I shook my head, my mind gone into the fog without words, no explanations, no reasonings, not even the surface ones; because they were not real. I could say it was boredom, but it wasn’t that, it wasn’t really all this time I had. What could it mean to Stephen to say there was something happening far down where I couldn’t reach, hadn’t reached yet, that was simply wrong? It was the bald statement of something out of joint, but I couldn’t explain what it meant.

I kept on shaking my head. “I don’t know, Stephen, I feel as if I’ve been falling apart, I’ve been so tired. I don’t know what to do.” I looked at him, tried to be reassuring and strong. “But it will be all right. It’s getting better now, everything will work out.” I wanted him to believe that; I couldn’t bear his concern. It was too heavy a burden.

I was grateful when he just nodded and hugged me, and later we made popcorn and watched television and made love on the couch, except that something in me was away from it, watching, judging, hiding, covering it all up, trying to be somewhere that I wasn’t. And yet I still “loved” Stephen. I wanted to protect him, I wanted to be what he thought I was.

He could have said, “do you want to get a job,” or “why don’t you try going back to school,” but he had the grace not to say either of those things, perhaps because he knew by then there was no point.

The next day, and the days after that, I tried, I really did. I straightened up the house and made large, elaborate meals. I was a whirlwind, laundering, dusting, even polishing the silver that we rarely used and was so very tarnished. I told Stephen we could reasonably plan the dinner party for two weeks away, to give everyone plenty of notice, and my days were suddenly full again. And yet, and yet, I was doing it all for Stephen, I felt I was making something up to him, but there was nothing in it for me.

I began to see it in that light: I owe it to them, but there is nothing in this for me. Surely an ordinary enough thought, and yet for me it was utterly foreign. I had never before separated myself from them like that, and it struck me, over and over, crashing inside my skull each time like a surprise.

The dinner party went well. I looked good, I worked all day at looking good, and I was pleasant and nothing went wrong, and Stephen was pleased. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said afterwards, his arm around my shoulders, all the guests gone and us in the living room getting ready to clean up the remains of the party.

“No,” I said brightly, “it was fine. Everything went well, I think. It was just fine.”