I’m sorry, Barbie, but your dream house was made of cardboard, the nubbly fabric was simply a picture of nubbly fabric, that button anchored into the plush pillow was the image of a button. Suzanne Button, my therapist, not plush but angular and real. Thank you to her and to everyone. Thank you to the New Hampshire ground, damp and black, under its bristles of last year’s grass and its strange winter moss, for rising to meet my toes just enough that the noose doesn’t completely shut me off. I’m not shut off, I’m open. A friend said, “Your face is so…open, Jo.” And he meant it as a compliment, but it also scared both of us. Me long ago in Iowa on Mary’s blue-ticking couch, me in Arizona on the cloudlike sofa, me in New Hampshire on this pea-green nubbly overdesigned built-in, me on the wall-to-wall carpeting of my parents’ broken-dreams house, kneeling over Barbie’s living room, bending her in half so she could sit on her cardboard bucket chair. Just like the crimson one over there that a man is sitting in, some artist-stranger who looks deeply immersed in his own panic and e-mail.

The sound of the librarian’s quiet and purposeful heels on the sleek architect’s dream of a floor, with its dark inlaid strips to point out step edges and its overall impression of rich pale paneling, a room so paneled that even the floor is paneled. And I can hear her walking around, not officiously but just like she has things to do and, yes, her shoes make noise, but she is used to it, this being everyday, her job being this, but also because people who decide to wear hard shoes on a hard floor every day are making the choice that they don’t mind so much hearing themselves following themselves as they do their daily tasks. That, to me, is interesting. Different, as my mother would say. Well, she’s different, about a person who wore something unusual or did something to her hair that impressed. (Never, probably, He’s different, by the way, because it was already understood that he, in general, was different.) Hair that startled being different than hair that was, oh, maybe gently teased to give the bouffant a lift. But not “piled up,” which was code for a woman trying to look better than everybody else or even just appealing. Like another mom who had super-slender legs that culminated in high heels and that were occasionally encased in black hose and who wore her hair “piled up” on her head—actually, the technical term would be more like in a French twist, but even to employ the word French would imply such a differentness that it could never be uttered in our midwestern town.

Anyway, lucky for me, in the Barbie dream library, with its soundtrack of hard-soled librarian feet and the silent roar of the heating system, the pleasant nubs of the upholstered couch-bench, and the warm flannel of my sweatshirt’s cradling hood…I somehow dropped off unassisted for the first time in weeks.