Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  When spring came, she worked in the garden with her father, planting things. He was small and fat and wore yellow rain boots even though it hardly ever rained. He planted rows and rows of flowers and the blind girl watered them. Here, Becky, he’d say, moving her hands over blossoms and leaves.

  I thought the flowers the blind girl imagined must be uglier than the ones I saw, the way you could think of something with wings and see a bat, not a bird. But my mother told me that just the opposite was true. That the pictures in your mind were always more beautiful than what was in the world. Ask Edgar if you don’t believe me, she said.

  I knew better than that, though. For weeks now, Edgar had been in a horrible mood. He didn’t want to talk about the blind girl or black holes or even machines. All he wanted to do was sit in a chair and read. If I asked him anything, even what his book was about, he just closed his eyes until I went away.

  But one day I noticed something odd about Edgar. He answered every question my mother ever asked. He told her his height (6′7″), his middle name (Malcolm), and his IQ (160). He told her that he had failed his driving test, that he had never had a girlfriend, that he had once accidentally killed a gerbil left in his care. He told her that he didn’t believe in God but that he suspected the universe might be intelligently ordered because of the many beautiful and complex varieties of mold. One day, when my mother offered him a glass of Tang, he told her his recurring dream that he was an astronaut hurtling through space in a VW Bug.

  “Oh dear,” my mother said when he told her this. “I think you may be suffering from a lack of fresh air.”

  Edgar put his head in his hands. He was suffering from nothingness, he explained.

  My mother went to the refrigerator and took out a box. She poured Edgar a glass of milk and tucked a napkin under his chin.

  “Are you aware,” she said, “that at the end of his life Jean-Paul Sartre renounced existentialism and turned to pie?”

  Edgar looked at my mother through his half-empty glass. “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Just what I said, of course.” She smiled at him and served us pie. It was cherry-rhubarb with crumbs on top. My mother held a forkful to her mouth. “Heaven,” she said.

  We ate until we couldn’t move. Edgar had a whipped-cream mustache when he was done, but no one said anything. He was talking about a movie he’d seen in which a man changed into a robot at the end. Edgar felt that this was a happy ending, but my mother disagreed. He told her about a place in the Nevada desert where huge machines fought each other to death once a year. He said that he would go there if he ever learned to drive.

  “How fascinating,” my mother said. “Now, that is something I would like to see.”

  Edgar retrieved a crumpled flyer from his pocket. On the front was a picture of a blue giant and the words “The Burning Man!” My mother folded the flyer into a tiny square. Then she slid it behind the picture of Michael on the honey farm.

  Edgar got up and washed his hands with the black soap. “Always a pleasure, Mrs. Davitt,” he said. My mother gathered up our dirty dishes and put them in the sink. She asked Edgar if he would like to go for a walk in the woods with us the next day. I was sure he would say no because he hated the outdoors, but instead he said yes, he’d like that very much.

  The next morning, he came over very early, dressed for a safari. He wore heavy boots that he had borrowed from his father and an odd sort of hat that my mother identified as a pith helmet. He had on a green vest, with all sorts of pockets to carry different things.

  My mother laughed when she saw him. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt with “I left my heart in San Francisco” printed across the front. She made Edgar carry our lunch in his big pockets, three Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade.

  I went to the kitchen and got out the bug spray. I wasn’t allowed to go outside unless I put it on, not even for a little bit. Sophie had died of a bug bite and because of this my mother had a horror of insects, even the flies that buzzed against the screen door in the summer. If one came in the room, she froze as if it were a bee.

  After my mother sprayed me, it was Edgar’s turn. He bit his lip as if in pain. She sprayed his arms and legs, then rubbed some on his face.

  “All set, then?” she asked.

  “All set.” Edgar looked at his hands, which were coated with film. I could tell he was thinking of his black soap, but he just shoved them in his pockets without a word.

