Escape into the Waking World
by Mary Grimm
Kathy puts her cup down, one more cup of the thousands we have drunk together, this cup, white with a blue band, down on the table between us. I used to think I had it in me to do something, she says. I used to think there was something ahead that would take everything I had. Now one day to the next is all I can handle. Everybody’s lunch. Everybody’s socks. Fucking shopping four times a week.
Outside there is a little boy starting a fire on a driveway, not either of ours, thank god, not the driveway, not the boy. He has a magnifying glass, the kind that is meant to be held over a book, square, with a handle.
I hate to go home, Kathy says, there’s no control. I murmur yes, yes, and we agree that home is chaos, home is a whirlpool that is always sucking you down, floating with egg-crusted plates, grass-stained pants, toasters that will toast only on one side so that you must turn the bread and turn it until it is the right shade of brown, the right shade that can be eaten without someone claiming it will make him throw up.
Yes, Kathy says, I hate to go home. I think that I think that she doesn’t really mean it.
At work Kathy wears a bathing suit, swims through the air at the side of the pool, encouraging the water-bound exercisers. She smiles, gleaming blonde in her blue suit, calling on the twenty-plus women to breathe deep, to love their own movement through the water. Now though, trapped in the sulky air of the kitchen, we cling to the handles of our cups. Something is chasing us, something dreamed and fanciful, but maybe also real.
I know it doesn’t matter, Kathy says. Everything is the same in the end. Her cigarette smoke drifts, smelling like heated caramel and burnt rubber.
I have nothing to say, nothing I want to say. I am thinking about sweat flesh sex, about trying as we do for the perfect new body, too late now for metaphysical fitness, too late for beauty, but still.
Mary Grimm has had two books published, Left to Themselves (novel) and Stealing Time (story collection). She teaches fiction writing at Case Western Reserve University. Currently she’s working on a dystopian novel about oldsters.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Escape into the Waking World”? On the origins of “Escape”: the start of this was a conversation I had with a good friend, years ago. We both were mothers of small children, which was both smothering and delightful. The conversation was on one of the smothering days. I wrote it down in my journal and then forgot about it for decades. Now my own daughters are in this same place — loving their sons and trying to fight for their own place in the world. I found that I wanted to write about that, and so I did, compressing and maybe dramatizing a little, taking the original (somewhat whiny) conversation to (I hope) a new level
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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