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

by Hall, Tina May

  When the Bird Feeder Goes Missing, Mercy Blames the Squirrels

  It has suddenly warmed into full spring, and her shoes clump with mud as she searches the shrubs beneath her kitchen window for the feeder. Later in the day, she finds it, propped against the door that leads to the crawlspace beneath their porch. When she carries it back around the house, bemused, she finds the X, chalked next to the kitchen window, small, up high, like a sleepy moth. The jolt that goes through her is the kind of fear one feels at an accidental cut. She is afraid to look directly at it. When she tells Jake about it and the first one, by the spigot, that she hadn't thought to mention, he is confused, as if these are figments of her imagination made solid. That night, they make a curry and spend a long time chopping side by side in the kitchen. The oil gets hot in the pan and the mustard seeds jump. The kitchen window grows dark as the world closes around them, the light space of the room, the smell of onions frying.

  Awash

  This is the year of overabundance. Storms saturate the desert into new blooms and the Great Salt Lake rises and butterflies that no one has seen in fifty years unfurl. And the stock market bulges slowly like a flooded river and the beef that Japan doesn't want rots on refrigerated shelves. Mercy's Aunt Geraldine dies, and she sorts her things, culling vintage laces and trims she can use for her hats. In her closet are thirty-two white broadcloth shirts and six pairs of unworn New Balance walking shoes. In the kitchen, two coffeepots still in their boxes. The garage is orderly, and the cedar chest holds stacks of tablecloths and embroidered pillowcases. These, Mercy holds to her cheek to test the thread count. An ancient Hershey's cocoa tin holds bone buttons and blackening snaps. The silk wedding dress tears on its hanger. Mercy's pile is growing. Then she finds the scrapbooks, the postcards glued like specimens on the ridged paper. Geraldine had an African safari fund she never used or gave away even when the osteoporosis crippled her. Boxes of screws and nails labeled by size bow the workshop shelves. Mercy's fingers grow numb with the sorting. She and Jake need to have a spring cleaning of their own. Like the pill bugs fringing the baseboards, her hopes curl in on themselves. Next to the kitchen sink, Geraldine's ashes settle in their paper box. In California, botanists name new flowers after stepchildren and second cousins, grade-school teachers who smelled of cardamom and stale polyester.

  Mercy Spends All Week Pinning, Sewing, and Gluing Flowers onto Hats

  Redbook's “Summer Fashions on a Budget” featured one of her hats, and she is buried under requests for pale citron bowlers trimmed with white silk peonies. Her fingers are spotted with hot glue burns and punctures from the wire stems. On the weekend, she plants azaleas in the corners of the yard, blankets them with ammoniac mulch. They are already flowering, and she admires their lacy fans; Jake, cranky from a bout of lawn mowing, says the blooms look like cat vomit. They stand in the hollow of their yard, and he rubs her shoulders, nuzzles the sweat off her neck. She counts backward and says, “Tuesday.” Early Monday morning, Jake comes in from getting the paper and says, “Something strange has happened.” The azaleas are laid out in a row on the front yard, their roots spidery and drying. The holes in the flowerbeds glare at Mercy, and when she turns to go inside, she sees the X on the doorjamb, thickly chalked, a closed eye. “Children,” Jake says, and she imagines them, curled in their tight houses, blinded like puppies by sleep. “Children,” she repeats and heads to the garage for the trowel and her gardening gloves. The sun is just coming up, a low hum on the horizon.

  Jake Falls off the Roof into the Mulberry Tree and Is Unhurt

  Things like this are always happening to him. Mercy carries a travel first aid kit and copies of their insurance cards in her purse. The tree is a white mulberry the first owners of the house brought back from China seventy-five years ago. Later in the summer, swollen lavender fruit will droop like pupas from the tree. Jake is still lying under it, new leaves in his hair, twigs for an aura, when she finds him. The original owners hoped for silkworms, not knowing they could no longer fly and thus existed only in captivity. “There is a huge spider web on the side of the house up there,” he says. This is the kind of thing he notices while falling from great heights. Once they pull the ladder around, they discover it is not a spider web but another X, chalked fuzzily in the space directly beneath their bedroom window. Even though Jake washes it off, late that night, Mercy feels its shadow, imagines some large dust-intestined insect watching them sleep, jealous of their warmth, their white sheets, their filaments of breath.

