We were at our kitchen table, a small white porcelain surface, and it must have been spring, because the window facing School Street was open and there was a single jonquil in a jar on the table. I don’t know what we ate (the plates are empty), and my parents are both smoking (Chesterfields, an ashtray shaped like a little frying pan between them). “I bet that’s why graves face that way,” my mother said, and my father nodded, both of them seeming pleased to be teaching me something, although it doesn’t always hold true; I have been to many cemeteries in my life, and there are a lot of graves not facing east. Even recently, when I went with your father to ride by that house where he once lived, we went in the cemetery where he played as a boy, a shady lovely place, Whispering Pines, but there seemed no rhyme or reason whatsoever to the way people were placed. His mother is facing north, in fact, which Frank said was unintentional but certainly made sense.

We were once on a trip, one of those far-flung places your father wanted to see—Egypt or Morocco or Peru; so much has run together for me, though I do remember that he was writing something about fishhooks from thousands of years ago. We were somewhere, brilliant-blue sky and sun and sand, when I suddenly froze in panic of what I had left written for you to find, should something happen to us. I kept a journal then, or my version of one, a legal pad tucked in my bedside table drawer, where I often documented the date and the weather or made lists of this or that: what to buy at the store, what people want for Christmas. Should I attempt a real ballet for the recital or just keep doing flowers and bees and sunbeams? Should we get a second dog so we are never without one in the house? Should I leave your father? The whole time it was all I could think about, picturing you two, your own adult lives barely beginning, having to read all that I had to say.

I recall that I had written “Frank—the pros and cons.” But now I’m not remembering the details listed there. What I do remember is burning the list in the kitchen sink as soon as we got home.

“Will you snap out of it?” your father said, the bright, exotic place devoured by my panic. “You could just as easily go to the grocery store and never come home.”

“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, that’s right.” Or I could just as easily say I was going out to teach a dance class on a cold November night and wind up in a club burned to cinder.

October 17, 2016

Do I need to draw you a picture?