I wait for the revelation of the luminous blank page on the screen. Where to begin? There’s the matter of voice. First or third? Should the narrative be sequential or non sequitur? Is each scene contingent upon the next? Or are a series of vignettes linked together in an impressionistic canvas? Is it moral, immoral or amoral? Is it self-referential?

Language is the currency of my daily transactions. But while I can talk the talk, there is something counterfeit in my sentiments. To hear me say it, I am a rich woman. Inside I am bankrupt. It is all semantics.

My words once rendered in black and white seem somehow divorced from me, an aborted creation, unviable and unwanted. Yet the urge to strike at the plastic keys is irresistible, to watch the advance of the enigmatic cursor which only speaks when spoken to, mimetic and cruel.

I alone hold the creative imperative to enter, modify or delete.            

I stretch my neck from side to side, rounding my shoulders in search of a word or phrase that can rev the engine and propel the discourse forward. Once you’re in drive and hit the road, it’s easy to put one word after the other. Look at Dr. Seuss, he could do it with a fox, he could do it in a box, he could do it here or there, he could do it anywhere. But how to say it uniquely? There’s the rub-a-dub-dub.

Writing is at once a private act of faith and a public penance. It is self-immolation by proxy, a mortification of my mind and spirit. Every blank page is a clean start. I need to do this.

Auto-da-fé

I knew a woman who had an appetite for words. She’d gobble them up whole, gorging herself on succulent syllables, her lips glistening with their slick verboseness. She’d pick right over the simple ones, rejecting their tasteless austerity for the luscious loquacity that was her signature, her raison d’être. She loved words more than she loved her children, who often went hungry while she feasted on felicitous phrases. Her husband would silently suffer her neglect and the bare cupboard, which was often empty, except for a few dallying remarks.

Soon, the once delightful domicile decayed into a den of despair. Hubby would stay away to avoid her reproaches, and the children would cower while she ranted and raved to find just the right sequence of sounds that only fell on ungrateful ears.

One day, she didn’t, couldn’t, get out of bed. She lay there, foaming at the mouth, thrashing her unwashed hair on the dirty pillowcase. She shrieked, she pleaded, she cajoled, she harangued, she insisted, she reiterated, but she would not recant.

Her husband and the children escaped by the backdoor, and they could still hear her raging as they pulled out of the driveway and down the block.

And she? She filibustered the walls until they began to crack and chunks of concrete crashed around her, interrupting her speech like hecklers, crushing her with their irrefutable arguments.

Later, when they bulldozed over the rubble at the request of the family, they planted the stony ground with flowers, and soon the laughter of children could be heard as they ran over her verdant grave that blossomed wildly across her hushed exile.

My words erupt from the cursed soil of the land of Nod, a place of eternal twilight east of Eden. As long as the Beast is my shepherd, I shall not want. But it comes with a price, a burnt offering of me. Even now my little darlings lie bleeding on the page, and I turn away for the carnage.

The sound of the shower in the kids’ bathroom mingles with the rain pattering rhythmically on the patio. Beyond the studio’s French doors where I sit in the dark in front of the computer, I see the blue flickering light of a television emanating from my neighbor’s darkened upstairs window. If he were so inclined, he could observe me by the glow of the monitor, which cloaks me like an aura. We are both illuminated by alternate realities that stand in for our own lives.

But instead of channeling my life with some TV program, writing has helped me unspool the tight winding that has kept me on task today. While I didn’t lose my patience or my temper once, by the time I got home, I could feel wisps of irritation gathering strength and threatening to turn into a thunder cloud.

I am now ready to emerge from the cyber-cave at peace with the world. I save my document, turn off the computer, and say goodnight to the Beast.

As I head down the hall, Nicole turns off the shower. I hear her move the little stool Daniel stands on to brush his teeth at the sink. I envision her, animal-print towel wrapped sari fashion around her chest, shoulders bared and lips puckered at her reflection in the circle she’s wiped on the steamy bathroom mirror.

“Nicki, I know you’re posing in front of the mirror.” I press my ear to the bathroom door.

“I’m not.” The little stool slides back in place. She probably thinks I have x-ray eyes. Good.

I peek into Daniel’s room. Felix is helping him pick up toys. Daniel (who is really a lump on a log) is dawdling with a Ninja Turtle, making karate chop noises while his father crawls around the floor collecting blocks and singing, “This is the way we pick up our room, pick up our room, pick up our room.”

Felix’s eyes plead for my intercession. Not a chance. I blow him a kiss and close the door.

I head for the shower, stopping on the way to plump a sofa cushion, push in a dining chair, then another, and straighten a framed mirror on the wall, which warps with my passing reflection.

From my bedroom window, I see the sky flare white for an instant and then fade to black. I wait for the accompanying thunder, but it never comes. The storm is still far away, and I don’t have to worry about a lightning strike while I bathe. Why tempt the Fates?

I take off my clothes, examine myself in the mirror, and because no one is watching me, I do a pinup pucker before turning on the shower and climbing inside. Soaking up the hot stream of water on my body, I feel my skin clear of the day’s detritus. I close my eyes and wash myself by sense of touch which forces me to keep my mind on the task at hand and not to wander off to some remote, querulous corner.

