There’s an old trick I used to practice to hypnotize myself. It was supposed to distort real time by changing subjective time. You had to lose yourself in a color or an object and then, before you knew it, whoosh—ten minutes would fly by, unconnected to the tyranny of the clock.

It’s a good way to describe the year that has intervened between that afternoon with Maggie sketching in front of the fire and last night’s orgy. Above all, I want to avoid any mental picture of big numbered days being ripped off a desk calendar by an invisible hand while a few autumn leaves blow around, followed by a little bluebird that lands on the calendar to announce the arrival of spring. No, that’s not how time goes. I hate the thought of it dripping away, ticking away, or being ripped out of my mother-in-law’s checkbook with a flourish and a “What day is it, anyway?”

No, that’s not how it goes. And for God’s sake, please don’t picture things physically speeding up, with the sun bouncing up, then down, up, down, like a giant yellow beach ball caught in the Time Machine, or the trees turning green and then catching fire one by one: poof, poof, poof, and then they’re skeletons again. It’s never, never like that, except in a nightmare.

No, I prefer to think of the past as a big scrapbook that comes to life when I open the pages, just like in the beginning of I Remember Mama. Obviously, the memories you put in the scrapbook shape the way you want to remember the past, rather than the exact way it really happened, but then nothing is perfect, not even the past. Memory is, after all, the street mail of the mind.

We will proceed by staring into the fire. Notice how it looks like a waterfall going the wrong way, pouring silken reds over the rocks and coals? Concentrate on the color red, which now first appears, shiny and clean, rolled out in long vinyl exercise mats in the high-school gym, where Maggie and I went every Tuesday night for yoga classes. She meditated every day, she told me, and I needed to lose some weight; she told me that, too. We were both extremely typical—she of a type of self-love, I of self-hate. Or, at the very least, self-avoidance. I don’t like to be as involved with my body as exercise forces you to be—I’d prefer to just work it from the conning tower in my head rather than get down there and tussle with it hand to hand.

I had wrapped myself up with thirty or so extra pounds of nice safe fat so that Jack was never really touching me but rather my insulating covering of pudding crust. Maggie detected the fat on me no matter how I tried to camouflage it, while Jack said he thought I looked fine—no need to bother. Men want to be fooled into believing you have a decent body, I think, so their eye is easily distracted from the problem areas by a fluff of breast or a curly eyelash; but women need to compare, and it’s an easy matter for them to zero in, since we’re all working with the same stuff. Maggie decided to improve me, and she saw it as her mission to intervene and save my marriage from a fate worse than Open.

The first time Jack ever saw her she had tied her long, red hair up on top of her head with a pink ribbon to match the even hotter-pink leotard she wore under her long-haired coat. He acted like an idiot, kissing first her hand and then mine, joking that he was glad I’d finally brought a good-looking woman into his life. Jack thought he was being honest by telling me how much other women turned him on, but it was painful to hear this because the small breasts and boyish hips that he liked so much now were what I’d never have again. We were both longing after my ghost, it seemed.

I wanted to drive to yoga myself the first night, but Maggie insisted: It was her treat. She had a hiking boot for driving that she kept in her old, dented Chevy, because the flat part of the brake was broken off and she had to press down on the stump of the pipe that was left. Should she have to stop suddenly, the pressure would cut right through the sole of a regular shoe. Besides, her foot kept falling off the brake, and at least the boot had some grid left on it, she said. She also said that her hands had a tendency to sweat on the steering wheel when she was nervous, and just as we were driving onto the entrance ramp of the turnpike, she said she really had to go to the bathroom.

“It’s this damn leotard—it’s made for a Barbie doll, not me. I’m anatomically correct, and it’s not,” she said, crossing her legs once, and then again, so she looked like a doctor’s snake all wrapped above the boot on the brake pipe. “Let’s talk about something interesting to keep my mind occupied,” she said, and when we went under a highway lamp, I could see that the steering wheel was glistening wherever her hands touched it. “Did you have to get married, or something? Debbie is your own kid, isn’t she?”

