by Jenny Offill
The woman replies, “I am seeing a psychiatrist.”
The dentist says, “Then what are you doing here?”
And she says, “Your light was on.”
* * *
…
Henry’s always calling me for advice too, cajoling me to come over. And when I do he hands the baby to me and lies down on the couch and stares at the ceiling. He lets everything go to hell all day, then does a mad rush to get everything together before Catherine gets home at seven. I’ve been treading lightly, but he seems worse, not better. Luckily, Iris is an easy baby. It’s Henry who seems ready to burst into tears.
Ben isn’t much better. He turns the volume off so he never hears his voice, but sometimes I listen. Now he is talking about something in space. The moon maybe. How we should go there again. I woke up in the middle of the night last night. The dog was barking, or maybe it was just in my dream. Today NASA found seven new Earth-size planets. So there’s that.
* * *
…
The sky is dull, a soft feathery gray, streaked here and there with clouds. Well, yes, I would, sir. I would like to hear the GOOD NEWS. I will read this pamphlet forthwith!
* * *
…
Ben looks into the Israel thing; I look into the idea of true north.
“The problem is it’s matrilineal,” he says. “I mean, you guys would have to convert.”
“I don’t want to live in Israel. That’s even worse.”
“I know,” he says. “You’re right.”
I think about those people shouting, Blood and soil! Blood and soil!
“But let’s keep it in our pocket,” I tell him.
Now when I see my neighbors the voice in my head gets all Jesusy. One of you will betray me. But which? Is it you Mrs. Kovinski?
* * *
…
Take care of your teeth, take care of your teeth, take care of your teeth, my monkey mind says. The class is thinning out again. This morning Margot talked about the difference between falling and floating. With practice, she says, one may learn to accept the feeling of groundlessness without existential fear. This is akin to the way an experienced parachutist or astronaut might enjoy the wide view from above even as he hurtles through space.
She gave us a formula: suffering = pain + resistance.
* * *
…
Today Mr. Jimmy starts up a conversation with me as soon as I get in. I’m so tired I hardly listen to him, just nod here and there. Now he’s going on about background checks again. “I check all my drivers. I mean, when I had other drivers I did. You have to be careful.” I nod, sure, sure. “Otherwise you could just have some Mohammed come in, get a car to drive, fill it up with explosives…”
He pulls up to my building. I fumble with my purse as he smiles at me, telling me to take my time. The car smells like fake trees. “I’m a little short today, sorry,” I tell him. “No problem,” he says, and waves his hand magnanimously.
And just like that I’m free.
* * *
…
It used to be simple to put up flyers at the library, but now they’re all in a glass case. There’s a key to open it and people have to ask us for it at the desk. My boss did that after someone started putting up hateful screeds.
There is a theory that new hate has been unleashed. Another that the amount of hate is exactly the same as it’s always been. Lorraine subscribes to the latter one. The only difference is that more people are noticing it, she says.
Someone returns a book called The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. I flip through it while I eat my lunch.
A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”
* * *
…
Henry keeps sterilizing the bottles then resterilizing them. I want to explain to him that it’s overkill, but my guess is he’s following strict directives. I hold Iris and play with her for a while, then put her smack in the middle of their king-size bed and go to the kitchen to see what’s keeping him. He’s sterilizing the metal tongs that he uses to put the plastic bottles in the boiling water. It’s cool in the apartment, but he’s sweating buckets.
“Why don’t you take a nap?” I say. “I’ll watch her.” He whirls around to look at me. “Where is she?” I tell him I put her in the middle of the bed. He drops the tongs to go in there. She is fast asleep. “She could have fallen off,” he says. “Henry, she can’t even roll over yet.” His hands are shaking. “She could have gotten hurt,” he insists.
I make him lie down on the couch, put a blanket on him. Thirty seconds of protest and he’s out. He’s not doing well with this sleep deprivation. There’s a reason it’s used as a tool of torture. But still, everyone I know is trying to sleep less. Insomnia as a badge of honor. Proof that you are paying attention.
* * *
…
There was a bomb threat yesterday at Eli’s school. And there are rumors that a woman had her hijab pulled off on Coney Island Avenue. All the EAGLE mothers cluster together before pickup to discuss the situation. “For starters, they need to stop calling this area Little Pakistan,” one says.
When I get to work, I look up some articles on Disaster Psychology in hopes of better assisting all the people wandering around here lately.
Much of the population was in a mild stupor, depressed, congregating in small unstable groups, and prone to rumors of doom.
But I don’t know. That’s pretty much every day here.
* * *
…
Margot’s class is too crowded lately so I’ve been skipping it. “Are you sure that’s the best chant for you?” Ben asks me. He must have heard me in the shower.
