When I went back to school and started trying to find quiet places to
study, my suspicions were confirmed: There is no quiet place on earth.

My first attempt to find a quiet spot was in the university library
on the silent study floor. I spread my books and coat out over a
whole unclaimed table to discourage squatters and left to collect the
books I needed. When I returned, two students wearing blue scrubs had
moved my notebooks and were sitting at the table looking for articles in medical journals. One flipped noisily through the volume in front of her, dragging an index finger (her own presumably, but I don’t trust anyone who spends so much time with cadavers) down a column of text saying, “pulmonary . . . pulmonary . . . pulmonary.”

Her companion was a few feet away in the stacks calling out “Did you
find anything?”

She called back, “Not yet. How about you?”

“Maybe,” he called, “Come look at this one.”

“Right now?” she asked.

This is when I discovered the depths of my own cowardice. What would
Dixie Carter do in a situation like this? Deliver a withering
monologue about otherwise bright people who are unfortunately unable
to read the very large signs that said SILENT STUDY FLOOR in six-inch
letters? Not me. I smiled at the students who would one
day keep people waiting interminably in paper gowns and made three
trips carrying my books to a new table.

Public libraries were no better. I love that libraries are
active, busy places that aren’t necessarily silent. But I would
expect other adults to remember that libraries are places where
folks might expect enough quiet to do a little thinking.

At my area library, I chose a table where no one else was sitting,
far from the giggling teenaged couple tickle-fighting on the couch
and nowhere near the children’s room. I spread out my belongings
to claim space, and watched, wimpy and amazed, as a woman pushed my
coat aside and chose my table over all the other unoccupied ones,
sighed heavily and took her cellular phone out of her purse.

She made a call, talking at full volume about a grant she was
researching. Then she stood up and walked to the shelves to look for
more books, her rubber thong sandals slapping against her feet with
every step. After several trips to and from the stacks, sandals
slapping, with the phone conversation continuing throughout, a
library employee approached. Maybe the librarian was going to ask her
to keep it down, I thought. I watched over the top of my notebook.

Instead the two women discussed the grant research at great length
beside me as I tried not to look as though I were about to scream.
And again, I smiled a weak little smile, stacked up my books, and
moved on.

At home, a locked bathroom door worked for a little while, but real
studying requires upholstery. Eventually I learned that sitting in my
car in parking lots was my best bet. I could park at the far end of
the grocery store parking lot, lock all the car doors and have the
quiet I needed to study.

Once as I sat in my car in the parking lot of a public park, trying
to decipher post-deconstructionist French feminist literature, a pair
of deer dashed past, looking for a place where they could read
quietly, I’m sure. I yelled after them, “Good luck! You might try
sitting outside Food Lion!”

SOME FRIENDS of ours just moved into a new home. We went to visit and were awestruck by the hardware on the drawers and cabinets (all of it matching and present), the sunken garden tub, the pristine painted walls, the smooth, clean glass with no fingerprints and the coordinated window treatments.

It was tough to come home, where our windows have not responded to treatment. Our bathtub is sitting beside the barn waiting for us to get the room ready for its installation. It might not even fit through the door. One drawer in the bathroom opens with a butterfly clamp. The stairs need to be refinished, and the living room floor is half covered by the particleboard that used to be under the carpet we pulled up last spring.

The floor in the kitchen has a decided tilt— put a ball down and it rolls to the corner.

But there’s a picture hanging on the wall of a young man who was born under this roof, and lived in this house before dying of the wounds he received in the Battle of Shiloh. Next to it is a framed copy of his father’s will, leaving belongings to the 11 children who lived here.

That original hardwood floor that we’re slowly uncovering dates from the 1840s. By the front door, where the oval of glass is wavy and distorted, we hung another photocopied picture, this one showing the road in front of our house as it appeared more than 100 years ago, when it was called the broad path.

This house has fulfilled my Olivia Walton fantasies. I have visions of being a grandmother sitting on this porch waiting for the kids on Sunday afternoons. This house has inspired me to bake bread, paint chickens on the boards that fall off of the barn, and dream of making this a working farm that grows something so unusual and lucrative that I can spend whole days here instead of commuting to a job that pays enough to cover the mortgage.

