There was a distant muttering on the phone as Michelle’s voice trailed off. Ella imagined her juggling several tasks simultaneously—checking e-mails, reading a review on one of her authors, taking a bite from her tuna-salad sandwich, and polishing her fingernails—all while talking on the phone. “Are you still there?” Michelle asked a minute later. “Yes, I am.” “Good. Listen, it’s crazy in here. I need to go. Just keep in mind the deadline is in three weeks.” “I know,” Ella said abruptly, trying to sound more determined. “I’ll make the deadline.” The truth was, Ella wasn’t sure she wanted to evaluate this manuscript at all. In the beginning she’d been so eager and confident. It had felt thrilling to be the first one to read an unpublished novel by an unknown author and to play however small a role in his fate. But now she wasn’t sure if she could concentrate on a subject as irrelevant to her life as Sufism and a time as distant as the thirteenth century. Michelle must have detected her hesitation. “Is there a problem?” she asked. When no answer came, she grew insistent. “Listen, you can confide in me.” After a bit of silence, Ella decided to tell her the truth. “It’s just that I’m not sure I’m in the right state of mind these days to concentrate on a historical novel.
I mean, I’m interested in Rumi and all that, but still, the subject is alien to me. Perhaps you could give me another novel—you know, something I could more easily relate to.” “That’s such a skewed approach,” said Michelle. “You think you can work better with books you know something about? Not at all! Just because you live in this state, you can’t expect to edit only novels that take place in Massachusetts, right?” “That’s not what I meant …” Ella said, and immediately realized she had uttered the same sentence too many times this afternoon. She glanced at her husband to see if he, too, had noticed this, but David’s expression was hard to decipher. “Most of the time, we have to read books that have nothing to do with our lives. That’s part of our job. Just this week I finished working on a book by an Iranian woman who used to operate a brothel in Tehran and had to flee the country. Should I have told her to send the manuscript to an Iranian agency instead?” “No, of course not,” Ella mumbled, feeling silly and guilty. “Isn’t connecting people to distant lands and cultures one of the strengths of good literature?” “Sure it is. Listen, forget what I said. You’ll have a report on your desk before the deadline,” Ella conceded, hating Michelle for treating her as if she were the dullest person alive and hating herself for allowing this to happen. “Wonderful, that’s the spirit,” Michelle concluded in her singsong voice. “Don’t get me wrong, but I think you should bear in mind that there are dozens of people out there who would love to have your job. And most of them are almost half your age. That’ll keep you motivated.” When Ella hung up the phone, she found David watching her, his face solemn and reserved. He seemed to be waiting for them to pick up where they’d left off. But she didn’t feel like mulling over their daughter’s future anymore, if that was what they’d been worrying about in the first place.
Later in the day, she was alone on the porch sitting in her favorite rocking chair, looking at the orangeyred Northampton sunset. The sky felt so close and open that you could almost touch it. Her brain had gone quiet, as if tired of all the noise swirling inside. This month’s credit-card payments, Orly’s bad eating habits, Avi’s poor grades, Aunt Esther and her sad cakes, her dog Spirit’s decaying health, Jeannette’s marriage plans, her husband’s secret flings, the absence of love in her life … One by one, she locked them all in small mental boxes.
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