Dept. Of Speculation (3 page)

Later, I am talking on the phone to my sister. I walk outside with the baby on my shoulders. She reaches out, puts something in her
mouth, and chokes on it. “Hold her upside down!” my sister yells. “Whack her hard on the back!” And I do until the leaf, green, still beautiful, comes out in my hand.

I develop an abiding interest in emergency precautions. I try to enlist my husband’s help in this. I ask him to carry a pocketknife and a small flashlight in his backpack. Ideally, I’d like him to have one of those smoke hoods that doubles as a parachute. (If you are rich and scared enough you can buy one of these, I have read.) He thinks I have a morbid imagination. Nothing’s going to happen, he says. But I want him to make promises. I want him to promise that if something happens he won’t try to save people, that he’ll just get home as fast as he can. He looks shaken by this request, but still I monster on about it.
Leave behind the office girl and the old lady and the fat man wheezing on the stairs
. Come home, I tell him. Save her.

A few days later the baby sees the garden hose come on and we hear her laughing.

All my life now appears to be one happy moment
. This is what the first man in space said.

Later, when it’s time to go to bed, she puts both legs in one side of her footy pajamas and slyly waits for us to notice.

There is a picture of my mother holding me as a baby, a look of naked love on her face. For years, it embarrassed me. Now there is a picture of me with my daughter looking exactly the same way.

We dance with the baby every night now, spinning her round and round the kitchen. Dizzying, this happiness.

She becomes obsessed with balls. She can spot a ball-shaped object at one hundred paces.
Ball
, she calls the moon.
Ball. Ball
. On nights when it is obscured by clouds, she points angrily at the darkness.

My husband gets a new job, scoring soundtracks for commercials. The pay is better.
It has benefits. How is it, people ask. “Not bad,” he says with a shrug. “Only vaguely soul-crushing.”

She learns to walk. We decide to have a party to show off how persony she has become. For days beforehand, she asks me over and over, “Party now? Party now?” On the night of the festivities, I pull her wispy hair up into a ponytail. “She looks like a girl,” my husband says. He seems amazed. An hour later, the guests stream in. She weaves her way in and out of them for five minutes, then tugs on my sleeve. “No more party!” she says. “Party done! Party done!”

Her favorite book is about firemen. When she sees the picture, she will mime ringing the bell and sliding down the pole.
Clang, clang, clang goes the fire engine bell. The men are on their way!

My husband reads the book to her every night, including very very slowly the entire copyright page.

Sometimes she plays a game now where she scatters her stuffed animals all over the living room. “Babies, babies,” she mutters darkly as she covers them with white napkins. “Civil War Battlefield,” we call it.

One day she runs down the block by herself. I am terrified she’ll forget to stop at the end. “Stop!” I scream at her. “Stop! Stop!”

“Just keep her alive until she’s eighteen,” my sister says. My sister has two daredevil boys, fraternal twins. She lives in the country but is always threatening to move to England. Her husband is British. He would like to solve all their problems with boarding school and compulsory backgammon. He has never liked it here. Weak-minded, he calls Americans. To make him happy, my sister serves boiled meat for dinner and makes the peas mushy.

Some punk rock kids move into the apartment above us. Our landlord lives in Florida so he asks us to keep an eye on them. My husband helps them carry up their three pieces of furniture and giant stereo system. I like them right away; they remind me of my students—smart, jittery, oddly earnest. “That’s cool, you guys are married,” the girl tells me one day, and the boy nods too as if he means it.

I have a chunk of vomit in my hair, I realize right before class.
Chunk
is maybe overstating it, but yes, something. I wash my hair in the sink. I am teaching a class called “Magic and Dread.”

Sometimes I find myself having little conversations in my head with the punk rock kids upstairs.

You know what’s punk rock about marriage?

Nothing
.

You know what’s punk rock about marriage?

All the puke and shit and piss
.

My husband comes into the bathroom, holding a hammer. He is talking, reciting a litany of household things. “I fixed the wobbly chair,” he tells me. “And I put a mat under the rug so that it won’t ride up again. The toilet needs a new washer though. It won’t stop running.” This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

People keep telling me to do yoga. I tried it once at the place down the street. The only part I liked was the part at the end when the teacher covered you with a blanket and you got to pretend you were dead for ten minutes.
“Where is that second novel?” the head of my department asks me. “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

We used to call her
Little. Little, come here
, we’d say.
Little, unhand the cat
, but then one day she won’t let us. “I am big,” she says and her face is stormy.

My old boss calls me to ask if I am looking for work. A rich man he knows needs someone to ghostwrite his book about the history of the space program. “The job pays well,” he says, “but the guy’s a total dick.” I tell my husband about it. Yes, yes, yes, he says. It turns out we’re running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips.

What Fitzgerald said:
Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in. Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell
.

So I meet with the rich man. It’s a spectacularly ill-conceived project. He wishes to talk first about the making of the space program,
then about the space race, then in the middle tell his own aggrieved story of almost but not quite making it into orbit. He’ll end the book with a proposal for how we might colonize the universe, complete with elaborate technical documents of his own devising. “Sounds good,” I say. “People like space.” The almost astronaut is pleased. He gives me a check. “It’s going to be a big book,” he says. “Big!”

Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself.

What do you want?

