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  Helen feels a great lifting inside; a wonderful relief, mixed with a vague confusion. If they have enough people, why didn't they call her and tell her not to come? “I see.” She stands, shoulders her purse, buttons her coat. “Well, thanks anyway.”

  “Of course,” Simone says. “And thank you so much for coming down.”

  Helen walks quickly out of the store and down the sidewalk. She will go home and call Tessa and she will say, “I didn't get the job.” Then she will call Midge and confess that she has apparently fallen a bit farther down the rabbit hole. Then she will read the letter she never got to last night. She fell asleep lying on top of her bedcovers, in her robe and slippers, her glasses on. When Dan was alive, he would find her like this sometimes, and he would gently remove her glasses, take off her slippers, and cover her with a quilt. Sometimes he awakened her with his ministrations, but she never let him know. She kept her eyes closed and waited for the little puff of air just before the quilt settled on her, waited for Dan's lips to press lightly against her forehead. Sometimes after he did that he would stand watching her sleep; she could feel it. The next time Tessa asks her mother why in the world she should ever get married, Helen will answer by telling her that.

  It's cold in the house when Helen comes in, dark, too. She turns on lights in the kitchen and the living room, boosts the heat, and then sits at the table with her coat on. She stares into space, recalling the “interview” she had with Simone, and wonders again why the woman asked her to come in. It must have been that, soon after meeting Helen, she decided she didn't want to hire her. Helen really must get a grip on herself, and stop trying to get jobs she doesn't even want. Surely her need and desire to write will come back soon; in the meantime, why doesn't she simply enjoy the break? Why can't she sit at the breakfast table taking in the angle of the morning sun, the sight of birds at the feeder? Why can't she visit a coffee shop and eavesdrop for the simple pleasure of hearing another's syntax, vocabulary, accent, problems? Afternoon movies can be a wonderful diversion: why doesn't she walk over to the Lake Theatre, buy herself a heavily buttered popcorn, and lose herself in someone else's story? Because she wants to write her own stories, that's why. Because she misses having that elemental need satisfied. She feels like a junkie, jittery with need, unable to focus on anything but obtaining that fix, that fix, that fix.

  Ah, well. She'll read the fan letter now and that will make her feel better, it will erase some of the indignity of the day. It will remind her that she is a respected author, with a lot to be grateful for, despite her present woes.

  She takes off her coat and boots, and goes upstairs to pull the letter from the robe pocket. She perches on the edge of her bed to read it, but the room is cold—some draft has developed somewhere. She comes back downstairs and lays the letter on the kitchen table—she'll read it here, with a cup of hibiscus tea, how civilized, how very pleasant. She puts the kettle on and slides out the page. It's a short letter, only one paragraph, but many times Helen has gotten a letter brief in content yet full of feeling.

  Dear Helen Ames,

  You don't know me, but I've been wanting to write to you for a long time.

  Usually when people start this way, they go on to say very specific and gratifying things about one of Helen's titles—or many titles. She reads on eagerly.

  I can't tell you how surprised I am by the quality of your books. I was given the first by a friend who told me I really had to read it; it was your novel Telling Songs. I did read it, and I must say I wondered about my friend when I'd finished—I enjoyed nothing about that mawkish and clumsily written book. But then I thought, Well, maybe it's a fluke; my friend—whom I normally admire—is so fond of you; and so I checked a few more of your books out of the library, only to find that I didn't like them, either. Who are you to have had these novels published? Your prose style is not “deceptively simple,” as one reviewer wrote, but insipid. I feel compelled to write this to you because I am so frustrated by what passes for literature these days.

  Margot Langley

  Against all better judgment, Helen reads the letter again. Then a third time. She smells it: nothing. Then she puts it on the table and folds her hands in her lap and stares straight ahead. When the teakettle whistles, she makes herself a cup of tea. A better woman would laugh at such a letter. Or be empowered by it; a better woman would think, Oh yeah, well watch this! and immediately turn out seven pages. Or she would show the letter to her friends, and they would rush to her defense, and that would make her feel better. Or she would stop reading the letter halfway through, throw it in the trash, and move on to something of worth.

