"Huh?" my mom replied, distracted, her arms stretched over the roof of the station wagon, adjusting bungee cords. It was the morning we were leaving Sonoma, and all the neighbor kids and their mothers were crowded around our fully loaded car, which my mom had strategically packed inside and on top with everything we'd need for the week it would take us to drive across the country.

For days on end as Billy and John and I had raced our bikes in the cul-de-sac with the neighbor kids or gone swimming with Mary Anne or to movie matinees chaperoned by one of the other moms, my mother had been packing up in preparation for the moving van and driving us across the country by herself. When we reached Ohio, she would leave us for a couple of weeks with relatives we knew only by name, my father's younger brother Don and his family, while she and our dad found us a new place to live in Pennsylvania.

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Following a gruesomely detailed description of how "they" dug up and roasted and ate her mother's corpse (an image fueled, unfortunately, by the real Plath fanatics who regularly defaced Plath's grave over the years, even stealing the pebbles left as decorations by Frieda and her younger brother, Nicholas), Frieda Hughes' poem ends:

They called her theirs.
All this time I had thought
She belonged to me most.

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Court Green

It is the black husk of another life that blows through her: the cold planetary blank of the crawl space, lightless beneath her mother's cellar; the flaking of dead stars into her eye as she bashes her head against the edge of the concrete foundation. It is the Morris climbing the lane and pulling into the courtyard after midnight, headlights sweeping the darkened windows of the bedroom and extinguishing as her husband turns their car into the stable. It is the crush of the tires on the cobblestones she hears from their bed.

The fifteenth of June. Sylvia climbs the stairs in her dirty canvas work pants, wet through the knees from a morning of scrubbing floors, carrying Nicholas on her hip and a tin of baking soda with a spoon balanced in a cracked teacup in her other hand. Minutes ago she was wearing a beekeeper's veil, the whole contraption, all new. The cloud of cheesecloth spread out before her over the picture-frame brim of the straw hat beneath, giving her a dreamer's view of the low mist of wood smoke curling about the ankles of the apple trees. As never before, she saw her world through a veil --- she'd eschewed even a hat at her simple wedding. Their sixth anniversary is tomorrow.

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It's repetition that feeds obsession, cutting a groove in your head that you just can't get out of. Regardless of developmental imperatives, the same principle holds true when little kids want to hear the same story over and over again. And again.

Thus began my relationship with Frances, the whimsical heroine of Russell Hoban's '60s-era series of children's books about a family of badgers. It started simply enough: Last year, "Bedtime for Frances" was the book my then-2-year-old wanted me to read to her ad nauseam. There are (mostly craven) ways around a lot of repetitive behavior; we all know that books and blankies "get lost." Solar-operated organs with microchips preprogrammed to play polka tunes can be jammed into a deep, dark closet or given away.

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As unmistakable as were Plath's volatile emotions in the 1982 journals, the heavy editing of the text necessarily made it hard to discern the patterns to her moods. Even so, there did seem to be a detectable pattern, and it did not seem then, nor had it seemed to the people closest to her during the last years of her life, to be merely a function of temperament. In the weeks before her suicide, Plath's physician, John Horder, noted that Plath was not simply deeply depressed, but that her condition extended beyond the boundaries of a psychological explanation.

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It's hard to argue with Didion's point -- to a point: The Polish girl from Nutley, N.J., who started a part-time catering business in her house, is now the famous scion of a staggeringly successful, publicly owned multimedia corporation bearing her name. She's running an empire on four hours of sleep a night, has numerous tastefully appointed residences and she's got all of those tag-sale treasures that you and I will never have.

But what are we to make of Stewart's unwitting confession of interpersonal failure in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine?

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Not enough spin on it, said my true love

When he left in our fifth year.

In her 1995 collection "Glass, Irony and God," Carson wrote:

Not enough spin on it,

he said of our five years of love.

There and in "Plainwater" (also published in 1995) -- which opened with a poem called "What Is Life Without Aphrodite?" -- as well as in her 1998 novel in verse, "Autobiography of Red," the emphasis was on the erotics of human interaction, the "love" that ends that couplet. In her new collection, though, the brilliantly inventive Carson has tipped her scale toward the secondary element in that earlier reflection on eros: Much of the book is a sui generis meditation on time. But it's impossible for Carson to divorce herself completely from a thematic territory she has previously made so startlingly new, and so "Men in the Off Hours" encompasses all of that picnic that time spreads behind itself: life and sex and love and death.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/04/05/carson_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/09/drakulic_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/09/drakulic_2/#comments Thu, 09 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/2000/03/09/drakulic For most Westerners, who have the luxury of rhetorical objectivity while pondering the benign creep of tiny tanks across a television screen, the word "war" has been sanitized, denuded of the visceral horror and fear it is meant to evoke. It's a word that's been used too often and in too distant a context. It's a concept that no longer holds its edge.

