Where, I wondered, had all this bitterness been, all this dislike, this contempt? It didn’t seem to be like me, for I still thought of myself as essentially gentle and loving. It puzzled me, for this feeling was like — well, it felt like hate.

And that left, what, a library? Where I would reshelve books, my head spinning with cataloguing systems, no contact with the books, just their numbers? I pulled away from the anger, frightened by it.

“Actually,” I said, almost in tears, “I don’t really want a job. There’s plenty for me to do here, and I’m not a bit unhappy; I just thought working might be a new interest.”

But he was worried, not quite believing, wanting, with all his generosity, to help. “Have you thought of going back to school?” he asked. “It wouldn’t be any big problem for the rest of us, we’d manage, and you could train for something you really are interested in.”

But that wasn’t it either. I wanted an answer, a completion, not a preparation.

Somewhere in me was some deep-buried worm that gnawed its way through the hidden places of all the parts of my life, so gently, so delicately, that I could not tell, until the hidden places had all been eaten away and there was nothing left to root me to what I had or what I was.

A church teaches that despair is the gravest sin. I was sliding into despair.

Time was huge, vast, a wasteland. After Katie and Elliott and Stephen left in the mornings, all of them excited or dreading the day but at least feeling some kind of anticipation for it, I would drink my coffee and smoke my cigarettes and wonder when I should stand up, and when I stood, what should I do, which direction should I turn, which room should I go to, and I would have another coffee and try to decide. Everything seemed very bright, and at the same time hazy. I was alert to sounds, smells, and everything was unreal, as if I were not a part of it; or as if I were only that, a part of it like a couch or a lamp.

Time. God, the times in the years before when I had said to Stephen, “I can’t wait till they’re in school, I’ll be free then.” Free for what? Faced with it, I was alone, really alone, for the first time in my life, and terrified. I thought perhaps that I was losing my mind; and then, worse, that I had no mind, and that the existence of these people had hidden that.

But no, I knew I was not stupid. In school so long ago, secluded and safe, I had done well. I had absorbed and understood and been praised; I had even, at times, been curious about certain things.