The Magic of Found Objects Page 11

  “Good. Well, I just wanted to tell you that I can’t come early for Thanksgiving. A work thing has come up—”

  “Oh no! That’s our favorite time together!”

  “I know,” I say. And then I tell him the short version about Gabora and the Pilgrims. Maybe he could pick up Bunny from the nursing home on Monday night? He says he’d be happy to.

  Somebody in the background is yelling about whose turn it is to feed the dog.

  “So, if you have another one tenth of a second,” I say, talking quickly now, “did you know that Judd asked me to marry him?”

  There’s a silence. Then he laughs. “What?” he says. “Wow. I did not see that coming. I thought you guys were strictly pals.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too,” I say, “but it seems that I’ve said yes. A new direction in my life!”

  There’s another beat of silence and then I hear him say, “Guys, I’m going to take the phone outside now. I gotta talk to Phronsie.”

  “Uh-oh, this sounds like a serious talk,” I say.

  “Well, I worry about you,” he says. I can hear him breathing hard as he walks. “Don’t get me wrong. Judd’s the nicest guy in the whole world. But he’s . . . ordinary compared to you. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve got a lot of our mom in you—”

  “Thanks,” I say sarcastically.

  “No, I mean all the best parts of her—all the fun and creative stuff,” he says. He pauses. “Phronsie, you know I adore you. You’re the most adventurous person I know, and when you had that marriage to Steve Whoever, and I watched you get so hurt, I just hoped there was somebody out there who could appreciate all the great parts about you.”

  “And you don’t think it could be Judd. Is that it?”

  He laughs. “Well, marriage is freaking hard sometimes. And I’ve studied you my whole life. Before I even knew I was alive. Even in the womb, I think you were redesigning the place and making sure it wasn’t too boring. I just wonder if you’re going to be as happy with all the conventional life stuff Judd’s attached to. That’s all.”

  I laugh. “Well, womb-mate, I appreciate your concern for me. But I really do think Juddie and I are going to be fine together. I’m not as much like Mom as you think, maybe. I want kids and a real life with a man who’s not going to cheat on me. I’m ready for this.”

  “Well,” says Hendrix. “If you’re happy, then I’m happy. And now I’ve got to tell you that Ariel is just practically leaping at me, trying to get the phone away. She has somehow surmised exactly what’s going on, and she has to weigh in. So I’ll say good-bye. See you whenever you get to Thanksgiving.”

  And then there’s Ariel in my ear: “Phronsie! Omigod! Congratulations to you! Welcome to the married-people club.”

  “She was in it before,” yells Hendrix from a distance. “She left the club. Whose turn is it to feed the dog because whoever it is better get to it!”

  “Well, welcome back to the club,” says Ariel. “New, improved partner. Am I right?”

  I squeeze my eyes closed. “Thank you,” I say. “Yeah. He’s an improvement.”

  “So—we won’t see you before Thanksgiving? Is that what I’m hearing? Boys, would one of you for God’s sake just get out of this kitchen so I can get this soup made? Why are you all underfoot? Scram!”

  “Dad said I had to feed the dog!”

  “I’ll be there—just not until after the dinner itself.”

  “Oh. Well, good, then,” she says. Her voice is the distracted voice of someone who’s dealing with a roomful of chimpanzees. “Anyway, honey, I couldn’t be more thrilled for you and Judd. And you know what I’m thinking? Maybe we can all go on vacation together sometime. The boys just love Judd!”

  “Sure,” I say. That’s a comforting and strange thought. I try to visualize us all camping out somewhere in the woods, or even at a resort somewhere, lounging by a pool. I have to say that no mental images come to mind.

  She laughs. Maybe she can’t picture it either. But it doesn’t matter: in another minute, she’s hung up, gone back to her life, where her whole existence depends upon taming wild chimpanzees and holding tight to her very loving husband.

