by Jenny Offill
Her sister listens to the story about the coffin. “Okay, remind me again why you never went out with him?” she asks.
“I thought you wanted to be an art monster,” the husband says.
The philosopher’s sister-in-law ordered a piece of antique mourning jewelry to wear. A gold locket with a place inside to put a picture of the one who died. On the outside there is a small etched rose. But Prepare to follow is engraved on the inside of it. The nineteenth century. Jesus. Those people did not mess around.
How was the bake sale?
She sends her best friend a text. “11pm. Husband still playing video games.” There is a little ping. The husband looks at her. “You sent that to me.”
Her sister is the one who comes up with the winning plan. They should move to her ramshackle house in Pennsylvania and live there for next to nothing. The wife checks the schools. She checks the car insurance. She checks the cost of firewood. She orders beekeeping and chicken-tending books for him and starts filling out forms so they can adopt a puppy when they get there. She fact-checks an eight-hundred-page book about space aviation, then finishes all her grading for school in one fourteen-hour session.
Any flight of ideas?
Any pressured speech?
Any grandiose plans?
Nope.
People who have already moved to the country give warnings: Beware fracking. Check for ticks. Don’t get goats.
Prepare to follow, the wife thinks. The husband is hardly talking, but he packs the car to the roof and gets in.
They have told the daughter it will take four hours to get there. Every five minutes, she leans forward and asks them again. “Is it an hour? Is it an hour? Is it an hour?” And then they are there.
40
The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped handwriting on a grocery list. She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea.
But only possibly.
Fall comes early here. And it is unnerving to see so many stars. At night, the wife lies awake worrying about bears and chimney fires. About the army of spiders that live within. The husband wants goats. The daughter cries for Brooklyn.
The wife keeps finding $20 bills she has stashed away in books. Also tiny pieces of paper she has written on. Here is something she scrawled on the back of a credit card receipt. She squints to read her own handwriting. I teach immaculately, but lately … lately, I’ve got some dirty windows, it says.
She can’t help thinking about how she has another thing squirreled away in a book. A Monopoly card sent to her by a divorced friend. GET OUT OF JAIL FREE, it says.
But she is tired all the time now. She can feel how slowly she is walking, as if the air itself is something to be reckoned with. The shrink says it’s because she has been running on adrenaline until now and that this is starting to recede. “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t let your mind go to a dark place.”
Right, the wife thinks. Gotcha. She does not mention how she goes out to look at the sky in the middle of the night. How she stands there in a T-shirt and bare feet, shivering. Witness this wind, this flimsily constructed tree. Theatrical, this terror, she feels.
And everyone drives too slowly here. Sorry, the wife thinks as she weaves in and out of lanes. Sorry, sorry.
They never talk about it when the daughter is awake. They keep it from her like the bugs, but still it is there under everything, a low hum like furious weather.
One morning she takes her to a playground. The sun beats down on them. “Where is everyone?” the daughter says. She swings listlessly on the monkey bars and then they go home again.
The wife has to remind herself to notice that it is beautiful here. She goes for a walk in the woods after a week of rain, wearing the husband’s heavy boots.
The rain has brought the mosquitoes back. The wife unpacks the bug zapper that the almost astronaut gave her. There are still a lot of boxes in the attic. I should be more efficient, she thinks. The husband sets up their old telescope. There is almost no light pollution here. The wife looks up at the sky. There are more stars than anyone could ever need.
One day while the daughter is at school, the husband and wife drive to a neighboring town to see a movie. On the way there, they pass a Holiday Inn Express. The wife stiffens. “What?” he says. She points to it. “I spent the worst night of my life in one of those.” The husband looks at her blankly. “In a Holiday Inn Express?” They drive a little farther. He reaches over and takes her hand. It seems they have taken a wrong turn somewhere because there are farms on either side now, not businesses. The wife looks out the window. A dog runs through the field, his dark fur ruffled with light.
41
The wife is trying not to look at the husband with a cold eye, but suddenly it is hard not to notice how Midwestern he is. How charmed he is if they do anything wholesome together as a family, like play a board game, how educational he wants all of their outings with the daughter to be. One weekend, they go to some underground caverns and she listens to him go on to the daughter about the composition of limestone. Class dismissed, she thinks.