  Mercy Meets Morris's Ex-Wife, Lydia, for Lunch at the Mall

  Her basal temperature tells her she is ovulating. She and Jake had sex twice in the last three days. The Chinese gender chart says their child, if conceived this month, would be a boy. She enters the mall through the lingerie section of a department store. Past the mesh bras and tap pants are the children's clothes, a joke, she wonders, natural progression? By habit, she resists looking at the baby clothes; any act of imagination feels like a jinx. Lydia is waiting by the Taco Bell, wearing one of Mercy's hats. She looks awful in it, and Mercy feels momentarily angry at the thought of all those unsuitable women buying her hats, paying for her lunch and her shoes and her gynecological exams. They sit by the carousel with their trays of mall-Asian food—eggroll, lo mein, plastic pillow of sweet and sour. “You've been keeping secrets,” Lydia says. “Morris told me all about it.” Children drag by on the creaky carousel, and Mercy feels a pang deep in her gut, an egg releasing, fear, a kiss, an X on the doorjamb, a hatch mark on the calendar. “Your hat was in Redbook,” Lydia says, holding her hand to the crown of her hat as if the carousel is kicking up a wind. “I dug this out of my closet—it was in the Salvation Army pile,” she laughs. “One more month and it would have been gone.” Mercy leans forward and tips Lydia's hat back on her head, rests her hand on the curve of her neck. She says, “I guess I got lucky.”

  They Start Finding Xs Every Other Day or So

  On the paving stone closest to the storage shed, the red flag of the mailbox, every fence post in the backyard, appearing one by one like light bulbs flicking on. On the spare wheel of Jake's Jeep, the clapper of the bamboo wind chimes. The potting soil is dumped in a mound in the backyard, the bag knotted around the front doorknob. Their garbage cans are knocked down, dented; they find their newspaper burnt on the walk. “It's some kind of campaign,” Jake says, and they stay up late, peering from their dark living room. In the bedroom, Mercy pulls a chair next to the window and watches the yard swell and diminish in the moonlight. They set amateurish traps, a video camera whose tape runs out, a string of bells on the garden gate, a drugstore motion detector alarm on the driveway. They don't call the police or quiz their neighbors. Without discussion, they both know there is a message here they must unravel. Jake talks about digging a pit and covering it with grass clippings. Mercy starts constructing her own semaphore; she leaves milk in an old tin pie plate for the neighborhood cats, paints their door Greek-isle blue, ostentatiously recycles. She ties paper lanterns onto the beams of the porch and washes the sidewalk in front of the house. She is broadcasting good intentions. The bells in the garden ring without provocation, on windless days, and Jake says, “Listen, the ghosts are at it again.”

  Mercy and Morris Meet at the Cineplex Fifteen Miles Away

  The Chinese film they are seeing is folded away in the smallest theater, and the only other people watching are two elderly women who whisper through the credits. Morris puts his hand over hers without looking at her. Mercy holds her breath as the colors stain the screen. A chartreuse dress, gold lanterns, indigo streets burnished by lamplight. The subtitles flash too brightly and create a sensation of flickering vertigo. Mercy turns to Morris, finds his mouth, sinks into a kind of oblivion, the long kisses she remembers from high school, the kind that went on until it wasn't about desire anymore, was simply the pursuit of texture, dark fleshy spaces that stretched until everything felt like an extension of one's own body. She relaxes into this moment, despite Morris's
inept rubbing at her shoulders, the giant paper cup of soda with its straw squeaking between them, the chirps and gongs of the fight scene. When she pulls away, her mouth is tacky with saliva and Morris looks blissfully at her, like a dog, she thinks and is startled by her bitterness, the extent of her betrayal. She tries to pay attention to the movie, but the subtitles seem wrong for the action, and she doesn't know if it is because she has missed crucial information or if it is just shoddy translation. Her jeans are wet as if something inside her is weeping, flooding with the onscreen dialogue, a language she doesn't understand.