  I sit there for a moment in the silence. How is it that some lucky people avoid all the pitfalls of love—the cheating husband who blindsides you, then the indignities of “putting yourself out there again,” waiting for someone to click on your profile, the retelling again and again of your life story to a random, bored stranger, and then the slow realization that time may be running out and that you need to figure out how to settle for a life that is so far from what you imagined? How, indeed, do they get that lucky?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The summer I was ten, I asked Mama why she never married anybody else after my daddy.

  I was expecting her to say, Because I still love your daddy, and someday we’re going to get back together again! And then I would say I thought she had a good chance of getting him away from Maggie, who wasn’t nearly as nice as Mama was. She was sewing a butterfly onto Stony’s jeans. She stared down at the jeans like the whole secret of life was contained there and said, “Umm . . . because . . . I didn’t want to.”

  I decided to help her along. “Because you still love Daddy,” I said. “I bet that’s why.”

  “Well . . . no.” She sighed. “I don’t want to be married to him. Or to anybody for that matter.”

  I looked out at the fields and thought about this. It seemed she should be married to somebody. “What about Stony?” I asked her. “Because he sleeps in your bed with you, and I think he likes you a whole lot. And I bet he would want to marry you if you told him.”

  “Nope,” she said. “I just don’t like being married, I guess. I like being free.”

  I almost laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of this. I had never heard of such a thing. Everybody got married! And if they weren’t already married, then they were waiting to get married. Or hoping to get married, like my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Stepkins, who was waiting for her boyfriend to get out of the army and come and marry her.

  I draped myself across the back of her chair and started playing with her hair, twirling it around my finger. “Well, why don’t you like it?”

  “Because marriage isn’t so great for women, Phronsie. We can do just fine in life without a husband.” She broke off the thread and tied a knot in it, and then held out the jeans to look at her work. “Look at me, for instance. How happy I am. Do you think I’d be this happy if I had some husband telling me what to do?”

  “You could tell him not to tell you what to do!”

  “Oh, but once you marry somebody, sweetheart, then all bets are off. He’s your partner, and he thinks he gets to tell you what you’re supposed to look like and act like, and even though you might not want to, you find you’re putting everything you want aside. Like if you want to do art, and he wants you to start a business with him? Or you want to do art, and he thinks you should be in there making dinner? No, thank you. It’s not a good deal if you like being free and doing what you want in your life. Trust me.”

  “My teacher wants to get married.”

  “Fine,” she said. “I wish her every happiness.”

  “Also Maggie and my dad are married. Did you know that?” I slid my eyes carefully over to her face when I said the name Maggie, just so I could see if I’d hurt her feelings. I didn’t know quite where the pain might lie.

  “Yes,” she said. “I did know that.”

  Her voice seemed so easy and calm, so I ventured a little further. “Did that make you mad when they got married after he was married to you?”

  “Nope. I understood it perfectly.”

  I left her chair and went and hung on the railing to the steps. “Well, what if you wanted to have another baby? What about that? You’d have to get married then, wouldn’t you?”

  “Another baby!” she said and laughed. “I am so done with all that. But just so you know, even if I did want a baby, I
could just have one. I wouldn’t have to get married for that.” She stood up and stretched her arms overhead and did a couple of deep knee bends. The sparkly things on her shirt caught the sunlight and flashed at me.

  I walked my two fingers up and down on the porch railing banister, pretending they were people needing to jump over the places where the blue paint was chipping off. “But I thought you couldn’t make babies if you weren’t married.”

  “Some people want you to believe that, but it’s not really true. Like, I had already started making you and Hendrix long before your daddy and I got married.”

  “You did? How did you do that?”

  She looked at me. “Has anybody ever thought to tell you about sex?”

  I shook my head and stubbed my toe on the riser to the step as hard as I could. “I mean, I know a lot about it.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “Well, I know that you have to be in a bed. And that when you do it with somebody, it makes babies. And you have to be married.”