That night, the wife gets up and goes to sleep in her daughter’s room. If he asks, she can lie and say she called for her.
Fight or flight, she thinks. Fight or flight.
She has noticed though that he seems to love her again. A little at least. He is always touching her now, brushing the hair back from her face. “Thank you,” he says one night as they are sitting in the yard. He says it was as if they were all trapped under a car and in a burst of inexplicable strength, she moved it. He kisses her and there is something there, a flicker maybe, but then she hears the bug zapper going. Zzzft. Zzzft. Zzzft. “You shouldn’t have driven us off of the cliff,” she says.
42
The wife braids the daughter’s hair every morning before school. At bedtime, the husband reads to her from Anne of Green Gables.
They are both worried about the daughter. At night, she writes long letters to her favorite doll, then mails them in a Kleenex box she keeps hidden under her bed.
If they ask the daughter why she is crying, she says, “Don’t talk about it.”
The husband decides to teach the daughter how to whistle and the wife listens to them in the backyard whistling away.
The wife still has a plan b just in case. I could join the Amish, she thinks whenever they pass them.
For the daughter’s birthday, they decide to get her a puppy. She is ecstatic, but it does the final work of unhinging the wife. “Can you take it back?” the shrink says more urgently than expected. “Take it back!” “No,” the wife says. It is the only thing that makes the girl happy. “You’ll have to crate it,” she says. “Often.”
Sometimes the husband says he is going to look for kindling. But later the wife sees him chain-smoking at the edge of the far field.
Sometimes she still thinks about the ex-boyfriend, but she does not hunt for him in the ether.
One morning the wife takes the puppy out for a walk. He blazes ahead then returns covered with burrs. She picks them off and lets him go again. Sky here. She had forgotten how much sky there could be. When she catches up with the puppy, he is eating something dead. “Leave it!” she says. “Leave it! Leave it!” He drops it on the ground, wags his tail at her. But later, the puppy runs back to the same place and rolls around in it.
Don’t drink. Don’t think.
The wife and the husband take the puppy to the vet to get his shots. They pass the Holiday Inn Express again. This time she manages not to say anything. She feels him notice this. After a while, he turns on the radio. The puppy licks the steering wheel. To their surprise, he is well behaved at the vet. He doesn’t pee on the floor or nip at the hand that holds him. But later when they get home, he stands on his hind legs and drinks from the toilet.
So she takes the pills the doctor gives her. Her hands stop flapping. She is less inclined to lie down in the street. But her brain is still buckling. In the parking lot of a store two towns over she cries like a clown with her face on the steering wheel.
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.
44
I’m hungry. I want to eat something delicious, have a beer and a cigarette. I’ve come back to Earth full of desires. The air tastes good.
This is what the Japanese reporter said when he came back from the space station.
In the morning, the wife lets the dog out: Hey a squirrel! Hey a tree! Hey a piece of shit! Hey! Hey! Hey!
They bathe him together, toweling him off gently. Afterwards, the wife gives him peanut butter and watches him lick it from the spoon.
What Emily Dickinson said: Existence has overpowered Books. Today I slew a Mushroom.
The husband buys a grand piano. No one out in the country cares how long or loud he plays. He teaches the daughter a few finger exercises. But she would rather pack a bag of candy and climb a tree.
He composes something beautiful for the wife. Songs About Space, he calls it. Sometimes she plays it late at night when he is asleep. She thinks of that radio show, wonders if the girl still listens to it.
For a long time, the wife had an idea that the girl might write her a letter. But, no, no, of course, there is nothing.
The wife sits in the backyard with binoculars. She is trying to learn about the birds. She has seen robins and sparrows and wrens. A green-throated hummingbird. She wants to know the name of the black bird with the red wings. She looks it up. It is a red-winged blackbird.
Dear Girl,
She writes the philosopher a letter instead. He has gone to live in the Sonoran Desert. He met a poet there who tends sixty kinds of cacti and speaks three languages. Yes, the wife says. Stay. She tells him about the red-winged blackbird because it is important to know the names of things.
My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right.
