End of day, or of writing day, almost—long terrible hours of twisting slowly in the cold New Hampshire wind, the noose tight, the toes just barely touching the ground, raw damp and the slowly revolving landscape of Eastern Seaboard trees with their evergreen fringe and their rough gray-brown bark, like the legs of the elephants in India. Me dangling above, not the abyss, but the cold, dark early-spring ground and above my own life, as mysterious and useless as the weird knobs on the trees outside this library window. This big soaring-light art-colony library with its Mad Men built-ins in pea-green upholstery, the crimson chairs designed to look like a cross between 1962 and the Jetsons. Everything low and ultra-designed, like my Barbie Dream House, back in the day when a girl could still dream about a house. The walls were cardboard, printed to look like shelves with books and chic modern vases; the furniture was cardboard too, punched out and then carefully folded into three dimensions, made to resemble this very nubbly green sofa I’m sitting on. Same bouclé fabric as Jackie Kennedy’s pink-and-blood suit, the one she wore with a matching pillbox hat. My own pillbox not a hat these days but an actual box of pills, intended to take away the feeling I have right now, in this hollow-echoing library moment—anxiety, the veil between me and whatever this is that I can’t stand feeling. Barbie as a bride in a long sheer veil, wearing a dress my mother made of brocaded white satin with pearls along the bodice—how did she get the pearls on there? My mother, named Pearl, making a Barbie dream-dress for her middle daughter who never became a bride at all, the daughter with the pale uncertain face and vivid imagination. The middle one, who has now been twice abandoned by a long-term man. Ken dumping Midge for Barbie, in both cases, and announcing it from his cardboard sofa. That daughter, me, could never imagine my way into Barbie’s life—it would have required entering the dream along with Barbie, or along with Betsy Wetsy or Chatty Cathy, or along with that eerily human baby doll that I loved because it seemed for a while like an actual baby, almost alive and yet not. It seemed like a dead baby, which is why it put people off, and for that reason I was quite attached to it, poor odd baby. Barbie’s dream, my dream, my mother’s dream. Pearl, figuring out how to attach the pearls. Tiny holes in the beads to run a thread through and anchor them along the neckline. Barbie’s mountainous neckline, that pronounced precipice. Me, dangling from my psychic noose, toes reaching for the damp New Hampshire ground, the yellowed winter grass, and yet still there’s a little stand of daffodils, insistently vibrant in the gray-scape, which makes them somehow even more depressing in this rain. And not just to me—to everyone who is walking by here hunched over, the mitten-wearing artists who all seem to understand that I’m not one of them. I smile, I speak, I play Ping-Pong, I watch things on the big flat-screen, sitting in the dark paying no attention whatsoever, and then they put in a DVD of Mad Men and I sit in the gloom through that too, just looking at the dream houses and the dresses the women are wearing, the spongy polyester pantsuits the show has evolved into—it must be closer to the ’70s than the ’60s now in its lengthening plotline—and noticing the little annoying art-directed details. The way they smoke with a lot more verve and self-consciousness than people have ever applied to smoking, and I say that as someone who applied absolutely everything to smoking in my heyday. I smoked like a true madman, not one of these.