Commonplace Book

Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing, until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.

The drench seemed to come off the sea floor itself, where blind white fish ferried themselves by their own light through the great polar cold. I saw sharks’ teeth and whales’ earbones littered about down there like gravestones.

Once when I visited Buddy I found Mrs. Willard braiding a rug out of strips of wool from Mr. Willard’s old suits. She’d spent weeks on that rug, and I had admired the tweedy browns and greens and blues patterning the braid, but after Mrs. Willard was through, instead of hanging the rug on the wall the way I would have done, she put it down in place of her kitchen mat, and in a few days it was soiled and dull and indistinguishable from any mat you could buy for under a dollar in the five and ten.

Mornings are a promise, afternoons are a heartbreak. Evenings are sly, and they deliver you into the thin arms of each dark night. But mornings hold such possibility, the tangible weight of better: today will be different. When the evening comes (such dreadful hours), the promise of the day has been broken because nothing is different—you are still yourself. To return to that, every day, to return to the truth of who and where you are, is more than a person should have to bear.

What people needed of her and from her was specific and almost impersonal: the mothering and the housework and the stoic agreement to the terms of their life as dictated by Nick. At times, it felt as though she could be replaced by anyone, any other woman, and as long as children were fed and sheets were cleaned and tax returns were filed, her family might never notice, might never realize the facsimile in her place. As though her labor equals her love, and is replaceable.

She was glad of it now, glad to have spent a lifetime practicing the art of disappearing, of removing herself in such a way that those left behind almost never noticed, and only later wondered if perhaps they’d been abandoned.