  “C’mon, my little chickadees!” my mother called. Edgar loped along beside her. His hat was too big and kept slipping down over his eyes. “Last night I dreamed I was a beaver,” he said. “What do you think that means?”

  I looked at the back of Edgar’s head. I had a suspicion that this might not be the real Edgar at all, but rather an impostor that looked exactly like him. I had read about such things in The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, which told the strange story of William X, who believed his wife had been replaced with a look-alike. The impostor looked like his wife, acted like her, knew all her secrets, yet she wasn’t her. She was slightly shorter, she wore her hair differently, and she was much kinder to the children, he said. They lived together as man and wife for several months, until one day he could bear the deception no longer. That night, while she was fast asleep, he dragged her from the house and into the street. He beat her until she was black-and-blue, but she said only that she loved him, that she was his lawful wife. The next day, he went into town and told everyone that she was a witch. He said that she left him at night to dance naked with the devil in the woods. He said that she had cast a charm on his children and turned his real wife into a mouse. In his pocket, he carried the tiny bewitched creature who was his true love.

  There was a trial and the man’s wife was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death. All the townspeople came to see her burned at the stake. William X asked to light the fire and was given a torch. But at the very last moment a white plume of smoke rose from the condemned woman’s head. The impostor vanished and his real wife appeared again. “Save me,” she cried as the flames leapt around her. William X dove into the fire, but it was too late. Husband, wife, and mouse all burned to death.

  I kept an eye on Edgar as we walked, wondering if he was a look-alike too. I made a list in my head of the evidence so far. Edgar or Impostor? I titled it. This new Edgar answered my mother’s questions, every one. He had dirty hands and liked to go outside. The real Edgar had once told me, Nature is a bore. But this Edgar took careful note of all the plants and birds we passed. My mother pointed out the pitcher plant that captures insects in its teeth and the whisky jay that flies as if it’s drunk. “How fascinating,” the impostor said.

  We stopped in a clearing and ate our lunch. Edgar wrote down on a little pad every bird we saw. There were blackbirds and yellow warblers and a goshawk carrying something back to its nest. Every one of them I had seen before.

  My mother pointed to a whisky jay on the far branch of a tree. “They mate for life, you know,” she said. “It’s terrible luck to kill one.” She gathered up our sandwich things and put them in a bag. “Let me carry that for you,” Edgar said.

  When we got back to the house, my mother gave him a book called Birds of the World that she had already promised to give to me.

  I slammed the door and went outside. From the porch, I could hear my mother talking to Edgar about all the different birds she’d seen. At first, it seemed she was speaking a language I didn’t know, but after a while the names came back to me: tree creepers, wood warblers, kingfishers, bee-eaters, white-eyes, bulbuls, motmots, waxwings, and something called the bird of paradise.

  I climbed a tree and spied on them through the kitchen window. My mother was trying on dresses for the impostor one after another. Each time she appeared in a new one, he clapped his hands. I decided that I would build a trap to keep him in until I could prove he wasn’t the real Edgar at all.

  I picked a spot beside the garden and began to dig, usin
g an old ice-cream scoop I kept in the shed. I dug until my arms grew sore and the sun began to set. Then I covered over the holes with branches and waited for Edgar to come outside.

  Later, after I had waited a long time, my mother wandered into the garden wearing a long dress. I hid behind a blueberry bush and watched her arranging smooth stones around the edge of a plot. She was singing the song I liked about the boa constrictor. “Oh me, it’s up to my knee. Oh my, it’s up to my thigh,” she sang. I held my breath as she moved a little closer to the pit. It was almost dusk. My mother put down four stones in the shape of an X, then wiped her hands on her skirt. I moved slightly to get a better view. She was only a few feet from the trap. Above her, the blue jays were making a ruckus in the trees. My mother took a step and stumbled in.

  She didn’t say anything when she fell. She just stood very still and looked around. The hole only came up to her knees, but she didn’t move, trembling a little as if she couldn’t get out. In the distance, a car backfired. My mother leapt out of the hole and ran toward the woods. She was still running when she reached the trees, her dress billowing out behind her like a sail.

