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?