You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson

A FRIEND SAYS EVERY BOOK BEGINS WITH AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION Then what is mine? how to carry this If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. —Agnès Varda

A FRIEND SAYS EVERY BOOK BEGINS WITH AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION Then what is mine? how to set it down

This is where The Wife becomes more mother than wife. There is a shift. If there were a program for this imagined play, we would change her name again on the cast page.

The Wife—The Mother, The Finder—would love to be someone who doesn’t give a fuck, or who at least gives considerably fewer fucks, but she is not that person. That’s not how she was built. The Wife’s factory setting is GAF. She gives so many fucks. All the fucks.

But no, I wasn’t having a baby. And no, I never knew the baby. And no, I didn’t hold the baby, unless the Tupperware container counts. It doesn’t count.

Or was he already wired to be like me: too raw for the world, nerves too close to the skin?

GOOD BONES Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

I wonder: How will my children feel if they think that being seen as a mother wasn’t enough for me? What will they think of me, knowing I wanted a full life—a life with them and a life in words, too? I’m dog-earing a realization in my mind now: I don’t think fathers are asking themselves these questions. Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home.

“Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.”

“The bully won?” she asked, incredulous, almost accusingly. As in: How could this happen? In the books she’d read and the movies she’d watched at that point, the hero or heroine always prevailed. Nothing in her experience had prepared her for the possibility that the right, good thing might not happen. My daughter was shocked because she believed—and I had led her to believe—that people are good. And that there is consensus about what “good” is. That the choice is always clear. But most of the time, “good” and “bad” aren’t so easy to discern. In stories there are good guys and bad guys. In life there are people in pain, people who are broken and making decisions from a place of brokenness, people living with wounds we can’t see—and these people, these fallible human beings, are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our children, our teachers.

How I picture it: For months, maybe even years, I folded and folded my happiness until I couldn’t fold it anymore, until it fit under my tongue, and I held it there. I kept silent in order to hold it. I taught myself to read his face and dim mine, a good mirror.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

The love is in all of these places—haunting?—and in none of them. The love is everywhere and nowhere.