  Suddenly, Everything Makes Mercy Paranoid

  Someone is calling and hanging up. The chalk Xs continue to bloom on their property, and Jake refuses to get caller ID. Mercy hacks his hotmail account in search of chat room hussies and grad school crushes. She sniffs his underwear, finds only the musky almond scent of him, scans his shirt collars like a fifties housewife. At work, she goes over their finances while the Catherines mutter at their sewing machines. No plot is beyond imagination: offshore accounts, angry bookies, a looking-glass family in Tennessee. A gray Cadillac passes her twice while she is running; a woman in the coffee shop is wearing the same cardigan as she is. She imagines her china rearranged, a shadow in the bathroom mirror, every horror movie cliché burned into her brain during countless bad date drive-ins and basement sleepovers in high school. When she calls Morris to ask if he is stalking her, he says, “It was just a couple of kisses, pretend we were drunk.” And then he laughs his horsey laugh, and she knows there is no way that Morris is creeping around her house at night. It is the season of thunderstorms that blow up without warning and a sky that darkens as if a filter has clicked into place. One evening, when the power has gone out and Mercy and Jake are sitting on the porch, lightning strikes the neighbor's fir tree. The air turns purple, their fillings hiss, and the light is so thick it hurts their sinuses. In that moment, she sees the figure in their yard, half hidden behind the elm. She runs toward the spot, leaving Jake shouting after her, knowing that nothing will be waiting there, just the smell of burning sap and loosed rain, the sound of water hitting skin.

  The Spine Is a Delicate Evolution

  “I'm mortified,” Mercy tells her sister as they line up for yoga class. She is visiting her in New York amid meetings with department store buyers. Her sister is the one person she can tell about Morris because they aren't particularly close. They have a two-hour threshold for mutual tolerance, worked out after rooming together for a year of college and nearly killing each other over mildewed dishrags and borrowed belts. The yoga instructor greets them all with a half-bow and ushers them into the small, mirror-lined room. He is shirtless and his skin is ruddy-tan, stretched tight over his belly like a roasted pig. They start with cat tilts, and her sister whispers, “Is it serious?” “Of course not,” Mercy hisses and feels the arch of her spine crimp. They face the wall for dancer pose, and Mercy says, “It's fucked up, right, making out with my best friend while my husband and I are trying to get pregnant?” She stumbles into her sister and they both yelp. The instructor squints at them and intones, “Get grounded.” During boat pose, Mercy inhales the dust of the mat as her sister rocks placidly beside her saying, “You just needed a little attention.” In corpse pose, she can feel every bone of her back touching the floor, and she imagines her body a crypt, each vertebra a walled-up secret. The instructor places his hands beside her ears to realign her head, and a small space opens at the base of her neck, radiates relief.

  Trapped on the Subway Due to a Fire on Another Track

  The scratched Plexiglas gives the feel of an aquarium, one of those cheap globes at Kmart Mercy mooned over as a child, each studded with a plump goldfish that her mother refused to buy her because she said they wouldn't last a week. The car is on a section of track closed between two walls, and Mercy is late for an appointment with a woman who makes flowers out of old calligraphy workbooks, every petal an imperfect word. She scuffs her pumps against the accordion floor and reads the newspaper over the shoulder of the man next to her. Cancelled shuttle launches, grilled chicken recipes, bomb scares that turn out to be lunch sacks. At the last station, waiting for the train to arrive, she called Jake on her cell phone, had a frizzled conversation of last syllables and interruptions until she said “I miss you,” and hung up, not sure what he heard. The walls were papered with Rodenticide warnings, forbidding people to touch or eat the bait without specifying what the bait was. A man slept on a folded blanket under the escalator while a woman next to him sat alert, scowling, as if daring anyone to disturb his delicate refuge. It broke Mercy's heart to see them, but then the train rattled in, blowing sweaty air in front of it, and she was pushing for a seat, not knowing yet about the fire burning ahead of them, not yet thinking of the orange fish and their conscribed pirouettes, their languorous acceptance of their fates.