So I told her about how Jack was such an excellent salesman—he could sell anybody anything, without ever looking touched by the transaction himself. He was therefore able to sell me on the idea of quitting my job and college and getting married when I was eighteen. “Your credit is good and there’s no money down,” and I didn’t even have to be pregnant. Now, however, after two babies, I looked ten years older than I should, but he still looked the same as he did when we got married—it’s not fair! It’s like the army boots he had at Officer Candidate School. He used to amaze everyone by being the first at formation every morning, starched crisp, with the miles of laces perfectly tight and tied on his spit-shined boots. Of course, what nobody knew was that he had seven pairs of boots, all specially altered by a shoemaker in town with zippers on the sides. The zippers were hidden when he stood at attention. And the worst part is that he sold every pair of boots for three times what they were worth when he got out—he’s an excellent salesman. For all I know, right this very minute he could be selling the whole idea of marriage again to another eighteen-year-old while I careen down the highway at top speed with this hotpink caduceus driving the car.

“That’s just the trouble with salesmen,” she began. “And you know the part I hate the most? You can’t insult them. They have no natural threshold of pride, like normal people. Jack looks typical—a Formica personality, clean and slick—you can keep him! He’s one of the few I’ll leave alone.” She turned into the school parking lot, and the screech as we rounded the curb drowned out my sarcastic “thanks!” Since the gym was only lit on one side, most of the parking lot was dark when we pulled in. “I’m gonna bust if I don’t get to the loo,” she said, and then she hit the big parked car so hard I gasped and popped the side seam of my new black leotard.

“Oh fuck! Well, hold on, now we’ll have to walk a little bit farther.” She backed off the bumper of the bluish car and smoothly pulled over to the far side of the parking lot and unwrapped her legs. “They should never make cars the same color as the nighttime—you really can’t see them for shit! Come on, come on” … And later, when she saw the rip in my leotard, she hunted around among the ladies for a needle and then pulled a couple of the longest hairs out of her head so I could sew it up. “Human hair is invisible,” she said. “It’s cool —you can still get started on the exercises and nobody will be the wiser—human hair is stronger than anything—it’ll hold you in—trust me.” You could see the stitches glowing pinkly in the dark seam, however, and they hurt like tiny burrs all through the class. But when I washed the leotard the next day, the pink color rinsed out and then the stitches were indeed invisible.

Next, I remember her red hair floating against a big piece of carpet padding that one of the neighbors had put out for the large garbage pickup. Garbage picking had become her favorite shopping exercise when I tried to get her interested in cleaning her house, which didn’t work all that well, but I felt I had to contribute something unique to this friendship, something to keep her away from Jack.

“Why would I want to clean it?” she asked, horrified, when I suggested a day of scrubbing. We only bought it for investment, and the trusty economy will put a special shine on it for me, you just wait. And besides, who has the time? Listen, I’ve got it—let’s collect instead of clean. Then you can organize what we gather up—take your mind off dirt. Do you realize all the great stuff these stupid people around here are throwing out?” And so we would set out at dawn, crawling close to the curb in my unmarked station wagon before the poor people came over from across the river and picked the place clean. We were on our way back home, after getting a few toys and some wicker baskets, when she yelled, “Stop! Stop! I can really use that!” and she was out of the car before it had stopped moving. She threw herself on a giant pile of carpet padding and it closed around her like a soft fortune cookie, leaving only her legs still on the sidewalk. She scrambled out of it and the commotion caused it to grow some more, so that now it was as big as a small, pale whale. She stripped off her pea jacket to attack it again. She jumped astride it and sank up to her elbows.

“Don’t just sit there—help me!” she yelled, her red head like a small bleeding wound in its side. I got out and embraced it with both my arms and tried to pick it up. It wouldn’t move, couldn’t be moved, and it was as heavy as the first time you ever tried to lift up your giant aunt, who was standing in front of the refrigerator pretending to guard it. It was overpoweringly moldy with urine and morning dew in each of its little pockmarks, but together we slowly stuffed it into the station wagon and drove it to her house. She put it on the back porch, where it sat breathing all last year like a doughy lump of unbaked bread. She said she wanted it to put under her blue shag rug to absorb the noise from her piano practice, because she was going to Juilliard in the fall if she could get in, and if she could stay in the neighborhood until then without cracking.

