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!”
The credentialed man is talking about the heavens now, about their most ruinous movements. The time lapse shows a field of plants perishing, a mother and child blown away by a wave of red light. Something distant and imperfectly understood is to blame for this. But the odds against it are encouraging. Astronomical even.
Still, I won’t be happy until I know the name of this thing.
12
Advice for wives circa 1896: The indiscriminate reading of novels is one of the most injurious habits to which a married woman can be subject. Besides the false views of human nature it will impart … it produces an indifference to the performance of domestic duties, and contempt for ordinary realities.
It’s true that I am feebleminded at the grocery store. I write lists that I forget, buy things we don’t need or already have. Later, my husband will say, did you get toilet paper, did you get ketchup, did you get garlic, and I will say, no, no, I forgot, sorry, here is some butterscotch pudding and some toothpicks and some whiskey sour mix. But for now my daughter and I stand shivering in front of the meat case. “I’m cold,” she says. “Why can’t we go? Why do we have to stand here?” There is some kind of meat I am supposed to buy. A kind of meat to go in a meat recipe. “We can go soon,” I say. “Just wait. Let me think for a minute. You’re not letting me think.”
So lately I’ve been having this recurring dream: In it, my husband breaks up with me at a party, saying, I’ll tell you later. Don’t pester me. But when I tell him this, he grows peevish. “We’re married, remember? Nobody’s breaking up with anybody.”
“I love autumn,” she says. “Look at the beautiful autumn leaves. It feels like autumn today. Is autumn your favorite time of year?” She stops walking and tugs on my sleeve. “Mommy! You are not noticing. I am using a new word. I say autumn now instead of fall.”
I run into an acquaintance on the street, someone I haven’t seen in years. When I knew him, we were both young. He edited a literary magazine and I sometimes wrote for him. He had a motorcycle but married early, both of which impressed me. He is still very handsome. As we talk, I discover he has a child now too.
“I think I must have missed your second book,” he says.
“No,” I say. “There isn’t one.”
He looks uncomfortable; both of us are calculating the years or maybe only I am.
“Did something happen?” he says kindly after a moment.
“Yes,” I explain.
That night, I bring up my old art monster plan. “Road not taken,” my husband says.
13
I had this idea in the middle of the night that maybe I could stop working for the almost astronaut and get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I’ve jotted down a few of them.
Objects create happiness.
The animals are pleased to be of use.
Your cities will shine forever.
Death will not touch you.
I send my fortunes to the philosopher. He writes back immediately. I am interested in bankrolling you. But I only have $27 in checking.
The next morning a man comes to look at the apartment. He brings his dog with him. “Seek!” he tells the dog. “Seek! Seek!” but the dog just sits there, looking at me.
A week later, I call the man back. I give him tea and cookies. “Here’s what you do,” he says. “Put poison on the mattress, then on the windowsills, then in the electrical sockets. Then just go to sleep in your bed.”
But the kid upstairs knows all about it already. “Can I give you a little piece of advice?” he says. “Throw out everything you own.”
I read an article written by a woman living alone who got them. She talks about how depressing it is to have no one to help her with all the spraying and washing and cooking and bagging. She’s spent all her money, hasn’t had a date in years. I show it to my husband. “It’s true. We’re lucky,” he says.
A few weeks later, they send a note home from her school about lice. Mothers drive across town to the Orthodox neighborhood to see the nitpicker. $100 a head is what she charges them. She is very thorough, the mothers claim. Worth every penny.
But my husband is thorough too. He goes through our hair, then holds the comb up carefully to the light.
“Do you know why I love you?” my daughter asks me. She is floating in the bathwater, her head lathered white. “Why?” I say. “Because I am your mother,” she tells me.
There is a video I have seen, which I cannot unsee, that shows them avoiding the poison by climbing the far wall, crossing the ceiling, and then dropping onto the bed. And another one, even worse, in which a woman films herself waiting up all night beside her daughter’s bed with a lint roller.
What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.
The almost astronaut calls me at all hours now to talk about his project. “I think it’s going to be a best seller,” he tells me. “Like that guy. What’s his name? Sagan?”
“Carl?”
“No,” he says. “That’s not it. Something else. It’ll come to me.”
A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.
14
My husband listens on his headphones to a series of lectures called “The Long Now.” For a long time, I hear this name without inquiring further. It seems to me a useful but imprecise phrase along the lines of “The Human Condition” or “The Life of the Mind.” I am startled to learn it is in fact an organization which seeks to right the wrongs of the world. A brief survey of their website turns up lectures on topics such as Climate Change and Peak Oil. Somehow I had assumed it meant the feeling of daily life.