be toxic and might be an improvement. The best thing would be the instantaneous transfusion. There’s not a god in the world who would confuse a milk blooded saint with a red blooded human. As for these friends of hers, they were liquor blooded pagans. She yearned for them, bathed herself in them, liked to smell them on her throw pillows. But she also wanted them to go away and stop talking to her, forget she had ever lived, and also leave her alone. If they ever abandoned her totally she would die. Watching them in the glass they were framed by lustrous mahogany; they looked good that way. She wanted the one who was meditatively rubbing his crotch to stop. She wanted the one who was making celery straws to quit it. She reached out and smooshed a small bug on the glass of the pen cabinet and turned around.

“Well, this makes two for her,” said Kate.

“And none for you,” returned Beta.

“Swell summary,” she said.

“Well, Babe will never get pregnant either,” he said, “So you’re in good company.”

It was here the libertines often stood, on the brink of knowledge, really having already concluded what needed conclusion, having made the connection in their hands but not looked down at it long enough to use it. Having put two neurons in firing distance and then left them there, synapses unbridged. So, they knew that her older sister had two babies and her younger sister had none, and she had none. This was all the information they needed to make a meaningful leap. Leaping, however, was boring. Later, if they found out anything that interested them, they would shriek and roll their eyes. Which reaction would be obviated by their connecting point A to point B all by themselves.

Kate turned from that conversation to another. She informed and was informed, but more the latter. The libertines lay over her house like a blanket of latent controversy and human interest. Candles burned and overspilled. And at ten o’clock in the evening, Leon the husband came out of the library looking mildly stunned and uncomfortable, like someone fresh out of a tanning salon and walking home in January. He had a foot of duct tape stuck to his heel. Shoo them away, his golden and baleful eyes seemed to say, I want to make a baby.

Kate in the Middle of Ronnie and Babe

When the pizza man came to Kate's house and said hello it was always with a certain degree of shame. Like hey, here I am again. Same outfit. Same pizza. Same rattling car. He said, "Hey," as an apology. Kate understood how he felt, because she was slopping around in some murky waters. Imprecise and undecided. In between Ronnie and Babe who were both perfect at being themselves.

Depending on which direction was up, Ronnie and Babe were a perfect ten. If motherhood was up and bohemia was down, then Ronnie was a ten and Babe was a negative ten. If art was up and middle class suburbia was down, then Babe was a ten and Ronnie was a negative ten. They have accidentally perfected their persons.

Ronnie was a perfect, charming mother of two brilliant children and lived on the cul de sac. Babe was a real live actual working artist who lived in an apartment downtown which she apparently paid for entirely by painting. Kate now lived on the cul de sac too but had no children. She went to church sometimes with Ronnie and knitted, but she also went drinking sometimes and smoked. Which was embarrassing.

Kate was better than Ronnie and she was better than Babe. She was worse than Ronnie and she was worse than Babe. However, her worseness and her betterness fell in such a way that there was always someone on her left and right. Kate fell at zero on the number line. The broken yellow line in the middle of the road. She was doing okay with everything, or you could say she had not been victorious in one thing or another. Had not been decisive.

If she said that what she would really like to do was to become entirely this or wholly that, it would be pointless. It had already been done, by the two sisters. She could flop in a basket and maintain the position. When she said "Hello," it would be with an implied apology because she was still here, which was neither there nor there. Or she could move Babe onto the cul de sac. And get pregnant. In the first way, life was mediation. In the second way, progression, with her own middle spot invulnerable to the elements, and strong.

What it Takes to Live on the Cul de Sac

As it happened, there were three houses on the cul de sac. One was lived in by Ronnie and Murray. This had been bought five years ago. One was lived in by Kate and Leon. This had been bought three years ago. One was vacant. This was to be purchased by Lloyd for Babe in the coming year. Everyone who currently lived on the cul de sac had decided this in their own minds. Everyone on the cul de sac wanted Babe to have a permanent address on the cul de sac too.

"Babe is going to be a terrible housewife," said Ronnie. Ronnie was sitting on a sage green corduroy sofa with peach patchwork corduroy throw pillows and a chenille blanket with a long combed fringe that was peach and sage. Ronnie's sofa matched everything in her entire house which wandered through coffee to pistachio through sage and peach in minute, perfect steps that could not be accurately mapped or located. Kate sat across from Ronnie, across the square coffee table.

"Running a house is like having a dog," said Ronnie, with one hand touching each coordinating throw. "There are things you have to do every day. You have to feed the dog. You can't let it slide. You can't drift. The lawn, the laundry. The dishwasher, the sink. The children's closets. The garage. You have to feed the dog regularly on a daily basis because the dog is hungry every day. And if you forget to feed the dog then the dog is getting sick. And the dog is getting scurvy and you're then having to feed the dog, and treat his scurvy with medicine, and if you forget the food and the medicine then the dog is getting boils, and you're having to feed the dog, give it medicine, and rub the balm into its boils... that's what running a house is like. If you let it slide. If you keep up with it, it's like just feeding a dog every day. But can Babe do that? I don't think I've ever seen her take an interest."

Kate said, "Babe has had a diabetic cat for seven years."

Ronnie said, "Diabetic. Exactly."

“All the same,” said Kate, “I think we should tell Babe that it’s time she moved into the other house.”

Kate Had Two Sisters

Kate had two sisters in her life. Babe and Ronnie were the two sisters she had. When they were born they were called Beatrice and Veronica and Katherine. Which changed to Babe and Ronnie and Kate. Babe and Ronnie got through many years without changing much, but then changed their names from the original because they found the other names more suitable to the personalities they had chosen by the time they reached an age of accountability.