  She pursed her lips. “Good God. You’re ten years old, and you—well, never mind. It’s time you knew the real story. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “Hendrix doesn’t know about it either. I know way more than he does. Like, get this! Last year, we went to a wedding with Daddy and Maggie, and when the bride and groom kissed at the end, Hendrix leaned over and said to me, ‘I think they’re doing sex and they’re making a baby now.’ And I had to tell him that it’s not sex when you’re standing up. He said sex was kissing for a long time, and I said you also need a bed. So sex is kissing in the bed, isn’t it? When you’re married.”

  She was smiling and shaking her head. “Oh, sweetie. You don’t have to be in a bed. It’s just comfortable there.”

  I looked at her for a long time, feeling a little bit shy. “Well. If you don’t have to be married to have babies, then why did you marry my daddy?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth. When I got pregnant, Bunny said we needed to get married. So we did.”

  “But I don’t get it. Why would she want you to get married if marriage isn’t good for women?”

  “Well, some people don’t think women should have babies by themselves. They think women need men to hang around and take care of them. Which would probably be great, if men didn’t think they got to be the boss of us.”

  I could feel myself blinking very fast. “Is that why you and my daddy didn’t stay together? Because he wanted to be the boss of you?”

  I could actually picture that. I remembered the day he came and picked us up, and the way he was so mad at her. And how at home, he was the one who always got to say what was going to happen. He was the boss of everybody.

  “Oh, honey, it’s so complicated. Who knows? We just didn’t work out, that’s all. We weren’t so good at regular life together. We wanted different things. That’s all. You can probably tell how different we are from each other.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  And then she laughed. “He loves the Woman with the Organized Hair,” she said. “That’s the kind of woman for him. Somebody who has all her hairs trained to obey her commands, to all lie down going the same way.”

  I laughed, too.

  “I wonder if I’ll get married,” I said.

  “If you want to, you should. But if you don’t want to, don’t listen to anybody tell you that you have to, okay? You’ll be just fine either way.” She flexed her bicep. “Strong women, remember? Strong, free women!”

  That day, after lunch, she took Hendrix and me to the river, and we sat on the sand and she told us the whole story of sex and love and how people decide who to love and how it’s all magic and mysterious and it’s a force in the world that’s very powerful, and when it takes over your life, you think you’ve discovered the whole world because you’re so happy and proud, and that’s called being in love and it’s worth everything. Everything. Because you’re all lit up from the inside. Something has happened to every single one of your cells, she said—scientists have proven that.

  We nodded. Hendrix and I were mesmerized by the whole story—except when she got to describing the mechanics of everything, the penises and vaginas part of the situation. We covered our eyes, and she laughed and said, “Okay. You think this way now, but this is going to be a very, very fun part of your life, and it’s all about love and being close to somebody you love. But you shouldn’t do it for a very, very long time. Not until you’re grown up and completely ready and you really, really love somebody.” And she hugged us both, one on each side.

  “I am never doing it,” said Hendrix. “I know that for a fact.”

  Well, she said, he shouldn’t say that for sure. She thought love might change his mind. Love was everything. It ran the whole universe. “Just always remember that love will get you through anything.”

  I had told Hendrix my theory about how our family was split up into two teams, and later that summer, he asked me, “Are you on the Maggie Team or the Tenaj Team?”

  I knew already he was on the Maggie Team, because of how worried he always was when we were with Mama. And bad things happened to him, just coincidences, although Tenaj said there were no such things as coincidences. He stepped on a piece of glass in the field and had to get stitches. He would have headaches and stomachaches. The smell of the marijuana smoke made him sick. He got burned one Fourth of July by a sparkler. He cut his thumb on the can opener. He had nightmares because of the bats that flew around in the trees. He was homesick.

  “It’s only two weeks, Henny,” I would say to him. “Can’t you try to have fun?”

