The Magic of Found Objects Read online

  I felt pretty good about that.

  Having Mama back in my life after the period call was a little bit like having a huge, delicious secret. I bought a phone card like she suggested, and a few times a week, I’d go call her from a pay phone located out behind Dinah’s Dress Shoppe, which had closed down the year before. The phone booth was way in the back of the parking lot, hardly ever used, and it was cramped and filled with papers and broken glass, but over time I came to think of it like another home, and I fixed it up. I cleaned out all the trash and brought a little plastic stool from home and left it there so I’d have someplace to sit. While I talked to Mama, I would draw pictures, and I propped the pictures I did against the walls of the phone booth, and so it was like my own personal little art gallery.

  On the days when I called her, I would get off the school bus in town instead of going home. I told Maggie that I liked to go to the pet shop and pet the puppies and play with the kittens. I wanted to be a vet, I said, and this was going to give me some good experience.

  I think Maggie was just relieved not to have me brooding and underfoot, so she ignored the fact that I had never once thought I would become a vet. She said, “Just don’t talk to strangers.” As if there were any strangers in our little town. It was a whole town of non-strangers.

  But, there’s this: if she’d known how magical and weird the conversations were that I was having, she might have preferred I was talking to strangers.

  Mama wasn’t like anybody in Pemberton, that’s for sure. Or maybe anyone in the whole state of New Hampshire. She talked to me about everything. She believed in goddesses, of which she was one, and apparently so was I. She was also a witch and she had a group of women she called “the women who run with the wolves,” and she told me they spoke of their vaginas like they were personal friends of theirs, not simply parts of their bodies.

  We roared with laughter over that.

  “Of course my vagina speaks to me as well,” she said, “but it’s mostly my stomach I hear from.”

  Just her voice—her throaty, low voice coming to me through the receiver—moved me beyond words.

  I told her all my problems. All of them. And I asked her all the questions I couldn’t ask anybody else. Was it worth it to take science when all I wanted was to be a writer? Should I wear eyeliner only on the bottom edge of my eye or draw the line up near my top lid? Should I stay mad at Hendrix for telling Billy David that I had a crush on him? What was the best thing to do to get to be friends with catty girls? How often should I shave my legs? Should I buy my own bras because the ones Maggie bought for me were horrible?

  Her advice was never anything I expected to hear. “Yes, take science. You never know what you’ll need in your life as a writer. Eyeliner: everywhere you want! Look how you want to feel inside! Don’t stay mad at anybody. Maybe Billy David needs to know you have a crush on him; that kind of information could change a person’s life. As for the catty girls . . . who needs ’em? Ignore them until they behave. Leg shaving: a barbaric ritual sold to women by the patriarchy. Bras: same thing. But if you wanted a nice lacy one, and Maggie doesn’t want you to have it, go find one yourself.”

  There are signs everywhere you look, she said. Messages coming to you. You just have to watch for them.

  There were other things, too, random things. Back when she was a teenager, she’d ironed her hair every single morning before school. She had wanted to be a ballerina and a concert pianist and a witch. In ninth grade, she was voted homecoming queen in a tie vote, and she won in a runoff, but she let the other girl wear the crown and she wore the sash because she really didn’t care and the other girl did. Now she wished she’d let her wear the sash, too. She’d had eleven boyfriends before she met my father.

  She’d had such an interesting life, and here I had practically nothing. I had—what? A farmhouse and a stepmother who was uptight and a father who scowled all the time, and a brother who never wanted to talk about anything real. Besides all that, I had homework and good grades and a job on the school newspaper.

  “No, no, no,” she would say to me. “Stop with that kind of talk. You’re at the beginning. You’re creating your reality, and the words you tell yourself, the story you believe about yourself, is the way things are going to turn out for you. You have to fill your heart with love for yourself, Phronsie. That is the first and most important thing you have to do. Everything you want will follow from that.”

  “Okay,” I’d say quietly.