  Helen reads the thing yet again, then goes to get her stationery and writes:

  Dear Margot Langley,

  You ask who I am. That is a question I've been asking myself a lot lately. And the conclusion I have come to is this: not a writer. Not anymore. I hope this news will gladden your day, which will be in diametric opposition to what your letter did to mine.

  She signs her name, and reads her letter again. Then she tears it up and throws it in the trash. The letter from Margot Langley, she keeps. She puts it in her kitchen junk drawer, beneath the rubber bands, the take-out menus, the extra keys and birthday cake candles. Even as she does this, she wishes she wouldn't. Bad enough that she will parse the attack over and over in her mind; must she also let the evidence live in her house? But for some reason, she feels she is not finished with it.

  Later that evening, she eats a dinner of saltine crackers with peanut butter and great dollops of grape jelly. Then she puts on her pajamas and crawls into bed. She calls Tessa, who does not answer, and leaves her a message. “I didn't get the job at Anthropologie,” she says. “Maybe you already heard and you're out celebrating.” She pauses, and makes her voice more cheerful. “Hey!” she says. “I got your email with the video of that guy doing the Tim Gunn imitation. He sounds just like him.” Another pause, and then, “Want to see a movie tomorrow night? I could come downtown. We could go to a five o'clock in case you have plans for later on. … Let me know.”

  She hangs up, opens the novel she began last night, closes it, and lies staring out the windows into the dark. It is six-forty Tomorrow morning she will call Midge and say, Help. I'm serious. Help me. She will not tell Tessa or Midge about the letter. She will not tell anyone. She closes her eyes and Margot Langley's words float back into her brain; she has the letter memorized.

  She opens the novel again, reads one page, another. Then another. And finally, everything in her own life surrenders to the one being presented here. An uneasy pain thins, lifts, disappears. Dan once had a friend who died from metastatic cancer. Toward the end, Dan visited him with some frequency; and each time he would call before going, to see what his friend might want or need. Each time, his friend requested the same thing: books.

  five

  THE PHONE RINGS, WAKING HELEN UP. SHE PUTS HER HAND OVER her eyes against the strong sunlight coming through her bedroom window and lies still, listening to see who's calling. Steve Parker again. “I don't know if you got the message,” he says, “but I really need to talk to you, Helen. Please call.”

  While he recites his number, she reaches for the phone, but then doesn't pick it up. She's got morning voice; it's after ten o'clock; she'd be embarrassed by her sloth. She'll call him later. She's beginning to be annoyed by his persistence. He's an accountant; can't he figure out whatever he's calling about by himself? What does she pay him for? What help can she possibly be? She feels herself getting angrier and then stops; she's blaming Steve for her husband still being dead. She looks over at the other side of the bed, reaches out to touch the uncreased pillowcase. Odd the way she looks every day to see if it is still so pristine. She knows it will be; yet she looks to see if it is. Sometimes she thinks coming to terms with Dan's death is like a log being rammed into a door. Eventually, it will get through. Until then, she will awaken each day and the first thing she will do is look to his side of the bed.
r />   She sits up and stretches, then casts about inside herself to see if today, if today, she feels a little bit like working, if she feels that something might be in her that would like to come out. Nope. The very notion of going into her study makes her stomach tense.

  So. What to do. Call Midge, who was not home last night, and so Helen left a message about her experience at Anthropologie; she left what she thought was a very amusing message, considering.

  But now Midge does not seem all that amused. “Listen,” she says, after Helen asks if she got her message, “don't be offended, but I just have to say this. Anthropologie? You're almost sixty years old! Why would you want to work there? Why don't you stop being so self-obsessed and volunteer for some organization that really needs you? Give back a little.”

  Helen, wounded, sucks in a breath, clenches the phone tighter in her hand.

