They held in them the memory of luxurious, purple-bellied sumac. The bottle cap on the arbitrary medicine bottle proved an ordeal. The monogrammed, totem-faced microbes spilled onto the saffron-tinged ivory of the sink. Their rubrics formed a chance tetragrammaton. Here was God, going down the drain. Frantic, she swathed the pills away from the sink hole, working with her dead hands. The tiny pellets rained the linoleum, whispering like fireflies. Moments later, she saw herself fissured in her children’s vigilant eyes as they stood in the bathroom doorway—her children whom she knew full well were not awake at the moment, and, anyway, only one of them had thus far showed an inclination to crawl—contemplating her on her knees, arse over teakettle on the floor, retrieving calcified vermin from the tiles. She shrank from their piccolo laughter. She receded partly into the icy womb of the glazed wall, where she would have been content to stay had it not been for the harassment of a waterfall. She stood up. She looked into the cabinet mirror to stake her rightful claim to herself, elder, mother, and above all someone who would never stand by and be unfairly judged from the perspective of innocence. The face that she saw in the glass was a sullen replica of the stone bust in the other room, torpid and postbattle. Her right eye was veiled by the sleepy lid of a dope fiend.

Her own children sneaking in to spy on her in their sleep. She had been put into the position of nurturing them until they were too big to fit back into the central bank of her body. They would soon be as unreclaimable as Ted. She made a mental note. This was the sort of thing that she must remember to tell the psych nurse when she came in the morning. She must remember to put her resentments flat upon the table as a gesture of good faith, if she wanted to promote trust and to keep her drug prescriptions.

That voice wanted to kick in. That nightly ham-radio voice, confident, assured, and with a block chord grammar. Holding back the voice was like trying to control the tide with a stopper. De Born had that sort of voice, at the same time eloquent and bilious. Etienne de Born was the editor of her recently published novel The Bell Jar. He was an elderly man. He used to come by early in the A.M. It flattered Sylvia to think that she was the worm that he was set on catching. Always, he wore the same black topcoat with the matching homburg and the black brolly, no matter the weather. She knew little about him, other than he had served in both pertinent wars and, like many men of broken conscience, he had turned from the world at an absolute right angle to put his faith in the anchorage of books. Thousands of men were suddenly commanded to hold their fire. Naturally, some of them looked to books to continue to feed the internal furnace.

She hadn’t liked her novel, once it was finished and edited.