Dept. of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

Studies suggest that reading makes enormous demands on the neurological system. One psychiatric journal claimed that African tribes needed more sleep after being taught to read. The French were great believers in such theories. During World War II, the largest rations went to those engaged in arduous physical labor and those whose work involved reading and writing.

There is a man who travels around the world trying to find places where you can stand still and hear no human sound. It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. 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.

Blue jays spend every Friday with the devil, the old lady at the park told me.

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

Of course it is difficult. You are creating a creature with a soul, my friend says.

I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

Her neighbor’s husband fell in love with a girl who served coffee to him every morning. She was twenty-three and wanted to be a dancer or a poet or a physical therapist. When he left his family, his wife said, “Does it matter to you how foolish you look? That all our friends find you ridiculous?” He stood in the doorway, his coat in his hand. “No,” he said. The wife watched her neighbor get fat over the next year. The Germans have a word for that. Kummerspeck. Literally, grief bacon.

These bits of poetry that stick to her like burrs.

How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

The wife is afraid. She is afraid again in the old way. She’d thought it was done. Until he died. (“If he died,” she almost said. “If” she loved him so much she contrived to say.) She did say “loved,” she noticed. “Tense! Tense!” the wife has always said to her students, trying to explain that it matters, that it illuminates things.

They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.

Imaging studies have found that the pain involved in romantic breakups is not just emotional. Similar areas to the ones that process physical assault light up in the brains of the recently jilted.

But it doesn’t matter that she returns. He is asleep and when he wakes up he won’t even look at her. “You left,” he mutters. “You left.” A whisper fight and then he is up and dressed. There is something about his eyes that stops her. “You’re not thinking of going there, are you?” she asks him. From his face, she sees yes, he is thinking this. For the first time, she plays the unplayable card, her daughter’s name. “Leave if you want, but not like this. If you do, you are going to change who she is.”