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

by Hall, Tina May

  I hand you a candle and you put it between the turned-out feet of St. Francis.

  The pomegranates we eat compulsively, the way the fruit numbs our mouths.

  A poem I wrote for you that you hated because I called you slick-backed and straw-veined.

  Summer. A cracked mission rising from the desert. The quality of light.

  The mornings you call before breakfast to read me headlines.

  We open the door to leave, and the arches of the ceiling falter at the sudden brightness.

  The smell of you: turpentine, smoke, apricot.

  You gasp at the first rush of heat. The fish in the courtyard mimics you.

  I say, “What did you wish?”

  The stone cat's whiskers tremble above us.

  The two years we lived together and got our periods every month on the same day.

  You open your hand to show me the miniature heart and say, “Nothing.”

  The mission pales behind you. Its faint histories of rain grow wider. You say, “I didn't trust that shriveled little man.” You say, “Take it.”

  The desert's stiff exhalations.

  The way your fingers fumble as you remove the silver chain I gave you for your last birthday and slide the charm onto it. The way the clasp pinches my skin as you fasten it.

  Places to find milagros: saints' dresses, gift stores, rearview mirrors, buried in backyards.

  The tin heart whispers as it shifts over my collarbone. I say, “This is a mistake.”

  You squint as if you don't hear me.

  Step closer to me so your face won't be in shadow.

  You say, “Shh, I am remembering something.”

  All the Day's Sad Stories

  A Novella

  Some Kind of Omen

  This is the year of beautiful trees. Cold nights, bright days, roadsides aflame. The wind blows, and maple leaves splatter the sidewalk. Mercy and Jake stand in the front yard raking. She has never had a false alarm; the blood comes as regularly as ever. Hopes are kept banked. The waiting extends only two weeks. It makes Mercy feel as if she is in some kind of dream in which they aren't really trying at all. Or as if the world in which she is living and breathing and menstruating is divorced completely from the landscape of her mind, which is cluttered with tired images of seeds and buds and petals unfolding, fruit ripening. The next morning, Mercy sees the first ginkgo leaf break from the tree and hurries outside. Dying, old, perseverant locusts rasp on the trunk; the leaves come down like wings slicing against her face. In less than twenty minutes it is over; the branches are clean, and a circle of gold spreads around her.

  Roadside Attractions

  One day, surprised by her reflection in a store window, Mercy realizes she is aging. The meat of her face is beginning to sag and pool. Her neck has a crepe-paper cast. She is thirty-seven, and it is ridiculous to be noticing such things. Bone loss, birth defects, mammogram. These are the words that float up to her from the car radio. She loves museums. She'll stop for anything claiming to be one, even those in people's houses by the side of the road. In Yuma, she paid two dollars to see an old man's collection of forks. They were arranged in cardboard soda flats lined with felt. One fork had a picture of Truman on the handle. In Kansas, a sign for a museum of Horrors and Oddities led to the detached garage of a blue ranch house. Metal shop shelves were stacked with boxes. A man sitting in a nylon and aluminum lawn chair inside the garage asked what kinds of oddities she was looking for. “Teeth, skulls, fetuses?” he said. She said she wasn't really into body parts. “Sweetheart, it's all body parts,” he said. He asked what she did for a living. Then he took a box from the shelf next to him. It was close at hand, probably the first thing he showed everyone. It was a lampshade with no lamp, translucent and browning. “Human skin,” he said. “Circa Nazi.” That museum was free.

  Yoga / Poker

  Mercy is flipping the deck of yoga cards, looking for her next pose. Jake is in the bedroom playing Internet poker. This is what he does when he is not at his flyspecked office in the history department or at yet another training camp on passive resistance. Ticking signals the dealing of hands. It sounds like a roulette wheel or a leaf caught in the spokes of a bike. Vrikshasana, tree pose; Mercy wobbles. She stares at her driste, her focal point, which is the thermostat on the wall. It is one of those old ones, brassy and pregnant with numbers. When the heat clicks on, a blue spark shoots out. Jake's Internet poker name is lowluck99; he says it is best to pretend you are a bad player to trick all the other players who are also pretending. When someone enters the table with a name like acesonly or TeddyKGB, you know he's a chump. Ardha Chandrasana, half moon, “I surrender into the flow of life.” Outside, children are shrieking. Mercy remembers a game she played as a child called “statues” in which the goal was to stay frozen mid-motion as long as possible. This now strikes her as a game made up by adults. Jake types in the bedroom. The players talk to each other via a little column that runs alongside the graphic of the poker table. They use abbreviations to comment on hands: TY for thank you, FY for fuck you, TYFY for thank you and fuck you, NH for nice hand. Eight months they have been trying now; they have different opinions on what magic might work. Mercy breathes out and sings Om, “I am a part of Life's joyful sound,” four parts: ah / oh / mmm / silence.

