And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"

Letting the days go by.

We went out today. No birds did. No rabbits or mice. They aren’t insane. It's like minus one or something. One deer was out, at the top of our hill, and us.

When I say out, I mean we walked from the house to the garage and got in the car. Richard has something wrong with his shoulder and needed to get x rays.

We also went to the CVS because I had a coupon that was expiring. Afterward, I said to Richard, “I think we should go to the Talbott and Arding and have tea.” He said, “Let's go home and have tea.” I said, "I think we need to sit some place other than our house. Something could happen to us. We might meet a stranger.” He said, “Can we please go home?” I said, “Okay.” He said, “How come you said okay?” I said, “Because we're married, and this is our honeymoon.”

Eliza

I began working with a physical therapist. I will call her Eliza because that is not her name. She is very fit with athlete energy and long hair streaked lightly with gray. When I first saw her the time we visited the place, I took one look and said, “You, I want you.” It made me happy to imagine hanging out with her. I am looking for a gym buddy, really, but never mind. If you are wondering if Richard could be my gym buddy, the answer is no. He feels he does enough. But really, is there such a thing as enough?

Because of my time with the divine Eliza, I am now sitting on the couch in our bedroom, instead of sitting with my legs stretched out in the bed. I feel returned to life a little bit. When Eliza told me not to sit with my legs straight out, it was a dead mouse I could present to Richard.

I placed it at his feet. He has told me for a very long time not to sit with my legs straight out. It isn’t good for my back. The dead mouse is: You were right. He went on about being right for a second longer than I thought comradely, and I said, “Do you want to have a party about being right? Here, I’m blowing up the balloons.”

I should be more generous about the party of his being right. I thought the dead mouse was glory enough for him. No one ever feels they receive enough glory, one is from time to time reminded.

Claire Danes a Carrie Mathison on Homeland.

Homeland

The other night, we finished rewatching all eight seasons of Homeland, and I will miss seeing Claire Danes dash around, dodging bullets, with her blond hair flying just so. People shoot at Claire’s character, Carrie Mathison, people who are Taliban, or CIA, or Russians. Lots of people place Carrie in great risk, while she saves larger populations from sarin gas in Berlin and from a war in Pakistan, prompted by misinformation about a downed helicopter.

I love Carrie so much I’m sorry she didn’t get to have a female friend. You can tell the creators of the show are men—they are Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, and Gideon Raff—because Carrie, whom we watch move through time and space for ten years, is written as the only girl at the boys’ table, a glittering exception she’s supposed to be proud of. When she crosses paths with other females, they are bossy and controlling to her, or deceitful and dangerous, or people, in the roles of student and novice, Carrie treats with contempt.

The stance of the writers concerning women with other women comes from something my mother would have said out of desperate boredom about her life and that wasn’t even true, something along the lines of: “I don’t like women, they aren’t interesting, feh, do I look like someone who wants to join the PTA?”

The one exception—for five minutes—is when Carrie and Astrid, an operative in German intelligence, join forces to save Quinn, but that’s because they both have romantic feelings for Quinn. I really liked Astrid and was sorry when she was killed because Quinn, who was crazed from medical maltreatment engineered by Carrie, removed the bullets from Astrid’s gun, fearing she was there to kill him, which is ridiculous because she was in love with him and it was amazingly obvious. Anyway, Astrid is as close as Carrie gets to join forces in a comradely way with another women.

Alex, Howard, and Gideon: This is not the way the world of women works. This is what men imagine the world of women to be like, so the focus of female attention will remain on men. The way, in fact, we live is women friends are our lives, plus work and some other things. You really need to spend the rest of your life watching My Brilliant Friend on a loop. Actually, everyone should.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

The other night, a man unsubscribed from my stack with a note he wanted to share: "Love the writing, hate the politics."

I said to Richard, "Can you separate the writing from the politics?" He said, "Yes." He meant the pleasure in a writer's style.

I said I felt insulted by the man's need to tell me why he was withdrawing his support. It felt like he was telling me off—a warning, a bit of a threat? It also felt like part of the reason for the politics to exist.

I hated the man's self-importance, his easy thought he could say whatever he wanted to me without any risk to him. “Don't let the door hit you on the way out,” I could have said and didn't. Not from an impulse to take the higher ground. I never have the impulse to take the higher ground. Maybe there is no higher ground. I didn't want to be in conversation with the man.

Richard said, "You don't need to feel insulted." I said, "I don't?" He said, "No." I said, "You made me feel better," and it was interesting how his removal of the splinter shifted my emotions.

I was reminded of a time in my twenties when I was going around to see editors for assignments. I went to see a guy at the Saturday Review. I must have sent him some clips. He said, "I like when you write without your feminist lens." I said, "Everything I write is through a feminist lens." I never wrote for the Saturday Review.

Sister

After my mother died, my sister and I became very close, as if we had been sisters all our lives. We cared for our mother during the last three years of her life, and we discovered we worked in the same ways and had the same amount of energy. If we said we would do something, we did it.

After our mother died, we could see each other for the first time without competing for the love of our mother. I have been alive for two years longer than Ellen got to live, and I miss her all the time. Who knew such love could exist? Maybe I got married the way a dentist fills a tooth.

Dear Ellen, you are the constant in my life I didn’t notice until recently. You once said you were sorry it took us so long to find each other, and I said I was sorry, too, but in truth we found each other when it was possible for me to fall head over heels in love with you. When we became friends, your husband and children were not consuming all your attention. You were ready for a new romance as well.

If you were here, I think the thing I would be taking to you about is friendship. I thought friendship would be a constant in my life along with work and sex. As constants, friendship and sex have not lasted as long for me as work has. Only work and you, it turns out for my life. And then you went and died.

I don’t regret anything. I loved you to pieces as a little girl, as your little sister—as the sister you asked for in the abstract way a child asks for a toy and then, when the toy is delivered, it turns out to be different from the one in the store window. I loved you to pieces as a woman in her sixties when we spoke on the phone most days. I would be walking on some hot desert path, ducking into pockets of shade, and you would be telling me about the first years of being married to Mark and how, in time, all the rough parts smoothed out. You were saying this would happen with Richard.

You were so positive about him in the way, abstractly, you had wanted a baby sister. Everything you told me about your life and how my life would go turned out to be helpful because you made me feel less lonely. I miss you every day and all the time. I just ordered pants from Spanx that are supposed to make you look slimmer than you are. Fingers crossed.

___________________________________________

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I almost like the cold. It stops time.