the telescope

The telescope is the Husband's most cherished possession, a three-legged device that he struggles to carry to the bottom of the garden, where it slopes down into the woods, in a nightly ritual of stargazing. It is the central prop in a recurring scene of domestic estrangement: while the Husband busies himself setting up his precious device, the Narrator stands apart, refusing to share his wonder. The telescope is not merely an instrument of astronomy but a stage on which the couple's fundamental incompatibility plays out, a concrete object that exposes the gulf between his enthusiastic engagement with the cosmos and her profound indifference to it.

The Instrument of Cosmic Enthusiasm

The Husband's relationship with the telescope is one of eager, almost childlike devotion. He carries it with effort to the garden's edge, where the land slopes into the woods, and sets it up with the care of a man performing a sacred rite. His enthusiasm is palpable: he points out the String of Pearls, the Great Bear and the Little Bear, and urges the Narrator to look at the moon because "it won't be the same tomorrow." He describes the stars as "bright twinkling specks" that one might "eat with your eyes," and finds the grey craters of the moon so appealing he wants to "eat it, smoke it even." For him, the telescope is a gateway to a universe of meaning, a way to get "your bearings in the sky" by following imaginary lines between stars, no more difficult than reading a road map. His elation is genuine, and it hurts the Narrator to witness it.

The Husband's stargazing is also a bid for connection that fails. He hugs the Narrator, putting his arms around her shoulders, a gesture that stands out because "it's been months since we've hugged." He tries to draw her into his world, asking if she sees the constellations, but her eyes linger instead "in the starless space, in the absence of light." When a meteor passes, he lets go of her in his excitement, and she misses it entirely. His annoyance is palpable, and the moment of potential intimacy dissolves. The telescope, meant to bring them together under a shared sky, instead becomes the instrument of their separation, highlighting how their attempts at closeness are out of sync.

The Narrator's Refusal of the Sky

The Narrator's rejection of the telescope is total and principled. She states plainly that she has "never been able to make him understand that I'm not interested in stars," that she does not care about what is in the sky, and that she has no desire to count stars, learn their shapes, or understand why they are called Orion's Belt or the Big Dipper. Her disinterest is not passive but active: "I don't like illusions," she declares, listing optical, auditory, sensory, olfactory, and cerebral illusions as all equally distasteful. She does not like "black objects in the sky." While the Husband sees wonder, she sees absence, a void that mirrors her own internal state. The telescope, for her, is not a window to the cosmos but a reminder of everything she cannot feel, a symbol of the husband who tries to show her a universe she refuses to inhabit.

Her mind, during these stargazing sessions, is elsewhere. While the Husband waxes poetic about the moon, she thinks about the baby crying, her body "secreting, impatient for him to stop." She recalls the advice of a young social worker who came to the house after the Mother-in-Law called, alarmed: if the child cries so much that she feels she might lose control, she should leave the child in a safe place and take a few steps back. She thinks about pacing with the baby for hours, a "tedious choreography" from exhaustion to screaming and back. She thinks about how "a child is a wild animal." The telescope's cosmic scale is dwarfed by the immediate, overwhelming reality of her motherhood, and the Husband's attempts to pull her gaze upward are met with a mind firmly anchored in the domestic trenches below.

The Telescope's Decline and Storage

The telescope's fate is sealed by the Husband's frustration. After a night of failed connection, he "got fed up, decided he'd had enough, closed the telescope and took it to the garage to store with his tools." The instrument is relegated to the company of the Father-in-Law's tractor and the canoe and paddles, objects of a rural, masculine world that no longer serves a purpose. The act of storing the telescope is a quiet surrender, an acknowledgment that his attempts to share his passion have failed. The night ends with the Husband smoking a second pack of cigarettes while "insulting the moon, women and me in equal parts," and the couple sleeping in separate beds, the Narrator having grown used to sleeping alone, stretched out diagonally across the bed in the house that was once a dairy farm.

The telescope's reappearance in the garage is a stark contrast to its former glory. When the Narrator goes searching for a torch in the tool drawer, she finds the garage filled with "layers of filth" accumulated on pieces of wood, unused furniture, and swivel chairs. Amidst this neglect, only the telescope seems clean, "sheathed as it was in clear plastic." The image is poignant: the object of the Husband's former enthusiasm is preserved, protected, while everything else decays. It is a monument to a hobby abandoned, a connection failed, and a marriage that has settled into a pattern of separate beds and unspoken resentments. The telescope, once a tool for reaching the stars, now sits in the dark, a clean relic of a dead aspiration.