Emily Dickinson Alone in Her Room

Emily Dickinson. Hidden in her room, wearing all white, refusing guests, avoiding household chores because her sister Vinnie would do all the work in support of the great art that was being created and then tucked away in a drawer. It’s all true. It’s as real as me sitting here in my broken desk chair because somebody got very, very angry when the SpongeBob game froze up and refused to play, and that anger had to go somewhere. To Emily Dickinson I will say don’t pretend to be real, because it can’t be real. A room, a life so close, so dedicated to you. And to Edna Pontellier I will say, choose your children or choose death—girl, please. I leave my children. I leave them at school, I leave them with babysitters, I leave them with their dad. But their voices echo in my ears. “God is in the silence,” I tell them, but they don’t want God, they want me to listen. To watch.

A room of my own? Sweetheart, I own the whole damn house. But the house gets crowded with vacuum cleaners. Four. OK, five. Target had one on sale this morning, and it picks up pet hair in a snap! And in that snap it will be as if I have no pets at all, and when I have no pets, I will be a writer in my office-slash-guest-room-slash-playroom-slash-storage-area just as soon as I mop the floor. Because somebody pooped, and I don’t want to name names, but it could have been any one of them.

I was a freshman in college. I will have a baby, I told myself, and I will put her in a backpack and we will cross Europe together. But she’s too big for that backpack now. We never made it to Europe. Her feeding schedule, napping schedule, school schedule, Mom-I-need-money-for-the-field-trip schedule interfered. And nobody told me they multiply like vacuum cleaners and now there are two. And two puppies, because we don’t share. But we don’t like puppies, because they are not toys. “She growled at me!” She growled at you because you are mean and you touch and grab and pet and hold and sometimes a puppy just wants to be left alone to its thoughts, and maybe its thoughts are not about you.

I thought children would be cool, have wild yet manageable hair, stomp their tiny bare feet on the concrete as dreadlocked drummers played in the pedestrian mall in a town where we don’t even live. But they don’t like barefoot. They don’t like drums. They don’t like dance that doesn’t involve three pairs of shoes, two changes of costume, a special bun pulled tight by their mom who doesn’t do hair. And lipstick and eye shadow and all the other kids have cell phones, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom.

I will line up my vacuum cleaners, one by one, straight lines, soldiers, and I will say to them, “You have betrayed me. You said you would pick up marbles. You said you would save my back. You said no bags meant less mess, but that was a lie. You said you would be the kind of guy that my girls would marry someday. Or maybe you didn’t say that, I just thought it. You said you would be the kind of guy who did dishes, and you do, but only if I say thank you, thank you, dish man. You are the dish hero, dish man.”

I will be Pilate from Song of Solomon and I will cook the perfect egg and chew things and make rot gut and sell it to the blacks in town because I own this house and you have pissed your last in it. I will close the door to my office-slash-guest-room-slash-playroom-slash-storage-area, and I will write. And I will ask that you not poke your little nose under the...