  Mercy Goes to Her Ob/Gyn for the Third Time This Year

  Her doctor, who is a little Texan redhead, drawls, “It's time to start looking at other options.” Pink plumes of reproductive propaganda flutter in the air conditioning. “Y'all have just about exhausted the natural route,” she says and pats Mercy's paper-covered thigh, clicks her pen, draws a pamphlet on fertility treatments from her clipboard. She barely looks at Mercy's ovulation charts, four months cross-stitched with temperatures, mucus descriptions and do-it dates. In the park across the street, mothers yell at their children on the slides and Mercy tosses the doctor's pamphlets in the trash can atop ice cream ruins and yesterday's news. Although profoundly unreligious, she is superstitious, needle-phobic, lazy and in love with the romance of old-fashioned cock and womb, candlelit, sweaty, pungent reproduction. She figures this is a sign or more likely, a punishment for procrastination and that her best defense is graceful concession. She summons up glamorous trips, unencumbered old age, reading novels until noon, starts exchanging one fantasy for another. A chalked X greets her from her driveway, boxed like a hopscotch square, and she sneaks into the backyard to cry, knowing Jake is calculating the odds on the computer upstairs. The corner of the yard is overgrown and shady, and she crouches in the ferns. If she is quiet, she can almost hear someone else's heartbeat, someone else's breath, as if coming to her from a distance, from a future she hasn't yet imagined.

  Jake Talks about Defoliants Over Dinner

  Dioxin, demeton, cacodylic acid. Mercy takes this as a hopeful sign; maybe he is missing his job, longing for a lectern, research trips, access to microfiche. Miscarriage, mutation, birth defect. He rolls the word, teratology, on his tongue with the black beans. Midway through the meal, she goes to the kitchen for a bottle of wine and two glasses. The look on his face is that of someone surprised by disaster, the click of a land mine, the drone of a plane's engine. “Pour it,” she says. She is tired; in the crib of her pelvis, she feels her ovaries wither. He fills each glass without spilling a drop, a terrible competence. The bottle sounds heavier than it should when he puts it down on the table. They sit without eating and watch the resin spread like poison across the surface of the wine.

  When Mercy Goes Outside to Pick Basil for Dinner

  She finds a man crouching by her back door who fumbles chalk into his pocket, says, “I thought you weren't home. Your car &” She says, “We're having the timing belt replaced,” almost apologetically. When he turns his face toward her, she recognizes the man whose dog they hit, and she recoils as if the windshield is breaking in front of her again. Into the awkward pause she asks, “Would you like to join us for dinner?” When she goes upstairs to get Jake, he hisses, “There are limits to politeness.” Back down-stairs, at the kitchen table, the man sits with a sweating bottle of Corona untouched in front of him. Jake says, “Hi there buddy, long time no see, what have you been up to?” Mercy says, “It's not much, just pasta.” Jake flings open the refrigerator and says, “Ham, we've got ham, and brie and look at these plums, gorgeous, big as fists.” He is yanking food out and slamming it onto the table. “How about another
beer?” He opens the rest of the six-pack of beers and puts them one by one in front of the man, pulls containers of olives and cherry tomatoes out of the refrigerator, piles pita bread atop takeout fried rice atop romaine. Carrots tumble over blocks of butter and eggs tremble at the edge of the table as the refrigerator rattles to life, leaks its cold air over them. The man doesn't touch a thing. Jake takes one of the beers and drinks it in noisy swallows, drops it onto the table where the bottle cracks into three pieces. Mercy says, “Please, Jake.” The man reaches across the table for the shards, stacks them into a lopsided pyramid. Jake asks, “Have you ever seen plums that big?” softly, as if truly puzzled by their appearance.