The next time she wanted to move was after the Avon Lady had organized a square-dance competition in their adjoining back yards, and Rosa, who was now the Avon Lady’s cook, had dumped all the refried beans at the corner of the property, all over Maggie’s wildflower preserve.

“It’s not the mess; it’s the dresses,” she said when she pulled the duffel down to pack. “Nothing personal—I’ll be gone out of here just as soon as I can get the place sold. I belong in the city—any city … see you around …” she said. But when the real-estate agent told her that, given today’s inflation, her house was now worth ten thousand less than when she bought it, because of the condition she’d brought it to, she called me up for some ideas on how to clean it up. I knew eventually she’d need me for something—it was just a matter of time, and like the Gila monster, I could be very patient.

“Do you have any buckets, or brooms, or a vacuum cleaner down there?” I asked, dusting off the angel’s left sleeve as we talked. The angel held my phone book open in her palms, and it was very convenient to lean back on her shoulder while I talked on the phone.

“Nah—just come down and talk to me—maybe you can convince me to go out and buy some. Or go buy me a wife somewhere. Besides, I’ve got a little surprise for you. Come right over, okay?”

I only had time to pack a small rubber football for Toby to play with, and when we got there, she had tacked a little sign to the front door: COME IN—IT‘S OPEN. I’M IN THE BEDROOM. I pushed open the door, knocking over a bag of kitty litter, but left the sign up in case it wasn’t meant for me.

“Come on up—I’m cleaningl” she called down when she heard two of the cats hissing at me. I found her in the bedroom, where she was sitting on the floor in such a big pile of ciothes that she looked like one of Aunt Ruth’s crocheted dolls for the bed, the ones with the impossibly big ruffled skirts. You could store a week’s worth of dirty underwear under one of them, and then they’d start to smell just like a real person.

“Welcome to the Age of Acquirious,” she said. “I was looking for something to wear to scrub in, and then I realized—just how many Russian peasant blouses does any one person need? Why don’t you look through some of this garbage for something you can use? Some of it’s hardly ever been worn. God, what are you supposed to wear when you know you’re going to be depressed? Here—see if this fits …” and she threw across to me a linen blouse embroidered all over in red cross-stitch, my first authentic piece of artistic clothing. Toby was bouncing his football and flopping into the piles happily, as if it were washday. Maggie burrowed deeper into the closet. “My mother sent it from the Ukraine. I’m afraid it’s ponderously Polish, but it’s nearly brand-new, and it was hideously expensive. Maybe you could do something with it—what do you think?”

I pulled it on over my turtleneck, and once I’d gotten my arms in and the sleeves buttoned, I turned and looked in Maggie’s tilted pier glass. The blouse smelled as if Maggie were still in it, and if I squinted, I could really look a little like her: a shorter, squatter version, a funhouse Maggie.

“I don’t know … you could cut off the sleeves, make it into a vest,” she was saying. “You’re pretty clever with sewing, right?” Before I could answer, Toby’s brown rubber football bounced against my leg, and he looked up and around for it.

“Listen, I think Chuck’s got the hots for you—”

And suddenly all was slow motion, there was dead silence, except for a persistent scratching sound, and before the edges of the room returned and the crowds began to cheer, I asked for an instant replay: Chuck’s got the hots for you. For you.

You.

I pictured myself picking up the little rubber football and running with it. All I would really need to do would be to make some plans for wholesome get-togethers with the four of us, and then there would be intimate moments pulled out of comfortable gatherings, and across a crowded room our eyes would lock, and I’d fall backward into his arms, our lips would touch with the excitement of crossed wires, but first … I had to throw Maggie off the track and keep her away from Jack, as well.

