Hearing Voices

The first day of school seems, at first thought, a bad time to begin a new project. And if it were any other project, I would agree. Given that I am channeling the voice of a woman who juggled her own artistic pursuits with those of a successful writer-husband and the needs of a large family and working estate, I wonder if I am already hearing her voice from the past.

If you want to get into my head, you have to do it in the midst of family life.

And so it begins.

I wake at 5:30am to get my 17-year-old daughter off to school. I make a bagel and pack a lunch for her. The dog wakes and lumbers into the kitchen. I feed him too, three scoops of dry food. After the carpool picks her up, I give my husband a haircut. He had surgery on his knee last Wednesday and this is his first day back at work; I have added nursemaid to responsibilities the past five days.

At 7:30, he heads out. My 12-year-old enters the kitchen, complaining of a sore throat. I give her ibuprofen and send her back upstairs to get dressed. She returns, a toasted bagel with peanut butter waiting at the table, her lunch packed and ready. She is riding the bus this morning, but because she has to carry all her supplies for the first day, my 19-year-old stepson drives her to the stop before leaving for his summer nanny job.

It is 8:30.

I wash the breakfast dishes by hand, because the dishwasher had been broken since February. I call the Vet to make an appointment for the dog, who has had pneumonia. I feed the chickens.

At 9:00, I have tended to all the voices except Sophie's.

The plan is to enter Sophie Tolstoy's head by retyping the Anna Karenina manuscript, as she did for her husband. What must it have been like to be a woman, struggling to manage all the duties of married life and also crave some passion of her own? I don't know what I am going to find as I embark on this project. I know I will have to type 2 to 3 pages every day to finish the job in a year. How long did it take her to complete each draft? How many times did she have to repeat the process? What was going on in her own head as she typed the words?

And the biggest question of all: How did she hold on to some sense of her own identity?