Sentient creatures are numberless. I vow to save them.
Now I’m rummaging around in a drawer, trying to find some pants that fit. These new dryers are too hot. Most of our clothes shrank before I realized it. Ben still wears these shirts that are too short at the sleeves, that strain at the buttons. He’s got that old ancestral guilt. Maybe it’s me, he said. Maybe I got too big.
* * *
…
When I arrive, Henry is standing in the doorway with his coat on, keys in hand. I give him a hug. “The baby’s asleep,” he says. “I’m going to go get some groceries.” I go in to look at her. Yes, she is sleeping the right way. I turn on their computer. YouTube videos about babyproofing your house. She can’t even crawl, people!
I can’t even believe I’m here before work. I need to put my foot down, that’s what everybody says. We are in his kitchen. That clever devil Catherine went to work at six a.m. to get a head start on her meeting prep.
“Do you ever think it’s weird that we even have families?” Henry says.
I take Iris out in her stroller. It is a misty gray morning. I pull the plastic down over her. The Buddha once described how his father protected him from the elements.
A white sunshade was held over me day and night so that no cold or heat or dust or grit or dew might inconvenience me.
(Onward we go, inconvenienced by dew!)
* * *
…
When I get home, there’s a postcard from Sylvia. On the front, a spindly tree surrounded by a wire fence. “Miracle Tree” is the caption. She’s at a conference about Fukushima. I said I couldn’t go, that I had to watch the baby.
I will caution you against choosing Japan as your next foreign travel destination unless you enjoy strict behavior rules, massive industrial skyscrapers, and paying ten dollars for a weird pastry and coffee in a can. If these things entice you, then hurry right over, my friend, you can’t even laugh loudly here in public without drawing a stare, and Tokyo is hell on earth.
On the way back, she meets me in the city for din
ner. I tell her that I’ve been thinking that we should buy some land somewhere colder. That if climate departure happens in New York when predicted, Eli and Iris could—
“Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks. I look at her. Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this. She orders another drink. “Then become rich, very, very rich,” she says in a tight voice.
* * *
…
Henry wants to confess something. We walk a long circle around the neighborhood before he manages it. He says he’s having bad thoughts about the baby, that he keeps imagining terrible things. It’s normal, I assure him. I tell him how I used to worry all the time that Eli would choke on a grape. “No, not like that, Lizzie,” he says. “It’s not her. It’s me.”
Later, I keep thinking about those people you read about in the paper, the ones who are discovered by animal protection services. They live in a studio apartment, go to work every day—their neighbors don’t notice a thing—but when they break down the door, there’s an alligator or a boa constrictor in there. Something that could kill them.
FOUR
It’s afternoon, but the sky is already dark with rain. We wait on the platform for the express. The old man beside us starts to cough violently. Henry freezes. To a man with a hammer…
* * *
…
Is it the amount or the frequency of these thoughts that causes concern?
Do these thoughts cause marked distress?
Do these thoughts significantly interfere with your normal routine?
* * *
…
“You can’t tell anyone this,” he says. “Lizzie, you have to promise.” I feel like he is tying me up with rope. “I’m bad at secrets, you know that.” He shakes his head. “Not when it counts.”
He won’t even bathe her. He’s washing her with a squirt gun now.
Lizzie, what’s going on? Lizzie, what’s going on?
Repeat ten times.
So yeah, I tell Ben.
* * *
…
There is a tradition in Judaism that happiness and sorrow must be intermingled. On Passover, you are instructed to remove drops of wine before drinking it to lessen your pleasure. Each drop removed represents a tragedy that befell those who went before you.
It’s the same at weddings. The couple breaks a glass by stepping on it together. This is so they will remember past sorrows in the midst of their present joy.
Sometimes I think my family just brought a pile of broken glass to Ben’s doorstep. He’s been quiet since I told him about everything. Well, not quite everything. There was one thing I left out. I think Henry’s stopped going to meetings. He told me he goes, but I waited outside the other day and I didn’t see him.
“This can’t go on forever,” Ben says. “Just give me time to stabilize him,” I tell him. He nods, looks away.
The pieces of glass from a wedding were meant to be saved. If the husband died first, the wife prepared his body for burial by weighting his eyelids with the shards. If the wife died first, it was the husband’s job to do this. I wish I had known this. I wish I had kept those shards.
* * *
…
Sylvia quit the foundation last week; there’s no hope anymore, only witness, she thinks. She tells me that she feels like she is in a car, trying to accelerate. Some people she works with are trying to get in the car. Some are throwing themselves in front of it to prevent her from leaving.
