’s success. Profit is not a word that would come out of his distinguished old fleshy mouth. He is a fragment that’s drifted away from a lost world that honoured, perhaps too worshipfully, the act of writing. An old-fashioned publisher, an old-fashioned man, he was thinking, instead, that a woman with a disturbed daughter would do well to distract herself with a project that occupies and consumes another plane of existence. “Something airy,” he said on the telephone from New York. “Something, dear Mrs. Winters, to take you away from your sadness for anhour a day. Perhaps two hours.” And then he said, “The world is hungry for amusement.”
I write now in the afternoons, carrying a pot of tea and a mug up to my box room. I am trying to be more disciplined about this. Natalie and Chris have basketball practice after school today. Tom will bring them home around six o’clock. Pet has settled down for a nap in the kitchen sunlight. He loves to lie on his back like a big hairy rug, back legs splayed, front paws neatly folded in, while gazing at you with a coyly wolfish grin. I try to breathe lightly as I climb the stairs, as though a willed quietness in my chest might connect with the points and edges of all I’m attempting to put out of my mind. Then I switch on my computer and get down to work. I have the sense that if I am serious about this business of “being good,” this is the only place in the world I can begin, snug in my swivel chair, like a hen on her nest.
I’m not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I’ve had a look, and there’s nothing down that road. I wouldn’t reply, as Anna Karenina does when asked what she’s thinking about: “Always about my happiness and my unhappiness.” The nakedness of that line of thought leads to a void. No, Ms. Winters of Orangetown much prefers the more calculated protocols of dodging sadness with her deliberate manoeuvres. She has an instinct for missing the call of grief. Scouring the separate degrees of innerness makes her shy. A reviewer writing about My Thyme Is Up two years agocharged its author—me—with being “good” at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard. Well, now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? Whimpering.
Ordering my own house calms me down, my careful dusting, my polishing. Speculating about other people’s lives helps, too. These lives hold a kind of tenancy in my mind, tricking the neural synapses into a grand avoidance of my own sorrow. The examined life has had altogether too much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air. Far more interesting, at least to a fiction writer going through a bad time, is the imaginative life projected onto others. Gwendolyn Reidman in Baltimore has just come out as a lesbian; the news arrived via a note from a bed-and-breakfast place called the Inglenook, and so far I’ve put off my reply. And there’s Emma Allen off with her daughter and daughter-in-law to a spa, where the two younger women will give themselves over to mud wraps and massages and leave Emma, who’s forty-four, the same as me, to feel guilty about falling into the vanity trap. Then there is Mrs. McGinn, who whispers her loneliness through the floorboards and who, in all probability, shook her dust mop on the same porch railing I banged on this morning, doing my daily rounds. There’s the violet late-afternoon autumn transparency entering the box room from the skylight,precise and square, and the creak of ancient tree trunks bending in the gusty October wind. Up here, on the third floor of the house, my senses sharpen and connect me with that other Reta, young Reta, not really so far away.
There’s my dead mother, who taught me French and also thrift. Every day her image rises up in one form or another, brushing against me with a word or gesture
I write now in the afternoons, carrying a pot of tea and a mug up to my box room. I am trying to be more disciplined about this. Natalie and Chris have basketball practice after school today. Tom will bring them home around six o’clock. Pet has settled down for a nap in the kitchen sunlight. He loves to lie on his back like a big hairy rug, back legs splayed, front paws neatly folded in, while gazing at you with a coyly wolfish grin. I try to breathe lightly as I climb the stairs, as though a willed quietness in my chest might connect with the points and edges of all I’m attempting to put out of my mind. Then I switch on my computer and get down to work. I have the sense that if I am serious about this business of “being good,” this is the only place in the world I can begin, snug in my swivel chair, like a hen on her nest.
I’m not interested, the way some people are, in being sad. I’ve had a look, and there’s nothing down that road. I wouldn’t reply, as Anna Karenina does when asked what she’s thinking about: “Always about my happiness and my unhappiness.” The nakedness of that line of thought leads to a void. No, Ms. Winters of Orangetown much prefers the more calculated protocols of dodging sadness with her deliberate manoeuvres. She has an instinct for missing the call of grief. Scouring the separate degrees of innerness makes her shy. A reviewer writing about My Thyme Is Up two years agocharged its author—me—with being “good” at happy moments but inept at the lower end of the keyboard. Well, now! What about the ripping sound behind my eyes, the starchy tearing of fabric, end to end; what about the need I have to curl up my knees when I sleep? Whimpering.
Ordering my own house calms me down, my careful dusting, my polishing. Speculating about other people’s lives helps, too. These lives hold a kind of tenancy in my mind, tricking the neural synapses into a grand avoidance of my own sorrow. The examined life has had altogether too much good publicity. Introversion is piercingly dull in its circularity and lack of air. Far more interesting, at least to a fiction writer going through a bad time, is the imaginative life projected onto others. Gwendolyn Reidman in Baltimore has just come out as a lesbian; the news arrived via a note from a bed-and-breakfast place called the Inglenook, and so far I’ve put off my reply. And there’s Emma Allen off with her daughter and daughter-in-law to a spa, where the two younger women will give themselves over to mud wraps and massages and leave Emma, who’s forty-four, the same as me, to feel guilty about falling into the vanity trap. Then there is Mrs. McGinn, who whispers her loneliness through the floorboards and who, in all probability, shook her dust mop on the same porch railing I banged on this morning, doing my daily rounds. There’s the violet late-afternoon autumn transparency entering the box room from the skylight,precise and square, and the creak of ancient tree trunks bending in the gusty October wind. Up here, on the third floor of the house, my senses sharpen and connect me with that other Reta, young Reta, not really so far away.
There’s my dead mother, who taught me French and also thrift. Every day her image rises up in one form or another, brushing against me with a word or gesture
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