She was continuing: “He keeps asking when we’re all going to get together, and I know it’s not Jack he means. At least, I don’t think so, although with Chuck you can never be sure of anything … anyway, wait until you see this! Don’t say a word …” and then she was digging deep, deeper, into the closet. “Wait! I’ve got him here somewhere … where are you? Ah! Come out of there, you little bugger” … Toby popped up. “Christ, where did you come from?” she asked the back of his head. She turned back into the closet, leaned over with both hands extended, and then finally she caught it and held it up in front of her.

At first I thought it was a little white stuffed toy, the kind you put on your bed next to the lady in the big ruffled dress, but it was real, a squirming white Angora kitten whose eyes, while she held him, flashed with a red glow and then changed back to blue.

“He’s for you. Here …” And I jumped back, horrified, as it reached a claw out for me.

“Nah!” And she pulled him back. Toby swiveled his head between us, and I threw him the football, suddenly embarrassed at the picture of a grown woman playing with such a silly little toy.

“Can I change my mind and keep him? We’re already in love,” she pleaded. “I can’t resist him, I have to have him—and now Chuck says if one more animal comes into this house, he moves out. I tell you, I really considered that ultimatum for a while. I mean, this little cutie here can sleep in a pile of my socks and still be happy, right? Not stay out all night … never throw things at pauvre little me … I hate giving him up because Chuck says so! And damnit, I won’t!” She paused again.

“But I don’t want to antagonize him any more than I have to right now …” She held the kitten at arm’s length, out to me …

“But I can give him lots and lots of love!” And she pulled it back, rocking him and kissing him between his squeezed-shut eyes. “Ha! Cat got your tongue? What do you think? Listen—you’d better go. You don’t want to be around Chuck when he comes home and I tell him I’ve managed to spend ten thousand of our dollars without ever even leaving the house. So depressing!”

It was time to help her, I decided, so I pulled the peasant blouse off, pushed up my sweater sleeves, and said, “Look at it this way—what you’re calling depressing can be lucky, or even beautiful. Maybe you’ve hit rock bottom and there’s nowhere to go now but up. That’s from Salada.”

“Salada who?”

“Tea—Salada tea.”

“You read tea leaves? I didn’t know that.”

“Just the bags, not the leaves. Listen, let me help you with this mess.”

She brightened. “You’ll clean it up? All right! Now we’re cooking! Maybe we could switch off on some projects together—the four of us—and Chuck and I will bring the good tea. What do you say? What can we name the cat? Let’s think up something grand … I’ve got it! Archimedes! How’s it go—give me a kitty long enough and I’ll move the earth? Or is he the guy who did the original screw?” she asked, as I bent to clean up her mess.

A month later, Jack and I finished off our basement as a playroom for the kids; on the side we built a workshop for him and a sewing room for me. I have “before” and “after” pictures of the room in my scrapbook. The transformation is amazing, but no matter how cheery we tried to make it, I still knew it was the basement, and you can never trust a cellar. It’s where the washtubs, the oil burner, and assorted other bad things are. It accumulates failure in wet boxes, and abandons all pretense to cracked, dirty windows and peeling paint. It is still the reminder of coming death to me, with its graveyard walls of dirt, vines growing into empty sockets, posts and beams getting eaten away by rot, by bugs, by age and weight, even if all that’s behind the bleached luan paneling now. The real cellar is flaw, roots, potential neglected, the end of hope.

And I worried about our constructing a room down there because I thought it was symptomatic of other cosmetic improvements we were making since we had started seeing Chuck and Maggie. During the basement renovation, Chuck started coming over more and more to learn all about carpentry from Jack, he said, but, I think, after what Maggie said, that he also wanted to see me. I didn’t believe any good ever came from asking friends to come into the cellar, however, because I could never trust anyone who wanted to sit in the cellar and, worse, pretend he was in a fancy room. Remember the room at the end of 2OO1? That pathetic little shell of the imagination alone in the bleakest of black space, whirling away? A playroom in the basement is no different than that, if you ask me. It’s like a fancy coffin in the ground.

