things to do in boston when you’re a fraud

There’s a woman I see on the train every day, a blond chick who’s twenty-nine or thirty, and she’s sort of exquisitely lovely except she always wears these long straight skirts and those J.Crew platform flipflops, the kind I used to wear in tenth grade. Since I started noticing her she’s gotten engaged and then married, and she carries a tote bag of no particular repute.

I imagine her going home at night, to one of those old apartment buildings on the other side of Mass Ave before you get to Fenway, and her husband is watching the Sox game and they eat things like baked chicken for dinner. I imagine her mind is very, very calm.

*

I’m writing a novel. That’s what the project is.  Somebody important wants to read it when I’m done so obviously I am a hollering lunatic.

*

We go to see The Town, which I love so hysterically much I want to find Ben Affleck and kiss him on his sentimental face and say, I always knew you were the brains of that operation. I wonder if Ben and Matt are still friends, if they have dinner with their pretty wives, if they call each other to say, nice work, jackass, or what’s another word for love. I sort of know better, but I hope.

Tom says: “Tell me why you liked it so much,” not because he didn’t but because it had more car chases than I tend to enjoy, and I think about it all the way to the bus stop at which point I decide:

“It did everything I want to do.”

*

I bake chocolate chip banana bars, which are delicious. I babysit. I finish Consider the Lobster and feel smug. I make to-do lists with the express purpose of checking items off, staving off panic with a felt-tip X.

Where’s the writing, Writer Girl?

*

In 1998 or 99 there was a series of YA books about teenage girls meeting their favorite celebrities and going on dates with them.

I think I probably would have been good at those.

*

I write a sentence and delete it. I research, sort of. I watch TV. I bang out frantic emails to my word tribe, begging them to fix me. I fear a life spent answering phones. I scrub my face with goat’s milk soap until my skin is tight and squeaky, as if my problem is sebaceous in nature.

“How’d that work out for you?” Tom asks.

“Shut up,” I say, and prepare a complicated dinner.

*

I think I should have gone to library school. I think I should have taught. I think I am hideously, terrifyingly stupid for thinking I could do this, and then I remember that this is all there is.

On, then.