  Experts Recommend the Missionary Position

  When they make love, Jake lights incense from Tibet. Mercy wears her kimono with the embroidered rabbit. To know it is the proper time, she uses a digital thermometer made in Germany. She places a dense Swedish foam pillow under her hips. The sheets are antique linen bought in Paris; they are worn thin from years of loving and washing on the part of a French farmer and his wife. Waiting on the bedside table is a pot of tea, the leaves harvested in Africa, packaged in cheap pastel paper boxes labeled with the names of ailments, and located in the grocery store's natural foods section. The rug is from Iran, the bookshelf from West Virginia. The condoms Jake used were made in Canada and have maroon wrappers; now, they linger in his sock drawer like love letters. The white-noise machine has many components, some from Mexico, some from Taiwan. Next to the teapot is a small fat rock that they found on a beach in Texas. Afterward, Mercy lies still and listens to the Williams-Sonoma egg timer tick off the minutes with metallic pings; this is the sound of hope. Under the bed: months of dust. It is bad luck to sweep there when trying to call a child home. It is bad luck to throw anything out.

  Why Mercy Makes Hats

  The mystery of them—the old-time tilt and shadow. Black netting casting constellations over noses and cheeks. The fedora's come-hither modesty, the pillbox's nod to convention. Her grandfather owned a millinery shop in Des Moines sixty years ago. He had a blond-ringletted girl front for him, and he ordered hats and gloves from New York and San Francisco. They came in paper-board boxes cushioned in pink-tinted newsprint, smelling chemical, festooned with small hard fruits that popped white foam if pressed too hard. During the war, when the hats were all plain straw and skimpy felt, he ran a black market in silk stockings, which he kept under the counter in industrial-sized rat poison tins. His customers would kiss him thanks—waxy, crimson prints that earned him eye-rolls and gelid roast beef at home. The store folded in the late sixties, and he folded soon after, when Mercy was just a child, hardly old enough to remember his stories, the boater he constructed of blue typing paper, the lethal dust that sifted from a stretch of silk.

  They Say Love the Skin

  The sidewalk outside the coffee shop is littered with handbills promoting garage bands and diet supplements. Sometimes Jake is so quiet, especially in the car, that Mercy wants to run into something just to get a reaction. Her friend Morris says he spent his Saturday night hunting down cough syrup for his son. He went to three drugstores with the child strapped in his car seat, wheezing angrily. “The doctor said only brands without dextromethorphan.” Mercy brushes a beetle off her napkin. Its wings open, glossy and iridescent, as it drifts to the table leg. “And then he won't to
uch anything grape-or cherry-flavored. Three years old and he already knows his own mind.” Morris tells how he left the child in the car, shuddering with phlegm and weariness, while he went into each store. He says people were giving him dirty looks, but what do they know about a sick child. At the last drugstore, the one where he finally found the right medicine, bubble-gum-flavored, a man in an Army jacket stopped him on his way in. He asked Morris to buy him Evan Williams and knew exactly how much it cost. He had it in coins. “He said they didn't want him coming in there anymore.” Mercy sees the way her life is going to go: coffee with friends, silent car rides, plucking stray hairs from her face, shopping trips to large cities. Morris hits the table with the flat of his hand. “I bought for him, of course. I bought for him.”