Jack and Chuck seemed to have no such thoughts, of course, when they decided to change a corner of the playroom into an elaborate bar with swings hanging from the ceiling instead of bar stools.

“Now we can all be swingers,” Jack joked over my head to Chuck once when they were taking a break to try out the new bar. I was on my hands and knees over in the TV section of the room, trying to scrub the black glue off the new floor tiles. I heard Jack whisse the caps off two Millers against his new custom-installed sunken bottle opener and I waited for the clatter of the caps falling into the coffee can he had installed to catch them. When one of them missed, he tried to adjust the can and slashed his arm so dangerously close to the wrist artery that he had to be rushed to the hospital for stitches. Before I could straighten up from the scrub bucket, Chuck had stopped the bleeding with one hand and slapped Jack in the face with the other to keep him from fainting. The only car around that day was Maggie’s old Chevy, because ours was in the shop, so she drove him to the hospital, and all I could do to help was stay behind with the babies because Maggie’s brake boot was too small for me. I waited and cleaned up his blood before the kids messed in it, washed it out of the coffee can, where it was so deep the Miller cap was floating, and off the sunshine tile we had just installed. If it hadn’t been for Chuck, who’d stopped the bleeding with his twisted shirt, Jack would probably have bled to death, a sacrifice to his own perfectionism in bottle-cap openers.

When he wasn’t on the road selling, Jack was now jogging with Chuck on Wednesday nights. They had formed a sort of alliance in which Jack made himself forever in Chuck’s debt for saving his life, something he said never happened to him during his whole tour in Vietnam. Chuck was the team doctor at the community college, and he had frightened Jack into worrying about a heart attack with stories of “Men in their twenties who just keel over one day, and they were in great shape! What’s going to happen to you?” Jack had changed in ways so subtle since he’d come back from Vietnam that I still had trouble understanding him sometimes, and this jogging was one typical example.

He said he was afraid of getting old, of dying, of not knowing everyone in the neighborhood. When three stewardesses bought the old ocher house at the very end of the neighborhood near the tennis courts, he and Chuck jogged down there, all the way past the train station, past the shutters the stewardesses always kept closed. Most of all, Jack mourned the fact that he hadn’t been in college during the time of coed dorms and “free love”—he’d had to pay for it through the teeth, he said. Then suddenly he worked up a whole new jogging route that avoided the stewardesses’ house when Maggie told him that they were lesbians. “God, you can’t be sure of anything any more,” he said, pulling on his third layer of sweatsocks.

“Just yourself. You can only depend on yourself,” and he kicked the beard of snow off the front doorstop and jogged off into the night. He worried more and more about missing something now, so he puffed around and around the neighborhood with Chuck, waved goodbye to him under the cheery coach lantern at our front door, and then collapsed, heaving, into the breakfast booth for the hot chocolate I had kept warmed at the perfect temperature for him. He wanted it all now, health as well as whipped cream.

I thought Aunt Ruth was finally fading into the background, since so much of the foreground was being taken up with the Mathesons. If Maggie cleaned the house more after knowing me, I didn’t particularly notice the difference, but I did notice that I wasn’t as satisfied as much any more with simply cleaning my house, and then cleaning it again, just for Aunt Ruth. The ironing, the ironing, was fast becoming the irony, the irony. I felt that I was giving all my life to the maintenance of my carpets, my kids, and the kitchen sink. The fragile tapestries of thought I would weave as I moved slowly through the living room with throbbing vacuum tube in hand, protected by my miraculous circle of noise, would then seem to disappear when the machine stopped, sucked away by something even stronger than the vacuum.

And it wasn’t as much fun any more, now that Aunt Ruth would never again creep up on me when I was supposed to be cleaning. I used to sing under the bed in the dust, with the big Hoover blowing away like a wind machine beside me. Once, she crept in, picked up the tube from the floor, and with a savage thrust poked me out from under the bed, beat me out the back door, and locked it, and it was freezing cold out there. I’m still afraid of being stuck outside without a sweater, and I still don’t know what made her madder—the fact that I was lazy or the fact that I was happy. Now I was trying to be a little lazy, if that would make me happy, because in spite of our new friendship with Maggie and Chuck, I was feeling sadder and more empty than the day that Glynnis told me to just leave the Corning Ware casserole in her mailbox when I was finished with it. Don’t call us, we’ll call you; and they never call back.

