The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) (5 page)

After dinner, Father folds a swan out of his paper napkin. Mother says, “My, how early it grows dark.” First Daughter laughs at a flickering outside the window. She thinks it is an out-of-season firefly or a spark from the chimney, but really it is someone creeping through the trees with a flashlight.

Father folds triangle over triangle, smaller and smaller, until a head and wings appear. Second Daughter watches the ghost of her grandmother walk around the table and touch everyone's plate. Second Daughter wonders if the dead get hungry and she eats the last corner of her tuna sandwich in one bite so grandmother's ghost will not stand too long by her. Birds fly up from the apple orchard in a cloud blacker than the sky. Only Son screams for his bottle. Mother says, “He has such strong lungs. Perhaps he will be a soldier.”

First Daughter goes to the fireplace and pretends to do homework. She writes numbers in long columns and eats the eraser of her pencil in secretive nibbles. Second Daughter follows grandmother's ghost into the kitchen and catches her trying to chew through the rims of cans. Second Daughter wonders if the dead feel pain. She whispers, “Stop,” and grandmother's ghost throws a can of pureed tomatoes at her. Father places the swan in the bowl of grapes where it rocks over the uneven fruit and watches everyone out of its mustard-spot eye.

Mother clears the plates from the table. She says, “Goodness, these dishes are so clean, I don't believe they need washing.” Father tears Mother's napkin into small pieces. In the garden, rows and rows of green beans tangle closer for warmth. The eggs in the henhouse mutter in their sleep. The light outside the window draws closer. Second Daughter sees it and knows what it is. Someone is moving through the forest toward them.

Only Son screams because grandmother's ghost is biting his upper arm. Mother says, “Perhaps he will be a stockbroker.” First Daughter throws her wool mitten into the fireplace to see the yellow smoke. She loves things for the colors they burn. Mother says, “What is that smell?” Grandmother's ghost flies shrieking up the chimney. Second Daughter wonders if the dead can get stuck in small places, and Only Son screams because he is growing older. Father touches the swan's wing with the brown tip of his finger and imagines holding a grape in his cheek, not biting it, just feeling its roundness.

First Daughter wishes she could burn everything. First Daughter wishes she could set her whole body on fire.

Mother says, “When the wind howls like that it means snow.” Father pinches the swan's beak so it opens and closes as if repeating Mother's words. Mother and Father both think of the garden and the tender asparagus, which sells for two dollars a bunch. Later, they will have to cover everything in burlap, as if pulling the covers up over their children. Mother remembers her own mother sitting by her bed on fever nights. Mother remembers planning her trousseau, remembers begging for the white silk nightgown, now yellow as an egg yolk in the upstairs closet. Second Daughter points to the window where the flashlight shines. Everyone looks at the window. Mother says, “My, the moon is bright tonight.” Only Son screams. He can't remember what moon is, but he thinks it means winter.

Second Daughter imagines all the things that could be circling her house with a flashlight. She remembers stories from school of children being cut up and left in the forest. She remembers the wolves and bears and the abused boys who grow up to torture people found via classified ads. Mother says, “Nonsense, that light is too white to be the moon.” Father's brown fingers crush the swan's long throat. The grapes wither a little in their porcelain bowl, roll closer to each other for comfort.

Second Daughter opens the door, and a wind rushes in that is not grandmother's ghost. The light moves away from the window and is lost in the shrubbery. Only Son screams because he knows someday he will sit alone in this same room, hungry and cold. Mother says, “Perhaps he will be a dictator.” Father feeds him a grape. First Daughter holds one finger over the fire and then her whole hand. The swan closes its one yellow eye and tries to remember life before dinner. Father sings a lullaby about three thieves and a serial killer. Mother says, “I believe I am getting a chill.” Mother says, “No one buys the cow when they can get the milk for free.” Only Son moans, and Mother gives him a knife to teethe on. Mother says, “You'll thank me for this later.”

Second Daughter walks outside where everything smells like a ghost. She leaves without her red cloak, without her father's ax, without breadcrumbs for the path home. She has only her proud virginity that clangs like a bell, her will to escape like an egg slipping free, and her curiosity, that strange puss, the part of her brain that claws toward the dark. In the night, in the black fringe of the forest, she could be anyone. She could be the witch sipping boy-blood, the doctor scraping lichen for his collection, the girl who runs and runs and runs.

