Dept. Of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

A. Because the insects were killing so many trees that the sparrows were needed to destroy the insects.

  Q. Did the sparrows save the trees?

  A. Yes, the trees were saved.

  Q. In wintertime when there are no insects and snow is on the ground, does not the sparrow have a hard time?

  A. Yes, he has a very hard time, and many die of hunger.

  The woman with the white hair and the mustache always held up the line at Rite Aid. Sometimes I waited fifteen minutes just to buy my antacids. Ever since I’d gotten pregnant again, I’d gobbled up a pack a day. But my big belly never swayed her. She would not be hurried. One afternoon I watched as she presented her items one by one to the handsome young clerk.

  “You’re lucky,” she said to him. “You still have it all ahead of you. My sister and I both have genius IQs. I went to Cornell. Do you know what that is?”

  The clerk smiled but shook his head no.

  “It’s an Ivy League school. But it doesn’t matter. It all comes to nothing in the end.”

  Carefully, he bagged her groceries. Toothpaste, itching cream, off-brand candy. “Take care of yourself,” he told her when she left, but she lingered in the doorway. “When are you working again?” she asked him. “Do you have your schedule yet?”

  7

  The baby’s eyes were dark, almost black, and when I nursed her in the middle of the night, she’d stare at me with a stunned, shipwrecked look as if my body were the island she’d washed up on.

  The Manicheans believed the world was filled with imprisoned light, fragments of a God who destroyed himself because he no longer wished to exist. This light could be found trapped inside man and animals and plants, and the Manichean mission was to try to release it. Because of this, they abstained from sex, viewing babies as fresh prisons of entrapped light.

  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 early days, I only ventured out of the house with her when we were desperate for food or diapers, and then I went only as far as Rite Aid. Rite Aid was a block from our apartment. It was exactly the distance I could make in the freezing cold, carrying the baby in my arms. Also the farthest distance I could sprint if she started screaming again and I had to go home. These calculations were important because she screamed a lot in those days. Enough that our neighbors averted their eyes when they saw us, enough that it felt like a car alarm was perpetually going off in my head.

  After you left for work, I would stare at the door as if it might open again.

  My love for her seemed doomed, hopelessly unrequited. There should be songs for this, I thought, but if there were I didn’t know them.

  She was small enough then to still fall asleep on your chest. Sometimes I fed you dinner with a spoon so you wouldn’t have to raise your arms and wake her.

  What the baby liked best was speed. If I took her outside, I had to walk quickly, even trot a little. If I slowed down or stopped, she would start wailing again. It was the dead of winter and some days I walked or trotted for hours, softly singing.

  What did you do today, you’d say when you got home from work, and I’d try my best to craft an anecdote for you out of nothing.

  I read a study once about sleep deprivation. The researchers made cat-sized islands of sand in the middle of a pool of water, then placed very tired cats on top of them. At first, the cats curled up perfectly on the sand and slept, but eventually they’d sprawl out and wake up in water. I can’t remember what they were trying to prove exactly. All I took away was that the cats went crazy.

  The days with the baby felt long but there was nothing expansive about them. Caring for her required me to repeat a series of tasks that had the peculiar quality of seeming both urgent and tedious. They cut the day up into little scraps.

  And that phrase—“sleeping like a baby.” Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.

  But the smell of her hair. The way she clasped her hand around my fingers. This was like medicine. For once, I didn’t have to think. The animal was ascendant.

  I ordered a CD online that promised to put even the most colicky baby to sleep. It sounded like a giant heart beating. As if you had been forced to live inside such a heart with no possibility of escape.

  Our friend R stopped by one night to see us while it was playing. “Wow. That is some bad techno music,” he said. He sat on the couch and drank beer while I paced with the baby. R’s job involved traveling around the world, talking about the future and how we might rush towards it. I walked up and down the hall, listening to him talk to you about the end of everything. The invention of the ship is also the invention of the shipwreck, he was saying. Twenty steps forward, then twenty steps back again. Thump, thump, thump, thump went the music. But the heartbeat song only enraged the baby. On and on she screamed. “This is intense,” R said after an hour or two. R who is not our friend anymore and began not to be on the night in question.