We don’t have a garbage disposal or wall-to-wall carpeting or French doors. But we have an incredible view of tobacco, corn, soybeans and cotton stretching nearly as far as we can see. And we have a story of a couple named Henry and Permelia, who built this house in 1829, and added on to make room for those 11 children. The graves we can’t quite see from the window are likely theirs. I’d like to think they’re happy this house has little kids to abuse it again, with parents doing the best they can to keep up with all that the place needs. I’d like to think that Permelia stood in the yard and threw bread to chickens and geese the way we do, and that she walked the hall at night, checking on the children before she went to sleep herself.

No offense to my friends.I think they bought a beautiful home in a nice neighborhood where fancy coffee and exotic groceries are five minutes away. They’ll be happy there, and their children will probably achieve higher standardized test scores than ours and get into the right fraternities.

But we bought more than a house. We bought a story.

YOU’VE SEEN the magazine ads. There’s a village with all the houses facing a winding canal instead of a street — sort of a miniature Venice, without the pigeons.

It is dusk. Old-fashioned gas streetlamps line the canal and golden lights glow in the windows of the stone houses.

The ad is for plates or framed prints or coffee mugs with these romantic images, available for five installments. The picture was created by Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light.(TM)

I’ve never met anyone with a trademarked name, and I’ve certainly never met anyone with a descriptive title as a surname. It harkens back to an earlier day, doesn’t it? Sir Lancelot, Defender of Damsels or Slayer of Dragons.

Maybe it’s just as well that we all don’t have titles like that. It might reveal more about what others think of us than we’re prepared to know. I might be Kerri, Bringer of Peace, to my face, but then again, I might be Kerri, Cause of Nausea, behind my back. Your boss might be Carrier of Ulcers or Ignorer of Deadlines. Your spouse might be Burner of Burgers or Loser of Keys. It’s a little reductive.

Recently I heard in a news story that Kinkade has extended the reach of his painted beam of light to the planned community business. There’s now a Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, housing development, where you can live in one of those stone cottages along the winding canal with the gas streetlamps. Is it always dusk there?

How old do you suppose a person might be before a title like Painter of Light is conferred? There might be several titles over the course of a lifetime, making it tough to keep up with old friends.

Hey, did you hear about Jane, Carrier of Extra Pounds? Didn’t she used to be Jane, Wearer of Size 2? What happened to her?

You didn’t know? She married John, Fryer of Lard, and they had four kids. She hangs out on weekends with her friend Marge, Wearer of Tarps, and they bake brownies all day. But her sister Renee, Stapler of Stomach — now, she kept her figure and married that lawyer Bruce, Chaser of Ambulances. They bought a house in that Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, village that went up. Lost their dog in that canal when it rained in the spring, and can’t use the front yard at all — you wouldn’t believe the things that wash up on the doorstep. And when the tide’s low, the smell isn’t so romantic, trust me. But otherwise, they love it there.

What do you suppose were the titles Kinkade nixed? Merchandiser Without Restraint? Robber of Readers of Parade? Competitor for the Franklin Mint?

I shall remain, Kerri, Keeper of Cash, and avoid the temptation to begin an installment plan for one of those commemorative plates. But if someone wanted to start calling me Kerri, Bringer of True Wisdom, I wouldn’t object.

My mother is still here. The evidence is everywhere. There are cuttings of six different types of plants rooted in water in bottles on the kitchen windowsill. There are half-finished craft projects and yards of fabric in plastic grocery bags and piles of clothes no one can wear but are too good to discard or give away. Even though my husband never met my mother, he keeps her memory alive through stacks of saved newspapers in a laundry basket and twist ties from bread wrappers stowed away in the kitchen drawers. Lately I’ve even been known to save rubber bands on doorknobs.

When a friend gave me a photograph of myself, I was surprised to see my mother where I should have been. Not only has she entered my bathroom mirror, but she’s also standing in for me at social events.