  Sometimes she was talking to me from work, from the gallery, and she had to stop to wait on customers. She always made fun of the city people, people who came up from New York City, wanting only to gawk at the hippies and buy paintings that would match their couches, she said. Once I heard her order a customer to leave the premises immediately for asking if she could repaint something a more orangey color. “Grief is not orange,” she said. “And this is a painting about my grief.”

  “Wait a minute. What is your grief?” I asked her when she came back to the phone.

  “You,” she said. Then when I was silent, she said, “No, no! That sounds horrible. You could never be my grief. My grief is that I don’t have you here with me. That’s always my grief. But it’s little. Just a little manageable-sized grief. I keep it in my back pocket and it only comes out when I let it, when I’m painting. I just want you to know that I’m someday coming back for you.”

  After that, we talked all the time about the extravagant measure of our sadness for each other.

  “Today I missed you one thousand elephants.”

  “Yesterday I took the grief out of my pocket when it was the size of a Chiclet, and five minutes later, it blew up to be the size of an aircraft carrier. But I shrank it by telling it to go away. I filled up the grief with love, and it slinked off.”

  “I took my grief out to the cornfield and buried it,” I told her once. “But it beat me back to the house. It was sitting next to Maggie when I went inside for dinner.”

  Tenaj never did come back for me, and from that I figured out that grief is something you can get used to. You shrink it down, put it in your pocket, like a phone number scrawled on a piece of paper, and maybe after a while, you just leave it in your drawer and don’t carry it with you at all.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Wow!” Judd springs awake like he’s just been catapulted back into the room—sitting up fast in the bed, rubbing his eyes. Then he looks at me and pretends to do a double take. “Whoa! Wot’s dis?? Is there a laaaady in my bed?”

  “I’m no lady, I’m your fiancée,” I say.

  “So you are, so you are,” he says. “Say, that was kind of a nice sneak attack in the middle of the night. Highly, highly unexpected.” He reaches over and pats my hip over the blankets. “A rather brilliant maneuver actually. I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  “Well,” I say. “You’re welcome.”

  I stretch my arms over my head and sit up. It’s still barely light in his room, but I can see his pants folded nicely on the armchair in the corner. Silver picture frames lined up on the dresser. The deep pile carpet. It hits me that I am way messier than he is. I wonder if that’s going to be an issue when we’re living together.

  “Holy shit, it’s nearly six o’clock,” he says. “I’ve gotta get out of here. I have my ladies coming to bench press at seven.” He jumps out of bed, flinging the covers back. And there we are, naked. In the daylight. I want to scrunch up my eyes. He reaches for his boxer shorts superfast, and I rummage through the covers for my underwear and leggings.

  “So this part might be a little weird, isn’t it?” he says. “I don’t think I’ve seen you naked since you were five.”

  “Well. Yeah.”

  “You look different.” He laughs and runs his hands through his hair, looks a bit sheepish.

  “So do you.”

  “But it was okay for you, right? Last night?” My heart contracts, seeing how worried and hopeful he looks. “We’re good together, right?”<
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  I say, “It was great.”

  He seems relieved. “So I guess you still want to get married?”

  “I do. I am officially throwing in my lot with you. Yes.”

  “Well, that’s great,” he says. He hesitates for a moment, looking just a little bit shy. “I gotta run, get in the shower. You pushing off? Normally, I’d make some coffee and a formal breakfast, but . . .”

  “No. No. Of course. You weren’t expecting company,” I tell him. “Go take your shower, and I’ll get up and let myself out. I’ve got a busy day, too.”

  He goes padding off down the little hallway, and then he calls back to me, “Oh! By the way, look in my pants pocket. I got you the ring.”

  “Well, but don’t you want to present it?”

  There’s a silence, and then he says, “Nah. Just take it out of my pocket and see if you like it. If you don’t like it, I’ll give it back to Eddie.”

  “Listen. I can wait for you to give it to me.”

