by Jenny Offill
F. You have not followed the assignment, Mrs. Carr wrote.
A girl came over and asked me what I got on my paper. Her name was Darcy Edwards, but I called her Girl 8 secretly. This was because of something Edgar had said. One day he rode by my school at recess and saw me standing alone by the fence. He stopped to talk to me and we watched the other kids playing for a while. All the boys were shooting marbles and all the girls were jumping rope. Then all the girls moved to the swings and all the boys played whiffle ball. Edgar spun the pedals on his bike. “Did you ever think that everyone around you might be an ingenious robot and you’re the only one that’s not?” he asked. In fact, I had never thought this, but now I saw it could be true. It explained why all the girls knew how to play the clapping game and all the boys brought baseball cards to school. The next day, I changed all my classmates’ names to numbers to better reflect their metal hearts.
“What did you get?” Girl 8 asked again. I covered the grade with my hands. “An A,” I told her. She snatched the paper away from me. “I knew you were lying,” she said. Later I stole her snowflake mittens and hid them inside my desk.
Just before Christmas, Mrs. Carr arranged a field trip to the raptor center where my mother worked. The day of the bird tour, I got up very early and drove with my mother on the highway out of town. She had brought along a box of slides and as she drove she held them up to the light and looked at them. When we got to the center, I sat in the lobby and waited for the rest of my class to arrive. On the bulletin board, there was a sign that said:
50 Javan Rhinoceros
30 California Condors
18 Mauritan Pink Pigeons
12 Chatham Island Robins
6 Mauritian Kestrels
5 Javan Tigers
3 Kauai O-O-Honeyeaters
2 Dusky Seaside Sparrows
1 Abingdon Galapagos Tortoise
Once my father had given me an old map that showed the world supported by a series of tortoises one on top of the other. “That was the way people thought of the Earth back then,” he explained. “Before they had sailed all the way around the world and seen that it was round.” At the bottom of the pyramid was a tremendous turtle with a weathered purple shell. This one I thought had survived.
My mother went to the bulletin board and crossed out a line. There was only one dusky seaside sparrow in the world left now, she said, and it lived all alone in a cage in Disney World. She turned away so I couldn’t see her face. It was early still and the sky was gray. My mother closed her eyes. “Can we go see that bird?” I asked her. I knew about Disney World, about all the other things that were there. My mother turned to look at me. I made my face look sad. “We’ll see,” she said.
My mother’s job at the center was to take care of the baby birds. At night, people left them in the parking lot in shoe boxes and shopping bags. BIRD, they wrote in block letters on the front. Most of them were not raptors, but she took them anyway. There were four in the center now. Eeny, Meeny, Miney, and Moe. Two were ospreys and two were sparrows. Only the ospreys were birds of prey, my mother said. Their heads were covered with white fuzz like the heads of old men. They had black wings and sharp, leathery claws that were bright yellow. The sparrows were dull brown and cried all the time. My mother fed them with eye droppers and sang them to sleep.
In her office, there was a picture of her, knee deep in water, dressed as a giant crane. The summer before, she had gone to Texas and worked for a program that bred captive whooping cranes. All the workers dressed as birds so that the cranes would know how to feed their own babies when they were set free. My mother took the costume with her when she left and sometimes she put on the feathered head and talked through the beak to me.
The clock struck eight. “Where is everyone?” my mother said. I went outside and waited for the bus. At a quarter after, it arrived, and all the kids got off and milled around the parking lot. Mrs. Carr motioned for me to get in line. Girls 1–9 already were. My mother clapped her hands. “Let’s begin,” she said. She led us down the hall and into a small auditorium. “Quiet, children,” Mrs. Carr whispered, holding a finger to her lips. My mother stepped behind a podium at the front of the room. Above her, a screen showed a picture of an empty sky.