  September Nights, the Sky Blushes

  Mercy reads the web forums moderated by female nurses and fertility experts with porn star names: Tiffany Titus, R.N., Ginger Mellon Bonaparte C.N.M. They are having a spate of what used to be called Indian summer. Even with the windows open and fans roaring, the house is steamy. Weeds are rotting in the drainage ditches, and by mid-afternoon, there is a haze in the air, stagnant clouds sifting down. The liveliest thread on the websites is about “motility issues.” “Have hubby take a cold shower thirty minutes before sex.” “Have hubby drink a cup of coffee—give the spermies a boost!” Baby talk for the childless. Mercy and Jake take turns watering the grass, clusters of gnats sticking to their knees. They have become superstitious about pleasure. She has spent hundreds of dollars on lingerie in the last eight months; the snap of elastic makes her think of her credit card. The weatherman is perpetually saying that this is the hottest year on record. At night, in the dark bedroom, sweat rises at the smallest touch. Mercy hangs her satin corsets and filmy underwear on the clothesline in the corner of the backyard, where they bulge and twist with the barometric pressure, as if trying to seduce the air.

  Mercy and Jake Fight in the Kitchen

  He leans against the sink. She sits on the lip of the cabinet that holds the good china. Neither one of them ever bothers to polish the silver. He has just come back from a run and is shirtless, skin swelling from heat and salt. His nipples are perfectly aligned, only slightly darker than his skin, wrinkled like eyelids squeezed shut. The dog eats its food without looking up. These are long, happy fights. Jake says, “Her hair is clearly red; how can you not see that?” Mercy says, “The plot wasn't even consistent.” They switch positions mid-argument. Mercy chops carrots; Jake scoops out the rice. He levels the grains in the metal measure with his fingertips. They listen to Billie Holiday or the evening news as they cook. A little sadness makes the water boil faster. Another forest fire, a mudslide, an earthquake. A suicide bomber in a hotel pool. An air strike on a wedding party. When the flour tips off the counter onto the linoleum, their footprints materialize like magic, ghost steps, a diagram for dancing.

  A Season of Darkened Parlors

  This is the year of nine hurricanes. Mercy loves the whole system of it, the alternating names that transform the storms into petulant cousins or strange great-aunts and -uncles, the visitors who will not leave. She would not be so sanguine if she didn't live halfway across the country where the storms peter out in flurries of rain and hail. As a teenager, Mercy read only tales of true love and stigmata stories. She Googles “hurricane names,” finds the FEMA-for-kids website, and is happy to live in a country that packages disaster for children. In dreams, faceless lovers and mysterious wounds still appear—fantasies of being chosen. She learns that only women's names were used for hurricanes until 1979. She learns that the list for Atlantic hurricanes may include French, Spanish, and English names. There is no explanation of which languages may be drawn upon for Pacific hurricanes. The romances she has given up, but she can't resist a good stigmata. On the satellite photo, a hurricane is an ephemeral thing, a veil of spinning mist. Sergio, Olaf, and Georgette. Flossie, Seymour, and Wallis. Visions of silent-film stars and bingo nights. Recently departed distant relatives summoned as if in séance, safe in a circle of clasped hands.

  Mercy Employs Three Women with the Names of Saints

  Catherine B., Catherine P., and Bridget crimp and sew and harden hat forms all day in a rented storefront downtown next to the bank. They are thirty years older than Mercy and call her honey pie or sweetpea when they are angry. They wear gasmask-like filters when they work with fixatives or fire-retardant. Mercy tells them her troubles; the buzz of the sewing machine loosens her tongue. One day, the mayor stops by on his tour of local businesses, and the Catherines fuss over him and force him to eat a brownie. Bridget ignores him because of the zoning decision that allowed a Walgreens to be built at the corner of her neighborhood. From her office upstairs, Mercy hears Catherine B.'s seal laugh and smells acrid whiffs of sizing and scalded coffee. She provides them with health insurance and Christmas bonuses and a refrigerator stocked with Diet Coke. They give her advice-column stories of surprise babies and chocolate-flavored calcium chews. They are hopeful and resigned at the same time. They get calls on their cell phones from their grown-up, moved-out children and their retired husbands that involve phrases like cream of mushroom soup, and the third time's the charm, and it was there yesterday.

