Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

It was still months before we’d tell each other all our stories. And even then some seemed too small to bother with. So why do they come back to me now? Now, when I’m so weary of all of it.

I felt a sudden chill and pulled the blanket over my head. That’s the way they bring horses out of a fire, I remembered. If they can’t see, they won’t panic. I tried to figure out if I felt calmer with a blanket over my head. No I did not was the answer.

My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.

Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching.

I wore a hat and gloves and heavy wool socks made for men.

The reason to have a home is to keep certain people in and everyone else out.

We had told people. We had to untell them.

I remember the first time I said the word to a stranger. “It’s for my daughter,” I said. My heart was beating too fast, as if I might be arrested.

In the past, we’d talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies,

Is she a good baby? People would ask me. Well, no, I’d say. That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.

He is famously kind, my husband. Always sending money to those afflicted with obscure diseases or shoveling the walk of the crazy neighbor or helloing the fat girl at Rite Aid.

he never forgets to thank the bus driver or pushes in front at the baggage claim.

How then is he married to me? I hate often and easily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent.

You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

“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.

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.

If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

Three things no one has ever said about me: You make it look so easy. You are very mysterious. You need to take yourself more seriously.

Three questions from my daughter: Why is there salt in the sea? Will you die before me? Do you know how many dogs George Washington had?

When we met, he wore glasses he’d had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones. I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, “I’ve always hated bangs actually.”

My husband is hunched over his computer, just as he was when I went in. All day long he has been following the news about an earthquake in another country. Every time the death count is updated, he updates me.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe. I remember how he stood there in that turtleneck, an oven mitt on his hand.

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.

There is nowhere to cry in this city. But the wife has an idea one day. There is a cemetery half a mile from their apartment. Perhaps one could wander through it sobbing without unnerving anyone.

I am not very observant, the wife thinks. Once her husband bought a dining room table and it wasn’t until dinnertime that she noticed it. By then he was angry. These are the sorts of things they talk about in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings.

Evolution designed us to cry out if we are being abandoned. To make as much noise as possible so the tribe will come back for us.

When she tells people she might move to the country, they say, “But aren’t you afraid you’re going to get lonely?” Get?

She has wanted to sleep with other people, of course. One or two in particular. But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn’t dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

She investigates the cost of cars, of heat, of health insurance. She makes a plan a, a plan b, a plan c and d and e. Of these, only one involves the husband.