God is an Astronaut (8 page)

Thank you.

I had a meeting on Monday with the contractor who was supposed to do the dig for the greenhouse trench and pour the knee wall. The guy seemed like he was on the up-and-up but unfortunately the figure he quoted me for a four-foot trench was . . . let’s just say it would have involved Jack and Corinne and a game of rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go to the state school of his/her choice.

Honestly, the money wasn’t the real problem, especially since Liam wasn’t here to veto the expenditure. The contractor was planning on bringing a backhoe up here, and if “Lie low” and “Don’t draw attention to yourself” are the orders you’re supposed to be following, then you probably shouldn’t be taking on a serious home-improvement project with a bunch of preemptively pissed-off neighbors, several of whom might be more than happy to take a break from their praying to pass on tidbits to any “journalists” who are still poking around. (That’s what Liam calls them. With air quotes like that.)

The thing is, though, I’ve started on this undertaking, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop now. I spent this evening after dinner staking out the corners and setting up the batter boards. I’ve decided I’m just going to dig the trench myself. Earlier this morning I ran to Home Depot for a new shovel with a handle that is ergonomically designed, according to the label, to make my backbreaking labor more enjoyable. (I also scored several lavender plants, on sale for cheaper than the dirt they were planted in. Now that it’s getting warmer, I’ve started stashing a few greenhouse acquisitions in the backyard.) If Pa Ingalls can build a house out on the prairie, how hard can it be? And it’ll be a workout to put your whole hiking-in-the woods regimen to shame, no?

Rolling up my sleeves,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:41 am

To: Arthur Danielson < [email protected] >

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: digging to China

I know. Four feet seemed deep to me too. But that’s what the contractor told me I’d need to get below the frost line. Anything shallower than that, and any hard freezes we might get could cause the foundation to shift and drift.
Shift and drift.
That’s exactly what he said.

“Four feet?” I said. I was struck by the man’s unintentionally poetic turn of phrase, distracted for a moment into envisioning the greenhouse peeling away slowly from the house and wafting off across the lawn, like some sort of glass ark full of orchids and heirloom tomatoes. I could see it all so clearly: me inside, Liam and the kids waving reproachfully at me from the dining room window . . .

Then I snapped out of it. “Are you sure that’s necessary?” I said. “Wouldn’t we be OK with three? I mean, what with all the global warming going on, pretty soon there won’t
be
any more freezes. It’ll be like Florida up here, only with more unions and less shuffleboard.”

He—his name was Bernard—gave me a long, hard look. You should have seen this man, Arthur. He was about six foot two, with stooped shoulders and a brown beard weathering toward silver. He had this taciturn, stoic composure. You could imagine him stepping out of a tent on the battlefield of Shiloh. Whatever disdain he harbored, he was going to keep to himself. I liked him, even if he didn’t like me—a tree-hugger academic with a liberal agenda who was wearing men’s shoes.

“Ma’am, you can do three feet,” he said. “If you don’t care whether your addition meets code. If that’s the case, though, then you’re going to have to find yourself a contractor who doesn’t mind cutting corners. I am not that man.”

“No, no.” I said. “Absolutely no cutting corners. We don’t believe in that.” I told him I would call him, and I feel bad that I didn’t. My back feels even worse.

Breakfast rush starts soon, and I have a toaster to reassemble.

Hope you’re at base camp sleeping well, and have a good morning,

j

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday April 18, 2014 10:10 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: Herculean efforts

Arthur,

Yes. Still digging away. It’s taking a little while to build up my endurance, but I’m now able to put in an hour stint at a time. The day I first broke ground, on a whim—no, scratch that, in the interest of science—I went rummaging around in Liam’s shed and found one of his scales. I cut out one foot by one foot by one foot of soil and I shoveled it onto the scale. One cubic foot of our earth weighs 125.32 pounds. It’s clayey, so that’s on the heavy side. The knee wall trench needs to be one foot wide. Its dimensions are fifteen by twenty feet, and four feet deep. So that adds up to—you do the math. I am certifiably brain-dead today.

Our soil’s pH also clocks in at an acidic 5.2 and is chock-full of nematodes. I know this because not long after Liam and I moved in, I brought a handful of it in to work, took a look at it under the electron microscope, and ran a few tests. I wanted to know exactly what we had gotten ourselves into, to arm myself with information. You were teasing me once, and you said something that I’m sure you don’t remember. You said that in my heart of hearts I was more an aesthete than a scientist. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but I’ve been trained in dispassionate inquiry just like you. I believe even laymen have a term for this. They call it “facing the facts.”

I’m sorry to hear about your dream. I’ve been having some doozies myself.

I’ll be careful, I promise. I’ll look both ways before I cross the street. I’ll check the sky for lightning. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m OK. We’re OK.

I’m off in search of some Ibuprofen now.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 4:12 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: some things, say the unwise ones

Glad you got it.

Mary Oliver makes me think of the first time I saw you, you know. I’m sure you don’t remember it. It was my second day on campus. I was putting my stuff in my office. I had my door open and I could hear you out in the hallway talking to a doctoral candidate from Portugal. The one with the unreal waist-length jet-black hair. She used to plait it up around her head in that disheveled yet demure
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
way. You were quoting one of Oliver’s poems to her. I thought I’d never heard someone so full of himself. Reciting poetry out loud like that, in public—seriously, Arthur, there should be a law against it.

