Sing to me, Muse, of the anger of Daniela, and how she raged in the dark at her alarm clock, which did not sit upon the sacred throne of her nightstand but was instead held captive on the dresser all the way on the other side of the room, the first misstep in an ill-conceived plan to carpe the diem and get out of bed before the sun came up, instead of waiting until she desperately needed to pee, drink water, or both.
Tell me, Goddess, how she cursed Zeus and Thor and Ra and the whole pantheon of gods and heroes as she sprinted barefoot across the cold floor because at that moment she would bear any pain, pay any price, to stop that obnoxious beeping. “Super loud alarm sound for heavy sleepers!” the box had said. It should have added, “Worst noise in the world! Start your day mad!”
The worst part was that she hadn’t had even a moment to enjoy the toasty cocoon of her comforter before leaping out into the frosty way-too-early morning air wearing nothing but a too-thin pair of cotton jammies. For her whole life, the only thing she had ever truly wanted was to be entombed in a personal sarcophagus of maximum thread count and trapped body heat for at least the first dozen minutes of each day, with the chill on the tip of her nose contrasting beautifully with the decadent comfort of a warm bed. Today, today of all days, a damn cold day, she was hurtled from her bed and into Boreas’s uncaring grip without even a single moment to gather herself, and it made her furious.
The sun wasn’t even up yet. Whose dumb idea was this? She looked back at her bed and could almost literally see the last of her warmth evaporating away. She yawned and stretched to quiet her sorrow, because no profit comes from chill lament. Her yawn was so deep that her toes curled and she worried for a moment that she might never breathe again, but like everything in this world, it ended, and she moved on.
It was five. She hadn’t seen five in the morning since Callie started sleeping through the night. She used to be proud of that, but not anymore. Daniela brushed her teeth and began to compose in her mind the opening sentence that she would write today. This was why she had woken early.
But she decided she’d take a shower first. Not a long one, because she had things to do and time waits for no man. She brought the cursed alarm clock into the bathroom and gave herself five—wait, ten—minutes. But no more.
In the shower, she let her mind drift into a fuzzy reverie of good memories: a honeymoon on Santorini, a cup of iced coffee and a fresh pastry, being awoken with a kiss and a caress. The alarm rang and she cursed it again, and then cursed having spent the time thinking of things past instead of her tasks ahead.
Comfortable clothes today; she wasn’t going anywhere. Jeans that still fit somehow, though soon—how soon?—they would fit even better. The first T-shirt in the drawer was fine, but the one underneath was, she realized for the first time, her favorite. Light blue with slightly darker blue flecks here and there, and it had been worn and washed so much that it was softer than any fleece, golden or otherwise. Soft as the veiling of soft purple with which Priam and his men wrapped the urn of Hector, tamer of horses.
The cold floor was now refreshing on her hot feet, and she moved down the hallway to the room that had always been her “office,” but starting today the ironic quotes could be dropped and it would be her office, maybe even her Office.
But first to peek in on Callie. Daniela cracked open the door and leaned her head in. Callie’s lamp stayed on through the night, rotating slowly and casting blurry images of smiling stars and bunnies on the ceiling. Callie herself had flopped so much in her sleep that even though she had been firmly tucked in the night before, she was now on top of her sheets with her legs bent in two-thirds of a triskelion. Her foot dangled off of the bed, an irresistible lure for the monsters under her bed. The little lotus eater slept an unawakening sleep, most sweet, like death. Her chest rose and fell like the swell of the sea. Such terrible beauty, Daniela thought as she closed her daughter’s door.
To work. Odysseus spent ten years coming from Troy to Ithaca; Daniela had already taken much longer to get started.
It would be an hour before the kids were moving. They were used to getting themselves ready for school without her, even Callie, since Daniela didn’t typically get out of bed until they were just about to leave, but today she would surprise them with breakfast. She could write for forty minutes, then make French toast or eggs and bacon, and they’d be drawn from their rooms by wonderful smells to her sunlit breakfast table.
She’d also have to take all of the papers off the table, but she could do that while the food was cooking.
Milo’s room came next. Her big boy, sweet and strong, the little man who held the family together when things went pear-shaped. She opened the door just a bit and peeked her head in.
He didn’t see her until she shrieked. It was quick and involuntary, the shriek. Better would have been to simply slink away, but if she had to announce herself, it was best for both of them that the shriek happened almost immediately.
“Mom!”
She couldn’t think fast enough to coordinate a hasty retreat and ended up bouncing the door off her big toe, which made the door fly wide open. Milo turned away as he leaped from the bed, covering himself. Daniela reached back in and wanted to keep her eyes closed but she couldn’t find the doorknob so she opened them. She had to.
“Mom!”
“Sorry!”
She finally found the knob—the doorknob, not the…—and then whirled around and slammed the door behind her.
This was not the way to start a new chapter in her life.
She looked down at the door at the end of the hallway, the one that led to her office. “Office” still. This was not the time to sit down and fire up her imagination. Unexpected nudity—“dude-ity,” she would have called it when she was younger—is not conducive to good writing.