  “This isn’t fun,” he said. “It’s highly dangerous.”

  I said there was nothing dangerous, that he needed to learn to have fun, to be brave and adventurous.

  I said he should even try being like me. I danced and stayed up late and wore cast-off clothes that were like costumes and learned to play the ukulele. I wore a tie-dyed shirt and embroidered jeans and kept my long hair in braids, and people said I looked just like a hippie chick.

  “Try to enjoy things for a change,” I told him.

  And then one day everything went sideways.

  It started out as any ordinary hot day. We’d lain around all morning, listlessly. I played the ukulele, Mama finished designing some cards, and Stony and some other friends were milling around drinking beers and working on the trucks. Hendrix was whiny. Why couldn’t we go do something? At last we packed everything up. It took a huge effort to get that many people to actually get moving.

  But we did it. We went down to the river—Mama and Stony and a whole bunch of other people. We took a picnic basket with egg salad sandwiches and potato wedges and carrot sticks and beer. There was iced tea and lemonade and apple slices. Some pears and raisins. Some more beer.

  We spread out on towels and blankets on the sand and the rocks. I watched as Hendrix, who was usually not all that brave, waded into the water. And then I saw his face change when he was staring at the big rock that sometimes people jumped from. I saw him decide to do it, too. He looked around, licked his lips nervously, did a couple of boxing punches into the air. He was a skinny, pearly-white kid with no fat on him whatsoever. His hair was shorter than anyone else’s. He breathed with his mouth open. But now he was going to be brave. I saw Hendrix think that, just like there was a thought balloon that came out of his head.

  It wasn’t all that reckless a thing to do, to be honest. But he was Hendrix, and he was always getting hurt. And this time, after he climbed to the top of the rock and stood there for a moment, holding his arms close to his side and closing his eyes, I saw him almost come back down. But he didn’t.

  With a suddenness that was almost breathtaking, he jumped. He flailed in midair, waved his arms around, kicked out his legs. I held my breath, seeing him soaring there before gravity grabbed hold of him. Then I stood up. He hadn’t jumped far enough out, and there was an awful moment when I realized he had hit the edge of the rock. I threw d
own the egg salad sandwich I was eating and ran. He hadn’t come up. I was screaming and screaming, but I didn’t even know if the sound was getting out, because people just kept talking and laughing on the rocks.

  “Hendrix! Hendrix!” I kept shouting his name and running into the water, and as if in slow motion, other people started yelling and coming after me, too. There was red in the water where he had jumped, and he still had not surfaced.

  The men dived down and brought him to the surface. They carried him to the shore, and he was lying in their arms. I was shaking on the shore next to them, wet and shivering, holding my hands up to my face, not quite able to make myself look. My teeth were chattering so hard I thought they might break off in my mouth.

  An ambulance came. The sirens, the white look of Hendrix’s face, the gash on his head. His eyes were open. He looked at me, and he was so not in his head that I could barely stand it. I touched his hand. I said, “You’ll be okay,” which I did not for one second believe, but it seemed like something that might help him.

  Mama went with him in the ambulance. She was clutching her skirt and a string necklace she always wore that had stones on it. Lucky stones, she’d told me once. She was white and quiet, and I wondered if she thought he was going to die, like I did. Her face was hidden by her sheet of hair, and I couldn’t see her eyes. I wanted to see her eyes, to know if she was as scared as I was. I needed to know if this had been my fault for telling him to be brave.

  But then they went away.

  Like that, they were gone, the siren shrieking down the road, the sound getting smaller and smaller until you couldn’t hear it at all.

  The day they left behind was a ruined, horrible gray thing that settled over all of us who were left on the shore. Petal helped pack up the food, and Stony carried me to the truck and tucked me in with a blanket because I was shaking so hard. The other people stood around describing to themselves what had happened, what they’d seen, when they first noticed the trouble. Then they all got in their cars and trucks and left. Went back to their houses in town.