It’s not the first time I daydreamed I was
Nicole Krauss, authoress
all-around good
woman good Jewish but not so Jewish
writer I could aspire towards
and as a matter of curiosity
exactly one day
(perhaps only hours!)
older than I.
But today most of all
when I learned husband
Jonathan
Safran
Foer
(even his name sounds groovy out loud with line breaks forcing teeth against my lips)
cuts up old books to make
new books
Fresh! Magical!
I thought I couldn’t stand to
be me another day
I just want to be Nicole Krauss
just to be married to a man
who thinks up cutting up
old books to make new ones
who writes books called
Extremely Loud
Incredibly Close
and then writes a book
about not Eating Animals
because sometimes he
doesn’t eat them
out of kindness or conviction
and then – to top it all off with an all-natural maraschino cherry –
lives in Park Slope and wears
smart but sexy glasses.
I imagine him sitting there
next to her
at a wooden desk in their house in Brooklyn
(the desk was his
found at an antiques shop in New Paltz)
separating their two laptops is an
antique robin blue typewriter
maybe even with Hebrew letters like
the one I drooled over but
didn’t haggle over
(4000 shekels!)
in the artist’s colony in the Golan Heights.
There is an imposed silence every week day
in Chez Safran Foer Krauss
from 8 am to 12:45 for
Writing Time.
They write and write and write
while sipping organic espresso
a matter that is serious to both of them
but they’re considering giving up
because of stomachaches.
On Wednesdays they listen to
Van Morrison for inspiration.
On Fridays he makes her a spinach and goat cheese omelette
and takes out the recyclables
and this is their life
I imagine
unless one of their kids is sick –
then she is downstairs
on the couch watching
Phineas and Ferb and
gritting her teeth in
frustrated agony
the way writers who are also
mothers grit their teeth.
She considers calling the nanny
but she won’t while he is upstairs cutting up
old books
to make new books
new stories.
She’ll wait.
Or that’s what I’d do.
Wait and wait and wait
and grit teeth
until Wednesday when the fever breaks
and she takes
her laptop
to the café down the corner
and stays there
til the sun goes down
til closing time
so he can sing the kids to sleep
and she can see if her Wikipedia page
is longer than his or
for once write a novel on the napkins
like she’s wanted to for
the last three years
and glue them together
with Juicy Fruit gum.
Fresh! Magical!
Sometimes, she writes
in her journal
how she wishes the internet would break
so she could start over
and find the wooden desk
in New Paltz first.
Or marry a carpenter.
And this is when
I understand why
she is keeping her name
and writing poetry again
and practicing the Law of Attraction
on the door to the cafe
daydreaming it’s a portal
to that kibbutz she volunteered on
in the summer of 1990-something
a kibbutz in the Lower Galilee
a lemon tree in the front yard
that looks remarkably
like the one I see
through my bathroom window.