Felix comes in to brush his teeth.

“They’re waiting for you to read a story,” he says.

I turn off the water and slide the shower door open. He passes me a towel with one hand while brushing his teeth with the other. I dab my face and wait for him to finish rinsing.

“Dry me.” Handing the towel back to him, I turn around.

He rubs my back, my arms, then reaches around with the towel and dries my breasts and belly, both hands meet between my thighs. I press against him.

“Mommy, are you coming?”

Felix drops his hands. I sigh.

 “I’ll be right there.” I kiss Felix and put on my panties and night shirt.

“I’ll be back.” I close the bathroom door behind me.

Nicole and Daniel are waiting on my bed. They each have a book.

“Let’s go, bugs.” I sweep them forward.

We head towards their rooms, Nicole running ahead and Daniel trotting along behind. Nicole gets there first.

“I won.” She pumps her fists in the air.

“Na-uh.” Daniel throws his book at her.

“Ya-huh. Mommy, didn’t I win?” Nicole pirouettes out of Daniel’s line of fire and the book hits the wall instead.

“Stop it, guys.” I pick up Daniel’s book and hand it back to him, my eyebrow arched in displeasure.

“But I won.” Nicole does another twirl punctuated with a plié.

“Na-uh.” Daniel throws his book again and misses again.

“I don’t think you guys want me to read you a story.” I pick up Daniel’s book and cross my arms.

Nicole and Daniel glare at each other. Daniel’s picture book is about the dinosaurs of the Jurassic, and Nicole’s book is about a whiney ballerina we’ve already read this week. Neither will do.

I hear the faint rolling of thunder.

“You know what? I get to choose the story tonight or there is no story, and you go straight to bed.” I wait for their whines, and when none are proffered, we walk over to the bookshelves in the studio. I select William Steig’s Amos & Boris, a delightful choice that includes a mouse, a whale, a sailboat, and a lyrical narrative that will make everyone, but most importantly me, happy.

The three of us scrunch together on Daniel’s bed, and I read aloud about Amos, a star-struck mouse who sets off on a sailing adventure and discovers the marvel of being a wee creature with a big soul:

“…and later, lying on the deck of his boat gazing at the immense, starry sky, the tiny mouse Amos, a little speck of a living thing in the vast living universe, felt thoroughly akin to all. Overwhelmed by the beauty and mystery of everything, he rolled over and over and right off the deck of his boat and into the sea.”

No matter how many times I read the story, this part always hurts. Couldn’t Amos have sailed around the world without anything more perilous than a brief spell of the doldrums in the equatorial sea? Alas there is no revelation without risk, no contentment gained without calamity ventured.

My father never read Amos & Boris, but he would have grasped the tiny mouse’s wanderlust and the pull of the open sea. Could he have found his way back home under the light of the stars? Or did he find the freedom at the bottom of the ocean too intoxicating to rise above?

In the fringes of my vision something dark and familiar stirs. I fear its approach, its threat to the fabric of normalcy that protects my family from me. On a scrim of dutiful purpose, I project inviolate images of motherhood, wifehood, and sainthood as a shield against the brewing anarchy of mental whoredom I sense in my growing irritation with everything.

But all this rumination takes only an instant, and the children never guess at the shadow lurking so intimately near them. I continue reading the story, turning the pages with the inevitability of a clock; I can no more stop being their mother than I can stop being a mammal.

I turn around and sail to port.

“In a few minutes, Boris was already in water with waves washing at him, and he was feeling the wonderful wetness. ‘You have to be out of the sea really to know how good it is to be in it,’ he thought. ‘That is, if you’re a whale.’”

Outside the thunder grumbles a little louder, and I say a silent prayer to appease God, the one I don’t totally believe in, lest he grant me a lesson about being a fish (or mammal) out of water in order to appreciate it. I finish reading the story, sort the children into their beds, kiss, coo, and tuck them in.

I remember the touch of Felix’s hands. Thunder rolls over the roof of the house.

“Is God bowling up there?” Nicole asks.

I nod. “I think that was a strike. Goodnight, baby.”

I race down the hall to my room and open the door.

Darkness. Silence. Absolute stillness.

I slip into bed, removing my nightshirt as a flash of lightning pierces through the edges of the closed blinds behind me.

“Felix?”

One. Two. The thunder rushes in to fill the vacuum.

“God damn it.” I sit up and open the blinds.

The sky flares again and reveals a conjugal wasteland. Felix’s face is slack-jawed and extinguished of all desire. The thunder rattles the windows, and he uncloses his eyes and smiles limply at me before turning over on his stomach.

This is what the thunder said: “Give. Sympathize. Control.”

Repeat. “Give. Sympathize. Control.”

I breathe in and out. Not the best of mantras, but I am a sleepless lover with hunger pangs.

Desire is the denial of death, and I am diminished by not being desired. A flash of lightning reveals the jagged silhouettes of marauding shadows in my room. The Beast clamors in the corner. Then darkness settles over everything.  So it begins.