Dept. Of Speculation

43

The wife has a little room now, one that looks out over the garden. She makes a note to herself about the book she is writing. Too many crying scenes.

One day the husband sees a woodchuck looking through the window at them. It is with great joy that they discover that another name for this creature is “the whistle pig.”

The daughter has stopped talking so much about going home. She is building something in the far corner of the yard now. They watch as she carries heavy rocks across the grass and dumps them in a pile. Days pass, but the construction remains mysterious. Sometimes she changes her mind and moves everything a few feet to the right or left. It seems to be some kind of game. “Backyard Gulag,” they call it.

The husband and wife whisper-fight now in the gloves-off approved way. She calls him a coward. He calls her a bitch. But still they aren’t that good at it yet. Sometimes one or the other stops in the middle and offers the other a cookie or a drink.

And then one day the wife realizes she’s driven past the Holiday Inn Express without noticing. Maybe it’s becoming just a hotel again. Not the place where she stood, then sat, then knelt, palms turned down on the bedspread. Dear God, Dear Monster, Dear God, Dear Monster, she prayed that night, shaking like a junkie until the slow sun rose again.

What Rilke said: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.