Dept. Of Speculation (2 page)

You called me. I called you.
Come over, come over
, we said.

I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come
rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.

I listened to you on the radio at midnight. Once you played a recording of atoms smashing. Another time wind across leaves. Field recordings, you called them. It was freezing in my apartment and I used to listen to your show in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin. I wore a hat and gloves and heavy wool socks made for men. One night you played a track you’d made for me. An ice cream truck overlaid with the sound of gulls at Coney Island and the Wonder Wheel spinning.

It is stupid to have a telescope in the city, but we bought one anyway.

That year I didn’t travel alone. I’ll meet you there, you said. But it was late when we spotted each other at the train station. You had a ten-dollar haircut. I was fatter than when I’d left. It seemed possible that we’d traveled
across the world in error. We tried to reserve judgment.

We did not understand where we were going when we took the boat over to Capri. It was early April. A light cold rain misted over the sea. We took a funicular up from the dock and found ourselves the only tourists. You are early, the conductor said with a shrug. The streets smelled like lavender and for a long time neither of us noticed that there weren’t any cars. We stayed at a cheap hotel that had a view out the window more beautiful than anything I’d ever seen. The water was wickedly blue. A cliff of dark rock jutted out of the sea. I wanted to cry because I was sure I would never get to be in such a place again. Let’s explore, you said, which is what you always said when I started to look that way. We walked for a ways along the edge of the cliff until we came to a bus stop. There we waited, holding hands, not talking. I was thinking about what it would be like to live somewhere so beautiful. Would it fix my
brain? The bus pulled up. Three people were employed to run it: one to sell tickets, one to take them, one to drive. This made us happy. We took it to the far side of the island, where the people looked more curiously at us. In a store, I saw gum labeled
BROOKLYN
and you bought it for me.

We passed the antelope diorama. “10×,” I said, but you wouldn’t look at me. “What’s the matter?” I asked. Nothing. Nothing. But, later, in the gem room, you got down on one knee. All around us shining things.

Advice from Hesiod:
Choose from among the girls who live near you and check every detail, so that your bride will not be the neighborhood joke. Nothing is better for man than a good wife, and no horror matches a bad one
.

Afterwards, we ducked into the borrowed room, fell back onto the borrowed bed. Outside, almost everyone who’d ever loved us waited. You took my hand, kissed it, saying, “What have we done? What the hell have we done?”

When we first met, I had a persistent cough. A smoker’s cough, though I’d never smoked.
I went from doctor to doctor, but no one ever fixed it. In those early days, I spent a great deal of energy trying not to cough so much. I would lie awake next to you at night and try my best not to. I had an idea that I might have contracted TB.
Here lies one whose name was writ in water
, I thought pleasingly. But no, that wasn’t it either. Just after we married, the cough went away. So what was it, I wonder?

Loneliness?

Lying in bed, you’d cradle my skull as if there were a soft spot there that needed to be protected.
Stay close to me
, you’d say.
Why are you way over there?

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out. A home has a perimeter. But sometimes our perimeter was breached by neighbors, by Girl Scouts, by Jehovah’s Witnesses. I never liked to hear the doorbell ring. None of the people I liked ever turned up that way.

Also there were incursions from within. Mice, mice, everywhere. We borrowed a cat for a month, a ferocious mouser, who caught and ate all of them. His name was Carl and I could hear him up all night crunching their bones in the kitchen. It gave me a bad feeling, worse than the scuttling of the mice even. The boy I’d loved in New Orleans had told me once that his father used to kill mice by dropping them in boiling water. I was too surprised to ask then how he’d caught the mice or why he killed them that way, but later I wondered. His father was from another country so maybe that was how they did things over there.

In my old apartment, the mice had cavorted even more openly. They had no fear, not of light or even brooms, it seemed. They lived in my pantry and one night while we were lying in bed, the door fell off its hinges and thudded to the floor. “I think they saved up for that battering ram,” you said.

His mother was visiting when we went to look at the apartment. She pointed out the church across the street. It pleased her that you could see Jesus on the cross if you leaned a little out the window. This was a good sign, she thought, and was not canceled out by the fact that her son no longer believed in him.

When we first saw the apartment, we were excited that it had a yard but disappointed that the yard was filled by a large jungle gym that we didn’t need. Later, when we signed the lease, we were happy about the jungle gym because I’d learned that I was pregnant and we could imagine its uses. But by the time we moved in, we had found out that the baby’s heart had stopped and now it just made us sad to look out the window at it.

I remember that day, how you took a $50 cab from work, how you held me in the doorway until I stopped shaking. We had told
people. We had to untell them. You did it so I wouldn’t have to speak. Later, you made me a dinner of all the things I hadn’t been allowed to eat. Cured meat, unpasteurized cheese. Two bottles of wine, then finally, sleep.