He was a willful child, brown and plump as a loaf of bread, and was left on their doorstep in the middle of the night. When she heard the wailing, Glynnis poked Frank with the crookhandled cane she kept under the bed for burglars. Brother and sister slept in two single beds with white sheets, plain as nuns' beds, the only adornment in the room a chipped red cabinet someone had brought back from China a long time ago. “You hear that?” she asked, thinking it was probably a rabbit caught in a trap or a cat yowling. When Frank came back holding the baby wrapped in the denim workshirt, it was as if the room cracked open from the heat of the infant's angry forehead.

There was no note, nothing except the grease-stained shirt and the child himself, whom they named Lyndon, a name taken from a headstone near the house. A happy name to counteract the canker, Glynnis thought. A happy grave, always in the sun, covered with a great patch of forget-me-nots that spread like milk over the grass come spring.

They fed the baby with a washcloth dipped in sugar water, as you would a foundling kitten. It was Frank's job to heat the water and test it with his gnarled elbow. They were old when Lyndon came to them, but it was as if they stopped aging that night, as if the steam from the pan of syrup boiling on the stove plumped up all their wrinkles. Glynnis's hair turned dark again and Frank's limp disappeared. Dawn was coming. The baby screamed so hard the stars squinted.

Everyone thought the child was a distant cousin. The brother and sister had no visitors. Glynnis made jam from raspberries that grew in the downhill portion of the graveyard, between the road and the lake. Winters, she made quilts that were sold in the fancy museum in town. It tickled her to think of rich people paying for and sleeping under scraps of her worn-out clothing. The house was a sideways house—white plank, narrow windows—that sat on a strip of lawn between the road and the uphill portion of the graveyard. The hill sloped dramatically up and the graves were terraced, each on their own strip of lawn. There was hardly room for the bodies. Frank and Glynnis knew that many of the caskets were buried into the angle of the hill so that their inhabitants stood up for all eternity. It was Frank's job to dig the graves and cut back the weeds. When the summer storms came, the caskets shifted and holes opened up at the edges of the terrace. Frank tamped earth into the rifts and contemplated the possibility that some day all the caskets would slip down the hill and pop out into the road. Next to the drainage ditch, Glynnis set up an old table and sign and a pyramid of jam jars, three dollars each, honor system.

Lyndon grew up lean, but still brown—brown as a berry, boot leather, the bark of the tree his name mirrored. He went to the village school half days and had a work release, like the kind they give out in prisons, to help Frank tend the graveyard. He learned to subtract from the dates on the headstones; he learned to read from license plates on the cars that shot by the house. He liked geography and arrived at school early to unspool the watery pink and green maps from their rusting shells and trace the vees of the mountain ranges. He could put his finger on any capital city in seconds. The other boys were a bit in awe of this. Geography was an acceptable subject to excel in, unlike music or literature. They called Glynnis a witch and claimed she set her jam with the bones and fingernails of children. Lyndon affected carelessness. He would not be drawn into a fight. If the others shoved him or tore his shirt, his face grew stony and he thought of the Great Salt Lake where even the fattest creatures floated with ease and where the brine shrimp hatched by the millions. The girls in the class cast sidelong glances at him and penned his name over the furrows of their wrists.

At home, they ate mostly fish and bread and bitter greens found by the roadside, boiled down with vinegar and salt. Once in a while, offerings turned up on their doorstep, a wedge of sheep's cheese, a store-bought pie in a foil tin. Glynnis and Frank had no idea why people left things for them; they assumed it had something to do with the cemetery. When Lyndon was a child, Frank taught him how to tie flies and took him to the river to cast. Frank's own father had kept his patterns a secret but had hooked a midge or damsel nymph on his Christmas stocking each year. When their father died, Glynnis found a bank book filled with drawings of flies and notes. Frank buried it in a hole he dug next to his father's grave without opening it. To construct the flies, Frank and Lyndon used horsehair and squirrel tail hair and once, hair from a raccoon run over outside the house. In his pockets, Lyndon kept balls of animal hair that he plucked from the brambles on his way home from school. These hardened into pellets in the wash and Glynnis lined them up behind the framed photos on the mantle, secret trophies. When fishing in the lake, they used bits of rotting meat that Frank kept in a Tupperware in the refrigerator for this purpose. They cleaned the fish on the shore and the entrails floated in the rocking water. It was from Frank that Lyndon learned augury by guts and bird formations. Early snows and droughts and frosts were unmistakable in the scrawl of the geese flying overhead and the drift of the intestines. The weeks before Lyndon had appeared on the doorstep, all the birds had flown in clusters of three.