Heart racing and face flushed, she went past the next door, the one to Timothy’s room. He was just eleven, but she knew now that only the gods should know what happens in a boy’s room. Even a fool can learn from experience.
Past the “office,” then, and into the living room. The picture shelf had been installed in happier times, specifically for the one family portrait that they took before Gary left and/or was kicked out. She filled the space with annually updated photos of the children but the absence of the big portrait was palpable. Three children with no parents. Father discarded and never replaced. And Mother.
Daniela didn’t want to think about that yet and so she didn’t.
The couches were covered in toys and books because she vowed to never put them away. It was supposed to teach the kids something, but this decision only affected her, since Callie and Tim didn’t mind sitting on books and toys, and Milo was always in his room anyway. Battling his Polyphemus, no doubt.
She let herself laugh at that. She had to figure out how to work that line into a story.
The dining room was the kids’ unofficial study. They didn’t eat here anymore anyway: they either ate standing in the kitchen or sprawled on the floor. The dining room was for displaying wedding china and doing homework.
In the kitchen, Daniela made herself a cup of coffee and looked up at the clock. The first day of the rest of her life, and all she had to show for it so far was a shower and a cup of coffee, and a small scar on her son’s psyche.
She should have been in bed. She had been foolish to think that she would accomplish anything today, and even if she did, she knew it wouldn’t matter. Nobody born, however cowardly or brave, can escape destiny. Daniela thought that her destiny had been to write a great novel. She had it, too, at one point in time, ready to go, when she was younger and more pretentious and owned an old travel typewriter that she hauled everywhere alongside an equally old and even more gorgeous leather satchel. She took it to coffeeshops and city parks, setting the thing on chess tables or coffee tables or just her knees if that’s all that was available, and she tapped away at the little buttons that were the perfect size for her fingers, taking the filled-up sheets and putting them in her satchel to sort them when she got home.
She showed her pages to Gary, back when he would have read them, and even he was floored by the depth of her ambition, and giddy at the very real possibility that she could pull it off.
“Isn’t that what Joyce did, though?”
“No,” she sneered, “it isn’t what Joyce did.”
It was, though, kind of, but Joyce hadn’t been a woman, American, post-punk, ironic and self-aware and ironically self-aware, living in an age without heroes and an era unattached to history, truth, or logic. Joyce had brought Homer to the twentieth century; Daniela would push him over into the abyss that followed.
Then things got in the way. “She loosed her broidered girdle wherein are all her enchantments, and therein are love, and desire, and loving converse, that steals the wits even of the wise.” Something like that.
Maybe tomorrow she’d try making Turkish coffee. She had the little pot somewhere in the kitchen; she could find the grounds in one of the fancier grocery stores today.
“Mommy!” Callie was always happy to see her. Callie was always happy to see everyone. Callie was always happy, and even though she didn’t have any front teeth, she couldn’t stop smiling.
“I was going to make French toast. Do you want some?”
“No, thank you, I want cereal.” A big hug, and then, “I love you, Mommy.”
“I love you, too, sweet pea.” The corners of Daniela’s mouth suddenly turned down to a hard frown, and her eyes danced on the edge of watering up. She felt overwhelmed by the need to call Callie by her real name, but she was still too young to bear the weight of Calliope, and a wave of pressure moved through Daniela’s body until she forced it away, glad that Callie was too happy and small to notice these things.
Tim came next. If he was surprised to see his mother awake, he didn’t let on. Like his sister, he declined the offer of French toast. He sat beside Callie and told her jokes while they ate together. He answered her questions, no matter how ludicrous. He understood her made-up words, and when there was silence, he brooded quietly, darkly mysterious and even a bit romantic.
He looked the most like his father. The same solid eyebrows and handsome round head. He had taken the best of Gary, the warmth and tenderness that used to define him when they were young. He was the only one with a name Gary chose; Daniela allowed it because it was still Greek, though not the right kind of ancient.
Daniela wondered when Tim and Gary would diverge. They had to. Tim couldn’t be all like Gary, because then eventually she would have to hate him, too. Hateful to her as the gates of Hades was that man who did one thing in his heart and spoke another.
Milo didn’t come in until the little ones had finished eating and gone off to get dressed. He’d probably been hiding for as long as he could. He jumped when he saw her, and she pretended to need more coffee, but the air was heavy with things that maybe needed to be said. Maybe.
“You know, it’s totally okay—”
He wheeled on her with wildfire in his eyes. “Oh my God, Mom!”
And stormed out without getting the breakfast that he had come for. O Muse, tell me how all the rage that was in her, all that anger that she had been roiling under her surface calm, came rushing forth at once to flood the entire world.
“Next time lock your door, goddammit!” She’d been masturbating for more than thirty years and nobody—no parent, sibling, roommate, boyfriend, spouse, or offspring—had ever walked in on her. This kid didn’t have the sense to lock his damn door and that was somehow her fault.
She didn’t even want French toast herself. She stood in the kitchen and waited until they were gone. Tim called out “Bye!” Callie gave her a hug, and Milo just went.
She needed to write.
