into a red crayon or put his tongue to the rain-soaked bushes behind the schoolyard fence), or else opening onto a lively boil of fantasy that tends to be dotted with bravery and tribute. And yet, for all his imaginative powers, he cannot—at his age—begin to picture the unscrolling of a future in which he will one day possess a key ring (in the shape of the Eiffel Tower) which will hold a pair of streamlined rubber-tipped car keys, as well as a rainbow of pale tinted others—house, office, club, cottage—and a time when he will have a curly-headed wife with her own set of keys (on a thong of red leather stamped with her initials) and a fourteen-year-old daughter whose miniature brass key will open a diary in which she will write out her secret thoughts, beneath which lie a secondary drift of thought too tentative, too sacred, too rare to trust to the inexactitude of print and to the guardianship of a mere key.
ABSENCE
She woke up early, drank a cup of strong unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple, and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.
Of course she had no money and no house-handy mate to prod the key free. Many a woman would have shrugged good naturedly, conceded defeat, and left the small stones of thought unclothed, but not our woman; our woman rolled up her sleeves, to use that thready old metaphor, and began afresh. She would work around the faulty letter. She would force her story, however awkwardly, toward a detour. She would be resourceful, look for other ways, and make an artefact out of absence. She would, to put the matter bluntly, make do.
She started—slowly, ponderously—to tap out words. “Several thousand years ago there—”
But where her hands had once danced, they now trudged. She stopped and scratched her head, her busy, normally useful head, that had begun, suddenly, to thrum and echo; where could she go from here? she asked herself sharply. Because the flabby but dependable gerund had dropped through language’s trapdoor, gone. Whole parcels of grammar, for that matter, seemed all at once out of reach, and so were those bulky doorstop words that connect and announce and allow a sentence to pause for a moment and take on fresh loads of oxygen. Vocabulary, her well-loved garden, as broad and taken-for-granted as an acre of goldenrod, had shrunk to a square yard, and she was, as never before, forced to choose her words, much as her adored great-aunt, seated at a tea table, had selected sugar lumps by means of a carefully executed set of tongs.
She was tempted, of course, to seek out synonyms, and who could blame her? But words, she knew, held formal levels of sense and shades of deference that were untransferable one to the other, though thousands of deluded souls hunch each day over crossword puzzles and try. The glue of resonance makes austere demands. Memory barks, and context, that absolute old cow, glowers and chews up what’s less than acceptable.
The woman grew, as the day wore on, more and more frustrated. Always the word she sought, the only word, teased and taunted from the top row of the broken keyboard, a word that spun around the center of a slender, one-legged vowel, erect but humble, whose dot of amazement had never before mattered.
Furthermore, to have to pause and pry an obscure phrase from the dusty pages of her old thesaurus threw her off balance and altered the melody of her prose. Between stutters and starts, the sheen was somehow lost; the small watery pleasures of accent and stress were roughed up as though translated from some coarse sub-Balkan folk tale and rammed through the nozzle of a too-clever-by-half, space-larky computer.
Her
ABSENCE
She woke up early, drank a cup of strong unsugared coffee, then sat down at her word processor. She knew more or less what she wanted to do, and that was to create a story that possessed a granddaughter, a Boston fern, a golden apple, and a small blue cradle. But after she had typed half a dozen words, she found that one of the letters of the keyboard was broken, and, to make matters worse, a vowel, the very letter that attaches to the hungry self.
Of course she had no money and no house-handy mate to prod the key free. Many a woman would have shrugged good naturedly, conceded defeat, and left the small stones of thought unclothed, but not our woman; our woman rolled up her sleeves, to use that thready old metaphor, and began afresh. She would work around the faulty letter. She would force her story, however awkwardly, toward a detour. She would be resourceful, look for other ways, and make an artefact out of absence. She would, to put the matter bluntly, make do.
She started—slowly, ponderously—to tap out words. “Several thousand years ago there—”
But where her hands had once danced, they now trudged. She stopped and scratched her head, her busy, normally useful head, that had begun, suddenly, to thrum and echo; where could she go from here? she asked herself sharply. Because the flabby but dependable gerund had dropped through language’s trapdoor, gone. Whole parcels of grammar, for that matter, seemed all at once out of reach, and so were those bulky doorstop words that connect and announce and allow a sentence to pause for a moment and take on fresh loads of oxygen. Vocabulary, her well-loved garden, as broad and taken-for-granted as an acre of goldenrod, had shrunk to a square yard, and she was, as never before, forced to choose her words, much as her adored great-aunt, seated at a tea table, had selected sugar lumps by means of a carefully executed set of tongs.
She was tempted, of course, to seek out synonyms, and who could blame her? But words, she knew, held formal levels of sense and shades of deference that were untransferable one to the other, though thousands of deluded souls hunch each day over crossword puzzles and try. The glue of resonance makes austere demands. Memory barks, and context, that absolute old cow, glowers and chews up what’s less than acceptable.
The woman grew, as the day wore on, more and more frustrated. Always the word she sought, the only word, teased and taunted from the top row of the broken keyboard, a word that spun around the center of a slender, one-legged vowel, erect but humble, whose dot of amazement had never before mattered.
Furthermore, to have to pause and pry an obscure phrase from the dusty pages of her old thesaurus threw her off balance and altered the melody of her prose. Between stutters and starts, the sheen was somehow lost; the small watery pleasures of accent and stress were roughed up as though translated from some coarse sub-Balkan folk tale and rammed through the nozzle of a too-clever-by-half, space-larky computer.
Her
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