The Magic of Found Objects Page 8

  I want to protest because she’s so comfortable, and also what if she looks at me and screams and then we will all know that I’d be a terrible mother, but he’s already removing her and is tying her onto the front of me. She makes sweet little sounds as she’s being transferred. Grunts or breathing sounds or something, and then, to my astonishment, she makes little fists and stretches and pooches out her lips as she settles against me. Who knew newborns know how to make a fist? This one probably learned it from Sarah.

  As soon as he closes the front door, I am seized with a fit of terror. This little face, this weight against my chest, the slight mewing noises she makes as she sleeps. What if she stops breathing? It’s like half of my whole body just wants to curl around her, and the other half wants to run after Judd and give her back to him. She likes him, after all.

  The whole time he’s gone, I walk around the apartment, trying to calm myself down by humming little tunes at her. And then the worst happens: she wakes and looks at me with one eye, and it hits her that she’s been handed to an incompetent buffoon. She screws her little red face up, and the only way I can keep her from screaming is by walking in circles at a velocity of five miles per hour and singing “Love Has No Pride,” which is the only song now that I can remember the words to.

  By the time Judd gets back, she has opened her eyes and is beginning to wave her fists around in the air. When he comes over and unties her and puts her back on his chest and she goes right back to sleep, I think I could marry him. Obviously he was issued some genetic material for parenting, like a set of instructions, that I maybe didn’t get. Maybe she likes his pheromones. A lot of ladies seem to. In our marriage, he can be in charge of calming the babies down, and I can do laundry. He can do dishes. I’ll tell it bedtime stories; he can teach it calisthenics.

  I watch him for the rest of the evening. He’s so solicitous and kind. Funny. We sit at the table with Russell and eat the lasagna. Sarah sleeps and sleeps. Judd wears the baby all through dinner, and he looks down at her with such twinkling eyes. He actually knows how to eat lasagna without even dropping one bit of cheese on the baby’s head.

  I drink a glass of wine and feel bravery coursing through my veins. Russell is making a joke about birth being the most intense biology lesson imaginable, and Judd catches my eye and winks at me. A long, slow wink.

  Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. I feel that wink viscerally; it actually sets off a flutter somewhere deep inside me. The first flutter caused by Judd, and I suddenly know that I really am going to do it. I am going to marry him.

  I wonder if I should tell him just yet. But the truth is, it feels like it’s a fun little secret that only I know. And if I tell him, and he reacts by talking about something ordinary, if he doesn’t sweep me up in his arms and start kissing me, if it turns out that he doesn’t feel the same kind of flutter—well, I can’t chance it. I don’t want to have to get mad at him—and then feel guilty about getting mad at him, because romance and kissing are not part of our deal and I know that. Deep down, I know that.

  Walking home, I’m tense. We talk about how adorable Willoughby is, and how stunningly clueless Russell is, and how sad it is that Sarah can’t get any sleep. We speculate about how long the marriage has, and whether it’s more likely to end in murder or divorce.

  “You know,” he says, “I was thinking I could probably go over after work a couple of days a week and help them out.”

  See? That is just like him: coming up with a concrete way he can help. This is what is so wonderful about him: he’s the first guy on the scene to help people move, debug their computers, tune their cars even. Go camping with them and their children so that bears won’t eat the kids. He’s kind of amazing.

  “Also,” I say, “you could check the premises for murder weapons.”

  “And that,” he says and smiles.

  I reach over and take his hand. “Can I tell you something kind of huge?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think we—I mean, I want to—” I close my eyes and start flapping my hands. “Back up. I’m hyperventilating.”

  He stops walking, as if that’s what I meant by back up. He’s looking at me funny.

  “This is hard,” I say.

  “It is hard, isn’t it? Same thing I realized when I was about to say what I think you might be about to say.”

  “You know what I’m going to say?”

  He puts his hands in his pockets. “You’re going to say you’re going to marry me, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So . . . good,” he says. He smiles. “Nice.”

