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Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 2 am not sick at all. He removed a little mole from my right shoulder and gave me some large yellow pills, tranquilizers! My family will be spared the calm but dramatic scene I had planned. Mark will not whisk me off on a whirlwind cruise. I will not languish on the deck of a Majorca-bound ocean liner. But I can't help wondering what it's like to die, if there really is an afterlife or if all the hymns and prayers and baptisms are meaningless. I think of all the earnest tears I shed over uncountable cats and dogs and birds that died somewhere back in my childhood. Nerves, popping like firecrackers. I've just finished reading DeFoe's Journa1 of the Plague Year, replete with buboes and fevers and ravings. There are no crazy people in my family. Until now. They all have clean red blood and rosy cheeks. Probably none of them have even heard of nerves. I make a mental note of my own particular soundness. I'll not be going to the pesthouse today, dear Mark. Poor Mark, studying to be an anthropologist, trying to go to school, and work, and feed and clothe a hypochondriac wife and four noisy babies. His magazines and newspapers pile up unread, I guess because of all the other reading he has to do. The desk is piled with thick, dull-colored volumes entitled |