  “I didn't mean that to be as harsh as it came out,” Midge says. “This is tough love, okay?”

  “I do give back! I give lots of money to all kinds of—”

  “I don't mean checks in an envelope,” Midge says. “I mean you should give of yourself. Volunteer to stack cans at a food pantry. Deliver Meals on Wheels. Walk dogs at a shelter. There are a million places to volunteer! Teach someone to read, for God's sake!”

  “I can't do that,” Helen says. “Every time I try to volunteer, they tell me they need a certain commitment, and when my life is normal, I work a lot, and I can't tell what day is going to be a really good writing day when I won't want to stop. And I also travel a lot for public speaking. I have a speaking gig in a few weeks, as a matter of fact. Though I'm thinking of canceling it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I'm a fraud, that's why.”

  “You're not a fraud,” Midge says. “If you can't write for the time being, so what? Go out and live some life. That's what will give you the seeds to sow for the work you will come to do.”

  It occurs to Helen to ask Midge if she's having a Kumbaya moment. Instead, she looks out the window, where a bird has landed on a branch of a tree outside. The bird stares directly ahead, as though at her, cocking its head left, then right. How about it? How about sowing some seeds?

  “Midge, it's … I need writing. Not the success, the success just makes me feel weird. Grateful, but weird. Writing to me is … It's not just the way I make my living. It's always been the place where I put things. It's my solace in a world that … God! It just seems like such a terrible world!”

  “It is a terrible world,” Midge says. “Also it is one of incalculable beauty. You know that.”

  “I have forgotten that,” Helen says and hears the bitterness in her voice.

  “That's why you have to do something to remember it.”

  “I have to go,” Helen says.

  “No, you don't. You're just pissed off.”

  Helen doesn't answer. She bites at her lip and watches the bird, who suddenly lifts off from the branch and flies away.

  “Aren't you?”

  “Well, I have to say, Midge, that you don't seem to be very supportive of the fact that I seem to be losing my mind! I really feel like I am!”

  “Hmm,” Midge says. “Now, why would I ever want to be supportive of you losing your mind?”

  “Oh, you just … Look, I know you want me to be King Kong, but I'm not King Kong. I'm the princess and the pea, okay? I would feel the pea, I swear. I don't want to feel the pea, but I would feel it! Did you ever hear of Gregor Mendel? Some people—”

  “Oh, stop using the theory of genetics as a rationalization. Get dressed and meet me at the Museum of Contemporary Art in an hour,” Midge says.

  “How do you know I'm not dressed?”

  “Took a wild guess. I would also wildly guess that you haven't washed your face or combed your hair. Or even looked at the newspaper, as usual.”

  “Okay, in fact I do look at the newspaper, and I usually elect not to read it. Why should I read it! It would only make me feel worse. Why don't they have a Pollyanna column, where the only news there is good news: humanitarian triumphs, small gestures of goodwill, recipes, who cares, just one place where you know you can go and read something and not feel assaulted?”

  “Maybe you should write such a column,” Midge says.

  “Maybe you should remember that I can't write.” Helen fumes quietly for a moment, then says, “Fine, I'll meet you at the museum. What's there?”

  “An exhibit that's live people, and all they do is kiss.”

  Helen recalls a time she was sixteen and made a bet that she could kiss for ten minutes without stopping. She did it, she kissed a really cute boy she'd been very much attracted to, but the kiss lost all its passion after about thirty seconds and became an act roughly equivalent to cleaning out one's ears. Why in the world would a museum feature such an exhibit? She starts to ask Midge that, but then decides to find out for herself. Somewhere inside her weary brain, a little light flickers, then holds. “I'll see you there,” she says.

