(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 include 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