Read Online Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill - Free Book Online

Then talk about God again.
    She tells the yoga teacher that she is trying to be honorable.
Honorable!
Such an old-fashioned word, she thinks. Ridiculous, ridiculous.
    “Yes, be honorable,” the yoga teacher says.
    Whenever the wife wants to do drugs, she thinks about Sartre. One bad trip and then a giant lobster followed him around for the rest of his days.
    Also she signed away the right to self-destruct years ago. The fine print on the birth certificate, her friend calls it.
    So she invents allergies to explain her red eyes and migraines to explain the blinked-back look of pain. One day, coming out of their building, she staggers a little from the exhaustion of all of it. Her elderly neighbor comes over, touches her sleeve. “Are you okay, dear?” he asks. Carefully, politely, she shakes him off of her.
    Sometimes when the wife is trying to do positions, the yoga teacher will single her out for instruction. The wife can’t help but notice that she never has to correct other students in this particular way.
    Do not instruct the head! The head is not being instructed!
    How has she become one of those people who wears yoga pants all day? She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire treads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

27
    He sent the girl a love letter over the radio. Later, the wife sees his playlist from that night. It is from the night before she went out of town. The night before it first happened. She listens to the songs he played one by one, ticking each of them off the list.
    Afterwards, the wife sits on the toilet for a long time because her stomach is twisting. She feels something rising in her throat and spits into her daughter’s pink plastic bucket. Just a little bile. She dry-heaves again, but nothing. The longer she sits there, the more she notices how dingy and dirty the bathroom is. There is a tangle of hair on the side of the sink, some kind of creeping mildew on the shower curtain. Their towels are no longer white and are fraying along the edges. Her underwear too is dinged nearly gray. The elastic is coming out a little. Who would wear such a thing? What kind of repulsive creature? She takesher underwear off and wraps it around and around in toilet paper, then puts it in the bottom of the trash where no one will see.
    When you pick up one piece of dust, the entire world comes with it
.
    “I am alone,” her student says. “Everyone is tired of this. No one will come anymore.” But Lia is only twenty-four. She is beautiful and brilliant. There are so many more years when people will come.
    Your friends and students adore you
.
    The wife loses a twenty-dollar bill somewhere between the store and home, but she can’t make herself go back to look for it. In the last store, the clerk was unkind to her or at least not kind.
    I only wanted you to adore me
.

28
    She goes to visit Lia in a hospital in Westchester. Her wrists are bandaged but her eyes have a little light in them. “Thank you for coming,” she says formally, as if she is in a receiving line at a wedding.
    The wife has been teaching for twenty years. It is not the first time she’s been at the bedside of someone with bandaged wrists.
    She brings Lia a notebook, spiral-bound. But they won’t let her take it. No wire, they say. She should have thought of that. Lia called her right before the lights went out. There’s that moment, you know, for most people, where you decide you want to wake up in the world one more day.
    Everyone there won’t do something. There is a small flock of dull-eyed girls who hate to eat, who hide measuring spoons in their coatsand leave clumps of hair in the sink, and then there are the ones who never answer questions no matter how many different ways you ask them. Sleep is