We played bridge with Chuck and Maggie, saw X-rated movies with them, and played doubles on the deserted tennis courts behind our neighborhood in the dead of winter. It was so cold last February that when I leaned over to pick up the ball I had missed, big wet drops of warm salty stuff would fall out of my nose onto the ground. I remember looking up from trying to find my ball by breaking the frozen weeds with my racquet. Maggie was suddenly standing very close to me, smiling, and holding a new metal racquet with a red bow tied on it. It absorbed the only gleam of light that sunless day. She was so skinny that she could wear two pairs of pants to keep warm without strangling at the waist.

“Happy Birthday,” she said.

“Where did this come from?” I asked.

“From Jack.”

Jack smiled when I thanked him and said, “It was nothing,” but I thought then that something was up between the two of them. He bought a new sports car in the spring, and she bought an antique one a few weeks later. Hers was an old MG the color and shine of a candy apple.

The first time she ever drove it was also the first time we ever had a formal dinner party. They were nearly an hour late, because the car wouldn’t start and Maggie wouldn’t leave it in the driveway and walk over. While we waited for them, we had second, and then third, drinks with the gardening neighbor and her husband on our side porch, beside the patio. As we sipped our drinks and watched the street, it was the softness of the early evening that was by far the most interesting presence in our small group. It was that moment in the season when spring seems exposed, uncovered, nearly obscene in its earliness; not ready yet, yet too delicious to wait for any longer. To sit on the porch in early April like that gave me the same kind of feeling I get when I eat the pudding I’m cooking before it bubbles, or peel a Polaroid picture from its backing before it’s ready. Or maybe it was just because Chuck was coming over and we’d get him drinking, and then, there would be no telling what could happen.

I’d been introduced to the gardening neighbor’s husband twice by that time, and I still couldn’t remember his first name. My biggest fear, as I finished my third gin-and-tonic, was that I’d ask him a second time what he did at the IRS, and then forget what he said about that again, too. I can’t take a man who wears a slippery white short-sleeved shirt seriously, especially if he wears an undershirt and has a hard leather case for his sunglass snap-ons in his breast pocket. When we finished that round of drinks, Jack suggested a quick tour of our property before the realization that we’d been stood up by Maggie and Chuck took over completely and soured the creamed spinach even before we sat down to eat. Jack is an excellent host, and the only rule he follows is to make the drinks so strong that you wince. It works, too. Those who need the alcohol are grateful, those who are too shy get drunk, and those who don’t like it complain. “If I’m too potent for you, I’ll water it down,” he always says as he hands out drinks, and someday I’m going to have a T-shirt printed with that saying on it for him.

By the time Maggie puttered past our patio with a merry honk of her new antique horn, I’d almost begun to wish she’d stayed home because the gardening neighbor was admiring my strawflower arrangement in the living room, and I hated to give up the spotlight. But everyone rushed to the driveway, gathered around the new car, stroked it, and while Maggie modeled it, I slipped into the kitchen to check on the roast. I heard sputters of laughter from the driveway as I basted the lamb and turned on the vegetables, and by the time I was putting the salad out, Jack had already gotten drinks out to the Mathesons.

By now the dinner was out of my control. The salad course was floating away because Archimedes had been packed into the car, too, so that the motor could be said to purr like a kitten, and now he was under the table, snagging his claws in the ends of my lace tablecloth. Chuck picked him up and put him on the porch during soup, but there he scratched the screen and nearly chilled the meat with the sound, so during dessert, Jack put him into the basement playroom.

“Don’t worry so much!” He patted my sweaty shoulder as he walked past my chair.

