TO: Taxpayers and Moms and things

FROM: Dept. Of Defense (DOD)

SUBJECT: About that 2 billion

First off, forget about the number. The 2 billion that’s gone missing isn’t really 2 billion. Not on our budget calculators.

All we’re saying is that if you superimpose the amount (of money temporarily unaccounted for) to our fair and balanced scale of budgetary relativity, 2 billion in our world is like a month’s car payment in yours. A Honda Civic car payment.  Not even a minivan payment—definitely not one of those grand doodad minivans with button-pocked leather and pop-down movie screens and LoJack for when your grand car is grand-thefted off the Costco lot.  That kind of car payment would be equal to a 4 billion dollar mysterious money walkout.

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I only have so many no’s in me. Same way I was born with approximately one million eggs floating in my ovarian soup, my no stash is pre-determined and constantly degenerating too.

I venture to guess, in my 5.5 years of mothering two kids, I’ve used about 40,000 no’s.  That’s twenty no’s per day, give or take days I’ve guzzled a margarita (less no’s) or was tap-tapped on the head mid-sleep by shuffling gnomes (double the no’s) or been made to feel especially maternally handicapped by say, missing the deadline to turn in a kid’s Superstar of the Week poster, and said kid comes home wrecked because he’ll never, ever be a superstar (I’m allowed zero no’s for approximately a week).

In which case that make-up week might go something like this:

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Today marks a highpoint in my first-term residency at Bennington College: I shaved my legs. It’d been about week. I’d have probably gone longer, at least until home and forced to put on a pair of shorts. But something struck me last night in bed. No, not the seven days worth of itchy stubble. Not a long-distance virtual striptease with PAL. Not a sudden impulse to practice prim and proper. My reason for finally rekindling a relationship with my razor was far more compelling: I was afraid I’d pass out.

My heart hasn’t stopped thudding since my arrival. From sitting in on lectures I find at once inspiring and incomprehensible, to having my work critiqued by some of the most admirable and grand minds in the litscape, to standing forlorn and tipsy in front of an audience and reading one of my own stories, my heart is working overtime. It flits to throat and dips to toes, and seems, at any given point, on the verge of clicking off.

So the passing-out nightmare would ensue: my head clunks the wood floor of the Commons, the paramedics arrive, and for some godawful reason related to the strange rules of resuscitation, they remove my pants. VOILÀ! legs of Chewbacca. And what do you know—there is Philip Lopate, or Bernard Cooper, or Lynne Sharon Schwartz, or Rachel Pastan, or Amy Hempel, or Martha Cooley staring down, all wise consolation.

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