  “No! Phronsie, just take it, all right? See if it’s what you like.”

  So I go over and feel around in the pocket of his sweatpants, and sure enough there’s a sweet little white box with a silver ring inside, nestled in a black velvet groove. It has a smooth little diamond, nothing ostentatious, which is good. It fits me. And he’d somehow discerned my size, which pleases me. Denotes effort on his part. Or maybe just amazing luck.

  The shower turns on, along with the ceiling fan.

  “You like it?” he hollers.

  “Yeah! I do! It’s nice!”

  “And it fits?”

  “It fits.”

  “Fabulous!”

  “Okay then. So. Well, I’m leaving now. Have a good day for yourself.”

  “Are you wearing the ring?”

  “Well, not yet.” I go and stand at the bathroom door.

  “Why not? You don’t like it?”

  “Judd,” I say. “No offense, but I think—I think I needed you to want to put the ring on my finger. So I’m not going to take it now. I’ll wait.”

  “What? Okay. Whatever.”

  “See? This is one of those things. It’s kind of symbolic. The ring. Putting it on the woman’s finger. You know?”

  “Uh-oh!” he says. “We’re having an RCM.”

  “What’s an RCM?”

  “It’s a romantic comedy moment.”

  The water running is loud. After a moment, he turns it off and opens the shower curtain and looks at me through the clouds of steam that are filling the room. “Will you hand me my towel?”

  “The green one?”

  “The brown one.”

  I give it to him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s one of those moments where you could look at me with the eyes you used when we were just good friends—when you thought I was just fine because I was your friend—or we could compare me to every single romantic comedy out there, in which case I’d come off looking like some kind of moron.”

  “Just put the ring on my finger. I do not think that’s too much to ask,” I say.

  “Fine. I will.”

  “Fine.”

  “Give it to me.”

  He’s standing there with his towel around his waist. I hand him the ring, and he looks at it, and says, “Give me your hand.”

  So I do. And he puts the ring on my left ring finger. We stand there, and then he says, “So we’re good?”

  I roll my eyes. “Yes.”

  “RCM survived,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve had sex and an RCM, and it’s not even seven o’clock in the morning on day one of our official engagement. I think we’re off to a good start. A momentous day.”

  I laugh because I can’t help myself.

  “Oooh, and now I’ve made you laugh. See? I think this is a trifecta. We’re off to an auspicious start to our entire plan here. Where you’re adorable and I’m adorable, and we do a whole bunch of things that make the other one crazy, but because we are such wonderful, forgiving pals—it all works beautifully. Ta-da!”

  He swoops down and gives me a kiss on the cheek and then pulls back and studies my face. “Right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  Because he is.

  As I let myself out, Marguerite Hubbard from 6185 comes out of her apartment with her three corgis. We call her the Queen because she’s stately and British, plus she’s always on about her dogs, which are so well-behaved that she can maneuver to take them for a walk, all three at one time.

  “Hello,” she says, and in my imagination, I think she raises her eyebrows at the sight of me in my bathrobe and slippers coming out of Judd’s apartment.

  Yes, Queen, I spent the night with Judd. And yes, in another stunning development, we’re getting married. Here is my ring!

  I say nothing of the sort. I say hello in an overly friendly voice, and then I wish her a nice day and go to the stairs and head down to my little apartment, where Mr. Swanky is waiting and wagging his tail.

  “Guess what. News flash: Judd and I are getting married, boy,” I say.

  He cocks his head to the side, like he’s trying to figure it out. I know the feeling well. “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “You too. You’re getting married, too.”

  He wags, but he’s got that worried pug look going on. I think he lacks confidence in the future.

  “Don’t take it so hard. It’s what all the adult humans do,” I tell him. “We have to match up with other people, you see. It’s like a rule or something. It’s because we didn’t get neutered or spayed. I’m sorry to bring that up if it’s difficult for you to hear about that chapter of your past, but there’s the truth of it.”