“It takes practice not to worry about details,” Maggie said, sipping her wine. “I’ve become expert.”

I saw the glance pass between the gardening neighbor and her husband, as she handed over the sugar to him and he spooned out a precise teaspoon into his cup. The two neighbors sat like twin library lions, quiet and substantial, while Maggie spoke in quick, graffiti-like strokes.

“I think being sloppy just takes practice, like anything else, Maybe if you and Jack traveled, you wouldn’t care so much about the fate of a single lace tablecloth.”

“That won’t help,” I ventured. “A while back, when Jack and I went to the Marriage Encounter—”

“You went to one of those things?” Chuck asked.

“Did it work?” someone else asked, putting down a cup.

Suddenly the floor was mine. I’d said something of undeniable interest. Or else, they were all being nice to me because I’d just fed them.

“What’s it do—I can’t keep these things straight—does it make you Total or Perfect?” Maggie asked the whole table.

“You’re missing the point,” I said.

“It’s just a weekend retreat,” Jack said.

“A weak-end retread,” Maggie said to him.

“Let her tell what happened—I’m interested,” said the gardening neighbor.

They turned to me again, and I took a breath. “My big treat to myself was going to be to make it seem like a vacation from all my jobs. I wasn’t going to do any folding or scouring or straightening up, and I figured some new thoughts would rush in to fill the vacuum,” I said, folding and refolding my flowered napkin.

“That’s logical,” he said. One of the men.

“Well, as we were going up to our room, I noticed a piece of white string curled into the raised nylon pattern in the blue carpet outside our door, and I thought to myself, I’m not going to pick up that string. I’m not going to clean anybody’s house for the whole weekend, and I’ll start with that string—by leaving it alone.”

“Good thinking,” Maggie said, finishing her wine. She looked to Jack for more, and he smiled at her fingers on the glass as he filled it, right up to the brim.

“Besides, somebody else would do it if I didn’t—why should I always be the one to pick up after everyone? Makes sense, right?” No one answered, so I continued, making it into a story: “Well, obviously no one else saw the string, and it sat there for the whole next day. During naptime I became obsessed with it—the way it curled into the carpet, and at the same time protected itself from being swept away on some one’s shoe. It was nestled there like a worm, winding into my thoughts, ruining my concentration on interpersonal dialoguing—”

“What in the hell is that?”

“Talking. And messing up my ability to contribute much to the mutual assessment of tacit commitment—”

“Wha… ?”

“Not talking.”

“Listen, this is important,” Chuck said, looking pointedly at Maggie, who was twirling her fork into the lace.

“But why do they call everything by those idiot titles?” Maggie asked.

“Because it costs money,” Jack answered. “Continue, continue—this is all news to me.”

“By nighttime, I saw it snaking through my dreams, back and forth, in and out—it was in the marbleized binding of the Bible in the room, and on the pattern of my suitcase lid. It’s a plastic bubbly lid, blue, just like the rug, with a white scratch in it that’s curved in the same exact wavy pattern of the string in the carpet. By that time we were doing non-verbal communication, I was finger-painting the string, making it out of clay, and curving it into a winding shape, and of course, you thought I was trying to say penis, but that I was too repressed.”

“Weren’t you?” Jack asked, actually surprised.

“Well, it all sounds pretty neurotic to me. What do you think, Chuck, do we pack her off in the wagon?” Maggie asked.

“This is a medically valid infirmity—I’ve read case histories of people who get totally obsessed, possessed even, with a single detail …”

“So—are you? Repressed? I mean, more than’s obvious?” she repeated.

“Do you ever get migraine headaches?” Chuck asked, obviously concerned.

“Is there an ending to this cliff-hanger of a tale? Did anyone ever pick the damn thing up?” asked the gardening neighbor’s husband.

“I’m coming to it—wait. All through the Mass of Renewal at the end of the encounter, I was mesmerized by the priest’s twisted and knotted white rope belt on his vestment, and I’m sure that’s where the string had come from in the first place …”

“Wouldn’t you just love to seduce a priest?” Maggie asked.