“Imagine, if you will, a world without birds,” she said. “It may be hard to picture, yet one day this may be. In the last thousand years, fifteen hundred species of birds have become extinct. Scientists estimate only eighty-five hundred species remain. Within your lifetime, at least a hundred more will disappear.” On the screen behind her, pictures of birds that were already gone flashed by. “The moa. The dodo. The great auk,” my mother said. Then there was a picture of thousands of birds flying in formation across the sky. These were the passenger pigeons, I knew. I hoped my mother wouldn’t tell the story of what happened to them, because it always made her cry.
After the slide show, we went to the baby-bird room and my mother showed everyone the picture of when she was a crane. Then she put on a glove and brought out the hawk that sat on her hand. Mrs. Carr asked what the bird’s name was and my mother said that it was Hawk. Hawk had a black hood over his head like a tiny executioner. This was so he would think it was night and not make a fuss. With Hawk on her hand, my mother led us down the hall to see the picture charts of how birds evolved from dinosaurs. This was the part the boys liked best. In school, they talked on and on about dinosaurs, their tremendous teeth and pea-sized brains. One of them had a button that said “I killed the dinosaurs!” and he often wore this pinned to his coat.
My mother took off Hawk’s hood. The bird blinked and looked around at the bright lights. Then he made a soft sputtering sound and fluttered his wings.
“Can I tickle his feet?” Girl 4 asked.
“No, you may not,” my mother said. She put Hawk back in his cage and brought out the skeleton of a small bird. “Birds have hollow bones,” she explained, “which is why they are light enough to fly.” She showed us a bird’s head which had been cut in half. The bones were shot through with tiny holes like a spiderweb. My mother held it up to the light and looked through to the other side. “Isn’t that extraordinary?” Mrs. Carr said.
In the lobby, my mother paused in front of the extinction sign. “Five weeks ago, one of the last two dusky seaside sparrows in the world died,” she told the class. “Soon they will be completely extinct.” Her hands shook a little as she pointed to the bird’s name and the number beside it. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one was paying attention. Boy 6 was passing out gum and all the kids were holding out their hands to him.
My mother turned away from the sign. “Follow me,” she said. She led everyone down the hall to a large glass case with two stuffed passenger pigeons inside. They were ordinary-looking birds, brownish gray with a spot of white on their chests.
My mother turned on the light that illuminated the case. The two birds inside had dull eyes and moth-eaten coats. They were sitting on a fake branch against a backdrop of trees. “Once the passenger pigeon was the most numerous bird in the world. When a flock of them flew past the sun, the sky darkened as if from an eclipse.” My mother paused and looked around the room. I wondered if she was going to tell about the great hunt that killed twenty thousand of them in one day. I was very little when she first told me about this, and afterwards I crawled under the back porch and hid there until it got dark. Just before the end of the story, when she got to the part about the birds burning in the trees, my father grabbed her wrist and said, “Can’t you see you’re scaring her, Anna?” but she told me the rest anyway.
But this time my mother trailed off in the middle of the story. She turned off the display light and went into the back room. When she returned, she was carrying a tray of feathers. She pointed out the different markings on them and explained how quills were made of keratin, just like fingernails. Then she passed them around for everyone to see. Some of the kids put feathers in their hair and tomahawked each other. Mrs. Carr si
ghed and shooed them away. Afterwards, she called for everyone to line up for the bus. I was allowed to stay behind since school got out at noon that day.
When everyone else was gone, my mother took out a handkerchief and wiped the case clean. On the wall beside the pigeons was a plaque that marked the date they’d gone extinct. Sept. 1, 1914. The last one’s name was Martha, it said, and she died of old age in the Cincinnati Zoo.
We went to the woods to pick out our Christmas tree. My father didn’t believe in Christmas, but still we celebrated it. It was like not believing in God but still you prayed. My mother said it was a shame to cut down a tree, so instead we chose one in the forest and tied a ribbon around it so we could find it again.
