Frances and Bernard - By Carlene Bauer Page 0,39

to get me to quit smoking by throwing out the packs of cigarettes she finds lying around the house. There are many, because I lose them moving from bedroom to kitchen to yard and I have to buy more to replace them, and so on and so forth. She didn’t like you, I have to say. I find this amusing. “Where did you meet that girl again?” she said yesterday, and I could hear the rest of that thought hanging in the air: It surely wasn’t Smith College. I think she can tell that you take pains not to know your place, and she wants to know who or what encouraged this wildness. I think she can also tell that I love you for it.

I’m glad to be recovering in the summer. Isn’t that silly? I’ve lived most of my life on an academic schedule, so I am used to being set loose to loaf during these months. I can pretend that being set loose to recuperate is not that different. And there are many other people on furlough from their lives now—I can tell myself that I have not fallen too far out of step with the rhythms of reality.

Now that I am off the drug, I can sit in the sun. I come out in the garden every day to celebrate this fact. My mother has just opened a window to tell me to put some zinc on my nose. It is noon now, and I think I may be out here until the sky ripens into a peach-bottomed plum, just because I can.

I would have prayed to be delivered from that drug if I’d had the ability to conceive of words that expressed preference, or hope. I didn’t care that I wasn’t writing because I didn’t care about anything. That was similar to what I’d felt during various depressions—words always out of reach. Words on a shelf too high for my lazy, faithless arms; words blurred and smeared around the sides of the errant crucible that was my mind; words a thing I had been smitten with now betraying me with their dullness. But this was worse. My mind was a ball of steel wool and lard.

When they took me off the drug, I had a few panic attacks, it appears, waiting for my will to return. I did not think it would. But here I am, at my parents’ house, sitting in the sun, in their yard, writing you. I don’t feel cured, but I do feel glad to go to bed without wishing for sleep to extinguish me. I did not think that was possible. I see that I may have my family in me after all—the other day my father said that everyone’s been concerned for my health, but “no one likes a layabout.” I would never have said a thing like that, but I am interested in, I am committed to, as he might say, moving along. It’s not unlike the difference between nausea and health: when you’re well you can’t imagine what it’s like to be ill, you’ve forgotten the exact dimensions of the squirming lassitude, and when you’re ill, you pant for wellness, whose sturdy contours now seem the unimaginable thing. The sane you, the real you—it must have been real, why else the innumerable vivid scenes of leaving your house and ending up exactly where you intended, of speaking swiftly and unselfconsciously and being understood, of being enchanted by small joys, your own and others’? You know it must have been real, but now you are not so sure—that dependable, uninterrupted flow of thought and action now seems a fiction, not your broken mind. But here I am in the yard. Here are birds. I’m writing, and I’ve written more than I thought I would. The neighbors’ sweetly rotund daughter is making a halting mess of Schumann on the piano. And now a church bell comes in, tolling “This Is My Father’s World,” and she gives up the Schumann to play along with hygienic Sunday school zeal. I want to tell her that may be a wise choice, to take refuge from one of the most Romantic of the Romantics in the orderly march of hymns. I close my eyes, then open them, and the scene is fixed; it does not spin or buckle. I close my eyes, then open them, and: the same. So I keep on writing.

Frances, you too are fixed for me, you do not spin. You