Rules She Invents

She ate the apple down to the core, because it seemed disrespectful, given everything, to waste it, and also because the part of her that had grown up being told to finish her plate did not switch off merely because the plate was metaphysically interesting. Then she put the core on a saucer — it was evidence; it was, possibly, the only piece of evidence she would ever produce that someone else would believe, assuming she ever told anyone, which she had no intention of doing — and she opened the notebook to a fresh page.

She found, sitting over it with her pen uncapped, that she did not actually need to write down what she had learned. She knew it already, in her hands and her gut, the way you know a route you have walked rather than one you have read: that the door did not open when she gripped and did open when she let the grip go; that the books were less doors than addresses, and any address she knew well enough might open onto its place; that things came back with their incidentals and not their context, an apple but no orchard around it; that there were at least two ways out, the involuntary jolt of being seen and the clean willed intention of home; that the places she reached were always the unwatched ones, the wings of the stage and never the stage. These were facts now. She had paid for them with four bad days and a soaked sleeve and a stolen apple. She did not need to file them like a clerk.

What she needed to write down was the other thing, the thing none of the experiments had handed her, and it took her a while to find the pen-shape of it.

She made herself fresh tea while she looked for it, and drank it hot this time, because the kitchen seemed to require a person who could be trusted with hot beverages, and she wanted to be that person, at least at the table. Then she wrote, at the top of the clean page, in her seriously-meant handwriting:

If I can go anywhere, I will go nowhere. If I can take anything, I will take everything, which will end badly.

She read it back. She thought it was perhaps a little grand for a Sunday afternoon in a kitchen, but she did not cross it out, because she suspected she was going to need it later, in a less reflective mood, when the wanting was louder than it was now. She had been raised — by no one in particular, by every poem she had loved and every recipe she had followed and every essay Mr. Behr had pressed into her hands with the gruff insistence of a man who thought reading was a contact sport — to believe that the sonnet was harder than free verse and better for it; that the haiku's seventeen syllables were not a cage but a tuning fork; that a kitchen with three ingredients made a better cook than a kitchen with thirty. The rule made the move. The frame made the picture. You did not get to skip the frame by being clever; you got to be clever by accepting the frame and then, inside it, dancing.

Whatever this ability was, she suspected it would behave the same way, and she wrote that down too, because she suspected she would forget: A power without constraints is not a power. It is a flood. You cannot drink from a flood. You can drink from a tap because someone, somewhere, bothered to put a washer in it — and no one is going to put the washer in but me. She drew a small picture of a tap. It was a bad picture of a tap. She labeled it tap (constraint) in case she came back to the page later and could not remember what she had been thinking, which, knowing herself, she would not.

She added, at the very bottom, set apart, underlined twice: The rules I invent now are the rules I will be grateful for later. Then she wrote, beside it, smaller, parenthetical, in the slightly mocking hand she used for talking to herself: (or furious at. but either way: present.)

She closed the notebook. She put the apple core in the bin, finally, because the saucer felt like a shrine and she did not yet want a shrine. She washed her hands. She looked at the kitchen — the cold kettle, the half-drunk tea gone cold again, the notebook with its small bad picture of a tap — and she thought, I am a girl who has rules now, and felt, underneath the dry amusement of it, something steadier: the small, real pleasure of a craftsperson laying out her tools on a clean cloth before any work has yet been done.

The work, she suspected, was about to be considerable.