  Helen takes a long shower, using a great variety of the products she has available due to the largesse of her daughter. What Helen truly believes is that she could use 409 to wash herself and her hair and it would be fine, but in the area of beauty products she is a hypocrite. As she is in many areas of her life. She wonders sometimes how many people live lives congruent with their deepest beliefs. She wonders how many people go running off to seminars intent on changing their lives, then come home and fall back into the exact same patterns. Most people, she suspects. That's why those seminars make so much money, people keep failing to achieve their lofty ideals. And what about the people who teach those seminars? They're just as hypocritical as anyone else, Helen is sure of it. She thinks of her mother, telling her once that she didn't believe in therapy because psychiatrists were the craziest people of all. Helen herself has doubts about the efficacy of therapy: she tried it once, years ago. But she didn't like the way she would wake up on appointment days feeling perfectly fine and then have to dredge up some discontent so as to justify the time and expense. She quit after only three sessions, saying that the reason she was leaving was that she was moving. “Oh?” the therapist said. “Where to?” “Cleveland,” Helen said, knowing nothing about the place and hoping the therapist didn't, either. Serene, that woman was called, unbelievably—Helen thought she must have given that name to herself on a mountaintop ceremony in California attended by other women therapists, all of them naked but for wildflower garlands, and not ashamed. It has always seemed to Helen that California is the place for outrageous acts of freedom, and only California. A bunch of naked therapists renaming themselves in Illinois? Never.

  She steps out of the shower and wraps a bath towel around herself. What to wear? What effort such a decision now seems to require!

  She selects a pair of black wool pants and a gray cashmere sweater. When she comes down into the kitchen to get her keys, she sees the red light blinking on the phone. Two messages; another call must have come in while she was in the shower. “Tessa,” Helen says, out loud. She likes to predict who the calls are from and she is often right. This has scored her points with Tessa, who still sort of believes her mother is psychic. Helen does little to disabuse her daughter of this notion; she thinks it offers her a kind of power she would not have otherwise.

  She is not psychic this time, though; the second call is from someone she doesn't know, saying she got Helen's number from Donna Barlow, a mutual friend who is also a writer, and that she wants to talk to Helen about teaching a very unique kind of writing workshop—Donna did it and just loved it, and thought Helen might enjoy it, too.

  Helen doesn't teach. She doesn't teach because she has no idea in the world how she does what she does and therefore doesn't feel qualified to instruct others in the practice. For her, writing just happens. Or used to. Writing is like falling in love, she's often said. Or deciding what to have for lunch. Who knows how a person does that? And for heaven's sake, how can you instruct someone else in how t
o do it? “Think of walking,” Helen has often said to audiences at book signings, speaking to people who asked the inevitable questions about the writing process. “Think of how you walk without thinking about it. That's how you need to write. If you thought about walking—the neuromuscular component, the speed at which you should move, what length your stride should be—you'd never get anywhere, right? You'd spend all your time thinking about how to get there.” People would laugh and look at each other, but there were always some who crossed their arms in exasperation: she hadn't answered the question.

  Helen looks at her watch, then quickly punches in the number to call the person who asked her about teaching, Nancy Weldon is her name. She'll let her know right away she's not interested, she'll get this out of the way.

  “Helen Ames!” the woman, who apparently has caller ID, says. “How nice to talk to you! I just have to tell you, I really enjoy your books.”

  “Thank you,” Helen says, and now feels bad about having to decline the woman's offer. Still, she speaks quickly, before the woman can say anything else. “Listen, I'm sorry, but I don't teach. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I can't. I'm a terrible teacher. Honestly. I tried it once and the people who came all but asked for their money back.” A true story. Early on in her career, Helen was lured to an island to teach a group of very wealthy women. She thought the best thing to do would be to show how she found her own inspiration, and so she crafted a number of exercises for the women to do, and brought in objects she thought might be seen as evocative—an old silver hairbrush, a blackened frying pan, a love letter from the 1930s, a pair of men's shoes, a floppy-necked teddy bear, one dusty wing of a butterfly. One of the exercises was to use all of these objects in a short story, and Helen had to practically sit on her hands to keep from doing this exercise herself. Already she saw the man who would wear those shoes, the corn bread cooking in that skillet, the towheaded child weeping because he'd accidentally torn the wing off the butterfly.