Last Things (12 page)

My mother drew a mushroom on the board. Then she erased it and drew another one.

“Pay attention, Grace,” she said.

I scuffed my shoes along the floor. Already I was tired of the calendar. We weren’t even up to the worms yet, and dinosaurs were months away.

My mother said my homework was to find out how fossils were made, then write it up in a report. As
soon as she turned her back, I closed my notebook and put it away.
Who cares about fossils
, I scratched on my desk.

It was hot in the black room. My mother talked on and on about the sea. I could see kids from the neighborhood coming home from school. I didn’t remember their numbers anymore, but I still remembered their names. Billy McAllister was It, and everyone else was running away. They ran past the blind girl’s flower beds, then around the corner toward the lake.

After a while, Jo Pace passed by on her bike. She had on overalls and her hair was cut short and crooked like a boy’s. She pedaled fast, standing up off the seat as she rode. I knew she was headed to the junkyard, where she lived with her father and a hundred broken cars.

In real school, I used to give her half my lunch every day because she was saving up to buy a horse. When she got the horse, she was going to run away to Montana and be a cowboy, she’d told me. In the summer, her father let her sleep outside in a huge tire that had once been part of a trailer truck.

“Grace, are you listening?” my mother said. She closed the window and pulled down the shade.

The stars on the wall started to glow. My mother stretched her arms out wide. She was talking about the universe again. I put my head on my desk and breathed in the wood smell. My pencils clattered to the floor, but I didn’t pick them up.

My mother whirled around. “What’s going on?” she said.

I threw my notebook across the room. It landed at her feet with a thump. “I’m sick of the stupid universe,” I told her.

“The universe is sick of you too,” she said.

A bat is not a bird, my mother corrected me. It was Halloween. I wasn’t allowed to trick-or-treat until we had given away all the candy. If we left it on the porch, people might take too much, she said. My mother had painted her shoes leaf-green. I wished it were snowing outside so that her shoes would be white again.

I went to the window. Outside, masked children moved from house to house. My mother was a flower and I was a bat. Flowers were not last things, but still she liked them.

Just after dark, the blind girl came to our door dressed as a fairy princess. Her cane had been covered with sparkles and turned into a wand. I was afraid she would recognize the sound of my shoes if I went to get the candy. “We’re out of candy,” I said.

My mother came into the room, carrying a bowl. “You know Becky, don’t you?” she asked me. She filled her jack-o’-lantern with candy. I stood very still in my spy shoes.

My mother walked the blind girl to the door. I could see her father waiting outside on the steps in his yellow rain boots. I remembered a witch I’d seen on TV who wanted the wing of a bat and the eye of a newt. Wing of a bat, eye of a newt, she’d chanted, sweeping the floor with her magic broom.

I closed my eyes and tilted my arms like wings. I flew toward Becky, knocking her to the floor. “I’m as blind as a bat,” I told her, giggling.

My mother helped her up and gave her extra candy. She went outside and spoke to the blind girl’s father. Then she came back and put all the candy away. She shut the windows and locked the door. When I asked if we could go out yet, she held me upside down until I cried. “See how bats sleep,” she said.

The next morning, Edgar came over, carrying a stack of flyers. “I’ve decided to become a Futurist,” he explained. He stood on the front steps and read aloud to me.

Let’s break away from rationality as out of a horrible husk and throw ourselves like pride-spiced fruit into the immense distorted mouth of the wind!

And this:

Oh! maternal ditch, almost to the top with muddy water! Fair factory drainage ditch! I avidly savored
your nourishing muck, remembering the holy black breast of my sweet nurse … When I got out from under the upturned car—torn, filthy, and stinking—I felt the red-hot iron of joy pass over my heart!

When my mother woke up, I gave her a flyer. She read part of it, then threw it away. “Those aren’t even his own words,” she said. “Edgar comes from a long line of decadent and overbred people.”

When pressed, she compared him to a Dalmatian she once had who was afraid of vacuum cleaners and teacups. I showed her the picture of a speeding train he had drawn for me.

My mother tacked it to the refrigerator with a piece of tape. “Edgar needs his driver’s license,” she said.

She told him she would hire him as our chauffeur so that he could practice for his test. From then on, he drove us to the lake and the raptor center and the store. On weekends, she took him out to the old highway and he practiced passing imaginary cars. “Watch out for that truck,” my mother said whenever he drifted across the yellow line.

He was supposed to always drive with an adult, but some days when my mother stayed late at work she let him pick her up.

Edgar drove fast, seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour, but still we were never on time. This was because of the bumps. If you started listening for them, they never stopped. Some sounded like metal striking metal, but others were dull thuds, the tire crossing
something in the road. “Did you hear that?” he’d ask me as we headed out of town. It didn’t matter what I said, because he always asked again. “Listen,” he’d say, slowing down. “Did we just hit something?”

Once he asked me on a day when we were already late to pick up my mother because of the rain. I shook my head. No, nothing. Edgar’s hands were white on the wheel. I watched the odometer click around. It had been fifteen miles since the last bump. Suddenly Edgar swung the car around. He drove back the way we had come, past the church, over the bridge, right to the edge of town. He pulled over where the bump was and got out of the car. “Wait here. I’ll just be a minute,” he said. Edgar walked down one side of the road and then the other. He crawled over the guardrail and looked into a ditch. When he came back, he was sweating. “It was nothing,” he said.

That night, we were an hour late to pick up my mother at the raptor center. When we got there, the lights were off and she was standing alone in the parking lot holding a newspaper over her head. The paper was so wet that the ink had bled and run down her face. She got in the car and slammed the door.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar said. “Something came up.” He didn’t say anything about the bumps, so I kept quiet, too. There had been five that day.

