that the panic was bound up in reading—the thing that had been at the center of my life for as long as I could remember, and which in the past had formed a bulwark against despair—made it especially difficult. I’d been sad often enough before, but I’d never felt this siege from within, as if my own being had developed an allergy to itself. At night I lay awake feeling that even as I lay still there, on some other level I was becoming further and further unbound.
Unable to work, I spent my days wandering the streets of Oxford, watching movies at the Phoenix Picturehouse, browsing the old print store on the High Street, or wasting time wandering through the skeletons, tools, and little cracked bowls of lost peoples on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum. But I barely noticed the things in front of me. I felt a deadening in my mind and a muteness in my being, as if somewhere a signal box had been shut down. As the weeks passed, I lost all sense of myself. Overnight, it seemed, someone had drained the contents from my physical shell, which was still walking around as if nothing had happened. But emptiness didn’t mean apathy: anxiety, loneliness, and despair seemed to lurk around every corner, waiting to sabotage my physical progress down the street. Negotiating this obstacle course, stripped of any sense of purpose, all I longed for was to be home in my childhood bedroom, tucked under the covers with their familiar smell of laundry detergent, listening to my parents murmur down the hall. Walking back to my room one evening after hours of pointless wandering, I stopped in front of a gourmet food store on St. Giles’. As I watched people come out with their bags of marmalades, pâté, chutneys, and loaves of fresh bread, I thought of my parents sitting in their kitchen in slippered feet, their backs rounded as they bent over their dinner, the evening news broadcast from the small television in the corner, and suddenly I began to weep.
I might have packed up and left had I not so dreaded my parents’ disappointment. They wouldn’t have understood. It was my father who had pushed me to apply, who had gone on at the dinner table about all the doors such a scholarship would open. (My parents’ bathroom was mirrored, and if you opened both of their closet doors at the same time and stood in the triangle they made, a sickening infinity of doors and selves hurtled back in every direction: it was this image I thought of whenever my father used that phrase.) He had little interest in whatever it might allow me to study. I think he imagined that after I collected enough academic accolades I would end up raking in a big salary as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs or Mackenzie. But once I’d gotten the scholarship and knew I was going to Oxford, my mother, who hadn’t said much on the subject until then, came into my room and with wet eyes told me how happy she was for me. She didn’t say that it would have been her dream at my age, had such a dream been the least bit plausible. As it was, she had known better than to receive encouragement from her hardscrabble immigrant parents for her own intellectual interests, and I couldn’t help thinking that, in marrying my father, my mother had decided to suffocate them in one fell swoop, as one drowns a litter of unwanted kittens. It was terrible to think that she thought there was no other way for her—her parents were religious, and my father, twelve years older than she, was not, and I suppose it was enough for my mother at the time to escape from them. But she was only nineteen when she married in 1967, and had she waited a few years all that was changing around her might have given her more courage. Though in that case I’d have never been born.
I don’t pretend to know just how much my mother crushed in herself. As the years passed she couldn’t hide her weariness, but she gave little clue about the weather and traffic of her inner life. All I knew was that some intractable part of my mother’s curiosity and hunger had never drowned, much as she might once have wished it would. There was always a small pile of books by her bedside that she