  Mr. Swanky goes over to the door. He’d just as soon go pee than hear any more about this matter.

  I call Maggie as soon as I get off the subway.

  “Well, it’s set in stone!” I say when she answers the phone. “I have a ring!”

  “Well, praise the Lord,” she says. “That’s wonderful. I knew it was going to happen.” Then she says to my dad, “Robert, Robert! Pay attention to me for just one second, will you? Put the paper down and look at me. They’re going through with it! We’re getting a new son-in-law . . . yes, it’s Judd! Of course it’s Judd. Oh, stop it!”

  This is the way they talk to each other these days. I try to remember if they ever acted like they were in love with each other. Maybe this is what married love is supposed to look like. As has been pointed out a lot lately, I’m a victim of sitcoms and romcoms, so I don’t even know.

  I hear him saying something in the background, but he doesn’t ask for the phone.

  “Hey, could you put Dad on?” I say, and she does.

  “So I hear congratulations are in order,” he says gruffly. “Or is it still true that one doesn’t congratulate the bride, but says ‘best wishes’? We don’t want anybody to think you deserve congratulations for trapping him, you know.”

  “You can say congratulations if you want to.”

  “I’ll just leave it at saying he’s a good man.”

  “Yes. He is.”

  “So do you think the two of you will find your way back to living in New Hampshire?” he says. “Or have you converted him to being a New Yorker?”

  I close my eyes. Why does everything my dad says to me sound like an accusation?

  “Robert!” says Maggie. “Don’t hit her with all of that right now. We’ve got a wedding to plan. Here, give me the phone.”

  He mumbles something to her, and then she says into my ear, “Okay, honey. What do you think about a summer wedding at our Cape house? That way we don’t have to worry about getting a reservation for a venue on such late notice. What about a destination wedding—we’ll put some people up at the house, and I’m sure we can get hotel rooms for the others, and we can have the ceremony in town at the church in Wellfleet.”

  “I’ll have to get back to you,” I say.

  “Well, hurry up,” she says. “This is the only real wedding
I’m ever going to get to plan in my whole life, so I’ve got a lot of pent-up thoughts.”

  It’s true. She and my dad had kind of a hurry-up thing out in the orchard when Hendrix and I were five. And Steve and I eloped, because we thought that was romantic and exciting. Although to even call it an elopement would be to give it some degree of romance and panache. Really, we went to some government municipal building, stood together and said our vows with two witnesses—one of them Judd—and then we went and had brunch at a French restaurant and then went home to bed to make mad, passionate, newlywed love.

  Thinking of that day, I briefly lose my train of thought. But Maggie doesn’t notice; she’s gone on talking about how fun it’s all going to be to plan something. And just like that, from out of nowhere, a little dark cloud flits across my mind and then settles there. Steve—whom I had just hours ago decided I would never think of again—is now figuring rather prominently. It hits me that he didn’t want to marry me in front of witnesses and family because he didn’t really, really love me; and now Judd doesn’t want to even pretend we’re in love. Even my father doesn’t act like he loves anyone. And Tenaj . . . gone from my life.

  No one, no one, loves me the way I want to be loved. No one loves the whole me.

  That news sailing in on the November wind hits me so hard that I almost can’t breathe for a moment. I have to stop walking. I don’t think I know exactly what prayer is, but I would gladly fall down on my knees on Tenth Avenue right between this nail salon and the Indian restaurant if I could feel really, really loved.

  After that, it’s rather a headache of a day. I have somehow gotten scheduled for two face-to-face meetings, the worst kind, with authors who have come into the city to discuss the plans for their tours. I have to watch the disappointment on their faces when they hoped for so much more. Then I have to call a third author and tell her that all the major reviewing periodicals are passing on reviewing her picture book, a history of worms. Worms who have personalities. And then there’s the Gabora Situation.

  That’s what I’m discussing in Darla’s office when my cell phone rings. I glance down at it as I am turning it off.