Stephen could glance at the business reports over breakfast. After they all left, I got into the habit of reading the whole paper, cover to cover, from the front page to the classified advertisements. I learned to stretch the reading out to a couple of hours, by which time it was noon, the lunch hour, and only a little while before I could start thinking about the children coming home and worrying about them. No time, between this moment and that moment, to try to grip the emptiness.

There was a secure, but at the same time disquieting, disorienting feeling about my reading of the paper. The security was in knowing that most of the events didn’t touch me, that inside my house, inside my city, I was safe from the greater part of it. People were fighting? It was somewhere else. Children were starving? They were somewhere else, and all I had to worry about was that goddamn car coming down that hill and around the curve before my children could get home to the dinner I would so carelessly prepare for them. City council was building an expressway, or fighting an expressway? Either way it was all right with me: I wasn’t going anywhere.

And yet the irrelevance was terrifying. Apart from this one, very small household, there was no reason for me to be alive; if they knew, it would make no difference to them. Perhaps it was enough, should be enough, to be important to three people. There must be some, I thought, who aren’t even that important.

One day I found that I had gotten up and made breakfast for everyone, had my coffee, read the paper, and then gone to lie down again. When I woke up it was almost two o’clock. I roused myself, made a small stew for dinner, and left it to simmer; later, I thought, I would make salad and with bread it would be enough. And then I couldn’t think of anything else to do, nothing for which I had the energy, and I found myself back in bed. The children woke me; I hadn’t been waiting for them at the door, and they looked frightened that they had had to come to the bedroom to find me; they thought I must be sick, and didn’t know what to do.