Homemaking

I must be grouchy, because everything I consider writing lately has a tinge of grouch to it. A decrying of the reciprocal losses of faces and books that seem to follow the rise of Facebook. A dirge for realism. What cheers me, apart from reading David Grossman's To the End of the Land--by no means cheerful, but isn't it the powerfully grim novel that perversely offers most comfort, a sense, perhaps, of recognition, of knowing?--and fretting over the semi-literate, but who cares, Tim Riggins, is browsing online at things I'd like to buy. Then, this depresses me further, makes me feel nothing exceeds my irritation more than my vapidity. Then I scold myself: don't be a prig, we all like pretty things. Etc, etc.

Homemaking. So seductive, so sickening. My mother recently recovered from an intense E-Bay addiction. Her particular affliction? Plates. Oh, my. Plates. Beautiful ones. And so many. We all laughed, and felt a little nervous, as the contents of her cabinets seemed to multiply between every visit. Beautiful things are a refuge. And for women, maybe also a trap. We are in a cultural moment obsessed with the handmade, the homemade, and by extension, with homemaking. With time dedicated to the home a near religious rite.

I do not in any way want this space to become a dream diary--yuck! But in the last week I've had the same dream, almost, twice, and can't stop thinking about it. I am trying to get home, to my apartment, and it's nearly impossible. In the first dream, the entrance is a delicate wooden-spoked ladder of sorts, and the spokes keep breaking off. In the second, there's a kind of playground plastic tunnel entrance one has to crawl through. I do spend a lot of time in playgrounds these days, but it's by no means a merry crawling in the dream. It's an exasperated, slightly worried, good grief, why is going home so hard?

So here's the idea: It's about a woman, a young mother, who moves with her young daughter, a toddler, into the playground, their neighborhood playground. It is summer, and in the plastic tunnel they make a bed for themselves with sleeping bags, which they tidy away before normal playground hours. They are known to other mothers and other children, have chatted casually by the swings over many months, or in a mommy-baby yoga class, or music class nearby, and at first, it seems to these other mothers just almost as if the two of them are always there. "Here you are again!" the other mothers say, a mask of friendliness not quite obscuring their worry. Could they really have moved here? And why? And what has happened to their home, which had seemed, just weeks ago, so certain, so clear?

Imagination's Discontents

My son's imagination has sparked into being, or, at least, it is now made more visible to me through language. Now a cardboard box becomes a rowboat he climbs into and out of singing, "Row, row, row your boat;" a small saucepan becomes a crib for his blue and red plastic Superman toy. He demands a lullaby for Superman, then slams the lid onto the pot, calling out, "Close the door!"

He is both emboldened by his mind's developments, and made a bit more fearful. He walks into a closet and then comes running out, plunging his head into my leg, wrapping his arms around me, saying "Noises!" Or he rushes from a corner of a room to my safe knees, asking "What happened?" anticipating my next question to him. Whatever has happened cannot yet be communicated. But as boxes are rowboats, so closets contain dark hidden dangers. Imagination makes us powerful, world creators, and at the same time holds a startling power over us.

I recently had a nightmare that was unlike my usual nightmares. I was not alone in a part of the city that I thought I knew suddenly turned an unrecognizable, strange web of alleys and elevated trains. I was not drugged or unable to dial a telephone. A jet plane did not come hurling out of the sky, and nosedive the ground a block away.

No, this one seemed designed by a different maker, a B-horror-film director. But the work of this hack was vivid, searing. I feel nauseated even now, maybe a month or two later, at the thought of summarizing it. It involved clusters of blueberry-like tumors (so blueberry-like they may have actually been blueberries) growing out of my forehead just where hair meets skin.

I can no longer eat blueberries. And the nightmare hangover in the days following was extreme. I kept rubbing my head, as if to reassure myself no rogue bulbous purple-y lumps were bursting forth. I occasionally felt an urge to cover my eyes when the images flashed again in front of me. Of course, the images were not out there, but in here, and eye closing was entirely beside the point.

As I felt tormented, I kept thinking, You wrote that. You designed that dream to make you sick. The gross-out factor was all your doing. Who knew you could write such a weird genre dream? This comforted me. My range of imagination growing. Troubling, yes, and masochistic, but maybe more expansive, too.

I loved the novel Atonement in part because it laid bare the power and menace--the sadism--of a child's imagination. Its life creating and destroying capabilities. It reminds one not to be too precious about the imaginary life of the young. "The chandelier didn't fall on your head?" So a family friend, shocked to find his fantasy life had somehow failed him, greeted his mother one day when she picked him up from school.

The story I want to write is of a young boy of seven or eight. His parents have separated and his mother is having an affair. She meets her lover at an old-fashioned fancy hotel and when she does this, she deposits the boy with his backpack of notebooks and pencils and stories in a winged armchair in the hotel lobby to entertain himself. He will be safe there, she thinks. There, he spends long afternoons and evenings drawing and looking through books his father once read him, and making up excuses to the staff and patrons as he knows it is not quite right that he has been so left alone in this in-between place, this world of adults. He begins to tell his mother elaborate stories of the people he has met and the scenes he has witnessed in her absence, and as the tales grow more ominous she tries to decipher what is real, and what may be imagined.