On Christmas morning, we got dressed in our warmest clothes and went to see our tree. My father pulled a sled behind him with all our presents on it and we had a picnic breakfast in the snow. Pine needles fell on the coffee cake my mother had made. We opened our presents all at once because it was too cold to take turns. My mother gave my father a telescope, an old map of Africa, and a woodworking set. My father gave her a bathrobe, an electric toothbrush, and a collapsible iron. My mother folded and unfolded the iron; then she ran it across the snow. “How marvelous,” she said. “What do you suppose its purpose is?”
I got the most presents of all, too many to count. The best one was a detective kit with fingerprinting powder and a potion that detected bloodstains. Also a magnifying glass and a roll of police-scene tape.
That night, I searched our house for evidence of a crime. I fingerprinted my parents and looked for bloodstains on the rug. In the living room, I found a dark spot that looked suspicious, but when I ran the test it came out negative. Check in your father’s study, my mother said.
On New Year’s Eve, Edgar came over to baby-sit. As soon as he arrived, I fingerprinted him. “Perhaps I should seek legal counsel,” he muttered. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his hands. Later my mother came downstairs wearing her mermaid dress and twirled around for him. “How do I look?” she asked. “As lovely as ever, Mrs. Davitt,” he said. The tips of his ears turned bright pink. He excused himself and went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk.
My mother sat down on the couch and put on her shoes. New Year’s Eve was my parents’ wedding anniversary and they were going to a restaurant in the next town. “Nine years, Grace,” my mother said. “That’s a nothing sort of number, don’t you think?” But when my father came down in his new suit she went to him and got down on bended knee. He laughed and held a hand to her cheek. “Marry me, Anna,” he said, and she agreed.
Edgar didn’t come out of the kitchen until after they’d left. Then he sat in my father’s chair reading a book called The Story of Stupidity. When I asked him what it was about, he told me it was an autobiography. “Whose autobiography?” I asked. “Oh, never mind,” he said.
It was snowing out and the only channel that would come in was the religious one. I watched a show about a Catholic priest who wandered around the world feeding hungry kids. Wherever he went, dirty children clung to him. He patted their heads and wiped their faces clean. My mother had once said that Edgar would make a good priest, but I couldn’t see why this was true. He never talked about God to me. Just once, he said he wished he were pure spirit, no body at all.
After the show, I asked Edgar questions about God, but he wouldn’t answer most of them. In my notebook, I kept a list of the questions he’d approved. Does God have a face? was a good one. Is God ever bored? was not.
The next morning, my mother woke me up at dawn. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. She opened the window and let the cold in. Outside, a few faint stars lingered like moths. My mother pulled the covers off my bed. Her hands were black and smelled of turpentine. I kept my eyes closed when she turned on the lights. “Rise and shine, little monster,” she said.
I got dressed and followed her down the hall. “What is it?” I asked her, but she wouldn’t say.
“Is it bigger than a bread box?”
My mother frowned. “Oh yes,” she said. “Much bigger.”
It was quiet in the house. In the distance, I could hear the rumble of a train passing by. “All aboard,” my mother said. We came to the spare room, where she kept her sewing things. Now that she’d stopped sewing, she kept it locked up with a key.
My mother pushed open the door. Suddenly it seemed we had stepped outside. The room was completely black. The walls, the doors, even the ceiling had been painted. Everywhere I looked, there were glow-in-the-dark stars.
My mother wiped her hands on her skirt. In one corner was a desk and a small blackboard. On the wall behind them, my mother had painted some words in white. “It’s the cosmic calendar,” she said. “Everything that’s happened since the beginning of time compressed into just one year.” She pointed to a neatly lettered sign above the doorway.
One billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar. And then on the wall next to it:
THE COSMIC CALENDAR
Jan. 1: Big Bang
May 1: Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy
Sept. 9: Origin of the Solar System
Sept. 14: Formation of the Earth
Sept. 25: Origin of life on Earth
Oct. 2: Formation of the oldest rocks known on Earth
Oct. 9: Date of the oldest fossils known to man
Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms)
Dec. 16: First worms
Dec. 19: First fish
Dec. 21: First insects
Dec. 22: First amphibians
Dec. 24: First dinosaurs
Dec. 26: First mammals
Dec. 27: First birds
Dec. 29: First primates
Dec. 30: First hominids
Dec. 31: First humans
On the blackboard, my mother had written: If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.