She’s started forwarding me jokes.
The leaders of Russia, Syria, and America are arguing about who is the best at catching criminals. The secretary-general of the UN decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and tells them they must catch it.
The American team goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations, they conclude that rabbits do not exist.
The Syrian team goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn down the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit. The rabbit was a dangerous rebel, they report.
The Russian team goes in last. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling, “Okay! Okay! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!”
* * *
…
Eli asks if he can look up something about robots. I hand him my computer and go to the kitchen to make him some macaroni and cheese. When I come back, he is watching a video from a British morning show. It’s about a robot named Samantha. She is made to look like a human and has two settings, the inventor says. In sex mode, she can moan if you touch her breasts. In family mode, she can tell jokes or talk about philosophy.
* * *
…
Tonight it takes four stories before I can get him to bed. The one that does the trick is about a dog who is on his way to a dog party being held at the top of a tree. On his way there, he meets other dogs headed to the festivities. They stop to talk.
Do you like my hat?
I do not.
Good-by!
Good-by!
This is my dream of how neighbors should talk to each other.
Instead, it’s Mrs. Kovinski knocking at seven a.m. “I see you’ve got your poison paper,” she says. She’s picked up the Sunday Times from the hallway, brought it to my door.
* * *
…
All day, Ben lies on the couch, reading a giant history of war. But he got it at a used-book store so it only goes up to World War I.
In the summer of 1914, there was an electric tension in the air. It would not be long until the descent into the madness of the first fully mechanized war. The British statesman Sir Edward Grey famously predicted what was to come. “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
At bedtime, Eli and I start Prince Caspian. At the beginning, the children are pulled out of a train station and land on an uninhabited island. They wander around until they find a bit of a stone wall. Eli realizes it is the ruins of the Narnia castle before I do. Then he starts asking questions. Will he still be alive when I die? If not, what will he do?
I tell him that old dodge. That it will be a long, long time before I do. That we will all live a long, long time.
But this is not what he wants to know.
* * *
…
Lately, Ben has been sending up trial balloons about other neighborhoods. But when we look up the rents they are ridiculously high. I keep worrying he will suggest New Jersey, but he never does.
He has an idea for the summer though. He wants to send Eli to camp at a historic estate where they teach kids to churn butter and herd goats. Eli does not want to go. “It’s you that wants to go,” I tell him.
* * *
…
I keep wondering how we might channel all of this dread into action. One night Ben and I go to a meeting about justice at the Unitarian church down the street. Good people all around, making plans, assisting—so why do I feel so embarrassed?
Most are older than we are; they speak of how others have helped them; they give thanks for those who have reached out and call on us to think about the less fortunate.
It’s church. I remember now how it went.
“I thought you wanted community,” Ben says afterward. But not so much. Not like that. All that eye contact. “Not my tribe,” I tell him.
Q: How does a Unitarian walk on water?
A: She waits until winter.
I miss the express bus and have to take the local home instead. Just the other day I heard one woman tell another that slowness is a form of goodness. This bus is full of old Russian people holding shopping bags between their feet. I sit across from a hot guy in a green coat who looks
as if he’s trying to place me. When I was younger, I sometimes knew why a man was staring at me, but these days it’s often no more than a lapse in memory.
He has a pouch of tobacco in his pocket and a ratty backpack that looks like it’s been to war. There’s a book sticking out of it, but not far enough to read its title. Ben told me once that the Greeks had this term, epoché, meaning “I suspend judgment.” Useful for those of us prone to making common cause with strangers on buses. Sudden alliances, my brother calls them. I have to be careful. My heart is prodigal.
It’s raining. The bus is full. It’s reached that density where being seated feels like a form of guilt. I look around. I will grudgingly stand for the infirm and the pregnant and those with children. But miraculously, it is all able-bodied teenagers with earbuds. I forgot my phone, or I too would have blotted out all these humans.
The guy in the green coat keeps glancing at me. “From the library,” I tell him, and he nods slowly, respectfully, it seems. “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he says. He has a slight accent and I wonder if he comes from some distant country where librarians are held in high esteem.
We get off at Coney Island Avenue. When he stands up, I see it is a field guide to mushrooms.
Pouring now. The pigeons have all flown away. The drug dealer from 5C holds the door open for me. We shake the rain off our umbrellas.
* * *
…
Sylvia has a new escape plan. She wants to buy a trailer in the darkest place in America. She lived there once years ago with an ex who was an amateur astronomer. It’s in Nevada somewhere, hours and hours from the nearest city. On a clear night, you can see the Pinwheel galaxy with the naked eye, she says. Later, I look it up and learn it is twenty-five million light-years away.