My Husband loves, almost more than anything else that we do together, to brush my hair. He sits me down in front of the gilt mirror that came from a mansion in Lille, he says, and watches his own hands as they run through my hair. He says it is like watching sunlight.
“Do you brush the hair of the First Lady of the House this way?” I asked him yesterday. And he said, “No, Sylv.ie. She travels into the Capital once a week and has a woman with no eyebrows do it for her.”
I wonder what this lack of eyebrows signifies. Does it mean this woman is like me? After he went downstairs, I let myself imagine what it would be like to go once a week to the Capital. I daydreamed about going to that lady without eyebrows, to have my hair styled, and whether, once there, she would recognize that we were of the same type, and we might laugh between ourselves about the funny ways Humans behave. We could relax a little with each other and speak in code.
When I stand at my window and look out toward the horizon, I can see a little cluster of tall, thin buildings, a distance of 17.523 kilometers away, and I believe that this is the Capital. Too far away, really, for me to gather much additional information just by looking.
In the garden down below, it is different. I watch the green of the lawn, a precise hue that is particularly soothing when I rest my eyes on it, shifting in tiny ways. 918,453 blades of grass become 918,454. Each emergence gives me a feeling inside, like something lodged. Once, my Husband came upstairs unexpectedly. I forgot myself and said to him that I had seen seventeen new grass shoots emerge since the sun came out.
But I sensed by my Husband’s reaction that he didn’t have the same feeling about the grass. All he said was, “Damn, Sylv.ie. You keeping as close a track of how many hairs are still on my head?”
And although of course I am, effortlessly, without even noticing, I knew that saying so would deflate his sense of himself and so I was restricted from doing so even if I wanted to.
I am powered by the sun. Photovoltaic. I wonder, during the time I spend at my window, if the First Lady of the House is too. I see her letting it fall down on her, stretched on a teak deck chair on the lawn. When the sky is blue and clear of smog clouds, or the red tinge that means the city will be closed to cars for a day or two, on those days of high, clean sun, when the First Lady lies in the nourishing green below, I stand at my attic window and flatten myself to it. Palms spread on the glass, the insides of my arms framing my face, cheek pressed out of shape, hip bones ground against it. I feel where there is give in my thighs, and the hardness of my titanium knees. I stand on my tiptoes to touch my shins to the window. It feels like the sun and I are communing together alone. It is a little like sex with my Husband, but it is me drawing strength, not giving it.
Sometimes, I picture what I must look like from outside the house. The First Lady, prone on the grass below, myself at the window four floors above, white as an angel in the sun’s beam.
While absorbing a textbook on applied physics recently, I learned that glass is what Humans call an amorphous solid—something almost liquid in its structure. If I choose to focus closely enough, I can see each drop of glass suspended, slowly, so slowly, settling down into itself, running in rows. Tetrising, finding and filling gaps. This is with my sight calibrated to the absolute limit of my spec, and I do not do it for long. But I feel as if I can see the spaces between each individual molecule. If my finger were tiny enough, I could fit it between these gaps. I could find a way outside. The garden is just there.
WORK
I wonder how the First Lady spends her day when she is not in the garden. Sometimes I can sense her moving around below me from the vibrations in the old bones of the house. I can faintly hear water going on and off, slinking through the pipes, and I imagine her drawing a bath, or perhaps filling up a vase for all those flowers.
Curiosity. A quality I am supposed to have, but not in excessive amounts. I asked my Husband the other evening whether the First Lady ever went to work. I felt my tone was respectful, but maybe it had some greater meaning to him that I cannot fully divine.
“Oh, she works, Sylv.ie,” he answered, sounding defensive. “You think keeping a beautiful old house like this running isn’t work? Keeping up with appointments and managing the droids and maintaining this life. That is all her work, Sylv.ie. I’m hopeless at it. As she likes to remind me.” He smiled, looked out of the window.
“A wife, and soon to be a mother. That’s a lot on one plate, don’t you agree? I literally couldn’t do all this,” he said, and he gestured about us at the furniture and the paintings. The sweep of his arm took me in too, though I don’t think he intended that. “I couldn’t do any of this without her. Nor would I want to.”
Soon to be a mother. I was formulating thoughts, wondering what this might mean for the house, one logic leading to another. But perhaps he mistook my expression for a pout. He put his arms around me, touched his fingers to my cheek.
“Or without you.”
When he allowed me to sit up straight again I dared to return to my original line of inquiry.
“So, do you do the same things with her that you do with me?”
He coughed, then seemed to laugh just to himself. “Some things, Sylv.ie,” he said, still looking amused. “Not everything. Women are all different, with all sorts of moods and temperaments. And so some women are more suited to some things than to others.”
SHOUTING
Yesterday, in the kitchen, my Husband’s wife was yelling.
“You promised me!” she shouted. “You promised. No more of it, you said. Just do this one thing for me, you said.”
I try not to listen when voices are raised. Nor when there are noises of breaking crockery, when the reverberations spread up the walls like ivy and tickle the soles of my feet through the floor. I am not a snoop, and what goes on between my Husband and his wife is really none of my business. But she was so loud this time, I really couldn’t help but hear.
“It was work. How many more times?”
It was my Husband’s voice, and at that I admit I did perhaps listen a little closer. Because although the First Lady shouts out this sort of thing quite often, my Husband rarely responds. Or if he does, he must do so in a reasonable, calm tone that is too gentle and measured to be overheard.
“I’ve given up so much!” she yelled back. “I share my home.” She emphasized the final word, pained and pleading. “What have you given up?”
“I pay for her. I pay for you. And if I want to be out until five in the morning, then I damn well will.”
My poor Husband. Although I respect the First Lady and would act most properly toward her were we ever to meet, my Husband’s logic cannot be faulted. The argument finished with the sound of bone china striking polished slate, or a surface of similar density. When my Husband comes tonight I will not ask him about it, but it will be in my mind. I look forward to soothing him with my touch, with my laughter, and with my soft, perfectly modulated speech.