I find a cheap piano and surprise my husband with it. Sometimes he composes songs for us after dinner. Beautiful little things. If it is after eight, the neighbors complain. Anyway, the bugs get in it.
An Arabic proverb: One insect is enough to fell a country.
A Japanese proverb: Even an insect one-tenth of an inch long has five-tenths of a soul.
My daughter has a habit now of rifling through our drawers to see if anything inside might be of use to her. One day she unearthed the bride and groom that stood atop our wedding cake. The groom was discarded but the bride has been placed on a shelf in her room among the plastic pink horses with girlishly long manes. This is a high compliment, I discern, though my daughter does not say so explicitly.
The little jokes of the long-married. “My wife … She no longer believes in me,” my friend says with a small wave of his hand. Everyone laughs. We are all having dinner. His wife passes me something intricate and Moroccan he has made. It is unbelievably delicious.
Are you afraid of going to the dentist?
Never Sometimes Always
I answer “sometimes” but they seem to bump me up to “always.” The dentist speaks carefully to me, probing my mouth with his soft fingers. The hygienist tries to make casual conversation by asking me how many children I have. “One,” I say, and she looks startled. “But you’ll have another?” she asks as she rinses the blood from the sink. “No, I don’t think so,” I say. She shakes her head. “It just seems cruel to have an only child. I was one and it was cruel.”
A Lebanese proverb: The bedbug has a hundred children and thinks them too few.
“Don’t tell a soul,” the kid warns me. “Not if you ever want anyone to visit again.” He gives me some special plastic bags that zip closed tightly. At night, we can hear the bags shifting as we lie awake in bed. The deal is that if one opens up, everything in it is contaminated. Before we leave the house, we have to cook our clothes in a special cooker. Anything we are not wearing must be immediately bagged and sealed. “We’re living like astronauts,” my husband says, inching over to his side of the bed.
The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin. This is what the first man in space said.
A woman at the playground explains her dilemma. They have finally found a house, a brownstone with four floors and a garden, perfectly maintained, on the loveliest of blocks in the least anxiety producing of school districts, but now she finds that she spends much of her day on one floor looking for something that has actually been left on another floor.
I am spending hours and hours at the Laundromat now, shrinking our sweaters and un-furring her animals. One day I forget and put her blanket in. When I hand it back to her, she cries. “That was my best thing,” she says. “Why would you ruin my best thing?”
15
Survival in space is a challenging endeavor. As the history of modern warfare suggests, people have generally proven themselves unable to live and work together peacefully over long periods of time. Especially in isolated or stressful situations, those living in close quarters often erupt into hostility.
Don’t cook, don’t fuck, what do you do? Don’t cook, don’t fuck, what do you do?
Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn’t look at it.
Russian ground control had a traditional signoff for the cosmonauts: May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather.
“What I’m looking for,” the almost astronaut tells me, “is interesting facts.”
Vladimir Komarov was the pilot on Soyuz 1, a spaceship that was plagued with technical problems from the start. In the weeks leading up to the launch, the cosmonaut became convinced that this would be a death mission, but the Russian politicians waved off the engineering reports. On the appointed day, a grim-faced Komarov was strapped into the spacecraft and launched into orbit. But almost immediately things began to go wrong. An antenna failed to rise. Then a solar panel malfunctioned, making the craft lopsided and difficult to navigate. Sensing a potential catastrophe, ground control aborted the mission and tried to guide Komarov home. But as he reentered the atmosphere, the spacecraft began spinning wildly. Komarov fought to control it, but it couldn’t be righted.
During the long terrible descent, a politician called Komarov to tell him he was a hero. Then his wife came on the line and the couple spoke of their affairs and said good-bye. The last thing anyone heard was the cosmonaut’s yells of rage and fear as his ship hurtled towards the ground. The capsule flattened instantly on impact, then burst into flames. There was no body to recover. Komarov’s widow was given his charred heel bone.
But long-term survival for astronauts in space environments poses other dangers as well. Some of the most daunting challenges may, in fact, be psychological. People studying such odds look to other kinds of isolation studies for clues. The logs of polar explorers may give us the best glimpse of what it might be like to stay in space for extended periods.
Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: Explorer Frederick Cook, trapped with his men on an icebound ship, wrote the following in his log:
We are as tired of each other’s company as we are of the cold monotony of the black night and of the unpalatable sameness of our food. Physically, mentally, and perhaps morally, then, we are depressed, and from my past experience … I know that this depression will increase.
“We’ll get through this,” I say to my husband. “We always do.” Slowly, he nods his head. I lie on the couch in the crook of his arm. Our clothes smell cooked.
We take turns taking her on trips. The other one stays home, sprays the house with poison again. Lice, she thinks they are. Neither my husband nor I can stand to keep secrets, but we keep this one, yes, we keep it. We learn not to wince when people worry aloud about getting them. We hardly ever go out and if we do we cook every bit of our clothing for hours so as not to chance giving them to anyone. Winter makes it harder. Before we leave the house, we must do the scarves and mittens, the boots and coats. When the timer goes off, we take all the clothes out of the cooker and then without sitting on the chair or the bed, get dressed and leave as fast as we can.
That year we get Christmas cards from his relatives, some with those family letters tucked inside. S got a promotion and is now a vice vice president of marketing. T has a new baby and has started an organizing business called “Sorted!” L & V have given up rice and sugar and bread.
My husband won’t let me write one. We send a smiling picture instead.
Dear Family and Friends,