According to Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic, the word war "has recently become tamed and domesticated in our vocabulary like a domestic animal, almost a pet." So it goes without saying that one simply cannot grasp the possibility of war entering one's daily life on a mild Sunday afternoon, say, while drinking Cabernet and eating pasta for lunch with a friend.

But war entered Drakulic's life in just such an inconceivable way in the fall of 1991: She held her fork poised halfway between her plate and her mouth as low-flying MIGs suddenly roared over her apartment building in Zagreb.

The Western world's reaction to the outbreak of war in the Balkans in the 1990s betrayed this lack of understanding of war as much as it betrayed a yawning gap in sensitivity to the fearful citizens of the Balkan nations, most of whom, despite the oft-repeated myths of their "ancient legacy of hatred and bloodshed," were simply stunned by the presence of war in their own villages and neighborhoods.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/09/drakulic_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/scott_3/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/scott_3/#comments Thu, 02 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/03/02/scott Can you pity a writer who's won a MacArthur fellowship, the coveted, so-called genius award that bestows both confirmation of one's bona fide egghead status and a financial package opulent enough to keep the genius juices flowing for a handful of years? The annual list of fellows makes for satisfyingly grandiose fantasies, but people also expect the award to be given to writers whose work is incomprehensible and dull.

This would be a wholly inaccurate assumption in the case of novelist Joanna Scott, former MacArthur fellow as well as Pulitzer Prize and PEN-Faulkner award nominee; the lofty critical affirmations of the literary establishment have little to do with the actual experience of reading one of her books. Scott is undeniably smart, but it's not her learned brain that rises full and glowing as Humpty Dumpty out of her fiction; it is instead her startlingly perceptive, fecund and appealing imagination that is the biggest thing about Scott.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/02/scott_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/09/17/rizzutointerview/ http://www.salon.com/1999/09/17/rizzutointerview/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1999/09/17/rizzutointerview In 1992, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto took a trip with a busload of Japanese internment camp survivors -- including her mother -- to the brown, blowing Colorado prairie and the site of what had been Amachi, one of 10 "relocation centers" where tens of thousands of innocent Japanese-American citizens and their families were imprisoned during World War II after being stripped of their homes, their businesses, their property and their civil rights. Seven years later, Rizzuto has published the debut novel that took seed on that trip despite the barren landscape: "Why She Left Us" is a haunting collage of conflicting accounts and fragmented memories, the story of three generations of a Japanese-American family indelibly marked by the war, the camps and their own heedless mistakes.

Standing at the center of "Why She Left Us" is Emiko Okada, the only daughter of an immigrant Japanese sharecropper and his picture-bride wife who are eking out a meager living in Southern California. From the time she is sent away at 12 to work as a maid, Emi becomes an enigma to her family, most pointedly when she returns home just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor -- unmarried, pregnant and having already given up an earlier child, a baby boy named Eric, for a adoption. Though family pride compels Emi's mother to retrieve her grandson from his adoptive family, she cannot force Emi to become Eric's mother any more than she can control the historic events unfolding beyond their house.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/09/17/rizzutointerview/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/04/13/welty/ http://www.salon.com/1999/04/13/welty/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 1999 19:27:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/people/bc/1999/04/13/welty It's the end of summer at the beginning of the century, the dark
middle of the night on a street and in a house just like the one where
Eudora Welty grew up in Jackson, Miss., and a little girl named Josie
has been roused from her bed, dressed in the wrong coat and escorted by her
parents to a safe room during a tornado. As the storm passes eerily over
and her smaller brother yells in his sleep, Josie floats through her
dream-life childhood, effortlessly conjuring visions of the season now
passing -- toy tattoos of flower baskets and Athenian ruins transferred
onto her arms and legs, live June bugs on threads, the fascinating
golden-haired teenage neighbor, Cornella, in her high-heeled shoes. The
morning after the storm, Josie finds a wet scrap of paper outside -- a torn
bit of ardent love letter with Cornella's name scribbled on it, which Josie
hides in her "most secret place": Oh my darling I have waited so
long ... "For the first time in her life," wrote Welty in
"The Winds," a short story published in 1941, "she thought, might the same wonders never
come again?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/04/13/welty/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/09/03/feature_410/ http://www.salon.com/1998/09/03/feature_410/#comments Thu, 03 Sep 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1998/09/03/feature There's a tiny, almost undetectable breeze lifting two, maybe three, crisp leaves off the surface of the blacktop on the upper playground at Yick Wo Public Elementary as our principal raises her megaphone, and 200 children, all dressed in brand-new knife-pleated skirts or carpenter's jeans rolled five fat times at their ankles, scurry to find their lunch-stuffed backpacks and try vainly to control the Brownian movement that anticipation of the first day of school has visited upon their narrow-chested bodies.

