Our Wives Under the Sea

For much of her narrative in Part 3, Miri talks about anxiety, death, and loss, with her internal dialogue marking her painful progress toward accepting Transformation’s Role in Achieving Autonomy. She remembers her mother’s death—while also recalling that Leah never met her mother—and elaborates on her own feelings about death. Miri’s attitude toward death is complicated. On the one hand, she understands that death is certain. On the other hand, her feelings are rather childlike in that she only ever imagines herself dying. She never considers that her mother will die, or, more importantly, that Leah will die: “For a long time, it failed to occur to me that I was not, in fact, the only person this could happen to. I would look into the mirror and imagine that only I could be in any sense finite” (74-75). This sense also contributes to the anxiety that has plagued Miri all her life. Now Miri faces the reality that death, or transformation more broadly, is a possibility for all humans in her life, even those from whom she gains a sense of stability.

Ironically, what Miri has gone through is given less weight than what Leah has experienced. Leah is too far gone to acknowledge all of her previous absences—this is not the first expedition on which Leah has embarked—and all of the pain that Miri has suffered while fearing Leah’s fate. Miri thinks about observing the departure of one of Leah’s earlier expeditions, only to miss the exact moment the submarine sank beneath the surface: “What I remember, then, becomes what happened: Leah leaving like the summer from the ocean, not by degrees but all at once” (77). While Miri is not always a reliable narrator of factual events, her recollections here reveal her emotional state. Leah’s leave-taking has always provoked anxiety and feelings of deep loss in Miri—this last time has only been more prolonged, more grief-inducing. Each time Leah leaves, the sun around which Miri revolves is gone. Miri has harbored this anxiety for a long time: “Sometimes I think you prefer it down there, I had said to her [...], you go so deep you forget you’re supposed to come back” (80). This time, it seems Miri’s fear has come to fruition.

Miri’s efforts to practice and find empathy throughout the steady dissolution of her relationship speak to the difficulty of identifying The Value of Relationships Ending. When the therapist asks Miri to imagine what the experience of being trapped in the submarine was like, Miri places a piece of paper at the back of an enormous book. She closes the weight of the book on the paper, “crush[ing] it beneath the weight of its pages” (106). Leah does not say anything but allows Miri to hold her hand, briefly, on the way home. Miri also considers her own grief at Leah’s absence, especially when it “was complicated by lack of certainty” and admits that “[g]rief is selfish” (107). Indeed, just like Miri’s feelings about death, Miri puts herself at the center of unfolding events; she thinks more of her own abandonment than of Leah’s predicament. Still, her feelings have validity, and she seeks out confirmation via companionship online. She finds a message board for women who pretend that their imaginary husbands have gone missing on space missions. Ultimately, though, the board only stirs up Miri’s tendency to lash out when hurt. She gets drunk, then posts an all-too-honest message: “fURTHERMORE, I added, unaware I had clicked on all caps, IF YOU PEOPLE DON’T WANT YOUR HUSBANDS THEN WHY DO YOU GO TO THE TROUBLE OF MAKING THEM UP IN THE FIRST PLACE” (86). Miri metaphorically shouts her disappointment and grief—and self-centered anguish—over the internet.

Later, she finds actual solace in a site wherein people talk about loved ones who have gone missing. As one woman puts it, “It’s not grief [...] it’s more like a haunting” (107). This assessment reverberates throughout the novel as a whole: Leah is haunted by her time under the sea, recalling mysterious smells and spinetingling noises; Miri is haunted by Leah’s absences, now her inexplicable transformation; they are both haunted by their pasts. Miri’s mother and Leah’s father both loom large in their respective memories. Miri cannot bring herself to introduce Leah to her mother, who seems likely to condemn their relationship. Leah cannot introduce Miri to her father because he is already gone. His comments about the underwater Tektite habitat and the all-female team make it clear, though, that he, too, might not understand or accept them: “No chance of crewmates getting involved with each other when it’s all women—no distractions, no nookie, no silly buggers. Clever in its way” (112). While Leah does not challenge him directly, she later envisions herself among the all-female crew.

The horror here is also that Miri’s Leah, “my Leah” (repeated several times, 95) is giving way to something else, something unknown and potentially inhuman. Miri is aware of this transformation even before she consciously acknowledges it. At first, she hides the salt, worried that Leah will make herself sick by putting it in her water. Later, “[w]ithout quite knowing what I’m doing, I move over to the sink and spoon a small measure of table salt into a glass of water for Leah to drink” (92-93). As the novel explores Liminality as Integral to Change, these adjustments are gradual and subtle, not quite marking acceptance. Miri observes, before Leah allows her to see the full extent of her transformation, that there is “a certain mutability in Leah’s stride and looks and presence, a certain ebbing” (120). When Miri does see everything, she first suggests a doctor, then thinks better of it and puts Leah in a saltwater bath. Miri understands, on some level, what is happening: “I feel for a moment that I understand the whole bright dailiness of our life before this [...]—understand it and also understand that it is gone” (127). On a conscious level, she resists this dissolution; in some of her actions, though, she begins to acquiesce to it. Miri knows that Leah is right, that “there was too much water” (129), as Miri’s Leah has been taken by the sea.