  8

  Then one day I discovered something that surprised me. The baby was calm at Rite Aid. She seemed to like the harsh light of it, the shelves of plenty. For fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, she’d suspend her fierce judgment of the world and fall silent there. And when she did, a tiny space would clear in my head and I could think again. So I began to go there with her every day, wandering up and down the narrow aisles while the terrible drugstore music played. I’d stare at the lightbulbs and the cold medicine and the mousetraps and everything looked strange and useless to me. The last time I’d felt that way I was sixteen and lived in Savannah, Georgia. I wore moth-eaten dresses and fancied myself an existentialist. The days were long then too.

  We ran into the dog-walking neighbor once on our way there. He seemed to hate everything except my baby. “Serious expression,” he said approvingly. “Won’t suffer fools gladly.” The baby gave him her thousand-yard stare. She made a little sound like a growl maybe. He wanted her to pet his dog, a giant brooding mastiff with a spiked collar. “He’s a good dog,” he told me. “He hates drunks and blacks and he’s not too crazy about Spanish either.”

  Sleep when the baby sleeps, people said. Don’t go to bed angry.

  If I knew telekinesis, I would send this spoon over there to feed that baby.

  My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter’s meter ticked. In the past, we’d talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people—the poets, the mystics, the explorers—were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.

  “Put a hat on that baby,” said every old biddy that passed me. But the devil baby cleverly dispatched with them to ride bareheaded in the freezing rain and wind.

  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.

  9

  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’s from Ohio. This means he never forgets to thank the bus driver or pushes in front at the baggage claim. Nor does he keep a list of those who infuriate him on a given day. People mean well. That is what he believes. How then is he married to me? I hate often and eas
ily. I hate, for example, people who sit with their legs splayed. People who claim to give 110 percent. People who call themselves “comfortable” when what they mean is decadently rich. You’re so judgmental, my shrink tells me, and I cry all the way home, thinking of it.

  Later, I am talking on the phone to my sister. I walk outside with the baby on my shoulders. She reaches out, puts something in her mouth, and chokes on it. “Hold her upside down!” my sister yells. “Whack her hard on the back!” And I do until the leaf, green, still beautiful, comes out in my hand.

  I develop an abiding interest in emergency precautions. I try to enlist my husband’s help in this. I ask him to carry a pocketknife and a small flashlight in his backpack. Ideally, I’d like him to have one of those smoke hoods that doubles as a parachute. (If you are rich and scared enough you can buy one of these, I have read.) He thinks I have a morbid imagination. Nothing’s going to happen, he says. But I want him to make promises. I want him to promise that if something happens he won’t try to save people, that he’ll just get home as fast as he can. He looks shaken by this request, but still I monster on about it. Leave behind the office girl and the old lady and the fat man wheezing on the stairs. Come home, I tell him. Save her.

  A few days later the baby sees the garden hose come on and we hear her laughing.

  All my life now appears to be one happy moment. This is what the first man in space said.

  Later, when it’s time to go to bed, she puts both legs in one side of her footy pajamas and slyly waits for us to notice.

  There is a picture of my mother holding me as a baby, a look of naked love on her face. For years, it embarrassed me. Now there is a picture of me with my daughter looking exactly the same way.

  We dance with the baby every night now, spinning her round and round the kitchen. Dizzying, this happiness.

  She becomes obsessed with balls. She can spot a ball-shaped object at one hundred paces. Ball, she calls the moon. Ball. Ball. On nights when it is obscured by clouds, she points angrily at the darkness.

  My husband gets a new job, scoring soundtracks for commercials. The pay is better. It has benefits. How is it, people ask. “Not bad,” he says with a shrug. “Only vaguely soul-crushing.”

  She learns to walk. We decide to have a party to show off how persony she has become. For days beforehand, she asks me over and over, “Party now? Party now?” On the night of the festivities, I pull her wispy hair up into a ponytail. “She looks like a girl,” my husband says. He seems amazed. An hour later, the guests stream in. She weaves her way in and out of them for five minutes, then tugs on my sleeve. “No more party!” she says. “Party done! Party done!”

  Her favorite book is about firemen. When she sees the picture, she will mime ringing the bell and sliding down the pole. Clang, clang, clang goes the fire engine bell. The men are on their way!

  My husband reads the book to her every night, including very very slowly the entire copyright page.

  Sometimes she plays a game now where she scatters her stuffed animals all over the living room. “Babies, babies,” she mutters darkly as she covers them with white napkins. “Civil War Battlefield,” we call it.