I fed the birds outside my window. Sparrows, I believed them to be.

The woman with the white hair and the mustache always held up the line at Rite Aid. Sometimes I waited fifteen minutes just to buy my antacids. Ever since I’d gotten pregnant again, I’d gobbled up a pack a day. But my big belly never swayed her. She would not be hurried. One afternoon I watched as she presented her items one by one to the handsome young clerk.

“You’re lucky,” she said to him. “You still have it all ahead of you. My sister and I both have genius IQs. I went to Cornell. Do you know what that is?”

The clerk smiled but shook his head no.

“It’s an Ivy League school. But it doesn’t matter. It all comes to nothing in the end.”

Carefully, he bagged her groceries. Toothpaste, itching cream, off-brand candy. “Take care of yourself,” he told her when she left, but she lingered in the doorway. “When are you working again?” she asked him. “Do you have your schedule yet?”

The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.

The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished to exist. This light could be found trapped inside man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it. Because of this, they abstained from sex, viewing babies as fresh prisons of entrapped light.

I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger. “It’s for my daughter,” I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.

In the early days, I only ventured out of the house with her when we were desperate for
food or diapers, and then I went only as far as Rite Aid. Rite Aid was a block from our apartment. It was exactly the distance I could make in the freezing cold, carrying the baby in my arms. Also the farthest distance I could sprint if she started screaming again and I had to go home. These calculations were important because she screamed a lot in those days. Enough that our neighbors averted their eyes when they saw us, enough that it felt like a car alarm was perpetually going off in my head.

After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.

My love for her seemed doomed, hopelessly unrequited. There should be songs for this, I thought, but if there were I didn’t know them.

She was small enough then to still fall asleep on your chest. Sometimes I fed you dinner with a spoon so you wouldn’t have to raise your arms and wake her.

What the baby liked best was speed. If I took her outside, I had to walk quickly, even trot a little. If I slowed down or stopped, she would start wailing again. It was the dead of winter and some days I walked or trotted for hours, softly singing.

What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.

I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-sized islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they’d sprawl out and wake up in water. I can’t remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy.

The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks
that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.

And that phrase—“sleeping like a baby.” Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.

But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine. For once, I didn’t have to think. The animal was ascendant.

I ordered a CD online that promised to put even the most colicky baby to sleep. It sounded like a giant heart beating. As if you had been forced to live inside such a heart with no possibility of escape.

Our friend R stopped by one night to see us while it was playing. “Wow. That is some bad techno music,” he said. He sat on the couch and drank beer while I paced with the baby.
R’s job involved traveling around the world, talking about the future and how we might rush towards it. I walked up and down the hall, listening to him talk to you about the end of everything.
The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck
, he was saying. Twenty steps forward, then twenty steps back again. Thump, thump, thump, thump went the music. But the heartbeat song only enraged the baby. On and on she screamed. “This is intense,” R said after an hour or two. R who is not our friend anymore and began not to be on the night in question.

Then one day I discovered something that surprised me. The baby was calm at Rite Aid. She seemed to like the harsh light of it, the shelves of plenty. For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she’d suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again. So I began to go there with her every day, wandering up and down the narrow aisles while the terrible drugstore music played. I’d stare at the lightbulbs and the cold medicine and the mousetraps and everything looked strange and useless to me. The last time I’d felt that way I was sixteen and lived in Savannah, Georgia. I wore moth-eaten dresses and fancied myself an existentialist. The days were long then too.

We ran into the dog-walking neighbor once on our way there. He seemed to hate everything except my baby. “Serious expression,” he
said approvingly. “Won’t suffer fools gladly.” The baby gave him her thousand-yard stare. She made a little sound like a growl maybe. He wanted her to pet his dog, a giant brooding mastiff with a spiked collar. “He’s a good dog,” he told me. “He hates drunks and blacks and he’s not too crazy about Spanish either.”

Sleep when the baby sleeps
, people said.
Don’t go to bed angry
.

If I knew telekinesis, I would send this spoon over there to feed that baby.

My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter’s meter ticked. In the past, we’d talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished
slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

“Put a hat on that baby,” said every old biddy that passed me. But the devil baby cleverly dispatched with them to ride bareheaded in the freezing rain and wind.

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I’d say.

That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

He is famously kind, my husband. Always sending money to those afflicted with obscure diseases or shoveling the walk of the crazy neighbor or helloing the fat girl at Rite Aid. He’s from Ohio. This means he never forgets to thank the bus driver or pushes in front at the baggage claim. Nor does he keep a list of those who infuriate him on a given day. People mean well. That is what he believes. How then is he married to me? I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves “comfortable” when what they mean is decadently rich. You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.