The leaves are nearly gone now. The daughter is pressing them into a book. The husband is outside chopping wood.
(So ask the birds at least. Ask the fucking birds.)
45
The weather is theater here. They watch it through the window from their bed.
What Singer said: I wonder what these people thought thousands of years ago of these sparks they saw when they took off their woolen clothes?
The husband feeds the stove so she can stay in bed. He goes outside to get more wood. The sky looks like snow, he says.
Saint Anthony was said to suffer from a crippling despair. When he prayed to be freed from it, he was told that any physical task done in the proper spirit would bring him deliverance.
At dinner, the wife watches the husband as he peels an apple for the daughter in a perfect spiral. Later, when she is grading papers, she comes across a student’s story with the same image in it. The father and daughter, the apple, the Swiss Army knife. Uncanny really. Beautifully written. She checks for a name, but there is nothing. Lia, she thinks. It must be Lia. She goes outside to read it to the husband. “I wrote that,” he says. “I slipped it into your papers to see if you would notice.”
The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention.
The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?”
So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now.
Attention. Attention.
Sometimes the wife still watches him sleep.
Sometimes she still strokes his hair in the middle of the night and half asleep he turns to her.
Their daughter runs through the woods now, her face painted like an Indian.
What the rabbi said: Three things have a flavor of the world to come: the Sabbath, the sun, and married love.
46
Snow. Finally. The world looks blankly beautiful. We take the dog out in it. He races ahead of us, blazing a trail of pee through the whiteness. We walk towards the road. Sometimes the school bus is early, sometimes late. There is ice in the trees, a brisk, bitter wind from the east. The dog appears, dragging his leash. We wait by the mailboxes. One or two trees still have some leaves. You reach out to pick one, show it to me. “It has oblique leaves,” you say. “See?” I let you tuck it in my pocket.
The yellow bus pulls up. The doors open and she is there, holding something made of paper and string. It is art, she thinks. Science maybe. The snow is coming down again. Soft wet flakes land on your face. My eyes sting from the wind. Our daughter hands us her crumpled papers, takes off running. You stop and wait for me. We watch as she gets smaller. No one young knows the name of anything.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to the Ucross Foundation, Ledig House, NYFA, and Ellen Levine Fund for giving me the space and time to write this book.
I am immensely grateful to Joshua Beckman, Lydia Millet, Rob Spillman, Elissa Schappell, Tasha Blaine, Michael Rothfeld, Merrie Koehlert, Greg Koehlert, Helen Phillips, Adam Thompson, Jon Dee, Steve Rhinehart, Fred Leebron, Liz Strout, Josh Glenn, Alex Abramovich, Mike Greer, Sam Lipsyte, Ceridwen Morris, Dorla McIntosh, Rebecca Leece, Laura Ogden, Bethany Lyttle, Ben Marcus, Ethan Nosowsky, Michael Cunningham, Matthea Harvey, Tom Hart, Leela Corman, Lucy Raven, Mimi Lipson, Anna DeForest, Aaron Retica, Sarah Bassett, Anstiss Agnew, Caroline Bleeke, Evalena Leedy, Joshua Henkin, and Sam Fox for their generosity and encouragement in matters literary and far beyond.
Thanks to my agent, Sally Wofford-Girand, who stood by me all these years and knew just when to wrench this thing out of my hands, as well as to my editor, Jordan Pavlin, whose thoughtful notes made this book much better than it was.
Above all, I want to thank my family whose love and support are the foundation of everything good and true in my life.
And to the crackerjack editorial, publicity, and production staff at Knopf who shepherded this maddeningly formatted book to press, I owe each and every one of you a pony.
A Note About the Author
Jenny Offill is the author of the novel Last Things, which was chosen as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and was a finalist for the L.A. Times First Book Award. She is the coeditor, with Elissa Schappell, of two anthologies of essays, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. Her children’s books in
clude 17 Things I’m Not Allowed to Do Anymore, 11 Experiments That Failed, and Sparky. She teaches in the writing programs at Queens University, Brooklyn College, and Columbia University.
Visit: www.jennyoffill.com
For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com
ALSO BY JENNY OFFILL
Last Things
