Dept. Of Speculation

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.

I find a cheap piano and surprise my husband with it. Sometimes he composes songs for us after dinner. Beautiful little things. If it is after eight, the neighbors complain. Anyway, the bugs get in it.

An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country.

A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul.

My daughter has a habit now of rifling through our drawers to see if anything inside might be of use to her. One day she unearthed the bride and groom that stood atop our wedding cake. The groom was discarded but the bride has been placed on a shelf in her room among the plastic pink horses with girlishly long manes. This is a high compliment, I discern, though my daughter does not say so explicitly.

The little jokes of the long-married. “My wife … She no longer believes in me,” my friend says with a small wave of his hand. Everyone laughs. We are all having dinner. His wife passes me something intricate and Moroccan he has made. It is unbelievably delicious.

Are you afraid of going to the dentist?

Never Sometimes Always

I answer “sometimes” but they seem to bump me up to “always.” The dentist speaks carefully to me, probing my mouth with his soft fingers. The hygienist tries to make casual conversation by asking me how many children I have. “One,” I say, and she looks startled. “But you’ll have another?” she asks as she rinses the blood from the sink. “No, I don’t think so,” I say. She shakes her head. “It just seems cruel to have an only child. I was one and it was cruel.”

A Lebanese proverb: The bedbug has a hundred children and thinks them too few.

“Don’t tell a soul,” the kid warns me. “Not if you ever want anyone to visit again.” He gives me some special plastic bags that zip closed tightly. At night, we can hear the bags shifting as we lie awake in bed. The deal is that if one opens up, everything in it is contaminated. Before we leave the house, we have to cook our clothes in a special cooker. Anything we are not wearing must be immediately bagged and sealed. “We’re living like astronauts,” my husband says, inching over to his side of the bed.

The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin. This is what the first man in space said.

A woman at the playground explains her dilemma. They have finally found a house, a brownstone with four floors and a garden, perfectly maintained, on the loveliest of blocks in the least anxiety producing of school districts, but now she finds that she spends much of her day on one floor looking for something that has actually been left on another floor.

I am spending hours and hours at the Laundromat now, shrinking our sweaters and un-furring her animals. One day I forget and put her blanket in. When I hand it back to her, she cries. “That was my best thing,” she says. “Why would you ruin my best thing?”