30

All that lying in bed in December, all those tears—Sarabeth wondered where they’d gone. She’d had trouble getting herself out of bed then, but in an odd way she felt worse now—she couldn’t get the bed out of her. Her legs, that had moved her through Tilden Park: they were full of sand, deadweights. Her head was full of sand, too, which made it hard to concentrate, hard to talk. She met Nina for coffee one evening and tried to explain what had happened, but she kept losing her train of thought or having trouble finding the right words.

“I’m worried about you,” Nina said, and Sarabeth knew she meant well, but it made her feel worse. “Will you make an appointment with a shrink?”

Sarabeth shook her head. She didn’t feel it was a bad idea, just that she couldn’t do it. Besides, she was too poor. Real estate was dead, and though she had lampshade orders to fill, she couldn’t make herself work.

Nina said, “Would you go if I made an appointment?”

“The lightbulb has to want to change,” Sarabeth joked, but her face felt weird, as if something were crawling on her cheeks, and she gave up and shrugged. “Anyway, it’s getting late—I should get going.”

At home she sat on her couch. She felt tired in one way but wide awake in another. There would come a moment when she would feel it was time to go to bed, and she would go, but meanwhile she waited. Time moved slowly. She thought of a freeway just past the point of a huge jam, how each emerging car would seem to have the road to itself, minutes passing, one by one.

In a while she realized that she needed to pee, and then that she needed to pee very badly: the pressure in her bladder surprised her. She got up and went into the bathroom, and it was the strangest thing—at the moment when she felt the urine against her skin, her eyes welled. It was like that trick kids played, putting someone’s hand in water to make him wet the bed.

Back in the living room it was very quiet—she could hear the tick of the clock in her workroom. She recalled a time when she almost always had music playing, but that was long ago. She hadn’t opened her stereo cabinet in months. What would it be like to have the kind of terrible, wasting disease where your mind was entirely intact but you couldn’t move or speak? She felt a little like that now, as if somewhere inside her there might be an urge to hear music, but that she lacked the means to bring that urge forward, to feel it.

She let Jim and Donald talk her into going to a cocktail party in Marin, at a stark hillside house in which just about everything was beige or white. The crowd was very upscale: she met a cardiologist, a landscape architect, a professor of sociology, a producer at KQED. She chirped her way through an explanation of her work, pretty sure they were all wondering how she supported herself. Not very well, she wanted to say.

At the hors d’oeuvres table she ate a handful of salty cashews, then a couple of mouth-puckering cornichons. She picked up a little plate and helped herself to a few sections of California roll, then added several leaves of pickled ginger and a knob of wasabi. She rolled a piece in the seasonings and put it in her mouth whole, and instantly the wasabi assaulted her sinuses, burning her nostrils and making her eyes water. She chewed quickly and immediately had another.

In the window over the table she saw her reflection, her pale face with its shadowed eyes, her mouth moving mechanically. Behind her, the party guests talked animatedly of art and Hawaii and feeling more grounded these days. She didn’t know them, but she knew she wasn’t them. Is this it? It was. She was where she’d been heading all along, though without knowing it. Liz hadn’t put her there; she’d just turned on the light. There was a fluttering in Sarabeth, like wings, and she thought her task was to quiet that feeling, to soothe the bird inside her, reassure it that all was OK. She looked at the window again, but this time she tried to look through it. She believed she was looking into the backyard, but it was too dark and rainy to tell if there were dense trees out there, or lawn, or a neighbor’s imposing house.

In the days after the party she began to think of her bedroom on Cowper Street, of how, because of an unfortunately placed streetlight, it had been very light at night, and of how when she couldn’t sleep she sometimes pretended that the illuminated shapes she saw were other than what she knew them to be. Her fan-backed chair was a peacock, her coat-rack was an antelope, and down the hall her mother’s voice was just the cry of a monkey, a shriek that should be, or the soft, rhythmic cawing of an exotic bird.

The bird in Sarabeth grew more and more still. Without the beating of its wings it began to seem like something quieter than a bird, a small warm roundish thing in the middle of her chest, like an auxiliary heart. This thought pleased her for a very short time and then repelled her with its reach toward poetry. If not a heart, then a stone? But that was poetic, too.

So there was nothing inside her—she said goodbye to the bird and missed it only briefly. She was shedding what she could, though the pile of stuff on her floor remained.