I went downstairs with her and promised, because she made me, that I would do something practical, but not a gratitude journal because, she said, it would freak her out.
‘Or like, a vision board. Unless it is just pictures of an over-forty Kate Moss on a superyacht.’
‘Bikini askew.’
‘Always.’
‘I love you Ingrid.’
She said I know and went home.
*
My father had left the study light on and the book open and face down on his desk. I went in and picked it up but couldn’t find the bit he had read. Trying to wedge it into a non-existent space on his shelves, I thought of him saying once – the summer I spent in this room – ‘all of life on one wall Martha. Every kind of life, real or made up.’
I stayed there and read so many spines, then one by one I started taking books off, building a pile in my left arm. My selection criteria was threefold. Books by women or suitably sensitive/depressive men who had made up their own lives. Any book I had lied about reading, except Proust because even with everything I had done I did not deserve to suffer that much. Books with promising titles, that I could reach without having to stand on a chair.
They were old. The covers made my fingers feel chalky, and the pages smelled like the boredom of waiting for my father to finish in a secondhand shop when I was young. But they would tell me how to be or what to want and they would save me from a gratitude journal and it was the only thing I could think of.
38
I STARTED WITH Woolf, her entire back catalogue, reading all day, in a room of my parents’ own, and sometimes when I began to worry I was going mad from so much time doing only that and conceived the thought in Woolfian language, I went out and read somewhere else. At night I read until I fell asleep and wherever I was, every time somebody in a book wanted something, I wrote down what it was. Once I had finished them all, I had so many torn-off bits of paper, collected in a jar on Ingrid’s dresser. But they all said, a person, a family, a home, money, to not be alone. That is all anybody wants.
*
I tried to go running. It is as awful as it looks. At the Westfield, 0.7 miles from my parents’ house, I gave up and went in to buy water. Because it was a Monday morning, shortly after nine a.m., and I was a woman over forty wearing athletic clothing, I did not arouse attention as I made circuits of the ground floor trying to find somewhere.
There was a Smiths. The only route from the front door to the fridge cabinet was an aisle with a sign above it that said Gifts/Inspiration/Assorted Planners and yet it it was, singularly, row on row of gratitude journals. I stopped and looked at them in search of the worst one to buy and send to my sister. Although there were so many individual injunctions on their mint and glittery lilac and butter yellow covers – to live and love and laugh and shine and thrive and breathe – considered together, it seemed like humanity’s highest imperative is to follow its dreams.
I chose one that was inexplicably thick, with twice as many pages as its shelf mates, because it said, on the cover, You Should Just Go For It. It was meant to sound carefree and motivating but for want of an exclamation mark, it came across as weary and resigned. You Should Just Go For It. Everyone Is Sick Of Hearing You Talk About It. Follow Your Dreams. The Stakes Could Not Be Lower.
It was my day, the woman on the till told me. ‘Free pen with every journal.’ She was so old to be working there and breathed heavily from the exertion of crouching down to retrieve the box from under the counter. ‘Whichever one you want.’ The pens were also inspirational. I took one that had a phrase on it misappropriated from third-wave feminism, thanked her and walked to a café kiosk in the centre of the mall that was pumping synthetic bread fragrance into the air.
I ordered toast. It took a long time to come and I reached the bottom of my Instagram feed while I was still waiting for it. The final post was a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, @author_quotes_daily. The caption said, ‘What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.’
My toast had still not appeared. I slid Ingrid’s journal out of the bag and wrote the caption out on the first page, then glanced quickly over my shoulder in case I had been seen. But I was the only person who would judge a woman who was sitting by herself in a shopping centre bakery on a weekday morning, when her running clothes and her gratitude journal testified to an effort to improve herself on two fronts. I shifted in my chair. It was in a spirit of repentance probably that I turned to another page, somewhere near the middle because I did not know where to start. I just did. You Should Just Go For It. Seriously, Nobody Cares.