The House of Representatives impeached the President yesterday. Hugh watched the vote in the study with a Scotch and said, "Well," and then went back to the Asian markets, which is how Hugh greets most historical events.

I finished the Christmas cards. Three hundred and forty of them, every envelope in my own hand, because Mother says labels are for dentists. I have a list on index cards in a shoebox, with a code in the corner of each card: a small x for people who sent to us last year, a small o for people who didn't, a dot for the dead. There were four new dots this year. I addressed a card to a woman I sat beside on a committee for six years and could not have told you the color of her eyes.

Last night at eleven Phoebe called from a friend's apartment on the West Side. She's left Grant. No one else, she says; nothing thrown; she simply woke up on a Tuesday and understood she was thirty-six and had been waiting for her real life to start since the wedding. "I'm not going to wait till I'm fifty to be a person, Caro." I said all the right things. Are you safe, do you need money, come here for Christmas, don't tell Mother until after Christmas. Then I hung up and sat in the dark kitchen for an hour and felt something I had to look at for a long time before I could name it.

It was envy. I envied my baby sister her disaster.

Merry Christmas to whoever reads this. Dr. R. says there are people. The little counter on the front page says so too, though for all I know it's only me, checking.

Thanksgiving. The table seats twelve and we were seven: Hugh and I, Oliver and Eliza home from school, Phoebe and Grant, and Mother, down from the Main Line on the train with one small bag and a large opinion.

Mother on the stuffing: "Interesting." Mother on my hair: "Is that on purpose?" Mother on Eliza, who is twelve now and wore black nail polish she had clearly acquired at school: nothing, in a way that made the nothing audible from the pantry. Hugh carved beautifully. Hugh does everything beautifully that can be done with a knife and a schedule.

Phoebe and Grant didn't speak to each other once. Not a quarrel, just two people passing the sweet potatoes across a very wide river. I noticed it and said nothing, which is a family skill, like the stuffing.

In the kitchen, while I was scraping plates because I'd sent Mrs. Duarte home to her own family, Mother came in and stood at my elbow and said, "You have a beautiful life, Caroline. Try to look like it."

I've been trying to look like it for fourteen years. I am, I think, extremely good at it. That is not, it turns out, the same thing.

Dr. R. asked me last Thursday what I did on Tuesday between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon. I said, "Nothing, really," the way you do. She waited. So I went home and on Tuesday I paid attention.

10:00 – Hugh long gone (5:40, the car to the train). Coffee in the breakfast room. Read the paper, including the parts I don't read. 10:40 – Called the florist about the Historical Society luncheon. 11:15 – Walked through every room of the house. I don't know why. Straightened a picture that was straight. 12:30 – Lunch standing up: half an apple, some cheese. 1:00 – Mrs. Duarte arrived. I followed her from room to room talking about her grandson's asthma, because she is the only person I talk to who answers me with something that is actually happening. 2:30 – Sat in Eliza's room. 3:30 – Drove to the drugstore for something we didn't need so I would have been somewhere. 4:00 – Home. Dark by six now.

So it was true. I did nothing. I used to think "nothing" was a figure of speech.

The house echoes now, since September. You'd think fourteen rooms and one woman would be quiet. It isn't. It's full of small noises that have nobody to belong to: the furnace, the ice maker, the clock on the landing that Hugh's grandfather brought back from London, which gains four minutes a week and which I set back every Sunday like a nurse.

We drove Eliza to school on Tuesday. That is, I drove Eliza to school on Tuesday. Hugh had a call at eleven he couldn't move, and kissed her on the front steps, and told her to give them hell, and she said "Dad," in the tone of a girl who has just turned out to be taller than she was in June.

Three hours north. Her room is on the third floor of an old brick house with a fire escape she's already planning to use. Her roommate is from Hong Kong and had already unpacked everything into perfect squares. Eliza put her pillow on the bed and her stuffed rabbit under the pillow where no one could see him and turned to me with a face that said, very kindly, You can go now.

She didn't cry. I made it all the way to a rest stop on the Mass Pike, and then I sat in the car next to a family eating fried clams and cried so hard a man knocked on the window to ask if I needed help. I said I had allergies. In September. He was very nice about it.

Both of them gone now. Oliver went last fall, to the school in the Berkshires where Hugh went at twelve, and his father before him. The Thornes are sent away at twelve, like wine laid down. It's supposed to make them something. I've never been able to find out exactly what, except that it made Hugh.

Mrs. Duarte left a note on the counter when I got home: Soup in fridge. Don't be sad. I ate the soup. I didn't manage the second part.

Written in a notebook on the porch, typed up at home.

The school sent a list. Twelve pairs of socks, eight shirts, two sweaters (one "suitable for chapel"), a laundry bag, and every single item marked with a woven name tape. I've been sewing them in all week. E. G. THORNE, in red letters, three hundred times. My mother sewed mine the same way, for camp, and I remember hating that she did it so neatly. I'm doing it neatly. I can't seem to stop.

Hugh comes up Friday nights and leaves Sunday afternoon. In between he is on the telephone in the little room off the kitchen, talking to London at five in the morning in the quiet voice he uses for money. The fog comes in over the harbor and he doesn't notice. Eliza and I rowed out to the island this afternoon and ate peanut butter sandwiches on a rock, and she asked me if I was going to be lonely.

"I'll be very busy," I said.

She thought about that for a while and then said, "That's not what I asked."

She's eleven. She'll be twelve in October. I have no idea where she learned to do that.

The longest day. Still a little light in the west as I write this.

Tuesday was our fourteenth anniversary. Hugh gave me a bracelet, a thin band of gold with small sapphires, very pretty, very right. The card said To C., with love, H. in the handwriting of his assistant, Mrs. Albee, who has been with him eleven years and has lovely taste and a lovely round hand.

