Dept. Of Speculation

11

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.

Personality Questionnaire

1. I enjoy the sensation of speeding in a car.

2. Others know me by the long hours I keep.

3. I am drawn to games of chance.

4. Parties make me nervous.

5. I eat more quickly than other people.

6. Friends have called me thin-skinned.

7. I prefer indoor activities.

8. Often, I fear I am not up to life’s challenges.

9. I would like to learn to fly an airplane.

10. Sometimes I am restless for no apparent reason.

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.

Student Evaluations

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!”

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.