Our Wives Under the Sea (20)

The music was loud. A blur of conversation between unfamiliar people and Sam somewhere at my side, poking my hip with a finger to make me move. In the kitchen, Poppy argued with Dan about something to do with the texture of the dip he was making. Sam found a bottle of wine, pinched three plastic cups from a sideboard, and poured one out for each of us, nestling her cup inside the empty third, which she was saving for whenever Toby arrived. I looked at her hands around the two cups and missed Leah, hard—missed the fact of saved spaces, of saying something in unison, of turning to one another afterward as if to say thank god it was you. I blinked, found that Sam was saying something to me. You should drink that, she repeated, you look a little white. I said nothing to this, imagined my mouth was filling with water, wished I could escape to a bathroom and check on the color of my tongue.

Sometime later, Leah’s friend Allegra, who had been at that first dinner party, came over to ask me how I was. She was wearing tennis shoes and a long white sweater and I remember wanting to tell her I liked this outfit and then feeling certain she wouldn’t care to know what I thought. She sat beside me on the windowsill and asked me how I was, which no one had exactly done up to this point. I told her it was difficult and she nodded at me, tipped her plastic cup against mine. I hear you, she said, and I wondered idly why she and Leah had never dated. You know you can call me if you need to talk about anything, she said, even if you just want to have a whine. It’s really shitty, I know. I thanked her for this, feeling briefly warm in a way I would forget about almost immediately afterward. That’s really nice of you, I said, and then, This wine is disgusting.

When I got home, I found a message from the Centre on my answering machine, suggesting—in a voice that seemed to glance at its watch—that I try not to worry, that it was all going exactly to plan. I played the message over several times, imagining I heard another voice in the background, perhaps instructing the caller on what to say.



* * *



I started losing time a little. The Centre still called, but a little less frequently. I thought about trying to find them several times around this point, searching futilely through their website for an address or any contact information besides their switchboard. Summer slunk into the brickwork, bloating the building outward, pressure in the walls. The space above the oven swelled and leaked some viscous substance like a body pierced between its ribs. I began to grow delinquent with my emails, sleeping poorly and at badly chosen times of day. Is this normal? Sam texted, and I had to think for longer than I care to admit before realizing she meant the length of Leah’s absence. They say it’s all standard, I replied. Did you know that submarines are able to produce their own indefinite supply of air? The only limitations are the amount of food onboard, or sustaining some sort of major technological defect. I had looked this information up online some moments earlier and hoped quite keenly that she didn’t realize this.

I found an online group for women who liked to role-play that their husbands had gone to space. I’m not entirely sure how this came about, though I believe it was probably a by-product of my fruitless search for a support group that really spoke to me. I spent several days moving through the message boards, reading conversations between women about their fantasy husbands, learning forum slang, not posting anything. MHIS [my husband in space] was a common acronym, as was BS [before space], EB [earthbound], and CBW [came back wrong].

MHIS was such a loving partner, a typical post might run, a friend and helpmeet, a wonderful father, but ever since he came back things have been different, I wonder if he CBW.

Six years and counting on MHIS, might run another. I know us EB wives all have it tough but sometimes I worry I don’t have the natural reserves of patience it takes to make it. It can be very hard just to wait for the end of his MTM [mission to Mars] without so much as a message to let me know he’s safe. Most of the time it’s easiest not to think about him at all.

Beneath each post would run scores of comments: women feeding in with their own fictitious experiences of husbands lost to impossible missions, husbands orbiting the moons of Jupiter, husbands strewn across space. After a while, I started to wonder whether the thrill of the fantasy wasn’t so much the thought of their husbands returning as the part where they wished them away.

New here, I typed once, EB, looking to talk. I lingered over this message for several minutes but ultimately chose not to post it, finding that none of the acronyms fitted me well enough to bother.

I imagined my mother’s symptoms and read them into the way that I swallowed, the way that I shaped my words. I fell prey to patterns of terrible thinking, imagined myself crowded with cysts, with cancer, growing an untreatable skin. I went to the doctor several times, detailing imaginary ailments, and was asked whether there was anything causing me anxiety. I’ve always been like this, I wanted to say, it’s just that she made it better. The doctor explained that hypochondria’s very insidiousness lay in its creeping logic, in the ways it purported to make sense. It’s very easy to locate one symptom and then go in search of another, to knit them together in a way that will satisfy almost any diagnosis. If you’re experiencing fatigue, vision problems, and tingling hands, the logical conclusion is multiple sclerosis. To a hypochondriac, any other inference smacks of little but refusal to look at the facts. Try, the doctor said, to be a little less logical. Sometimes symptoms just happen, we don’t really know why.