We joked about it
when we got engaged, how
I would become this
pink thing with fuzzy slippers
and curlers, toting the vacuum, dusting
the laundry hamper…
But have you had a dream
you couldn’t wake from, seen yourself slip
into an alien life? Or does it happen
in such increments
you can’t see, don’t remember
your dreams at all?
After the marriage, I wrote
letters, kept making the same typo:
“I have been marred
since June…
Half of me
always tells the truth; half goes on,
becomes a teacher, writes
more letters, has children and takes them
to Schultz’s Apple Farm. The years
feel soft and hazy, imprecise
but busy with concerns
about safety wheels, gas heat — I have concerns
about this lack of feeling, lack
of singular concern. Can a life
disappoint itself? Is there someone else
I meant to be? Half of me
can’t live the way I live, in this abandonment
of jelly jars and cleaning fluids.
I am looking at myself and judging.
I am the judge of pink things,
in halves, awakened
by the middle of my life.
You say it’s not so bad.
You say, look around…
But I can’t bear
this mitigation, the holes
in our lives plugged up
with little corks. I don’t want
to be president, don’t
want to be on t.v. I’d just like
one day of life to be real with us really
in it, talking, driving, actually
smoking the cigarettes we smoke.
I want a heart for a heart, instead of a brain.
I want a bird to land on a tree
that’s never been landed on, I want that connection
to life. I want that connection to life
to be clear.
Not so much to change
as to acknowledge. Own up
to say yes, I am a housewife:
I have curlers and a hairnet. Yes,
I am average, not young,
not old, not fat, or thin, not
beautiful and yet,
not impressive and yet… by all appearances
I have settled for less
and I am saying it’s not a question
of less. It’s seeing
who I am, framing that
like a work of art,
with this body and walking
into the world — not at peace,
but at home at last.
This piece originally appeared in the 1993 edition of Sarah Lawrence.