“Something always comes up,” my mother said. She turned on the heat as high as it would go, then sat hunched over, shivering. Rain drummed on the roof. My mother shook out her hair like a dog.

Edgar drove carefully through town, stopping at all the lights. When he passed the woods, he tried to point out a whisky jay to her, but she wouldn’t look. In the driveway, he touched my mother’s wrist. “See you tomorrow, Mrs. Davitt?” he asked. My mother shook her head. “Consider yourself fired,” she said.

A few days later, Edgar stopped by to give her a pie he had made. It was sunken on one side and burnt on the top. My mother was in the garden when he came around. “Go away, Edgar,” she told him. “I don’t have time for you or your sorry pie.”

He moped around the driveway until I called him in to see the globe my mother had given me. In the black room, he spun it again and again. “Africa, Asia, Russia,” he said. We sat at my mother’s desk and ate the pie. On the board was a lesson from the week before:
Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms)
.

“That was the day that all the trouble started,” Edgar said.

“How long? How long?” I asked each night at dinner. My father had promised to build me a dollhouse, but already it had taken longer than he’d said. Every morning, he got up at seven and packed a bag lunch to take to the basement. Then he stayed in his workroom until my mother called for him at six. When I asked why he didn’t go to school anymore, my mother said it was because he had told a Catholic boy that God was really a monkey.

My father had been working on the house for a month and during that time I’d come to think of him as a basement beast, dull and thudding, afraid of light, his pockets filled with sawdust. For a while, he indulged me in this, lumbering up the stairs with a roar, twirling me through the air, letting my mother transform him with a kiss. At dinner, he smelled always of the basement damp. “You beastly man,” my mother cried, because she had once wanted to be an actress. I took to saying this too, pursing my lips
and putting one hand on my hip the way I’d seen her do. “Stop that at once,” my mother said. “No one likes a coy child.”

I had begun to admire a pink plastic dollhouse at the toy store. It had an elevator and a heart-shaped pool. “Soon,” my father told me. “Very soon.” I could hear my mother crying when he came up from the basement at night. The bedspread he had bought for her was covered with orange flowers. In the afternoons, while she slept, my mother pulled the covers up over her head so that one of the flowers covered her face. I was terrified of the flower, but I knew better than to wake my mother. At night, I could hear her walking through the hallway and down the stairs. Sometimes my mother opened or shut the window outside my door. After a while, my father would get up and say, “Anna, what are you doing? Come back to bed.” Then I would hear the soft swish of her slippers and the door easing shut.

I knew that my mother was listening for the sound of our house settling into sleep. Each night, while we slept, shingles fell off our roof like eyelashes. The spindly trees outside my window leaned into the wind. Still, they branched like fish bones against the sky. Rain fell through the roof and into a pail down the hall. Long before my father had started on the house, he had built me ships out of kits. Ships for all the seven seas, he said. Black Sea, Dead Sea, Red Sea, he sang into a song for me. My father said that once a ship had listed on a windless sea for months and
when it crashed ashore it was filled with ghosts. He told me of the creatures, half woman, half bird, whose voices sped like arrows through a sailor’s heart. My mother grew restless, listening. “That’s such an old story,” she said. She called me to her, but I wanted to hear about the great eyeless fish that lived in the depths of the Sargasso Sea. “They might be as big as horses,” my father told me. “No one has ever gone down that far.”

“Why eyeless?” I asked. “Isn’t there anything to see?” My father shook his head. “There’s no light in water that deep,” he said. “The fish find their way by vibration alone.” He kissed my mother then, once, twice. I closed my eyes. Before I was born, they had traveled around the world together, and sometimes it seemed that they went away again and forgot me.

One night, while my father worked on the house, my mother let me come into her room and fold clothes with her. We put socks over our hands and turned them into electric eels that slithered across the flowered bed. Mine was black and my mother’s was gray. The eels danced through the air; my mother made a clicking sound whenever the black eel came too close. I thought we looked happy in the mirror that hung on the closet door. My mother looked as if she had slept well the night before. The rain had stopped and I knew that the sound she liked best was the sound of the wind in the trees. My mother took the sock off her hand. She wrapped my head in one of her scarves. “Now you look like me,” she said. “If only you didn’t
have your father’s nose, we’d be just alike.” She laughed, covering my face with the scarf so that only my eyes showed. “There,” she said. “Perfect.”

The next morning, I went into the bathroom and found the shower drain covered with half-dead flies. It was already late for my bath and I was afraid if I went to get my father my mother would come in and see them. When I tried to pick them up with a washcloth, they buzzed fiercely. “Don’t bite me, don’t bite me,” I whispered like a charm. I could see their greenish wings and the tiny thread-like hairs on their legs. I picked up my mother’s perfume bottle, then heard the bedroom door open. I turned the lock and sprayed perfume all over the flies. My mother tried the door. “What are you doing, Grace?” she said. “Open the door, please.” I sprayed more perfume, but a few legs still twitched. “Grace!” my mother yelled. I took the top off the bottle and emptied it into the tub. The black flies were shiny with perfume. None of them moved. I waited a minute to be sure, then picked them up with a tissue and flushed them away. I hid the empty bottle in the back of the cabinet and washed my hands twice. When I opened the door, my mother’s fist was raised to pound on it. “What have you done in here?” she said. “Have you been playing with my things?” Suddenly it seemed the room was filled with perfume. My mother yanked open the cabinet. When she found the empty bottle, she shook me until my shoulders hurt. “I only overslept a little,” she yelled. “You’re old enough to take a bath by yourself.”
She let go of me and slammed the door. I could see a bit of her robe had gotten caught in it. I leaned over to touch the pink, but before I could, my mother opened the door and slammed it again.