  When she didn’t come back, I crept out of my hiding place and refilled the trap with dirt. I gathered up the branches that had covered the hole and hid them behind the shed. A little voice, like the voice of a bird, told me that my mother wouldn’t come back until I had put everything back exactly the way it was before she came into the garden.

  Carefully, I refilled the hole with dirt, then smoothed over the ground with my shoes, dragging them back and forth over where the trap had been. I brought back some stones I had moved. Near the trap were some flowers I had trampled and I propped them up with sticks to straighten them. Finally, when the last twig was in place, I hid behind the bushes and waited for my mother to return. I waited for a long time, but she didn’t come. After a while, I got sleepy and went inside to wash my hands. I wandered through the house, but no one was home. I went into my parents’ room and fell asleep on their bed.

  I awoke to voices outside the window and went to see who it was. It had grown dark while I slept. My parents were walking back and forth through the garden with lanterns. My father had a stick and was poking the ground with it. They stopped in front of the blueberry bush where I had hidden. There was an X shining on the ground between them. The trap, I thought; then I remembered the stones my mother had left before. My father turned suddenly and held a lantern up to the window, but I slipped behind the curtains just in time.

  When my mother was a little girl, her father invented a secret language for her. He named it Annic and told her to speak it only to him. The trick to learning the language was simple but still hard to guess. It involved dividing the alphabet in half, so that the first thirteen letters mirrored the second thirteen. In Annic, the top letter became the bottom and the bottom became the top. In my notebook, my mother had written me a decoder key:

  It pleased her that her name in Annic had the same letters as it did in English. Naan, she wrote in her notebook. Naan. Her father had meant for it to be a written language, but my mother learned to speak it too. Soon she learned how to translate from English to Annic in her head and she threw away her decoder key. It was like doing sums, she told me. As easy as that. It took her father much longer, but after a while he learned to speak it too. Only my grandmother didn’t know how. Each night, she ate her dinner in silence while her husband and daughter talked secretly. Finally, after my grandfather told a long story in Annic on Christmas Eve, she threw a glass of eggnog at him. “Stop that!” she yelled. “You’re driving me insane.” My grandfather wiped the milk from his face. “Jung’f gung?” he said.

  My mother tried to teach me Annic, but I could never learn. She talked too quickly for my decoder key. When she spoke it at the dinner table, my father rolled his eyes. He was never any good at languages, she explained. The way he butchered Swahili could have raised the dead. My father looked out the window when she said this. He grew tired of my mother talking, I could tell. Sometimes she talked and talked through dinner and he never said a single word.

  My mother thought I would learn Annic if she spoke enough to me, but after a few months I knew only a few words.

  On the board in the black room she wrote:

  ZNL 1: BEVTVA BS GUR ZVYXL JNL TNYNKL

  Bhe tnynkl vf pnyyrq gur Zvyxl Jnl. Vg vf znqr hc bs qhfg naq tnf naq fbzr gjb uhaqerq ovyyvba fgnef. Gbtrgure, gurl sbez gur fjveyvat cvajurry jr frr va gur fxl. Orgjrra gurfr fgnef yvr zvyrf naq zvyrf bs rzcgl fcnpr. Bhe Fha vf na bofpher fgne; vg yvrf ba gur sne bhgfxvegf bs gur tnynkl naq vf abg hahfhny va nal jnl. Rira gur Zvyxl Jnl, vzzrafr nf vg vf, vf bayl bar bs nobhg bar uhaqerq ovyyvba tnynkvrf va gur pbfzbf. Rnpu tnynkl vf yvxr n terng juveyvat pvgl bs fgnef.

  When she finished, she read the words aloud to me. If I closed my eyes, it seemed she was speaking a language from a planet far away. The planet of Annic was purple, I decided, and surrounded by icy rings. Everything there was made of metal and it was always night, never day.