Here is the thing I want to put down, since this is where I put things. I wasn't hurt. I looked at the card and I knew, and I felt nothing at all, the way you feel nothing when you press on a bruise that healed years ago. And that is what frightened me: not that he didn't choose it, but that I didn't mind.

I told Dr. R. on Thursday. She asked what I would have wanted him to do instead. I said I didn't know. She said, "That's all right. That's what we're here to find out." She says "we." I pay her for the "we." It's worth it.

Last night Hugh came home early, for him, to watch the last Seinfeld. I was on the stairs when he laughed, a real laugh, from the stomach, and I stood there with my hand on the banister like a woman in a play, because I couldn't remember when I'd last heard it. Not at anything I've said, anyway. Not in a while.

Then this morning the radio said Frank Sinatra had died. My father had every record. On Sunday nights after supper he'd put on In the Wee Small Hours and do the crossword in ink and let Phoebe and me stand on his shoes and be walked around the living room. I was nine. He smelled of pipe smoke and bay rum.

I played the record this afternoon, the one I took from his house after the funeral, in the living room where nobody lives. Mrs. Duarte came in to dust and stood in the doorway for the whole of one side and didn't say a word, and then said, "My father too," and went on dusting. It was the best conversation I've had all month.

The Spring Gala was last night. It raised a great deal of money for the hospital and everyone said so, several times, in the voice people use for money that isn't theirs.

Hugh looked wonderful in his dinner jacket. He always does. He talked to the men about the market and to their wives about their children, whose names he'd asked me for in the car. I wore the green silk. At about ten I went into the ladies' room and sat on the little velvet stool and read the program cover to cover, including the list of committee members. There I was: Mrs. Hugh Thorne. I read it three times. My own name wasn't anywhere in it. Not even a letter.

On Thursday Dr. R. asked me what I want. Just like that, the way you'd ask someone to pass the salt. I sat there for so long she finally said, "You can take it home and think about it." I've been thinking about it for four days. I can tell you in some detail what I don't want. It's the other column that's blank.

Two hours this morning on the question of tulips versus peonies for the gala tables. Peonies are nicer, but in April they have to be flown in, and someone felt that flying in flowers for a hospital benefit "sends a message." No one could say what the message was. We went with tulips. I suggested, since I had to say something, that we use branches of forced quince, which cost nothing and look like a Japanese screen. There was a small silence and then a woman I have known for nine years said, "Oh, Caroline, you're so clever," which in Greenwich means stop it.

I turned thirty-nine on the seventh. Hugh took me to dinner in the city, at the place with the good bread, and we talked about Oliver's grades and the roof. He was lovely. He is lovely. I keep writing that as if someone were going to check.

An inventory, since I'm told this is good for me.

The house has fourteen rooms, not counting the three bathrooms or the room over the garage that we call the studio, though no one has ever made anything in it. Of the fourteen, we live in five. The living room is where no one lives. The dining room is used four times a year. The library has the books I brought into the marriage in cartons from my apartment, still in the order I shelved them in 1984, and nobody has taken one down since but me.

I walk through all of it at three in the afternoon, before Eliza comes home from day school. I don't know why. To make sure it's still there, perhaps, or that I am. It is a beautiful house. Everyone says so. It is also, I've begun to think, a very well-kept argument that I lost a long time ago without knowing there'd been a debate.

A letter from Oliver today, from school. Three lines. Dear Mom and Dad, I'm fine. We had lacrosse. Please send the blue sweater. Love, Oliver. I have read it perhaps eleven times. I'm sending the blue sweater.

Dinner tonight at the Pembertons'. Ten of us. All anyone could talk about was the President and the young woman from the White House. The men talked about it in the voice they use for sports, the women talked about the men talking about it, and I sat between a surgeon and a man who does something with airplanes and thought about the young woman's mother, who must have picked up a newspaper on Wednesday morning and read her daughter's name.

Nobody asked me what I thought. I'm not sure what I'd have said. I used to have opinions the way other people have allergies: suddenly, and in public. I wrote a paper once, at twenty-three, that made a visiting professor from Rome stand up and argue with me for twenty minutes. I won. I remember my hands shaking afterward and the feeling that I was finally the size I was supposed to be.

Tonight I said the lamb was wonderful. It was.

Dr. R. says I should write things down. She said it the way a doctor says drink more water: kindly, and quite sure I won't. I told her I kept a diary at fourteen and my mother read it and corrected the grammar in pencil. She didn't laugh. She's good that way.

So. A diary nobody can read over my shoulder, which means a diary anybody can. Eliza made a page on here last month for her science project on volcanoes and showed me how, and tonight after she went to bed I sat at the computer in Hugh's study, which he never touches because he has the one at the office, and made this. It took two hours.

Facts, since Dr. R. likes facts. I am thirty-eight. I live in Greenwich, Connecticut, in a very large house. I have been married for thirteen and a half years to Hugh, who trades bonds in New York and is very good at it. We have two children: Oliver, twelve, at boarding school since September, and Eliza, eleven, who goes in the fall. I sit on three committees. I once studied the history of art and got three chapters into a dissertation on the frescoes Fra Angelico painted in the friars' cells at San Marco in Florence. I stopped when I married. I don't do anything now that anyone would call a verb.

I am not unhappy. Dr. R. asked today what I am, then, if I'm not unhappy, and I said, "Accounted for." She wrote that down. I would give a good deal to know what she wrote next.

Why "Greenwich Mean Time"? Because I live in Greenwich, and because I've become, lately, mean, in the old sense: average, middling, the ordinary sort. And because every day here seems to be the same hour.