Anita has hung a banner between the cherry tree laden with gleaming red but terribly tart fruit and the lilac tree with its delicately perfumed clusters of flowers.
Happy Birthday Laura.
It is early summer and their daughter is about to celebrate her second birthday. Two cakes are baking in the oven—one chocolate, the other vanilla. Anita routinely wipes the table, rearranges the racks where the cakes will cool. She has put in orangeade and apple juice to chill. She has already made a lemon cake for the grownups and iced it. The sink is clean, but she rinses it. She checks the timer on the oven, another twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, twenty minutes, twenty minutes, twenty minutes. Without being aware of it she starts massaging her hands, as if they could not bear to be left to their own devices, with nothing to do. Anita is aware of these times when she is no longer a light, delicate, competent woman. She feels as heavy as a watermelon, as clumsy as a crude wooden doll. Everything around her takes on a bloated and ungainly aspect. Her breathing is a roar in her chest, her heartbeats are strokes of a gong, the ticking of the timer fills the kitchen with its clamor. Anita claps her hands, once, twice, in an attempt to extricate herself from this odd hypnotic state, but that does not work. She makes haste to go up to the second floor and there, on the threshold of Laura’s bedroom, hey presto, she recovers her composure, her poise.
The room is primrose yellow. On the floor a carpet, toys, a chest against the wall. There is also a wardrobe, and a big giraffe woven from knotted straw. At the center of the room a magnificent child’s bed made of wood, painted in soft yellow, the palest that exists. Laura is asleep, her arms raised above her head. This bedroom is Adam’s creation—apart from the toys, he has made everything. Anita sits right down on the floor and inhales the innocence and calm that this room gives off.
A few minutes later she hears the timer on the oven. And at the same moment her child wakes up. And Anita once more becomes that light, competent woman, the woman who feeds, washes, cleans, sweeps, polishes, shines, tidies, cooks, laughs, provokes laughter, plays, gardens, shops, loves her husband, her daughter, her house.
Nobody asked her to become this woman. Her husband, her dear Adam, always seems satisfied—with what he has on his plate; with the way she looks after their daughter; with the arrangement of the flowers in the vase; with what she grants him when they are intimate together. Deep inside her there is, as it were, a little pocket of emptiness, and when she gets up in the morning, this pocket whistles, as do cavities hollowed out of rocks. And then she spends her time eager to fill this space. Each task accomplished to the full (all the housework, potato puree made by hand, the books in alphabetical order, each nursery rhyme) brings her closer to the feeling of being complete—being completely a woman, completely a mother, completely a wife. She can no longer turn her back on the reality, the weight and volume of her life. Her daughter = 28 pounds; her house = 30 by 36 feet floor area; the number of diapers used daily = 7; the number of potatoes for a puree = 2; the number of measures of powdered milk needed for a five-ounce baby bottle = 5; the correct temperature for a drink = 82 degrees Fahrenheit; the furrows between her eyebrows = 1; white hairs above her right ear = 3; the income she brings in each month = 0; the hours in her day = 24.
Sometimes Anita has the feeling she is tirelessly reliving the same day, but she does not seek to make any changes at all, on the contrary, she catches herself wanting to do exactly the same thing at the same time, bath, meal, housework, games, taking a walk, looking, listening. Perhaps through this repetition she will finally discover what it is that eludes her, recover what she has lost (but what was it?), find the solution (but to what problem?) or the answer (but to what question?).
At night she wakes up, goes up to the attic, and opens old cardboard boxes. What she finds there is notebooks, poems, articles she wrote when she was on her internship, countless ideas for novels; she rereads the letters her parents sent her when she was a student. She studies everything attentively and absorbs her own dreams, her own desires, her own fantasies, so as not to lose touch completely with that other Anita, the one who wanted a career out in the world, the one who wanted to write a novel.
Occasionally she has enough energy left to open a notebook. Then she writes about her daily life, the birthday, the well-laid table, the cake, her child’s downy skin, the incredible elasticity of the hours of the day … On occasion something mysterious arises out of her words, something almost as palpable as a caress, and then she finds this new path she is following has some meaning, far away from her
