You Are Not the Boss of Me

The romance is gone. I am no longer enamored with Leo's long, complicated sentences. My hand hurts, not my finger and thumb from gripping the pen, but alongside my palm and up through my pinkie, from being curled and cramped underneath as I slide across the page.

I don't want to copy anymore. I dread sitting down to it each day, and yet, I am still strangely compelled to do it. Some days, I get right to it, pages spread out across the kitchen table as early as 5:30am, the only light a lamp that hangs overhead, the sky outside still dark. Other days, I sit and watch old movies, like Inherit the Wind and The Harvey Girls, while I write on a TV tray set up in front of my seat on the couch.

After everyone leaves the house, I trick myself by turning the furnace down to 60 and set up a space heater at my feet, forcing myself to sit in the only warm spot in the house while I copy line after line. I feel a little like Bob Cratchett.

I carry pages with me to write while I wait in doctors' offices. I sit in the car and copy words while my daughter has her saxophone lesson. I even tore out several chapters to take with me on a recent trip to Dallas for a friend's book launch party.

Lately, I have taken to eating handfuls of chocolate chips each time I reach certain milemarkers: the end of a page, the end of a particularly long paragraph, or the end of one long boring conversation inside Levin's head. Last night at the store, I bought another bag, telling myself that I was going to bake chocolate chip cookies for the kids.

The bag is already half gone.

I want to quit. I am grouchy. My shoulder and back ache from stiffness when I get up. I silently cheer each time the chapter turns out to be only two pages. More often than not, the chapters are much longer, five, sometimes six pages. It has been at least fifty pages since I heard a peep out of Anna, or Kitty, or Darya. The only females I come across are the peasant wives, silently gathering up hay or serving tea. I don't care about new methods of agriculture. I don't neet to debate whether sour cream or fresh milk makes better butter.

Where is the passion? Where is the love? Where are the women?

But, I tell myself, I can't quit. I made a commitment, and I have to see it through. Sophie couldn't quit, so neither can I.

 

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