I’m not speaking metaphorically here. This is a scientific phenomenon documented by my friends as well. We also have enough of us experiencing strange inaccurate readings on our bathroom scales to verify a significant increase in the pull of gravity—something akin to global warming. The fact that it seems to affect females over forty who are underrepresented in the scientific community is only more proof of a vast conspiracy to keep this environmental shift a secret. I blame the current administration.

But back to my mother’s recent manifestations, I’ve also been channeling her voice as I rant to no one in particular about how hard I worked to decorate our living room on a shoestring, and how glad I am that I’ve never had enough money to buy new furniture since it would be even more upsetting to see GOOD upholstery ruined by indoor animals and the abuse of children. That was my mother talking, not me.

Like my mother before me, I am a dabbler. I can pull off a variety of creative acts, from doodling a decent sketch of a duck’s head on the back of a school board meeting agenda, singing in a voice I blush to admit a music professor once remarked was “very human” (faint praise, but I felt vindicated, somehow), and tossing off witty repartee—sometimes during the actual conversation, but more often in my slightly embellished recounting of the episode later. And just since my daughter turned thirteen, I have developed my mother’s uncanny ability to exasperate teenage girls.

This December will mark seventeen years since my mother supposedly died. Now I know the truth. She’s still here. She’s still right here.

SELFLESSNESS MAY BE A FEMALE TRAIT, BUT DO WE HAVE TO INDULGE IT?

I wonder when it starts. Do tiny female embryos begin life saying, "No, really, I'm fine. You just go ahead," to the various items floating by in the amniotic fluid?

I've read that female babies cry sympathetically when they hear others in the hospital nursery start to wail. Is it because their reveries were interrupted by the noise or because they're trying to show support for each other? Or are they just frustrated that they can't climb out and fetch a bottle for the kid in the next cradle?

Whenever it begins, there seems to be an innate tendency, encouraged enthusiastically by the rest of the world (read that dad and the kids), for females, even in the modern Western world in the '90s, to feel they were born to serve, always putting others first or facing the guilt if they don't.

I certainly don't claim to be especially unselfish on the big issues. I insist that toilet seats be returned to the down position and that we stop to look in the antiques stores on our way home from vacation, or that we ask for directions when we get lost.

Yet I do notice in myself a weird sense of responsibility for the happiness of everyone in my line of sight, at my own expense if necessary. I'll admit some of it is a little crazy. What is that twinge of guilt I feel when something good comes on TV, and I am the only one to see it? Why do I feel compelled to run to the phone to make sure it doesn't belong just to me?

And watch me around the fried chicken. I feel no guilt about having the highly competent teenaged staff at the fast-food counter cook the stuff, but I'd never be the one to take a good part. Save me the wing. I'll just sit here and eat it in the dark.

Maybe it isn't just me. Traditionally female careers are service-oriented, with many of us clumped in jobs that pretty much require us to be selfless and uncomplaining. And how many of us become the office mom - remembering the birthdays, watering the plants, buttoning everyone's coats before we send co-workers home?

All this selflessness is wonderful when it springs genuinely from a person's nature. And it's great to be on the receiving end. But what if we all wake up one day and just don't feel like it? What about all of us who happen to have the biological parts and hormones but not the sweet, giving spirit? How about all of us selfish, grumpy, tired females who want the best piece of chicken? We get Part 2 of the female equation: guilt.

Watch me and count the apologies. I'm sorry about the weather, the traffic, the cover charge, that I didn't keep you from making the mistake, that I didn't know what you were thinking. And if you tell me I apologize too much, well, I'm sorry about that, too.

Am I the only one who feels this way? Can I start a new anti-selflessness movement? We could revolt. Refuse to be put on hold. Just say no to sending those sappy greeting cards with bad poetry written in flowing script. Strike the phrase ``Oh that's all right'' from our vocabularies. Let's do it. Let's declare Monday to be a day of celebration: a National Day of Maternal Absolution.

Meet me for lunch. We'll order all white meat.