I copied this into my green notebook. My mother wiped the chalk off on her skirt. “I just thought you should know,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you did.”
Outside, a car started up. Then a sound like thunder far away. My mother drew a tiny dot on the board. “We will start at the very beginning,” she said. “Then continue on until we reach the end.”
JAN. 1: BIG BANG
In the beginning, the universe was very small. Everything in it fit into a space no bigger than a dot. There were no planets in the beginning. No galaxies or stars. There was only this tiny dot, infinitely dense and hotter than a thousand suns. Then one day a great explosion occurred. The dot burst into a million pieces, streaming into space. These fragments sped through space at incredible speeds. Within minutes, they had traveled many light-years away. They traveled to the edge of what is known, and then beyond. They expanded to fill the emptiness of space, forming galaxies and, slowly, stars. Later came the sun and the planets and our blue home, the Earth. And this became the universe.
I went upstairs and woke my father up. I told him that there was a surprise in the sewing room, but he didn’t want to see.
“Let me sleep, Grace,” he mumbled, pulling the covers over his head. Later he came down for breakfast and I showed him the black room. He touched the paint gingerly, but it was already dry. “Dec. 16: First worms,” he said, running his finger across the line.
My mother came in. “It’s the history of the world,” she told him. “I used the paint left over from the shed.”
My father cleared his throat. “The history of the world, you say?”
“I thought I would teach it to Grace in real time. I wrote it out last night while you slept.” She pointed to the dot she had drawn on the board. Beside this, she wrote: Jan. 1: Big Bang.
My father murmured something and checked his watch. “I’m going to the office to do some grading,” he told her. “If you need me, I’ll be in the ninth circle of hell.”
This was what my father said each day before he went to work. For six
years now, he had taught chemistry at Windler Academy, but he was always threatening to quit. The boys who went there were made of money, he said. They came to class in cashmere sweaters and busied themselves blowing things up. The year before, one of them had singed off his eyebrows and penciled them in with yellow crayon.
My father kissed me goodbye. “Listen to your mother,” he said. After he left, she drew a cartoon of him on the board. “I am in the ninth circle of hell,” the caption read.
My mother got an ordinary calendar out of the closet and tacked it up on the wall next to the cosmic one. She flipped through the pages until she reached May, then put an X on the first day of the month. “Nothing happens in the world until then,” she explained.
I looked at the cosmic calendar. My mother erased the dot that had started everything. Then she opened the door and let the stars fade. We wouldn’t be back in the black room for four months, she told me. We had to wait for our galaxy to form.
There were only a few other houses on my block, and a blind girl lived in one of them. As soon as the weather got warm, she’d come outside and play on the sidewalk in front of her house. I liked to walk at a distance behind her, matching my footsteps to hers, stopping when she did. Sometimes she paused and moved her cane through the air. Who is it? she’d say. I can hear you walking.
In the afternoons, I hid in the prickly bushes behind her house and spied on her. She had a funny sideways way of walking, like a crab. In the yard, she didn’t have to use her cane because she knew where everything was. There was a chair she liked to sit in and a wheelbarrow filled with dirt where flowers grew. Whenever she came into the yard, she would go to the wheelbarrow and smell the flowers one by one. There were five flowers, all red, and she always smelled them left to right, exactly the same way. Then she’d sit in the chair and turn her face to the sun. Sometimes she read a book, using only her fingers to see. I wanted to invite her over to play, but I wasn’t sure how she’d get across the street. What if she stopped in the middle when a car was coming and wouldn’t get out of the way? What if she fell in a pothole or slipped on a rock? I had an idea that I could put a leash on her and lead her like a dog, but I didn’t think she would agree to this.