pre-Revolutionary house in the middle of a drowsy coastal town called Coverdale. We had a small but, what with our children and their neighborhood friends, well-used backyard, in a corner of which I would plant each year two rows of lettuce, four feet of parsley, eight tomato plants, and some mounds of zucchini seeds—salad ingredients, all, within a few strides of the kitchen door. Spring that year had thickened around me paralyzingly. In Boston, in the sealed-in fluorescent environment of Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise, I was able to function, but at home on weekends, as the trees budded and our plethora of children—four, and Roberta huddled, head down, in Perdita is tummy—trooped through the house with muddy knees and noisy grievances, a paralysis of depression hit me. I saw everything as if through several thick panes of smeared glass. No air circulated between me and the world. I went out in the late afternoon to dig up my garden plot and a single earthworm, wriggling blindly to return to its darkness of earth, seemed, from my towering height, an image of myself. Except that I was miserable and terrified and the worm was not.
Our eldest, Mildred, had an eighth birthday coming in May, and I wanted to build her a dollhouse. It wasn’t to be a very elaborate one, just four rooms, two over two, beneath a peaked roof and a triangular attic, with perhaps a flight of corrugated-cardboard stairs connecting the two floors. I had the wood, the half-inch plywood, the six-penny nails, and the cans of white and gray (for the roof) and red (for the door and window frames and two-dimensional shutters) paint, but whenever I went down to the cellar to work on the dollhouse—it had to be when Mildred was off playing—a clammy sense of futility would ooze out from the rough old eighteenth-century foundation stones and try to drown me. Had my workbench been less rudimentary; had there been objects down there more companionable than an asbestos-plastered furnace, a filthy oblong oil tank, a stack of tattered wooden screens to repair and insert when I could find the time and strength, a tumble of cast-iron furnace guts—ash-coated coal grates and shaking levers—never taken away after the conversion from coal to oil, and a rickety set of bicycles covered with cobwebs; and had the dollhouse been a less makeshift and more intricate artifact by a more skillful carpenter than I, I might have cheered up.
As it was, a dreadful fatigue dragged at my mind and numbed my hands on the tools. The whole real house, with its dependents and its mortgage and its pregnant mistress seemed to be pressing upon me down there. I had taker pride, at first, in Perdita’s pregnancies, but by now the process felt stale, a stunt stained with Nature’s fatality. Ye another new life coming underlined the passing nature of all our mortal arrangements. The house had seen many arrangements pass through it since 1750. I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die, would die an old lady in whose mind I had become a dim patriarchal myth, and her dolls would die out of the innocent fervent make-believe that gave them momentary life, and the spiders had died in their webs around me, waiting for prey that had never come, and it all seemed futile. The spider corpses were like little white gyroscopes, I remember, and the streaked foundation stones behind the piece of pegboard that I had crudely nailed up over the narrow workbench sweated, at that time of year, with moisture thawing out of the soil. There was no God, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile. Dust to dust: each hammer stroke seemed dulled by cosmic desolation, each measurement for my rust-dulled crosscut saw seemed part of the grid of merciless laws that would soon extinguish me. I couldn’t breathe, and had to keep coming up into the relative brightness of the kitchen, and into Perdita’s full-bodied presence, though her puzzled, wifely concern was part of the oppression. She had joined me in natural process; we had bred children, and together we would reap the varicose veins and decaying teeth of middle age. I blamed her; even at those times when, sensing my despair, she tried to lift my spirits with lovemaking, I kept blaming her,