  “I am going to pretend you said, ‘Oh, my dear, oh the wonderful love of my life, please let me take you upstairs and ravish you!’”

  He blinks. “Okayyy. Oh, my dear, oh the wonderful love of my life, please let me take your upstairs and ravish you!”

  And this is the moment his phone rings. I shake my head no, but it’s useless: he gives me a regretful look and answers the phone. It’s one of those calls that I think of as his “yo, bro” kind of interchanges. There’s a lot of those. This one is one of his trainers, Mercer, whom I can hear bleating into the phone, “Yo, bro, there’s a situation here, you know? Down at the gym?”

  Judd paces around, fielding talk of keys gone missing, and a special elite client who’s training for a triathlon and . . . blah blah blah. I see the way this one is going. It’s freaking Sunday night, but that’s the way Judd’s gym operates. They do anything for their clients. He says he’ll come down and unlock the place. Of course he does.

  When he clicks the phone off, he turns and looks at me.

  “I gotta go,” he says.

  “Go,” I say. “It’s fine.”

  He looks at me incredulously. “Wait a second. Are you mad? You’re actually mad.”

  “I’m not exactly mad, but I’m disappointed. We were having a momentous thing between us just now, and you had to go answer the phone, and now you’re leaving.”

  He looks exasperated. “I’ve got to go unlock the gym. It’s my work.”

  “It’s the weekend, Judd. Sunday night! The gym is closed. And it’s going to take you nearly an hour to get all the way downtown with the subways on weekend schedule. And then an hour back. It’s like I’m not your priority. This. Us.”

  He stands there, running his hands through his hair, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Phronz. Listen. I thought the plan was that things weren’t going to change between us just because we’re going to be married. The idea is that we’re still going to be each other’s best friends, and—call me crazy, but in my book, best friends support each other’s business, am I right? I gotta just go do this one thing. Okay? Am I going to be in trouble now every time I need to work?”

  I put my hands on my hips. We’re just like any couple, arguing in the street. “Judd, don’t you want to have sex with me?”

  He runs his hands through his hair, rolls his eyes. “Of course I do. I’m a guy. Also, I’m going to marry you.”

  “Then why doesn’t it happen?”

  He looks up at the sky beseechingly. “Phronsie? Seriously? Come on,” he says. “Let me go help out this guy. We’ll get to this sex stuff, you know we will, and it will be amazing. I promise you amazingness. I’ll fall at your feet. I’ll bring you red roses. Whatever you think you need.”

  “Just . . . go,” I say. “Go. Do it.”

  “Oh!” he says. “I almost forgot. I have something for you.”

  He digs in his pocket and pulls out a bright green twist tie.

  “I bought a new loaf of bread, so I have a brand-new ring for you. Wove it into a circle and everything. Here.” He grins, bounces up on his toes. Does a few boxing moves.

  Oh my God. He’s so impossible. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe what I’m signing on for isn’t going to look like love. Why do I even expect that he’ll suddenly change and want to be romantic?

  “Could our lives not be a comedy routine?” I say. “Could we just pretend t
o be normal?”

  “This is normal. This is the real way love should be!” He blows me a kiss and turns and walks back down the street, back to the subway. He calls me later to say he’s stuck at the gym fixing a plumbing issue, and now he’s going out for a much-needed beer with Mercer.

  “You’re not still ticked off at me, are you?” he says, and I sigh and say no. Because there’s no point being mad. He’s my best friend. And if it was unthinkable that I would have been mad at him last week for going out for a beer after work, then I shouldn’t be mad at him now just because of a little thing like we’re going to get married.

  Mr. Swanky thinks that if I want romance, maybe I should watch Sleepless in Seattle for the millionth time, and so that’s what I do. Just in case Judd comes over after having a beer with Mercer, though, I take a nice bubble bath and get myself cleaned up a bit.

