Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill Read Free Book Online Page A

lightheartedly. “Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl.” And then, more soberly, “Do you mean for keeps?”
    “Yes, for keeps,” he said tenderly. “Let’s get married.”
    “Yes,” I said, and that moment we felt we knew what it must be like to discover a new law of nature
.
    So there it is, the famous cosmic love story. But like most love stories there turns out to be more to it.
This timeline doesn’t make sense
, the intern writes in the margin.
Isn’t Sagan already married?
    That night, my husband complains that I’m working too much. He grumbles about the overflowing trash and the out-of-season fruitrotting in the fridge. I clean out all the moldy things and empty all the trash cans. I line the garbage bags up by the door before I take them out, hoping he will comment. He gives me a look. The one that means:
What do you want? A medal?
    The kiss was the trickiest sound to capture, the engineers said. Some of the ones they tried were too loud, others too quiet.
In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was one that Timothy Ferriss planted on his fiancée Ann Druyan’s cheek
. The intern takes his yellow marker and highlights this for me.
    The blip in that cosmic love story then. Ann Druyan was engaged to marry Timothy Ferriss while they were working on the
Voyager
project with Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda. Then Carl and Ann decided to get married. The news took a while to reach Linda and Timothy. Or so my intern says. But when Ann Druyan tells the story, that part is missing, like a record that skips.
    She talks instead about how she went into a laboratory just two days after that phone call. She was hooked up to a computer and began to meditate. All the data from her brain and heart was turned into sound for the Golden Record.
    To the best of my abilities I tried to think about the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love
.
    According to
People
magazine, Carl and Linda Sagan’s divorce was “acrimonious.”

21
    The Yoga People always travel in pairs, their mats under their arms, their hair severely shorn in that new mother way. But what if someone sucker punched them and took their mats away? How long until they’d knuckle under?
    Would you like to run the fun fair? Would you like to join the compost committee? Would you like to organize the coat drive? Would you like to teach a puppetry elective?
    A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.
    There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X
.
    What T. S. Eliot said:
When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing
.
    She will not go to college if that means she must go away from me. When she has a baby, she will come and stay with me for a month and I will help her care for the baby and then she will go away for one day, then she will come back again and stay for a month or a year. She does not ever want to live away from me, she explains. “Promise?” I say. She curls up in my arms, all elbows and knees. “Promise.”
    My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles
. This is the mnemonic they give her to remember the order of the planets.
    Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her