She also needed to call Gary, that goddamned sorcerer captor who kept her from her Ithaca for so long. Once upon a time she had looked at the two pills left in the blister pack and realized that she had made no arrangements to refill the prescription, which meant that she was really going through with it. She could recall that moment almost at will, how her throat closed and her heart raced—weirdly, the same reactions she got from spicy food—and she told herself that it wasn’t too late, she could get more tomorrow with no trouble at all if she wanted to. If she wanted to. And she said to herself out loud that she didn’t want to, that this was the right thing, and that conscious decision was the purest expression of love that she had ever felt in her life and, honestly, would ever feel. Even more than seeing her children for the first time, she was moved by the decision to create them.
For months, she typed and typed and paused only to run her hand over her growing belly. Homer had never felt that, creating a world and creating a life at the same time. Neither had Joyce. Their stories couldn’t have that dimension, and without it their stories had a hole. Daniela would fix that. For a while, she did, cranking out her pages until other thoughts took over and then life itself got in the way.
It wasn’t just the baby. Hyperactive Dani had been slowing down long before Milo came. Because her writing was becoming more ambitious, more difficult, more labored, it created a mask. She was producing fewer pages but they were better pages, she told herself and Gary. And then she was just producing fewer pages, and then none.
And then there were two babies, and then three. And then Gary left and/or was kicked out, and she didn’t even know when or where the pages had been lost.
She needed to call Gary but instead went to her “office.” She looked at the computer that had replaced the typewriter, which was too loud to use in a house with sleeping children. “Why, dear heart, have you come with all these demands of me? I will do all that you ask. But for one moment let us throw our arms around each other, and take our fill of dire lamenting.”
“I’m sorry, Daniela,” Dr. Guyome had said. Just yesterday morning, in a different world. He had been very kind. “Is there somebody we can call, somebody who can drive you home?”
“No,” she sniffed. “I came in a cab. I’ll be fine.”
“You really shouldn’t be alone today.”
She could have ripped his head off. She should have. When had she become so angry? When Gary left? No, before. Long before. Maybe she had always been.
Dr. Guyome continued. “This is usually genetic. We should test your children. Your daughter, of course. And your sons, too, in case they’re carriers. They may have daughters someday, too.”
“Then what?”
“If they’re negative then it’s nothing, the gene stops there. If they’re positive, then, we make the decisions that make the most sense. We test the girls, and we evaluate from there.”
They. A seven-year-old girl and various theoretical little girls, their theoretical mothers still schoolgirls, their fathers still boys, their doom an exotic oviraptor dormant in their genes.
“This type of cancer moves quickly, Daniela. We didn’t catch it last year because for all we know it didn’t exist last year. But now it’s very late.”
“And if she’s positive, then what?” Callie was a baby still but her body might have a trap already set for her, one planted by her mother.
Dr. Guyome hesitated. “One step at a time.”
“And what about me?”
He sighed. He had literature to share, and if she wanted to she could rage. She even maybe should. But the honest answer was surgery, chemo, radiation, cocktails.
“And what does that buy me? Tops?”
“There is no ‘tops.’ Medical advances occur every day. Nobody has ever lived in this moment before, or in tomorrow.”
But her eyes demanded an answer about now.
“At your stage, on average, six months. Some patients, maybe a year.”
“And there’s no chance of success.”
He didn’t nod. “That’s not what I said. This disease is rare, and we don’t have a reliable treatment. I can’t make any promises, except that we will try.”
“And that the treatment will mess me up.”
He measured his words carefully. “I would recommend you make arrangements for your children’s care while you’re in treatment.”
Fucking Gary.
“And if I skip it?”
He put his hands on his knees in a way that answered her before he spoke. “At this point, that is definitely a choice, but not one that I can make for you. But whatever you choose, I will support you.”
She didn’t take the taxi home. Instead, she walked, even though it was a miserable walk along roads that weren’t meant for walking on, and she thought about Homer and Joyce and the book that she had nursed for far longer than any of her children but had never been able to care for. “My doom has come upon me,” she said to herself. “Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that will be told among men hereafter.”
The kids were gone from seven to three every day. That gave her eight hours, minus one or two for housekeeping and eating. She could add all that time back by waking early. Six months to a year. None but Fate could stop her.
Forget calling Gary. She would tell him when she found the time. And the kids…she’d tell them when she was ready. Beyond his strength may no man fight, how eager soever he be. Because whenever she let herself think about it, she would feel wave after wine-dark wave of grief and despair and regret and anger. Mostly anger. Inescapable, all-consuming, eye-blinding, god-defying, wall-breaking, skull-dashing anger.
O Muse, tell how she would write and let all this be a thing of the past, and for all her pain, curb the anger in her breast because she must. “No man may be angry of heart for ever,” she sighed, and sat down.
She had been crafting the first sentence for twenty years. It gleamed like a polished helmet. She typed it and smiled. The next sentence was new. She smiled again, drew a deep breath, and pressed on, creating her world while the Fates ate her from the inside out. Treatment be damned, she would beat this in her own way and become immortal because her story would outlive any cancer and all the mortals and the gods themselves.