Status Updates From Accidents in the Home

Partly, it was precisely the singleness of Helly's life that Clare most envied. […] The idea of such empty acres of solitude was a cooling balm against the promiscuous itch of Clare and Bram's crowded little house where every surface was greasy with touching and there was no lock on the toilet door and at night the children wandered from bed to bed.

She imagined a morning for Helly, a parallel place in the world where Helly moved with lightness between free choices, taking a long shower, picking out clothes from her wardrobe, drinking filter coffee, eating a croissant and then a peach from a shallow ceramic fruit bowl on a glass table, looking over a script for a rehearsal she was going to in the afternoon.

Bram got up and went to work. Since then Clare had made breakfast for the children, washed up the dishes, got them all dressed, tidied the beds. She had sorted out a wash for the machine, and hung it out when it was finished on one of the two drooping wooden clothes horses she had to use to dry the clothes in a corner of the kitchen when it wasn't fine enough to hang them outdoors.

Marian's older daughter Clare was supposed to help too, but she had young children and moods and didn't regularly manage it; she was in that baffled, lean, wolfish phase of young motherhood Marian dimly remembered, when you feel you may have been cheated of too many pleasures in exchange for the burden of loved children you can't unwish.

It was impossible to imagine her in the midst of all the palaver of Clare's generation, beanbags and water births, bonding and demand feeding; impossible to imagine hers as one of those middle-class households thrown into a kind of slack excruciated martyrdom for years on end by sleep problems and the crisis of belief in adult authority.

People who don't read often imagine that a life lived with books is serenely truthful, perhaps rather idealistic, elevated to a higher sphere above the trickeries and treacheries of real life. Combined with the children, and the little house without television, and the making of her own bread and the salting of lemons, the books may make him think she is wholesome and sane.