I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(49)

But I get it now. It must be the meditative aspect of yoga that makes it such a draw for people whose minds are crowded with anxious voices. It must be the stillness. The permission to disengage.

I wanted to be quiet and small.

DAY 9: Found a recipe card in a kitchen drawer for “hot buttered crackers,” which calls for tossing saltines in butter and dry salad dressing mix and putting them under the broiler. Why does this require a recipe? Is it gross?

DAY 11: Winston sat in a chair next to my chair while I drank tea. Maybe in cat-world, we are friends now. Made hot buttered crackers.

DAY 12: Hot buttered crackers should be called hot buttered crack.

Mostly, when I felt the need to engage with something, I read. I’d packed a box of books I’d gotten behind on—novels I’d bought but never started, self-help books with inspirational titles like Daring Greatly, books about business and technology and science and nature and all sorts of things I wondered about and felt the need to have answers to. Because I was doing so little else, I ran through the books more quickly than I’d expected.

Lucky for me, my friend worked in the local bookstore. “Come with me to work,” she said. “You can find something new.”

I knew about Parnassus Books already, of course. It was owned by the writer Ann Patchett and her business partner, Karen Hayes. I’d read about it on the front page of the New York Times after it opened: “Novelist Fights the Tide by Opening a Bookstore.” The store had a certain kind of fame among book lovers. I was excited to visit.

What a jewel of a place. Store feels like too commercial and impersonal a word. This was not a store like Target or Kroger or the place where you get car batteries. This was a home. Books nestled together in tidy lines along every wall, bunked up on wooden shelves under warm yellow lights. Booksellers milled about, each busily tending to some task or another: climbing a ladder to pull down a memoir, shelving a stack of paperbacks, tying ribbons around gift-wrapped bundles at the register. Customers—but again, the word feels too impersonal; they seemed like they must all be neighbors or cousins—treated each other like friends, or at least acquaintances, passing books back and forth over the New Fiction table. I stayed for about an hour, imagining I shopped there all the time, too; then I bought a few novels and took them back to the house.

I went back a couple of days later. And again a couple of days after that.

One afternoon, I wandered back to the office at the far end of the store and said hello to the three women seated there, each of them barely visible behind stacks of paperbacks heaped on their desks, a busy, joyful mess. They waved cheerfully and asked what I was reading. I wanted to stretch my arms against the store’s wall and hug it.

DAY 15: Figured out how to stream TV on the laptop. Watched six episodes of The Good Wife, season one. When the show comes on and the house fills with strangers’ voices, Winston goes back under the bed.

One afternoon my friend came over and asked for my help writing an email. She wanted to ask her boss at the bookstore for a raise and a promotion. “I’ve been subbing for someone on the late shift and I like it,” she said. “I think I should be the assistant manager and always work evenings.”

“But what about when school starts back up?” I asked. Her son was the same age as mine and in middle school, which meant lots of homework. I hated homework more than anything. It made my already exhausted children desperately frustrated and turned what could have been relaxing family time at the end of the day into teeth-gnashing, paper-crumpling torture sessions. When John was home, it was bad enough; but if he was working late or traveling, the lack of his patient presence made everything worse. I tried to give pep talks—“Check your work! Write neatly! Stop fiddling with your eraser!”—but my attempts to help only stressed the kids out more. We were often war-torn and raw by the time bedtime rolled around. I figured it was like this for everyone.

“Oh, I’m terrible at homework time,” my friend said. “I’m better at handling the mornings, so my husband and I split it up. He leaves for work early and I stay at work late. He handles dinnertime and I do breakfast.”

It may seem crazy, but that conversation was a revelation for me.

My friend explained it all so calmly: She hated homework, so she got a job at homework time and handed homework over to her husband. She and her family had all made an adjustment in their lives in order for things to be better for everyone. She didn’t look at her new routine like a failure to make her old routine work; she looked at it like a sensible solution. No big deal.

You can just change things, I thought. What a concept.

DAY 18: Watched six more episodes of The Good Wife. If I had a cat, I would name it Alicia Florrick.

DAY 19: Made it to season three of The Good Wife. Donuts for dinner for me. A can of Poultry-Lovers Dinner for Winston. He’s a poultry lover.

I fed the cat. I watered the plants. I watched my show about a woman taking control of her life. I walked. I read. I slept. I sat. I felt like a fist unclenching. I could remember, with greater clarity than I had in years, the person I was before I was a speck on a highway clogged with other specks.

Sensory memories came dislodged and bubbled up to my mind’s surface: A shadow fell over the chair where I sat staring out the window at a spider, and I remembered the fuzzy webs among the old shoes at the back of my childhood closet, where I sat sometimes to read. I tied my sneakers to go for a walk, and I could smell the asphalt track where I walked with my friends at lunchtime in middle school. I bent to pick a fallen twig out of the monkey grass along the back deck, and suddenly I was running my fingertip along the notched edge of a leaf on my mother’s rosebushes. It was as if, given the quiet and permission to come out, past iterations of myself were emerging from their places in my memory and tumbling one over another, allowing me to sort through them and remember who I’d been. Who I still was.