Dept. Of Speculation (5 page)

My friend who teaches writing sometimes flips out when she is grading stories and types the same thing over and over again.

WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?

WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?

I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

It’s different, of course, with the art monsters. They are always elsewhere.

It was quite difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no steady lodging or office. He was always on his way through the world and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take
.

This according to Stefan Zweig, one of his closest friends.

The philosopher is traveling across the country, giving lectures at colleges. He sends me his new book. It is called
Stimmung
and refers to the state of mind that precedes a schizophrenic breakdown. It is accompanied by something known as “the truth-taking stare.”

Everything seems charged with meaning. “I noticed particularly” is the refrain of those who are experiencing it
.

I think the philosopher is a little bit famous now. Bright-eyed girls come to his lectures and want to talk to him about how paper thin the world feels. He doesn’t go out with them.
He is holding out for someone who knows how to garden.

I keep forgetting to get glasses. It makes my husband crazy. I ask my most stylish friend to come with me to pick them out. The salesman wants me to buy bright blue ones. Fashion forward, he calls them. My friend laughs. “I don’t think they go with the way you dress.” How do I dress? I wonder. Like a bus driver is the answer.

Three things no one has ever said about me:

You make it look so easy
.

You are very mysterious
.

You need to take yourself more seriously
.

I get glasses that are a little bit fashion backward.
If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be filled with light
.

Just after she turns five, my daughter starts making confessions to me. It seems she is noticing her thoughts as thoughts for the first time and wants absolution. I think she must be
Catholic after all.
I thought of stepping on her foot, but I didn’t. I tried to make her a little bit jealous. I pretended to be mad at him
. “Everybody has bad thoughts,” I tell her. “Just try not to act on them.”

At night before she goes to bed, we look at pictures of cute animals on the Internet. My husband shows me how far back the meme goes, all the way back to a big ugly cat saying: I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?

But my daughter is not impressed. “When can we see real animals?” she says. She wants a dog. We decide that for her birthday she can have a cat. Better for the city, my husband says. Why make a dog miserable?

Sometimes she will come in complaining about seeing things when she closes her eyes at night. Streaks of light, she says. Stars.

My husband has taken to calling me Bizarro Wife. Because when he decided not to drink anymore I talked him out of it. Because I said
once that he looked sexy smoking. Because I’ll give him a blow job anytime he wants, but mostly am too tired for sex. Also because I’m always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we’ll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid.

My husband doesn’t believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese. I often read catalogs meant for the rich.

But lately I’m like a beatnik in a movie.
Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let’s be pure of heart again!

I have lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in years. She orders things I’ve never heard of, sends back a piece of middling fish. I tell her various schemes to redeem my life. “I’m so compromised,” she says.

I’m spending a lot of time online trying to buy a deserted ramshackle bungalow colony. As soon as I find one (and the money to buy it), I’m going to get ten friends to stay up there with us all summer. Kind of a commune minus the hallucinogenic drugs and the mate swapping. My husband is unmoved by my scheme. “I don’t see how it will really affect me,” he says. “I still have to go to work every day.”

We find another apartment finally. The packing is epic, orchestrated for weeks and weeks. On the last day, the philosopher comes over and helps us drag the piano out onto the street. We put a sign on it.
DON
’
T TAKE
.

In the elevator of the new building, my daughter pushes the button for the eleventh floor. “If there were a fire, we’d have to take the stairs,” I say. “But what if there were a
flood?” There won’t be, I tell her, not lying. For once, not.

Sometimes on the subway platform I still sway, imagining her in my arms.

Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils
eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car
.

As we’re walking home from the grocery store, the plastic bags I am carrying, three to a hand, twist around my wrists. I stop and try to untwist them. There is a white band on one wrist now where the blood has fled. “Mommy,” she says. “I will help you. Mommy, stand still. Mommy, let me spin them!” I let her spin them.

Three questions from my daughter:

Why is there salt in the sea?

Will you die before me?

Do you know how many dogs George Washington had?

Don’t know.

Yes. Please.

36.

My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.

We have been there once before, when she stuck a plastic jewel up her nose by mistake. I tried to get it out with tweezers while my husband talked me through it on the phone, but it just went farther in. He took a cab from the city to meet us there. On the way to the hospital, she sobbed and sobbed. “Has anyone ever done this before? Has any kid ever done something like this before? Ever?” At the emergency room, we perched ridiculously on the edge of our seats, waiting for our name to be called. Hours passed. Jewel up nose = lowest mark on the triage scale.