  At the Grocery Store, Mercy Selects the Super-Sized Bag of Corn Chips

  It is autumn and late at night and the moon is shriveling like a mum. Mercy buys olives, soda water, bright red pistachios. She has cravings; sometimes she licks salt off her index finger if there is nothing else in the house. The store is air-conditioned and fluorescent. There is a frost warning for tonight. Mercy and Jake wrapped their shrubs with burlap, and now it looks like a row of decapitated heads rings their house. The sliding doors at the front of the store whisper. Mercy has a hard time triggering automatic things—doors, faucets, towel dispensers. She spends a good portion of her time in public waving her hands at electronic eyes. In the fish section, the banks of ice are barren. The salad bar is lidded and dark. An old woman in a motorized cart is parked in the produce area. “There is no cilantro,” she says plaintively. Mercy weighs limes in her palm. “There is no cilantro,” the woman says again, this time as if in warning. Mercy brushes her fingertips across the paper skins of garlic, lifts a cantaloupe to sniff. Don McLean serenades the wide aisles. Somewhere, loaves of bread are rising.

  The Catherines Sew Grandchildren's Costumes on Their Breaks

  “Please not the fake fur,” Mercy says. “We just had those machines oiled.” Felt pumpkins, candy corn onesies, Red Riding Hood with ruffled panties—things to be gobbled. This is how the Catherines talk about the babies, as delicacies. “I just want to eat him up,” they say. And, “Her hand is so perfect, I could bite it off.” Hungry, aggressive grandmother love. Mercy knows the feeling, the ache in the jaw at the sight of a plump baby, the urge to chew and chew until that sweet thing is a part of her. When she was a teenager, they set up an X-ray at the mall on Halloween; kids in plastic skeleton outfits peered into the monitor at their ghost candy, waited for a needle or razor blade to fluoresce. Jake buys the most lumpish pumpkins he can find, the underrepresented pumpkins. Halloween night, they have few visitors. Their house is old and dark with a tipping porch, set back from the street. Morris comes with his son, who is dressed as a caterpillar or a leech. Mercy and Jake give him too much candy and go back to the doorway with their Tupperware bowl of packaged offerings, hoping their friendly silhouettes will draw the children. It's a pastoral scene: the scent of cider doughnuts and burning leaves, hollowed squash blackened by leftover citronella tealights, recorded moans blowing across the yard on wisps of nylon spiderweb. Miniature gods and demons drift down the street, demanding their empty sacks be filled.

  Mercy and Morris Visit the Newly Painted Water Tower

  It used to be striped rusty red and white, tea-stained and molting over the town. The pale blue paint makes the tower fade into the sky, and the town's name, stenciled in large black script, seems to float unmoored overhead. Morris's c
ar is filled with burger wrappers and cases of generic diet cola. Mercy nudges a sock under the floor mat. Morris has been divorced a year; his beard is unkempt and he clutches her shoulder whenever he makes a joke. The scaffolding is still up on the north side of the tower. “Let's climb,” Morris says. The layers of paint are lumpy on the cold rungs and her sandals slip before catching. Once they reach the top, the town is spilled before them, so quiet that she hears the courthouse clock hiccup before it chimes the half hour. She hiccups too, suddenly absurdly aware of time's passing. Morris puts his hand on her shoulder. “It's nothing,” she says. They eat lunch in the car. Morris takes a carton of cut-up vegetables and a shaker of salt substitute out of a paper sack. Mercy has a bagel and a child-sized yogurt for which she has forgotten a spoon. He crunches away at half of a red pepper, and she thinks how bitter-sweet it is, the belief in self-improvement.

  The First Real Snow of the Season Comes on Thanksgiving

  The streets disappear, and Jake and Mercy hole up in the house watching the sci-fi channel. That evening, they unearth the snowshoes from the garage and head toward dinner at Jake's department chair's house. They take the shortcut over the golf course, leaning into each other as they slip down hills, and come out on the main street almost directly across from Mercy's shop. The electricity has held, and her hats glow in the window display like alien spacecraft, quivering in the draft. Other people are out on their snowshoes as well, whole families with babies bundled into carriers and dogs bobbing in the drifts. There is a carnival atmosphere, the scent of woodsmoke and roasting bird, the carrion yells of the children flinging snowballs. Jake takes her hand; the warmth radiates as if they are holding the heart of a small animal between them. When they get to the house, they unpack Ziplocs of nutmeg-scented mashed sweet potatoes from Jake's bag, their contribution, along with a bouquet of icicles pilfered from the bus shelter's overhang, sharp as knives, already melting.