Free Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill

feels?
How she feels something she’s never felt before surge through her body, how she stands on a corner in Midtown at one in the afternoon, kicking a newspaper machine, screaming, “You fucked a child! She’s a fucking child! Tell her to come out here!”
This is very emotionally charged
, she’d write next to the moment when the husband calls the girl and softly tries to convince her. Softly saying, just come, please, so tender his voice, so sorry to cause the girl pain, and all because of the scene his crazy wife is making, his wife yelling in the background. Yelling and yelling.Then the wife stops yelling and says slowly and clearly to the husband, “Tell her if she doesn’t come, I’ll come to her job, and if she quits this job, I’ll come to her apartment and if she leaves that apartment, I’ll come to her new one. Tell her I’ll find her. Tell her I’m great at research. Tell her I’m fucking great at it. I’ll fucking find her one way or another.” People avert their eyes as they pass. “Just come out,” he says. “Please? Please? It’s going to happen sometime.”
    It is raining harder now. They are getting drenched. “Ten minutes!” the wife screams in the background. “Ten fucking minutes! That’s all I want!” His wife who has hardly ever yelled at him and never in public.
It’s important to note the POV switch here
. The wife notices that her foot hurts from kicking the newspaper machine. She wonders if she’s broken it.
Add a pause here. A little beat before the action continues
. The husband hangs up the phone. His hands are shaking. “She’s coming,” he says. “She’ll be here in a bit.”
    But it’s a long time still. They stand on thedesignated corner. There is, of course, the theatrical rain. The wife knows which direction the girl will be coming from and she thinks that she should stand back in the doorway, that it would be kinder that way, because it will be hard for this girl to walk towards her. So she lets her husband stand out there in the street and then when she knows the girl has come from the look on his face she steps out and greets her in the rain. The girl is shorter than she expected. Long red hair. Glasses, fashion-forward ones. She stands there shaking. With fear, the wife thinks. Or no, something else maybe. The girl stands there rigidly as the wife speaks. Then the moment the words stop she turns and walks away.
    The husband and wife walk in the other direction. It is a block before they speak. “She has pretty eyes,” the wife says. They walk towards a bar, prearranged. He holds the door open for her. “Wait, did she have bangs?”

33
    “Haven’t you punished us enough?” the husband says a few days later.
Us?
the wife thinks.
Did he say us? Holy shit
.
    She learns something new, something that sends a chill through her. The girl made him go for a walk with her the next day. Correction—he went on a walk with the girl the next day.
    The husband doesn’t volunteer this. Like every detail it is eked out of him in the Little Theater of Hurt Feelings. “She was furious,” he explains. “She felt ambushed.”
    Sorry
, the wife thinks of saying.
Sorry, sorry
.
    But that night, in the taxi, she does not concern herself with his voice, which is low and grievous, but only with the position of the moon in the sky. How she can make it disappear with one small movement of her thumb.
    Hahahahahaha​you​stupid​cunt​hahahahahaha
    “Am I winking?” the daughter asks them when they get home. One of her eyes is closed, the other twitching.
    “Not quite,” he says.
    “Now? Now?”
Two Jokes
    1. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?
    His wife. (Because his mistress will always understand.)
    2. A man is standing on the bank of a river when it suddenly begins to flood. His wife and his mistress are both being swept away. Who should he save?
    His