Anyways, I had just hung up that bulletin board above my desk. I had been vengefully stapling papers to it, but I had paused mid-staple to listen to you, to confirm just how full of shit you were, when, out of nowhere, you appeared in the doorway behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin and then proceeded to drive the stapler straight into my thumb. All the blood started running down, soaking into the cork and the photo of me and Liam and Jack I had been tacking up. All that gore made things look way worse than they felt, is what I kept insisting to you. And now I can’t remember it hurting at all, only how annoyed I was that you kept hanging around, that you wouldn’t leave me alone to bleed in peace. That picture of Liam and Jack was ruined beyond saving—the whole thing bloodstained and gouged with the jagged staple holes I had punched straight through Liam’s chest. Which was too bad, because it was one of my favorites. Some stranger took it for us when we were at Lake Michigan years ago. In it, the water was shining like it was being mysteriously lit from underneath its numinous surface, and Liam and I both looked like younger, less annoyed versions of ourselves. I can’t describe it any better than that. Maybe I’m just at the age now where all the past is becoming poignant, where it aches the way so-called bygone, allegedly healed-up fractures ache when it rains. I always told myself that sentimentality wouldn’t happen to me, but I’m starting to think it’s one of those traps you just can’t escape, one of those fates all of us are consigned to—like dying, like denial, or like sullying the things we want more than anything to save. You keep talking about global warming and the evidence of plunging rates of coniferous reproduction, Arthur, but I keep thinking about the crumpled Coors Light can you found nestled down in the roots of that pine tree, that jarring, inexplicable eyesore out in the wilderness, miles from anything, far from where any person had any right to be. When you described it, you made that single piece of litter sound like a harbinger of impending doom, and that frightened me more than anything has so far. If you, my beloved, my indefatigable optimist, are throwing up your hands, if you have given yourself over to doom-saying, I don’t know what that means, except that we are really in trouble.

“What are you going to do?” you asked me. It was yet more of your prodding disguised (badly) as a question. Well, I don’t know, Arthur. There have been more developments here, ones that you’re sure to disapprove of, but I don’t have time to regale you with them right now. Paula left on Friday, having used up all her family-in-the-national-headlines leave. That’s what she told me, anyway, although maybe she didn’t phrase it quite like that. I think the truth is that she’s just tired of the crazy people she can’t help, and wants to get back to the people she can. That means I’m on the hook to pick up Jack from tae kwon do in . . . shit, ten minutes ago.

So start your preemptive headshaking now. Or don’t. I don’t give a rat’s ass.

~jpf

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 5:37 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: the sound of one head shaking

Stop twisting my words around. I never said I hate Mary Oliver.

I just think poetry is something people should keep to themselves. It’s a little embarrassing, like being caught with a bodice ripper. I press the covers against the bus seat in front of me, or shield the pages behind my grande latte cup. Or I read it in the bathroom. That’s what I started doing after Liam and I got married. He was only teasing about Jessica Plath, or
po’try
(like that, two syllables), but it got old. Not long after the kids were born, I started doing my reading in there, just so I could have some peace and quiet. Everyone thinks I’m suffering from last night’s fish tacos, and instead I’m sitting cross-legged in the bathtub reading back issues of
Plant Biology.
I turn the hot and cold taps on all the way so I can’t hear the plaintive wailing on the other side of the door. I’m guessing that’s a problem you’ve never had—not being able to hear yourself think—and Arthur, you don’t know how bad it can be.

Speaking of reading, Corinne and I are reading
Little House on the Prairie.
I haven’t read Laura Ingalls Wilder in years, and I’ve forgotten a lot of things about those books. Like how harrowing they are, for one. Wolves, poison gas in the wells, malaria. I was a little taken aback. For all the childish simplicity of the stories, the stakes are deadly high, and it’s not Laura I find myself wondering about, but Ma—Ma, the stoic, going along with all her husband’s gambles, but thinking God only knows what. We never find out either.

Corinne seems unfazed by any of it. She breathes with her mouth open in a dreamy, blissed-out sort of way while she’s being read to, but once I reach the end of the chapter, when I clap the floppy old paperback shut for the night, she doesn’t seem to give any of these extraordinary near misses a second thought. I don’t think I did either when I was her age. Desperate times, desperate measures. To quote a certain
New York Times
reporter.

We were stretched out hip-to-hip on Corinne’s tulip bedspread, reading, when Liam came home late last week. A prairie fire was menacing the Ingallses’ cabin, and Corinne and I were so intent on finding out what would happen that I failed to hear Tristan’s car pull into the driveway. I failed to hear Liam open the front door or come down the hall. I didn’t know he’d arrived until I looked up and saw him standing there in the doorway, and he lifted his right hand, his damaged thumb, and pressed it to his lips, a signal telling me—I took it as such—to carry on. I kept on reading, determined to give nothing away, but at the sight of the gesture, the words on the page trembled strangely and went swimming away. Corinne’s eyes were half closed; she was lost in her trance. She didn’t lift her head from my chest, but she stirred at the tremor and sighed in that guttural, troubled way dreaming people do.