  Just in case it’s going to be our first time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The year after my dad and Maggie got married, when I was six years old, our cat, Mama Kitty, died. She was just a barn cat—not particularly friendly or anything, didn’t even have a real name so she was definitely not a pet—but I came upon her dead body one summer afternoon out by the barn, next to a raspberry bush, and when I saw her there, so still and quiet for the first time ever, with the green-headed flies buzzing around her matted fur, I just sat down on the hard dirt and stared.

  The flowers were all in bloom, and it was a yellow-green afternoon, with the breeze blowing my hair. I felt like I could hear everything that the whole sky was saying. Birds were making a big racket, and I heard Maggie call me in for lunch. There was the sound of the tractor down by the cornfield, and an airplane flew overhead, leaving a long, lazy white trail.

  But I just sat there.

  The sky said, Your mama is dead, too, little child. You know she is.

  “Bunny said my mama is not dead,” I said out loud.

  A fly landed on Mama Kitty’s belly and walked up to her mouth. The fly said, Bunny doesn’t know. If your mama was alive, why didn’t she ever come see you?

  The white trail from the airplane whispered as it was fading from view, turning back into the blue, You know she would have called you if she was alive. You know she would have. She said she was going to come get you back.

  I sat there for a very, very long time. Maggie stopped calling my name after a while, and then started back up again. I lay down in the grass next to Mama Kitty, and I told Mama Kitty that I wished she hadn’t always run away whenever I would try to pet her, and also that I had loved her kittens, and pretty soon I started to cry.

  And that’s what was going on when Bunny came and found me.

  “Here you are!” she said. “You should get out of the dirt. Maggie’s been looking for you for lunch, you know. Didn’t you hear her calling?” And then she said, “Ohhhh. Are you crying? What’s the matter, child?”

  I couldn’t say what was the real trouble, so I said I was sad about Mama Kitty, and Bunny said she understood about that. She hugged me and we walked back to the house, and later we all had a little funeral and buried Mama Kitty in the yard, and Bunny said nice things about her, and so did I and so did Maggie. But that night, after we lowered her into the hole in the ground, my stomach started hurting, and it just kept on rumbling and hurting and keeping me awake at night.

  It was the kind of stomachache that a little girl would get when her mother was dead, I thought.

  Everything was terrible for days. I got in a fight with Hendrix and got sent to my room. I dumped out four puzzles onto the floor and got sent to my room. I said I wouldn’t go get eggs from the henhouse and got sent to my room. Every night I had to eat dinner up there all by myself as a punishment, and instead of eating, I threw my dinner out of the window and watched as it landed on the grass and the dogs ate it.

  Finally, Bunny said I should come and stay with her for a little bit.

  “What’s going on with you?” she said.

  And so I told her. “My mama is dead, and that’s why she doesn’t come to see me.”

  To my surprise, she didn’t try to tell me that Mama was perfectly fine and alive somewhere like she did the year before. Instead, she said, “We are going to fix this, little one,” and she clamped down her mouth and narrowed her eyes the way she did sometimes when she was having a big think.

  And then the very next week, Bunny told the rest of the family that she and I were going to visit her sister Alfreda, who lived in Pennsylvania, and who needed company in the nursing home. Hendrix couldn’t go, she told them, because only one child at a time was allowed to visit patients there, and she had no one to watch him when I was visiting, and no one to watch me when it was his turn.

  That next Saturday, which was a very hot day in July, we got in the car, and we drove for a long time, and then when we were miles away from home, Bunny said to me, “We’re not going to go see my sister, you know. We’re going to Woodstock, and we’re going to look for your mama. And this is going to be just our secret, and we aren’t going to tell anybody else what we did.”

  I thought the top of my head was going to come right off. I grabbed on to Bunny’s arm, which made the car swerve all over the road. And I was laughing and kicking my legs against the dashboard, and I wanted to jump out of the car and run around in a circle I was so excited.