  My mother rang the bell she kept on her desk. “Translate this by tomorrow,” she told me.

  I copied what she’d written off the board. It took a long time to get all the words right. My mother grew restless, waiting for me. “It must be your father’s side that slows you down,” she said.

  That night, I sat at my desk with my notebook and the decoder key. My mother lay on the floor playing solitaire. She was wearing my father’s pajamas and a headband we’d found in the woods. I wasn’t allowed to ask her anything. Outside, a dog was howling. “Dhvrg!” my mother said. I wrote out the decoder key at the top of the page and translated her sentences line by line. I tried not to guess what a word was until every letter was done. But some I could remember because they showed up again and again. Gur was “the,” for example, and fgne was “star.” Finally, I reached the end:

  MAY 1: ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY GALAXY

  Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. It is made up of dust and gas and some two hundred billion stars. Together, they form the swirling pinwheel we see in the sky. Between these stars lie miles and miles of empty space. Our Sun is an obscure star; it lies on the far outskirts of the galaxy and is not unusual in any way. Even the Milky Way, immense as it is, is only one of about one hundred billion galaxies in the cosmos. Each galaxy is like a great whirling city of stars.

  “Yes, Grace, that’s exactly right,” my mother said.

  In the spring, my father coached the track team at school. There were only five boys on the team and they hardly ever won. After practice, he came home smelling of cinder dust and drank a quart of water standing at the sink. Then he took a shower and went to bed.

  On weekends, when he was away at meets, my mother and I slept all day and looked through the telescope at night. On clear nights, we took it down to the lake. My mother showed me how to find the Dog Star and the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. Some of the stars we saw were bright and others were very faint. My mother said that some of the stars we were looking at no longer existed. We were seeing them as they’d appeared many years before. This was because it took light time to travel through space to us. It was as if you took a photograph of yourself and had someone walk all the way to China with it. By the time the person arrived, the picture wouldn’t look like you.

  At home, my mother drew a star on the blackboard with light streaming out. Then she surrounded it with other stars and crossed out each of them.

  “We live in the Milky Way Galaxy,” she told me. “If I sent a letter to someone who lived in another galaxy, I would write my address like this:”

  Anna Davitt

  52 Larkspur Lane

  Windler,

  Vermont

  United States of America

  Earth

  Milky Way Galaxy

  The Universe

  My mother looked at me vaguely. She took an eraser and wiped her address away. “Our galaxy is so big that it takes light a hundred thousand years to go from one edg
e to the other,” she said. “Light travels through space at a speed of 186,282 miles per second.” She picked up the chalk and scribbled a series of equations on the board. By the time her letter reached its destination, my mother would have been dead for thousands of years.

  A few weeks later, a letter came for my mother. It was in a blue envelope with no return address. My mother turned it over and held it up to the light. She showed me how there was just a smudge where the postmark should be. It could be from another galaxy, she said, but as soon as she opened the letter, I saw Mrs. Carr’s handwriting inside. Twice before, she had sent notes home with me. These notes I did not deliver, but kept in a shoe box under my bed. My mother sat down at the kitchen table and read the note aloud. In it, Mrs. Carr regretted to inform her that I was an incorrigible thief. She told how I had stolen the pennies our class had collected for the Ethiopians. Also a ruler, two finger puppets, thirty-four gold stars, and a box of paper clips. Despite repeated explanations, Grace seems unable to grasp the concept of private property, Mrs. Carr wrote. My mother laughed. “Grace, are you a Communist?” she said.

  But that night, when my father came home from work, she asked to speak to him privately. They went upstairs and talked in the bedroom for a long time with the door closed. At first, I could hear them arguing, but when they came out, a decision had been made. There was good news and bad news, my mother said. The bad news was I had to give the pennies back to the Ethiopians. The good news was I didn’t have to go to school anymore. In the fall, I’d stay home and my mother would teach me. What would we study, I asked her. And she said the history of the world from beginning to end.