One morning, during the hour on local history, the other boys wrote
Vampire
in marker on the back of his jacket that was hanging from his chair. This was one of their riffs, that Frank was one of the undead, that he slept in the graveyard and rose up each night to suck the blood of the local livestock. Skinny, old, shambling Frank! With his drooping trousers and his quiet voice and the sandy hairs covering his arms. Lyndon wished Frank was a vampire; he wished all the cattle would drop dead simultaneously. Glynnis always ended the story of his arrival at their door as an infant by declaring that there were some things thicker than blood. She said this like a joke but always patted him on the head when she said it, even now that he was a grown boy. Lyndon told her he had lost the jacket on a field trip to the state legislature and went cold the rest of the winter.

Frank liked to read books about far-off places, especially the parts about how the dead were treated. At dinner, he described urns of oil and honey, packets of food, candies in the shapes of skulls, blankets of marigolds and scores of clay servants. He said that in Vietnam, they built a hut over the grave and then replaced it a few years later with a wood house, nice as anything the living occupied. In Poland, there was a flurry of scrubbing of stone once a year, and flower sellers crowded the roads to the cemeteries. Some places, they built elaborate shrines at the graves and left pictures of new babies and pets, bowls of rice, candles, and little statues of birds and frogs. He had seen a photo of a tomb in New Orleans with a wrought-iron fence and a pile of bottles of whisky. They looked out the window at the quiet graveyard as they ate. A flag fluttered at one headstone; on another a blanched plastic wreath clattered. Beyond the graves, over the heap of the mountain, cows and horses grazed, and beyond that, teenage boys lay on their beds, drinking orange juice out of the carton, reading books about men who could fly.

During the years Lyndon studied geology at a neighboring branch of the state college, he still lived with Glynnis and Frank and still dug the weeds out of the cemetery every May. One winter afternoon, the day after a storm which dumped three feet of snow on the graves, Frank had a heart attack while Lyndon was in class learning about mass wasting. His professor explained the slow process of downhill creep, the affecting factors of soil type and vegetation and precipitation, and chalked on the board,
angle of repose.
Lyndon thought of the graves inching down the hill. When he came home that night, hands chapped from gripping the steering wheel against the icy roads, Glynnis had prepared nothing for dinner. Frank was in the hospital two towns over, and Glynnis and Lyndon sat at the splintery kitchen table and ate slice after slice of toast, laden with jam, as if they could not get enough sweetness to fill them. Glynnis told Lyndon that Frank was fated to die first because he was a man, because men's hearts are so big and unruly. Lyndon knew Frank had a girlfriend in town that he saw on Sundays, the day of the week the inhabitants of the sideways house turned invisible. Summers, Frank's girlfriend worked at the museum where Glynnis's quilts were sold, dressed in calico and churning butter. “Good money,” she always said when Frank put on her bonnet to tease her. He never brought her home; she said graveyards creeped her out because she didn't know where to stand. She didn't go to visit him in the hospital because it was winter and her bonnet was packed away. Glynnis, at the kitchen table, surrounded by empty jam jars, claimed her own heart was small as a walnut and thumped her chest so hard tears sprang into her eyes.

