30.

The smoke from the wildfires reached the city that night. It seeped through my locked windows, and over the next few days a yellowish, grayish haze the color of hard-boiled yolk filled the skies. Various authorities suggested we stay indoors as much as possible, and if we had to go outside, they said, wear a mask. There were no masks to be found in my neighborhood. I stayed inside and wrote. I wouldn’t have said I was writing to exorcise pain—Rose and I used to think it was one of the worst reasons to pick up a pen, and anyone who claimed it worked wasn’t a writer, they were a magical thinker of the highest order and a pretty shallow pond, if coughing up words could cure what ailed you. I missed that Rose every day. She might still exist in some form, but I was done giving people the benefit of the doubt, which meant that really I just missed my youth every day. I was better than she was: I needed to repeat it until I believed it the way people believed Jesus died on the cross for their sins. I was better than she was. Stronger than she was? For standing all by myself out on this edge of the continent without husband and children to give me shelter or break my falls. She had betrayed the girls we’d been and I owed her nothing. Or she had grown up and I might never? I was a little confused as to how I actually felt, which meant I probably shouldn’t have been writing about her, should have waited until I was seventy to do it, but she and I had been a song, and I wanted to sing it before I forgot the words, and I had started to forget words, words like iconoclastic and obnoxious and cherished and vulgar. I wanted to sing a sentimental and nostalgic song before I forgot how, and if the song trailed off and grew wounded and mumbling toward the end, and if I could not produce satisfactory, valedictory attitudes toward the long painful moment where youth ends and what Elinor had called non-youth begins, and if as I wrote I could not bring myself to tell the whole truth about my life despite wishing I could cut every vein open and bleed to death once and for all and so never have to write again, I pled with Puck—if we shadows have offended—and perhaps my real offense was not against future readers but against reality, which I had insulted over and over again by expecting it to be more and better and clearer than it was. I did not want to care about future readers. I wrote for myself, or tried to. The notion of putting down sentences to please only my own mind had never made sense to me; my own mind was the thing that needed escaping, and so could not be appealed to as an authority. I wrote this instead of writing Karl, which meant that sometimes I wrote pursued by a fever. One day I would not feel it when I thought of him. I wrote for the daughter I’d never have. If she read it when she was too young she might shout, out loud, at the women in the pages the way Rose and I shouted, out loud, at Isabel Archer for her infuriating passivity, and if she read it when she was too old she’d be annoyed with the women in the pages for being too concerned with their love lives. As was I, sometimes, when I read back over these pages. I wrote for Elinor, knowing that I really should have written her directly to apologize. I’d get around to it. I wrote for the student who’d asked me How do you know when you’ve become an adult? and I said without thinking When you stop needing an audience, and she said What does that mean? and I said When you stop caring what other people think and she said But won’t that take a long time? and I said It could, but everybody’s different, and when my student sighed, I wished I could have known what it was like to be the body sought by a small face when it was sad and lost. It had taken a very long time for that yearning to make itself known, and I wondered what would have happened if I’d been a different person sooner. If I had given in to Jimmy, or demanded more from Karl. If I stopped to think about that for too long I’d want to go outside without a mask and use that air like it was Sylvia Plath’s oven, so I typed quickly, sloppily, first thought best thought, typed maniacally, a little, to outrace my regrets. What did I want? To respect my solitude. It could be soil not sand. To forgive myself for my mistakes.