Finishing my projects, which numbered precisely four, took up all of three weeks. It was astonishing how much you can accomplish if you don’t have a life. I watched so much TV that my aunt pointed out that I was speaking in phrases that sounded like commercials. “Put your trust on wheels,” I caught myself telling Marie, quoting a tire commercial, one night when she had to hurry to the TV station during a snowstorm. (I would have given my molars to feel and breathe a snowstorm.) Dr. Setnes came daily, and I got to know her better. She was as mellow and given to random positive statements as Dr. Glass had been to flat, dour disclaimers. A hippie in her late forties who’d been a doula before she was a doctor, she said that the way she figured it, there would be plenty of time to feel bad about things. There was no use doing it in advance. “Here’s what I know,” she said, one day not too long after Christmas. “Nature is always contriving, the way Thornton Wilder said.”
