“And we took it up, inviting each other over for government and coffee. Children were told that when a man and woman loved each other, the government brought them a baby. At backyard cookouts, the neighborhood refrain was, ‘Put another government on the grill.’

“And we wondered why government was the word that he said. Couldn’t the word that came into his head as easily have been grasshopper? Or galoshes? Or ghost?

“Some of us saw it this way: there was a morning we walked our properties, taking in the damage the ‘government’ had done in the night. We saw broken trees and downed lines, flooded gullies and drowned flowers. And as we cleared away debris, it seemed to us that even though he didn’t realize what he said when he thought he was using the word that he meant, when he invoked for protection from all that was ungovernable the word that he did, the son of a bitch was right.”

A sign of getting better: without getting larger, we seem to take up more room in a room.

“Where are we?” I one day asked Warren, who said, “In a little country south of Canada, and just this side of Mexico, in a state the size of this table, in a town the size of this ashtray.”

I still couldn’t tell if Warren liked me. Always there is a point when you can tell, when most people can tell. It takes longer for me. And then I’m angry with them, for it being so hard to tell. And whose fault is that? I think this is another assumption I have made a life without. I am like those people who hold grudges for what someone has done to them in a dream.

Always, we are asking here, What does a thing mean? And being asked back, What do you mean? Whereas I like to say things just to say them, because they are pleasing to say, to remember and say, “There is a tiny cove on a lake in the Sierras and I sat in its sand one late summer night when the air didn’t move but was clear and dry and the lake barely lapped and the only thing that moved was a passenger ferry set forth from the other side that was strung with lights like a flirty Parisian barge and made no noise but kept coming closer,” a consolation then, and now.

In the library, I found these words in the margin of an old copy of Vogue:

Why, then, did you engender me?

We didn’t know.

What didn’t you know?

That it would be you.

Warren again. In approximation of Beckett.

* * *

A clipping from a tabloid paper: a woman in West Virginia carried her unborn baby for more than forty years. It calcified outside the uterine wall. When questioned by reporters, the woman said, “As long as the child is inside me I haven’t lost it.”

A friend of mine tried to get pregnant and found out she could not. I said, “The world doesn’t need more babies,” and she said she wasn’t going to do it for the world.