  We had a map that was spread out on the front seat, which Bunny would pull over to look at from time to time. I was nearly out of my mind with excitement and questions, bouncing up and down on the seat and singing all the songs I knew, until Bunny said maybe I should try to take a rest. I looked out the window at all the fields flying past, then at the mountains as we turned onto the state highways. Then I sang more songs.

  When we stopped for lunch and ice cream, Bunny cleared her throat and said my mother might not be like I remembered her. It had been a long time, and she hadn’t been able to reach her to tell her we were coming.

  “Things are going to be fine,” I said and wiped my sticky hands on my shirt. And then I got up and spun around and around, mostly because I didn’t want to see Bunny’s face anymore. She had started out on this trip so happy, and it seemed like the closer we got to my mom, the more worried she looked.

  My mama was going to be so happy to see me. I said that over and over again so Bunny wouldn’t be scared.

  When we pulled up to the old house, I jumped out of the car and ran up the steps to the front porch, even though Bunny and I had discussed this. How we would go carefully and easily up to the door. We didn’t know for sure who lived there, she said, so we would knock politely on the door and wait to see who came.

  But it was Mama who came to the door. Mama! I started to cry the minute I saw her. I felt like a balloon that had just lost all its air. She was standing at the old white screen door with the torn screen, and she opened it, and her face was lit up like the moon. All the colors dancing all around her. She was wearing a shirt that was soft and blue and filmy with little shiny things on it and her old blue-jean shorts, the ones she was always sewing stuff on. And she didn’t say a word; she just picked me up and held me close to her, and we stood that way until I could hardly breathe anymore. She smelled just the way she used to smell, like something sweet. Like the earth and soap.

  There was music playing inside the house and people talking, and Mama was saying my name over and over.

  “Tenaj,” Bunny said from behind us. “Honey, it is so good to see you!” And Mama let me go then, but I kept both my arms around her waist, and the two of us moved over to be hugged by Bunny, too. Bunny had set down a big bag that she’d brought, and the three of us just stood there together like we were one person with six legs and six arms all mashed in together.

  “Look at my baby!” Mama said. “Oh my goodness! Look at you! You’re six years old, and you’re so grown up now!” Her face changed suddenly, and she looked at Bunny, like she was scared. “But where is my Hendrix?”

  “He’s at home, honey.
He’s fine,” said Bunny. “I just brought Phronsie this time. She’s been wanting to see you so much, and I thought she and I could get away with a little secret visit.”

  “Hendrix would tell everything to everybody,” I explained. “He’s a big blabbermouth.”

  “Is he?” said Mama. She was smiling and wiping away tears. “Oh, come in, come in. I can’t believe you’re here. You’re really here!”

  Then we went inside, and I remembered the place like it was part of my bones. It was like my brain kept going click, click, click as it saw things it recognized. The colors! The way Mama had a color for everything. Each wall had its own feeling—orange and yellow and some kind of shade of blue—and the couch was purple, and there was a red wooden table, and a rug that had big round circles of different kinds of green. It was like you were in a big box of crayons, in Mama’s house—so different from my daddy and Maggie’s house, which had big brown chests of drawers and tables and bookshelves, crowded in against every wall and so heavy and dark they looked like they ate all the light in the room and might come and eat you, too.

  It made my heart beat faster, just to see it all, like it was from a dream. And that guy, Stony, was there looking just the way he looked before, and the woman, Petal, from next door was visiting, and everybody hugged me and said I was so big, and some of them remembered Bunny, too. Mama made us some tea that tasted like leaves and grasses, and we sat in the living room on the big paisley pillows, and then we walked outside and picked up little flowers and pieces of fluff for Mama’s art, and we just talked and talked. I told her about the farm and Bunny’s barn, and how Hendrix liked to play with the baby goats and that I wanted a puppy because our old dog was so old and wouldn’t climb the stairs anymore to sleep in my room, like he used to.