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school and they thought he had broken his foot, but in truth he had not broken any bones and had no pain as there were no such things as bones and pain, but only mind that could feel nothing. I remember that I wanted to be a Christian Scientist then. But in time this passed.
    Afterwards, incredibly, they give her morphine. She begins to talk dreamily about doughnuts. How she will get a dozen as areward for this and take one bite out of each of them.
    We take our daughter to the doctor’s office to get the casts. After he puts them on, he warns her not to drop anything in them. “If you do, you will have to come back and have them removed, then put on again under anesthesia,” he says. We leave the office.
    Something fell into my cast
.
    What?
    I don’t know
.
    But you’re sure something did?
    No, maybe. Maybe I just thought it
.
    You just thought it?
    No, I felt it
.
    You felt it?
    Maybe
.
    What was it?
    I don’t know. Something
.
    What?
    Nothing, I think. Maybe something
.
    What?
    Nothing. No, something
.
    We wash her hair in a bucket, try to scratch her wrists with a chopstick. It is summer and she cries because she wants to swim.
    What Wittgenstein said:
What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body
.
    One night we let her sleep in our room because the air conditioner is better. We all pile into the big bed. There is a musty animal smell to her casts now. She brings in the night-light that makes fake stars and places it on the bedside table. Soon everyone is asleep but me. I lie in our bed and listen to the hum of the air conditioner and the soft sound of their breathing. Amazing. Out of dark waters, this.

19
    On our seventh anniversary, my husband plays a song for me, but it’s almost too sad to hear. It’s about marriage and who will go first.
One of us will die inside these arms
is the chorus.
    Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.
    He misses his piano, I think. But he doesn’t talk about it. I give him a recording of Edison explaining his phonograph.
    Your words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke them in … This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx
,
dumb voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to whisper against this iron diaphragm
.
    Our words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of this instrument and so we try as much as we can to speak kindly to each other.
    When we met, he wore glasses he’d had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones.
    I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, “I’ve always hated bangs actually.”
    My sister shakes her head at this story. “You have a kid-glove marriage,” she says.
    She’s moving to England. That bastard husband of hers.

20
    The almost astronaut has become obsessed with
Voyager 1
and
Voyager 2
and the Golden Record. He’d like me to put everything that’s ever been written about them into his manuscript. I tell him I think the story is too well-known, that we should look for something less expected. But he shakes his head. “Give the people what they want. That’s the first rule of business.” He made his fortune selling bug zappers. Last year, I got one as a Christmas present. I ask him what the second rule