Later my husband said, “I should have remembered this. You are only supposed to
do that if you can remain very calm. Were you very calm?”

This time she is sobbing so hysterically that they can’t get the X-ray for her wrists. The technician does my left hand to show her what it is. He holds the film up to the light and we all look at it. Here is the bone, shot through with emptiness, the solid ring, the haze of flesh. I think of a boy I met once on a bus who told me he was a Christian Scientist. He said they believed in idealism, which means that only the soul is real. He said once he fell off a jungle gym at school and they thought he had broken his foot, but in truth he had not broken any bones and had no pain as there were no such things as bones and pain, but only mind that could feel nothing. I remember that I wanted to be a Christian Scientist then. But in time this passed.

Afterwards, incredibly, they give her morphine. She begins to talk dreamily about doughnuts. How she will get a dozen as a
reward for this and take one bite out of each of them.

We take our daughter to the doctor’s office to get the casts. After he puts them on, he warns her not to drop anything in them. “If you do, you will have to come back and have them removed, then put on again under anesthesia,” he says. We leave the office.

Something fell into my cast
.

What?

I don’t know
.

But you’re sure something did?

No, maybe. Maybe I just thought it
.

You just thought it?

No, I felt it
.

You felt it?

Maybe
.

What was it?

I don’t know. Something
.

What?

Nothing, I think. Maybe something
.

What?

Nothing. No, something
.

We wash her hair in a bucket, try to scratch her wrists with a chopstick. It is summer and she cries because she wants to swim.

What Wittgenstein said:
What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body
.

One night we let her sleep in our room because the air conditioner is better. We all pile into the big bed. There is a musty animal smell to her casts now. She brings in the night-light that makes fake stars and places it on the bedside table. Soon everyone is asleep but me. I lie in our bed and listen to the hum of the air conditioner and the soft sound of their breathing. Amazing. Out of dark waters, this.

On our seventh anniversary, my husband plays a song for me, but it’s almost too sad to hear. It’s about marriage and who will go first.
One of us will die inside these arms
is the chorus.

Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

He misses his piano, I think. But he doesn’t talk about it. I give him a recording of Edison explaining his phonograph.

Your words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke them in … This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx
,
dumb voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to whisper against this iron diaphragm
.

Our words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of this instrument and so we try as much as we can to speak kindly to each other.

When we met, he wore glasses he’d had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones.

I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, “I’ve always hated bangs actually.”

My sister shakes her head at this story. “You have a kid-glove marriage,” she says.

She’s moving to England. That bastard husband of hers.

The almost astronaut has become obsessed with
Voyager 1
and
Voyager 2
and the Golden Record. He’d like me to put everything that’s ever been written about them into his manuscript. I tell him I think the story is too well-known, that we should look for something less expected. But he shakes his head. “Give the people what they want. That’s the first rule of business.” He made his fortune selling bug zappers. Last year, I got one as a Christmas present. I ask him what the second rule of business is. “Always be efficient,” he says.

I think about this rule. What would my life be like if I followed it? It is true that the almost astronaut never wastes a minute. There are always energy bar wrappers in the bathroom trash can. He eats while on the toilet.

That night, my daughter asks me to read to her from a book her teacher has given her.

In it, alliteratively named animals go on extremely modest adventures and return with lessons learned. A child in a wheelchair is thoughtfully penciled in in the background. My daughter yawns as I finish it. “Tell me a better story,” she says.

I tell her about
Voyager 1
and
2
and the Golden Record. They were like messages in a bottle, I explain, but thrown into outer space instead of the ocean. My daughter is mildly interested. She wants to know what sounds were recorded for the aliens. I find the list and read it to her.

Music of the Spheres

Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder

Mud Pots

Wind, Rain, Surf

Crickets, Frogs

Birds, Hyena, Elephant

Whale Song

Chimpanzee

Wild Dog

Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter

The First Tools

Tame Dog

Herding Sheep, Birdsong, Blacksmith, Sawing Riveter

Morse Code, A Ship’s Horn

Horse and Cart

Train

Tractor, Bus, Auto

F-111 Flyby
, Saturn 5
Liftoff