I don’t know
.

What do you want?

I don’t know
.

What seems to be the problem?

Just leave me alone
.

A boy who is pure of heart comes over for dinner. One of the women who is dabbling with being young again brings him. He holds
himself stiffly and permits himself only the smallest of smiles at our jokes. He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. “You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones,” someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.

Do not jump off a wall. Do not run in the street. Do not strike your head with a stone just to see what this will do
.

Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.

In 1897, a French doctor named Hippolyte Baraduc conducted a series of photographic experiments. He hoped to prove that the soul does indeed reside in the body and leaves it at the moment of death. He fastened a live pigeon to a board with its wings outstretched, then placed a photographic plate on its chest and secured it tightly. As he’d hoped, when he cut the pigeon’s throat the plate depicted
something. The soul leaving took the form of curling eddies, he said.

Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could an object attract or repel?

One day I see the dog-walking man kicking a mattress on the street. He kicks and kicks it.
BUGS, NO GOOD, VERY BAD
someone had written on it in red paint.

Baraduc claimed to be able to photograph emotions. “Hate, joy, grief, fear, sympathy, piety, & etc. No new chemical is necessary to obtain these results. Any ordinary camera will do it.” He sought out emotionally agitated people, then held light-proof paper a few inches from their heads. He found that the same emotion would make the same kind of impression upon the photographic plate, but that different emotions produced different images. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.

There are always other mothers at the school. Some of them arrive early, and because of this it is the same ones who notice every day if I am late. These are the same mothers, the early ones, who are also good at remembering what to bring on a given day. You might have to bring a picture of your child and her father, or suntan lotion, or an empty egg carton which is to be transformed into something. Because there are mothers like me who are sometimes late to school, the teachers have built a grace period into each day. There is choice time at the beginning of the morning and if this is missed by your child it is bad, of course, but not terrible. It is not like missing circle time, where they talk about how a flower grows and what it needs (water, sun) or how we humans too are animals or how the planets are particularly arranged nearest to and farthest from the sun. All of the children know that Pluto has been demoted and they shriek with glee if their older, slower parents forget this. There
is also a grace period when it comes to the bringing in of things. The day the egg carton is due is not the real day but the day before it is really really necessary, before it is really really a catastrophe not to have it. And then, even then, some teachers make provisions for the moms who forget. They may bring extra cartons or receive extras from some of the other mothers, the rememberers, the ones who are always early.

There is a story about a prisoner at Alcatraz who spent his nights in solitary confinement dropping a button on the floor then trying to find it again in the dark. Each night, in this manner, he passed the hours until dawn. I do not have a button. In all other respects, my nights are the same.

There is still such crookedness in my heart. I had thought loving two people so much would straighten it.

What the Yoga People say:
None of this is banal, if only you would attend to it
.

All right then, this thing clogging the sink. I reach my hand into the murky water, fiddle with the drain. When I pull it back out, my hand is scummed with grease.

My husband clears the table. Bits of meat cling to the plates, a soggy napkin floats in gravy.
In India, they say, there are men who eat only air
.

Someone has given my daughter a doctor’s kit. Carefully, she takes her own temperature, places the pressure cuff around her arm. Then she takes the cuff off and examines it. “Would you like to be a doctor when you grow up?” I ask her. She looks at me oddly. “I’m already a doctor,” she says.

I would give it up for her, everything, the hours alone, the radiant book, the postage stamp in my likeness, but only if she would consent to lie quietly with me until she is eighteen. If she would lie quietly with me, if I could bury my face in her hair, yes, then yes, uncle.

She is a good teacher but VERY anecdotal
.

No one would call her organized
.

She seems to care about her students
.

She acts as if writing has no rules
.

“Where is the funny?” my husband says, clicking the remote. “Bring me the funny.”

What Keats said:
No such thing as the world becoming an easy place to save your soul in
.

Our beautiful Italian babysitter tells me she broke up with her boyfriend. I know him, a serious young musician who adored her. “What did he do?” I say. She makes herself a cup of tea. “He cried like a clown.”

When my daughter comes home, her fingers are indelibly red and black. “Look at your hands! What happened to them?” my husband says. She looks at her hands. “I guess it is my responsibility,” she tells him.

“Were the parties always so dull?” I ask my husband as we stand at the bank machine, getting money for the babysitter. He puts the bills into his wallet. “That was a $200 party,” he tells me.

The Buddhists say that wisdom may be attained by reaching the three marks. The first is an understanding of the absence of self. The second is an understanding of the impermanence of all things. The third is an understanding of the unsatisfactory nature of ordinary experience.

“Everything that has eyes will cease to see,” says the man on the television. He looks credentialed. His hair has a dark gleam to it. His voice is like the voices of those people who hand out flyers on the subway, but he’s not talking about God or the government.

“When is everyone coming?” my daughter says. “Isn’t everyone coming?” She drags her dollhouse out of her room and begins arranging and rearranging the chairs inside it. It is hard to make them as they should be, it seems. One is always askew. She is so solemn, my little girl. So solemn and precise. Carefully, she places the tiny turkey in the center of the tiny table. It is golden brown. Someone has carved a perfect flap in it. Why? I wonder. Why must
everything have already begun? “Hurry,” she murmurs as she works. “Hurry, hurry!”