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52 5 Making Lists Ihave long been a list maker. An obvious way to keep track of things, lists are also a way to tame a chaotic reality: the multiple pulls on time and energy. I especially like to find old lists by chance, lingering in a book, misplaced in a discarded purse, hiding in a stack of unfiled paperwork. Even in recent years I have occasionally found lists from Kara’s babyhood, left like time capsules between the pages of Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse— hardback editions no longer current for classroom use. Because old lists provide a shorthand diary of what my past life was like, I have learned to set them aside: physical reminders of that earlier time. When I turn again to my box of unsorted papers, I find a small handful of such lists. H E R E’S ON E L I S T. I found it a few years ago, tucked away in an old edition of To the Lighthouse (the topic for chapter 3 of the dissertation): wash diapers, bake pie, write chapter 3, bathe Kara, grade papers, cultivate tomatoes, harvest beans, feed chickens. As with all such lists, there is no sense of proportion among the tasks; large and small are jumbled together. But at that point the graduate work—“write chapter 3” and “grade papers”—was barely surviving . The papers got graded, as they always do, because students waited for them. But chapter 3 was not only buried among other endlessly reproduced tasks but also regularly pushed to the end of that list, carried over to the next list, never prodded forward. The mother work, too, is scarcely evident on the lists from 1971 and 1972—other than “wash diapers” and “bathe Kara”—though increasingly it was as a mother that I engaged with life. The needs of a growing child are, after all, immediate, prompting what Tillie Olsen calls a mother’s “instant interruptibility.” But there were other reasons at work as well: as a student, M A K I NG L I S T S | 53 I had lost all clarity as to what my goals were; as a wife, I was increasingly only a shell, a role played out in a series of tasks. My mother life expanded to fill these other vacuums, giving me a more vivid sense of purpose. But like my less rewarding gardening tasks, it, too, was tied to seasons and growth, external exigencies, and future possibility. As the seasons progressed, I would occasionally think back to my earlier afternoon alone—seeking a sexual self and a solitary one, too—but only with a kind of nostalgia. I could not conceive an identity that didn’t include Kara. Regardless of what the lists said, she was woven into every portion of my life, my constant companion as I worked in the kitchen or the garden or hung the diapers on the clothesline in the backyard—strings of white rectangles pegged together in beautiful symmetry. She gave form and value to the time that had no presence on the list: the time cuddling on the porch swing, walking down to the road together for the mail, reading a story together, or sitting on the floor beside the low window in her bedroom looking out at the chicken yard, the barn, the dog. BY T H E FA L L OF 1972, I was no longer eligible to teach as a graduate student . Though I welcomed the easing of schedule, I chafed at the increased domesticity. Kara, not yet one and a half, became a more insistent presence, charming and devilish—and always there. With a wicked gleam in her eye, she would snatch my glasses, pull my hair, tug on the phone cord, even (on rare occasion) scribble in one of my books—and then, just as my exasperation overtook me, she would hold out her hand, smiling softly: “Hi,” as if a greeting served as ready redress. Unable to carve out real writing time, overwhelmed by countless gardening tasks and an endless stream of colds and earaches and unremitting parental responsibility, I looked elsewhere for an expression of creative energy that would still allow me to be with Kara: sewing could at least provide projects of my own, not driven by demands of season or husband, yet yielding visible, even durable, products. I made Kara a big stuffed doll with embroidered eyes and mouth and brown yarn for hair; “Big Doll” wore...

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