Sometimes they go too far. Into the rarified air of their art. Painters do it, with cubes and splashes and excursions into the process. Composers do it, at the edges of variations, around the corners of jazz. Decadents do it, venturing through the borders into the dark side, acclimating to the hideous. And writers, even writers, have been known to go too far to follow … into the offputting paths of later Joyce, or Barth, or worse.

Rand could have stopped with The Fountainhead. She made her point when she had her hero declare that he would die for his beloved but wouldn’t live for her. She didn’t need to write Atlas Shrugged except maybe for herself. And a writing for herself doesn’t need to be published. Vanity.

“Okay if I use the shower?” Her son’s voice pulls Sharon away from her indignant reverie. His deep voice. He is seventeen, but his voice changed with never a crack four years earlier. He is checking to make sure she doesn’t want to get into the bathroom in the next twenty minutes. Sam is very considerate that way. He always tells his mother what he is planning to do, where he plans to go. He always tries to answer her query about when he’ll be back. His frequentest phrase is “Just so you know,” and he as often follows it with a recital of his intentions toward homework as he does with an out-of-the-house itinerary. Sharon never considers what activities that openness might obscure.

“Go ahead, Sam. Have a good shower.” She sends the words over her right shoulder through the study door, and then she starts chewing on her thumb. Nothing tastes better to her than the thickened skin near her fingertips, around her thumbnails and the nails on the first two fingers of each hand. Not the cuticles: no. The almost-calloused skin at the sides of the nails, where she rakes habitually with her ring fingers, where she nibbles and pulls at the tips of her index and middle fingers. She wonders if there is any calorie gain or loss in chewing one’s own skin. It hardly matters though. She can only gnaw a little bit before she pulls off the epi and exposes the dermis, or worse: draws her very blood and has to be careful not to blot it on papers, has to apply pressure squeezing her fingertip together, pushing the torn skin against the nail for an amazingly long time.

She twists her right thumb to her mouth, knuckle forward, and she gnashes her lower teeth against the roughened skin. Loving aloneness and the sound of her son’s shower a room away.

“I want you to speak more quietly.” Sharon remembers her father saying that to her three weeks earlier, seriously, while cupping her chin in his hand. Bossy old father. Always forgetting the space between his body and his kids’… her dad is an intelligent loving man but he sends out too many shoulds, and he usually reacts with indignation instead of humor.

“Take your pick,” she wishes she’d said. “Either I won’t have sex, or I’ll eat the foods you like, or I’ll lower my voice.” And as she wishes that, she knows what he’d choose. They’re old enough now her father would pick the modulated tones.

They’re old enough now she starts to understand her parents, even if they don’t understand themselves. They are bright, somewhat happy, and very complacent; they see themselves eyeglasses off, her right leg cocked ahead of left, his shoulders strong. In fact, Sharon’s mother is impatient/impulsive, burning baked goods and pushing against small barriers, all because she never had the vigor to defy her family orthodoxy. In fact, Sharon’s father tries to govern his children’s bodies because he hasn’t yet had the governance of his own. He has always been too responsible.

Oh but Sharon’s mother and father devoted themselves to raising their children. With maternal impatience and paternal control they took the job seriously. Creatively they everyday expected something to go wrong. And wrong rarely came, but they were always prepared. Sharon’s mother cut her thumb slicing cucumbers the wrong way, but the children were unhurt. Her father’s neck chords stood out in fury when his kids wouldn’t eat mushrooms or eggs, but calamity never struck.