Life Sentences by Laura Lippman

content? She had to think that a truly happy, content person wouldn’t battle her aging body with such intensity, would let the gray hairs grow in, forgo facials, and, most of all, fuck the gym, that Sisyphean battle against gravity. But Cassandra also worried that her life was too soft, that small things became magnified in the midst of all this comfort, and the gym was the only place where she encountered active opposition. Or had been, until the publication of her novel.
    Hadn’t someone written a poem about how it was the small things, the fraying of a shoelace, that broke a man’s spirit? She walked over to her laptop and typed the fraying of a shoelace into Google and got back nine entries, and half of those were about the Nicholson Baker book The Mezzanine. But there was some blog crediting it to Charles Bukowski, so she started over, with just Bukowski and shoelace. And here was the poem,called, in fact, “The Shoelace.” Ah, it was snapping, not fraying, and it sends a man (or a woman, as Bukowski adds in a moment of preternatural political correctness) to the madhouse.
    She read on, impressed by a poet she had never much considered. Her father, for all his progressiveness, hated the “new” voices, as he called them—Bukowski, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs. Anyone who announced himself as a revolutionary could not be one, said Ric Fallows, and, in that way, managed to announce that he was a revolutionary because he was not announcing himself. Cassandra, a contrarian in so many ways, did not defy her father on this. She was too busy reading Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz and this one really shocking book— Laurel Canyon ?—in which a girl with a pronounced masochistic streak volunteered for a gang rape that another man witnessed for sexual pleasure. What teenage girl had time for Bukowski when there were books like that in the world?
    But now she read on, interested in Bukowski’s list of things that led to insanity. Car troubles, dental problems, a fifty-cent avocado. ( How quaint, she thought.) These were, for the most part, the very things she had dreaded in her twenties and thirties. Car repairs, dental work—never adequately covered, no matter how good the health care plan. Add to the list Bulgarian wine, which she and her first husband had started drinking because it cost only five dollars a bottle; stealing toilet paper from the Burger King, which she had done several times while trying to survive as an assistant in publishing; chipping the new pedicure you couldn’t actually afford or justify. Of course, Bukowski had his political litany, too, but she didn’t really see world events driving anyone crazy. Not directly.
    Which was the problem, she supposed. The burnt-out lightbulb in the hall might send you into screaming fits at the end of a long, frustrating day, but would your concern over global warming lead you to consider replacing it with a fluorescent bulb? She hated the coinage “blank nation,” but if she were to permit herself such a title, she would rantabout how resigned people seemed, inured to their own powerlessness. Inert nation. Nowadays, your shoelace snapped, so you sat down at your computer and read about the latest insane starlet, then zipped over to Zappos and ordered new shoes, because who had time to find shoelaces.
    She clicked back to Google’s rectangular robot mouth, always ready to be filled. So what if it was Saturday morning? She was in Baltimore, she had nothing to do and nowhere to go. She could work, after all, make the lie true. She started with Leticia Barr. Nothing. She tried Tisha, but that came up empty, too. Donna Howard. Too much came up; the name was shared by a Texas state representative and a psychic. Fatima, larger-than-life Fatima. Certainly she had made a mark on the world. Again, nothing. Had they all married, taken their husbands’ names? Many women did, even good feminists, especially once