So it was a surprise when Glynnis died first, later that year, at the beginning of summer, when the leaves were still so tender Lyndon wished he was a deer. The doctor said she was riddled with cancer and charged sixty dollars to sign the death certificate. Frank died two days later from a massive heart attack while fishing with Lyndon. He flung his arm up to cast and hitched on the backstroke, sending the hook wildly into the air where it caught Lyndon on the earlobe and tore. Both men cried out in pain and Frank crumpled into the river, growing so sodden and heavy that Lyndon struggled to drag him out. It was only when Lyndon saw them laid out in the funeral parlor, side by side, that he realized they were twins. Frank's black wool suit and Glynnis's black wool dress were both too small for the corpses because they shrank in the dryer at the town laundromat where Lyndon had hurriedly washed them. It gave the illusion that the siblings were still children, outgrowing their clothes faster than anyone could afford. No one came to the viewing and there was no funeral; Glynnis's will stipulated cremation and scattering anywhere but the cemetery. The box Lyndon carried back to the house was flesh-colored plastic. Inside, the ashes were in a cellophane bag with a red-and-white-striped twist tie he recognized from bags of supermarket bread. He put the box in the kitchen window facing the road and went through the house, looking for secrets.

In the twins' bedroom he found two pairs of Frank's shoes. One scraped and worn through at the toe and one still in the box. The acrid scent of tanned leather and polish filled the room when Lyndon opened the lid. Glynnis's one pair of shoes, black leather lace-ups, had been burnt up with her. Under her bed, in a brittle dress box from the now-defunct department store in town, there was an assortment of linens with hand-crocheted trim and a blank space for the monogram. A virgin's hope chest. The pillowcases and tablecloths were white and fresh-smelling. She must have aired them in the sun each year and tucked them away again. The red Chinese cabinet had many awkwardly-sized drawers and a top that popped up as a vanity. The mirror was cracked, three jagged lines and one wedge missing. Lyndon could not recall when this had happened. He remembered Glynnis bouncing him in front of the mirror, the only one in the house except for Frank's pocket shaving mirror on the shelf in the bathroom.
This is how the gentleman rides.
The drawers were filled with screws and nails, old paper dolls, clippings from newspapers that seemed to have no unifying theme (a recipe for arthritis liniment, a letter to the editor about speed limits), calico scraps for a rag rug, shellacked red paper poppies from years of memorial days, two letters from their mother to their father when he went to a livestock auction out of town
(I love you, dearest. The corn is higher than I've ever seen it.)
, loose keys without markings, a Dixie cup filled with crumbling rubber bands. In the bottom drawer, their birth certificates, frayed at the folds. They both had their mother's maiden name, Southby, as their middle name. Lyndon could not think where else to look. The Chinese cabinet was the only closed piece of furniture in the house. In his room, a small nook wedged between the bathroom and the stairs, he traced the frets of his childhood and adolescent heights marked in pencil on the doorframe. He peered at the window to see where he had scratched his initials into the corner of the glass. On the floor, there was a large gouge where he had dragged the bed away from the wall the autumn he was afraid of ghosts. The bench at the end of the bed was piled with the quilts Glynnis had made for him over the years,
wishing quilts
she had called them, star-patterned, intricate as any map, corduroy-backed. Downstairs, there was nothing, just the usual sand in the corners of rooms, an inexplicable row of furry pellets on the mantle, the shelf of his textbooks, all marked in other people's handwriting. Rows and rows of jam jars stood proudly in the window, casting a red glow over the kitchen. They would last him years. It appeared he had been left at their door as a baby, hungry and anonymous, just as they had always told him.

Lastly, he went outside to examine the stoop. There was a cake and a foil pan of meatloaf on it. There was also a wreath of daisies interwoven with white clusters of wild dill. Ladybugs were swarming over it. The stoop itself was a substantial ledge of limestone worn down in the middle by years of stepping. He felt all the fibers of his unruly heart unwind as he looked at the infant-sized depression in the step. Every Saturday, Glynnis had lugged a kettle of boiling water outside to scrub the stoop. In the winter, the steam rose up in clouds. A trowel was rusting in the grass. Frank had been meticulous about his tools and the only time he had ever struck Lyndon was when the boy had left out a pickaxe all night in the rain. In the lean-to that held the shovels and rakes, Lyndon sanded the rust from the trowel blade and oiled it. The oil can clicked satisfyingly and gave off a happy scent that was part automobile, part eucalyptus.