  One day she runs down the block by herself. I am terrified she’ll forget to stop at the end. “Stop!” I scream at her. “Stop! Stop!”

  “Just keep her alive until she’s eighteen,” my sister says. My sister has two daredevil boys, fraternal twins. She lives in the country but is always threatening to move to England. Her husband is British. He would like to solve all their problems with boarding school and compulsory backgammon. He has never liked it here. Weak-minded, he calls Americans. To make him happy, my sister serves boiled meat for dinner and makes the peas mushy.

  10

  Some punk rock kids move into the apartment above us. Our landlord lives in Florida so he asks us to keep an eye on them. My husband helps them carry up their three pieces of furniture and giant stereo system. I like them right away; they remind me of my students—smart, jittery, oddly earnest. “That’s cool, you guys are married,” the girl tells me one day, and the boy nods too as if he means it.

  I have a chunk of vomit in my hair, I realize right before class. Chunk is maybe overstating it, but yes, something. I wash my hair in the sink. I am teaching a class called “Magic and Dread.”

  Sometimes I find myself having little conversations in my head with the punk rock kids upstairs.

  You know what’s punk rock about marriage?

  Nothing.

  You know what’s punk rock about marriage?

  All the puke and shit and piss.

  My husband comes into the bathroom, holding a hammer. He is talking, reciting a litany of household things. “I fixed the wobbly chair,” he tells me. “And I put a mat under the rug so that it won’t ride up again. The toilet needs a new washer though. It won’t stop running.” 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.

  People keep telling me to do yoga. I tried it once at the place down the street. The only part I liked was the part at the end when the teacher covered you with a blanket and you got to pretend you were dead for ten minutes. “Where is that second novel?” the head of my department asks me. “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

  We used to call her Little. Little, come here, we’d say. Little, unhand the cat, but then one day she won’t let us. “I am big,” she says and her face is stormy.

  My old boss calls me to ask if I am looking for work. A rich man he knows needs someone to ghostwrite his book about the history of the space program. “The job pays well,” he says, “but the guy’s a total dick.” I tell my husband about it. Yes, yes, yes, he says. It turns out we’re running low on money for diapers and beer and potato chips.

  What Fitzgerald said: Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in. Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell.

  So I meet with the rich man. It’s a spectacularly ill-conceived project. He wishes to talk first about the making of the space program, then about the space race, then in the middle tell his own aggrieved story of almost but not quite making it into orbit. He’ll end the book with a proposal for how we might colonize the universe, complete with elaborate technical documents of his own devising. “Sounds good,” I say. “People like space.” The almost astronaut is pleased. He gives me a check. “It’s going to be a big book,” he says. “Big!”

  Sometimes at night I conduct interviews with myself.

  What do you want?

  I don’t know.

  What do you want?

  I don’t know.

  What seems to be the problem?

  Just leave me alone.

  A boy who is pure of heart comes over for dinner. One of the women who is dabbling with being young again brings him. He holds himself stiffly and permits himself only the smallest of smiles at our jokes. He is ten years younger than we are, alert to any sign of compromise or dead-ending within us. “You are not allowed to compare your imagined accomplishments to our actual ones,” someone says after the boy who is pure of heart leaves.

  Do not jump off a wall. Do not run in the street. Do not strike your head with a stone just to see what this will do.

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

  In 1897, a French doctor named Hippolyte Baraduc conducted a series of photographic experiments. He hoped to prove that the soul does indeed reside in the body and leaves it at the moment of death. He fastened a live pigeon to a board with its wings outstretched, then placed a photographic plate on its chest and secured it tightly. As he’d hoped, when he cut the pigeon’s throat the plate depicted something. The soul leaving took the form of curling eddies, he said.

  Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could a
n object attract or repel?

  One day I see the dog-walking man kicking a mattress on the street. He kicks and kicks it. BUGS, NO GOOD, VERY BAD someone had written on it in red paint.

  Baraduc claimed to be able to photograph emotions. “Hate, joy, grief, fear, sympathy, piety, & etc. No new chemical is necessary to obtain these results. Any ordinary camera will do it.” He sought out emotionally agitated people, then held light-proof paper a few inches from their heads. He found that the same emotion would make the same kind of impression upon the photographic plate, but that different emotions produced different images. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.

  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.