I hold my hand over my heart and turn toward the flag for the, oh, 3,000th time in my life, and it occurs to me that some of those narrow-chested bodies aren't so narrow anymore. They're taller, too, the ones I've been watching for the last five years, especially my own new fourth grader -- as big as the fifth graders he'll be saying goodbye to next spring as they're launched into the hormonally charged outer space beyond elementary school. For now these boys might be content to crash each other's Micromachines, the girls to earnestly chirp Spice Girls lyrics we parents hope they don't yet understand ("If you wanna be my lover, you better get with my friends ..."), but that's all coming to an end sometime soon, as the first day of school makes abundantly clear yet again. "I can hardly wait -- I can't wait -- I can't -- I don't know what I'm waiting for!" my son burbled into the mirror this morning, purposefully wet-combing his thick blond hair into some mysterious "style."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/09/03/feature_410/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/08/19/cov_19newsa/ http://www.salon.com/1998/08/19/cov_19newsa/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 1998 16:16:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/08/19/cov_19newsa This year's family vacation was women and children only. Where were the
men? Saving lives, crunching numbers, hiking the Alps, resisting child support while brandishing girlfriends who look like Christie Brinkley. As the lake-grubby kids built blanket forts at one end of the log cabin, the wives and ex-wives watched the
flaring, badly built barbecue fire and talked not about fidelity but about realism. Our reaction to the Starr investigation and President Clinton's impending testimony could be summed up thus: Who doesn't think that powerful men get blow jobs?

Now that the president has admitted his affair with Monica Lewinsky and asked to get this behind him on national television, it's stunning how quickly everyone from the indignant morality police to the Clinton family's spiritual advisor are rushing to characterize Hillary Rodham Clinton. In Monday's Salon, Arianna Huffington pitied the first lady as a victim of presidential abuse. And in Tuesday's New York Times, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told us the president feels "embarrassed" while the first lady feels "humiliated." Why is it that everyone thinks they know how Hillary should feel?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/08/19/cov_19newsa/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/07/30/newsa_9/ http://www.salon.com/1998/07/30/newsa_9/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1998/07/30/newsa This year's family vacation was women and children only. Where were the men? Saving lives, crunching numbers, hiking the Alps, resisting child support while brandishing girlfriends who look like Christie Brinkley. As the lake-grubby kids built blanket forts at one end of the log cabin, the wives and ex-wives watched the flaring, badly built barbecue fire and talked not about fidelity but about realism. Our reaction to the Starr investigation and President Clinton's impending testimony could be summed up thus: Who doesn't think that powerful men get blow jobs?

Now that the president has admitted his affair with Monica Lewinsky and asked to get this behind him on national television, it's stunning how quickly everyone from the indignant morality police to the Clinton family's spiritual advisor are rushing to characterize Hillary Rodham Clinton. In Monday's Salon, Arianna Huffington pitied the first lady as a victim of presidential abuse. And in Tuesday's New York Times, the Rev. Jesse Jackson told us the president feels "embarrassed" while the first lady feels "humiliated." Why is it that everyone thinks they know how Hillary should feel?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/07/30/newsa_9/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/06/10/09feature_4/ http://www.salon.com/1998/06/10/09feature_4/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 1998 16:53:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1998/06/10/09feature At about the same time you slunk out to the sidewalk with your
desiccated Christmas tree -- a couple of weeks after the scheduled tree-pickup day -- some Pavlovian, maternal alarm went off in your brain: It
was time to start fretting about what the kids were going to do this
summer. Camp brochures and summer-program fliers were jamming up my
mailbox, too, with all but the very lamest ("Kiddie Self-Actualization Workshop:
12-week program, lunches provided," "Shaman Training for ages 8-11," "Special
Power Animal Retrieval Overnight Camp") equipped with strongly worded
warnings against procrastination.