“I’m sure he was littering the whole retreat house with his strings. When we were packing to go, I had an urge to bare my soul and tell Jack about the problem.”

“You sure as hell should have. Let him know what he’s got on his hands,” Chuck said, unwrapping a long, thick, hefty cigar.

“Poor Jack,” said Maggle.

“So why didn’t you tell me? That’s really stupid!”

“But you were reading your journal of commitment so peacefully in the window seat while you waited for me to pack us up that I couldn’t disturb you. You looked so comforted—”

“Damn right I was comforted—we paid over three hundred dollars.”

“And no matter what, comfort like that is fleeting.”

“So? What happened?” asked the gardening neighbor.

“That night back home in bed, I couldn’t consider having sex, because by now I was panicked—why had the string been in front of my door? Was it a personal test? And if so, had I failed by not picking it up? And the worst part, I realize now, is if I had gone ahead and picked the string right up, as is my normal habit, I’d never have given it a second thought. So that’s why I clean.”

“O … kay. So!” Maggie looked up, and around, as if she’d just broken through the water into fresh air. She looked to Jack.

“Would anyone like an after-dinner drink?” Jack asked, standing up and gathering a few butter plates. And then the spotlight snapped out, and the second cup of coffee was passed around, and I’d gone too far, I could feel it. I couldn’t get back into the group fast enough, and so the currents at the table parted, quite naturally, the way your hair will when the hair spray wears off. Chuck was talking to the other husband, and Maggie and Jack were comparing sports cars.

The gardening neighbor turned to me and said, “I like your ideas about cleaning—you say them very well. You must read a lot.”

“Oh, I do, I do. I also watch TV, and I saw an episode of Kung Fu that said to consider cleaning as a humbling act that allows your spirit to rise the more you are disciplined to the world around you.”

“Sickening!” Maggie broke in, turning her chair toward us. “That’s insane! Admit it—it’s a never-ending job, and what kind of satisfaction can you get from a job you can’t get done?“

“That’s just it—the Orientals rake sand into patterns in their garden. I scour the sink every day. Then Jack dumps his coffee grounds in, and Debbie throws in the jelly knife, and the wind has blown the gardener’s patterns away. I have a job—there is something so comforting about the person who picks things up and arranges, don’t you think? It’s the opposite of being an iconoclast—I think of myself as an iconokeeper.”

“Maybe Tupperware will come out with a whole line of you.”

“I think that’s a beautiful thought,” the gardening neighbor said, and Maggie stared at her, making her eyes cross a little. It wouldn’t have been noticeable unless you knew Maggie’s typical expression of contempt.

“I guess that’s proof, then, if two of you agree,” she said. “You both are certifiable. It’s so depressing! Maybe I could steal Rosa for a week or two. Help her keep beans on the table.”

“If Rosa comes and cleans up your messes, she’ll be stronger than you, because she’ll be doing something you admit you can’t do,” I said. “Besides, she’ll know everything about you in the world, after having gone through all your stuff—do you want somebody that close? Even a cat covers up its trail—”

“Shit! The cat! I forgot all about him down there—what do you think he’s messed into this time? Which reminds me—I have to brush him every single day so he doesn’t develop a fur ball and die! Can you believe it! Every day! I knew I should have given him to you—it’d give you something new and exciting to clean.”

“See! That’s exactly what I mean! Cleaning is a matter of life and death: all life means is not being dirt. The minute a thing dies, it gets stinky, smelly, dirty, rotten—it becomes a piece of garbage, and it has to be cleaned up.”

“You’re really a mental, you know? I have better things to do with my time than think about garbage. My parents paid a fortune for my education—and you’re telling me to wash floors. You know, you sound like one of those people I’ve always heard about but never believed I’d ever meet. Someone comes bleeding their guts out into your kitchen and you try to mop it up before you even go to help the wounded.”

And then, in front of everybody, but seen by no one but me, Chuck winked at me. 🏠

☜* previous Chapter Eight 🏠

next *☞ Chapter Ten 🏠