What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.
She will not go to college if that means she must go away from me. When she has a baby, she will come and stay with me for a month and I will help her care for the baby and then she will go away for one day, then she will come back again and stay for a month or a year. She does not ever want to live away from me, she explains. “Promise?” I say. She curls up in my arms, all elbows and knees. “Promise.”
My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles. This is the mnemonic they give her to remember the order of the planets.
Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. “It hurts. Don’t go,” she said. “What does? What hurts, sweetie?” She paused. “My eyelashes.”
Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.
Stop writing I love you, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”
There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m. One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, all the other wives think. Never.
But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.
So now this woman at the playground is telling me about how her husband rifles through her purse for receipts. If he finds one for the wrong kind of ATM, he posts it on the refrigerator, highlighted in red. She shrugs. “He can’t help it.”
What exactly am I waiting for her to say? That she married a fool? That her house is built on ashes? And here I am, the lucky one for once. Such blinding good fortune to have married him.
The wives have requirements too, of course. What they require is this: unswerving obedience. Loyalty unto death.
My husband sits in our kitchen and hand-sews a book. I hope that when it goes through the post office no machine will touch it.
22
How Are You?
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The wife is praying a little. To Rilke, she thinks.
It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth. But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you most want to be happy to be unhappy.
In the year 134 B.C., Hipparchus observed a new star. Until that moment he had believed steadfastly in the permanence of them. He then set out to catalog all the principal stars so as to know if any others appeared or disappeared.
They were in the coffee shop that day he asked her. When were you the happiest? Something she should have seen then, something about the look on his face, the way the air changed in that moment.
So how come it took her a month to think of her own question? The one he answered rhetorically.
Is that what you think this is about?
And then there is the night that he misses putting their daughter to bed. He calls to say he is leaving work right when she thinks he will be home, something he has never done before.
And so slowly, stupidly, she asks the question again.
Why would you even say that?
He falls asleep. All night, she lies there beside him, listening to him breathe. Her whole body is prickling. She feels hot then cold then hot again. I noticed particularly, she thinks. The minute it is light out she wakes him.
That’s not what I asked you.
His eyes, god, his eyes, in the moment before he nodded his head.
Thales supposed the Earth to be flat and to float upon water.
Anaxagoras thought the moon was an inhabited Earth.
Her sister drives in from Pennsylvania at five a.m. to pick up the daughter. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll take her on an adventure. She won’t know anything. Not yet at least.”
What Ovid said: If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it / Though it is as clear as the day, swear up and down it is a lie / Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly attentive / That would establish your guilt far above anything else / Wear yourself out if you must and prove in her bed, that you could / Not / Possibly be that good, coming from some other girl.
Taller?
Thinner?
Quieter?
Easier, he says.
In 2159 B.C., the royal astronomers Hi and Ho were executed because they failed to predict an eclipse.