When Babe was twelve years old she was wearing a lot of overalls of the variety that is held up by a stretch of cloth rope that goes through a channel in the bib. She was not girly. Of all the people in the connection, she might have been least likely to end with the name Babe. However, she had been called this by an uncle since birth. She was the only one that he saw born. So, it was not a proper noun, it was descriptive. Other people started calling her Babe when she started dressing like a slut. Veronica had always been dressing like a slut from the very minute she could pull up pants, and she got the name Ronnie when she stopped dressing that way. They were Beatrice and Veronica who did not and did dress like prostitutes and then they were Babe and Ronnie who did and did not. It was like watching two cars go down the freeway and they simultaneously switch lanes, like an orchestrated movement.

Did Kate ever stop or start dressing like a slut? She wore what she was instructed to wear, what she then took out of her closet and put on her body. There was a time, when the two cars each crossed the dotted yellow at the very same moment, where all three sisters dressed like sluts. It was right about the time Babe got an apartment. Then Babe's apartment became a litter of discarded outfits which they pawed through aggressively. Then the cars moved on into the opposite lanes and the fun times were over.

Kate’s older sister was Veronica. As it turned out, Ronnie was all cage and no bird. Ronnie was a good, fine person and the woman with whom one could share a folder on Sunday morning in the choir. The essence of Ronnie can be summarized in the neat titration of the name Veronica into the name Ronnie. Ronnie could take a word like titration and not see tit. Ronnie could buy eleven pairs of khaki colored pants and not even claim them as variant, they could all be just as good as tan. And her ass in those khaki pants was heart-shaped and perfect, even in those awful pleated khaki. Invisible. Like Ronnie in the kitchen. Wraith pants. For stealth-Ronnie. SO perfect she cannot be seen because the knife-like edges of her absolute self overlap with exactness the clean lines of her gourmet Frigidaire. If Kate could wake up and be Ronnie, would she? Wouldn’t she? Khaki pants notwithstanding, rigid. Ronnie was the happiest person she knew. Except for Babe.

Babe got all the tits in the family. Babe was a painter of murals, beholden to no one. A traveler. Babe was one that didn’t write or call or contact the rest of the family for four to six weeks and then might call four times in a day and suddenly be very present and immediate, with no transition, with no one surprised or trying to “catch up” with her. She always seemed to have money but didn’t make any large investments. She was the happiest person in the world. Ronnie was the second happiest. With Ronnie older and Babe younger, Kate was in the middle. They grew up in the same house. She must have been the third happiest person in the world, because that was the next position available.

Three Girls

There are three girls and a mother, three men and a son. And a tiny baby that has just been born. And another one, eventually, that comes out later. The three women are sisters, each older than the last, and the mother is their mother. The men are their men, and the children belong to them too. They have, in short, everything they could ever imagine.

Why do things change? There are spheres of influence at work -- industrial, social, political, scientific, artistic. What do we really want? Comfort, entertainment, personal gain. What do we say we want? Peace, harmony, unity. Where a husband and child intersect comfort and entertainment is where astonishing achievement equals zero. Where exhilaration and freedom lead one to visit monuments in Bolivia or go on drinking binges or compose symphonies, there you will find marital comfort, maternal peace, swinging below the X axis.

All three girls have been to college, haven't they? Haven't they all at least done that?

PROLOGUE TO “THE SIMULTANEOUS LIFE” BY EMMALINE FOSTER

Everyone knows the secret of the Buddhist monks who light themselves on fire and persevere silently through their fiery deaths until they are a pile of ashes. They are living life simultaneously. The whole thing at once. The burning monk is experiencing at one moment the joy of sugar, the peace of prayer, the love of brother, the expanse of mountains, the mischief of babyhood, the throb of adulthood, the swish of his robes around his ankles, the soup, the callouses, and the pain of death. His life is played on every octave in the same time, all up and down the keyboard in one harmonious crash, not step by step, each white or black key making its own sound for its own pathetic moment, building to nothing, amounting to nothing. So among them is one sharp flat note of immolation. It is drowned out by the rest. The one loud sound of fire burning is incorporated into the simultaneous life like a blaring trumpet into the ocean.

So do you women in labor, not to say you victims of gunshot, and you nervous interviewees, do you really think that you cannot incorporate this hour of muscle spasm, this thud of metal, this moment of awkwardness, into a lifetime of whatever you’ve padded the rest of your existence with? Can you, if this burning monk can do it, not do it? Fatty F. Laboria, can you not see this hour of struggle as a tick mark on the life of your baby? Your sweet beautiful baby will bring you many beautiful hours of love, and by the time it is grown up you will have a hundred thousand memories. Does this tinny squawk of labor really stack, next to the chimes of smiles reaching on into the rest of your life? The hair bows, the baby hands clutching yours, the notes written on the refrigerator, the sleepy evenings? Are you so fat and overcome with the drama of your moment that you have to wail and scream him into this life? Can’t you purr him in, because your stupid uterus is just a muscle doing what it’s supposed to do?

If you are dying from anything less than fire, and if you are impatient with or burdened by or god help you irritated with anything less than being burned to death by fire, consider yourself a woman sitting on a C sharp. All the other keys are there all the time. They have only to be played in unison, at the exact same time, together. To produce in some great lives the beginning of an overture, or the end of a concerto, or for most of us just mild cacophony, even to make the gods wince. But the point is, that C sharp is well drowned by the rest of the noise. See your life from point to point, not as you are but as you always are. Live the simultaneous life.