Armed with a fresh stack of alluring camp brochures, I sidled up to my
9-year-old as he sat on the couch doing his daily reading homework while
wolfing down a snack before getting dressed for his twice-weekly ballet
class (if it had been Monday, it would've been after-school computer
graphics; Tuesday, science workshop; Thursday, ceramics). God forbid
my child would be stuck all summer doing exactly what he would like to do,
what I had done every summer vacation of my childhood: nothing. Nothing but
hang around the house, untroubled by adult intervention, for three long
months each year that seemed to fan out endlessly before me like my entire future.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/06/10/09feature_4/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/04/28/time_15/ http://www.salon.com/1998/04/28/time_15/#comments Tue, 28 Apr 1998 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//time/1998/04/28/time You probably thought your mythology days were over; how could you ever beat
the ninth-grade titillation of hopefully searching the pages of "Oedipus
Rex" for an actual sex scene between the king and his mother? But wait a
minute -- doesn't Siddhartha seem like a crybaby compared to the patience
you display when your 4-year-old regales you with yet another plot synopsis
of the latest episode of "Muppet Babies"? If you have the right attitude,
mythology can be even more gratifying now that you're an adult, especially
if you're a parent. And if you're a parent with a spouse, mythology is the
key to understanding the meaning of your pathetic mortal life. Here are a
few of my favorites:

1. The Myth of How My Body Used To Be.
I don't like to tell this to most
people, but I used to have an amazing body. This is an especially
satisfying myth for me, since I was already the worn-out mother of a
2-year-old boy when I met my present husband. Boy, was my body perfect
before my son was born! Just like Kathy Ireland. All of my friends'
bodies were perfect, too. "Hey, look," said my friend Chris the other day
while turning the pages of Mirabella. "Remember, I looked just like Cindy Crawford before I got pregnant with Ned?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/04/28/time_15/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/04/10/10feature_3/ http://www.salon.com/1998/04/10/10feature_3/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 1998 17:42:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1998/04/10/10feature As mystifying as our children's innocent passions for the unctuous or
saccharine stations of childhood -- Rainbow Brite ponies,
Barney,
late-career Raffi -- are our own early, misguided tastes. As a kid, I
blissed out every Easter on Peeps, those squat chorus
lines of yellow marshmallow chicks, now available to a new generation of
candy fiends in chick and bunny forms and in a variety of
unappetizing colors (purple bunnies, turquoise chicks -- the mind and
stomach reel). In my lurid youth I could eat a whole package of them at a
sitting, deftly picking shreds of Easter grass from their sticky sides,
though I was so charmed by their chickie shape that on occasion I made them
into toys, poking pipe-cleaner legs into their undersides and propping them
on furniture in my doll house. My brothers and I conducted scientific
taste-tests on the relative qualities of peepish marshmallow over time: How
hard would they get after a week? Two weeks? If you waited until Halloween?

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/04/10/10feature_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1998/02/06/06featureb/ http://www.salon.com/1998/02/06/06featureb/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 1998 19:09:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//feature/1998/02/06/06featureb Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy.

Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.

She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.

It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.

("Daffodils")

On the dust jacket of Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" is a photographic detail of the floral embroidery on a shawl made in northern India. The product of a long tradition of needlework by men, the shawls of Kashmir are made of fine wool stitched with intricately detailed paisley or floral patterns in deep colors -- reds, blues, greens, pinks, golds. If you turn one over, you'll see on its underside the messy, knotted shadow of the finished work. Turn it over to its right side and the shawl is precisely and minutely embroidered over its entire surface, embellished by a graceful design of curving lines, leaves and flowers.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1998/02/06/06featureb/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1997/12/16/time_21/ http://www.salon.com/1997/12/16/time_21/#comments Tue, 16 Dec 1997 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/life//time/1997/12/16/time A couple of years ago I got sick for Christmas. For me, that's nothing new: I was the kid who always got sick on holidays. In third grade I was so anxious over the Baby Tender Love doll I desperately wanted from Santa Claus that I fell apart on Christmas Eve and barfed sugar cookies all night. At 11, when I was the class fat girl and shunned by all but a couple of other misfit kids, I broke out in chicken pox on the morning of Valentine's Day and went to school anyway -- I'd spent the previous evening hopefully spackling 32 heart-shaped doilies with paste and glitter. I fainted from an undiagnosed case of mono as I walked into my 16th birthday party, a "surprise" event that I had, of course, known about and breathlessly anticipated for weeks.

Adulthood, as you might imagine, only exacerbates these kinds of constitutional Waterloos. Let's see: There was the week-long flu I contracted over Christmas when my son, Zachary, was just a month old and I'd flown to Alaska to show him off to my family; there was the emergency appendectomy a few days before Thanksgiving a couple of years later. On another Thanksgiving, when my future husband invited me to meet his entire family for the first time, not even a just-diagnosed case of walking pneumonia could keep me away. As I sat trembling and feverish (but not contagious!) at the table, a brother-in-law sat beside me compulsively tapping his butter knife on the rim of a bone china tea cup and nattering on: "The last girlfriend Gary brought home for Thanksgiving wrote a bestseller," he brayed. "Gary's last girlfriend won the Pulitzer Prize!"

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