Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  Something sharp scraped across my foot. The monster’s claw. I opened my mouth to scream and the water rushed in. It tasted of mud and silt and filled up my lungs until there was no air left. I tried to swim to the surface. The water felt like a stone on my chest. You’re going to die, Grace Davitt, I thought, but it was as if the voice came from somewhere outside me and whispered in my ear. Then I felt my mother’s arms around me and suddenly I was pulled out of the water and there was air again, cold and clean. My mother dragged me to the floating dock and hoisted me on top of it. Then she pounded me on the back until water flew out of my mouth in a dark stream. I had swallowed a small leaf and this seemed amazing to me. I picked it up from the dock and held it in my hand.

  “Why did you do that?” my mother said. “What’s gotten into you?” Her face was red and the vein in her forehead was pulsing the way it did when she was mad.

  “I fell asleep,” I said. “I woke up and I was underwater.” My mother turned away. When she was mad, she refused to look at me. If we’d been home, she would have told me to get out of her sight.

  My throat hurt from all the water I had swallowed. I tried not to cough and remind her of what I’d done. It was almost light out. The sun was a thin red line in the sky like a piece of thread you could pull.

  My mother dropped back into the water and I followed her. I put my arms around her neck again. “This time, hold tight,” she said.

  We started back toward shore. Clouds covered the moon, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like to look at it anymore because my father had told me it was just a piece of rock in the sky, beautiful but dead. Nothing ever grew there and there was no weather, not even rain. “Poor moon,” my mother said when I told her what I’d learned.

  When we reached the shallow part, my mother set me down. “If you ever try a stunt like that again, I’ll kill you,” she said. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. We walked down the beach to the spot where we’d left our things. We looked beside the pier where we’d put them, but they weren’t there.

  “What in the world?” my mother said. She walked back and forth across the wet sand, looking for our clothes, but they were nowhere to be found. Nightgown thieves, she said.

  The sky was the color of cement. I looked out at the lake. I had an idea that birds might have carried our clothes away. We stood there shivering in our underwear. My mother’s breasts were bare and in the gray light they looked as if they were made of stone. I was sorry now that I’d agreed to come to the lake. I thought of the monster gliding through the water, eyes wide open in the dark.

  There was sand in my underwear. I took it off and threw it into the lake.

  My mother laughed. “Shall we be nudists, then? Is that what you have in mind?” She stripped off her underwear and tossed it in the water too. “Race you to the car,” she said. As quickly as that, she’d forgotten she was mad at me.

  I was out of breath when I reached the car. My mother beat me there. She always beat me at races because she ran as fast as she could and never gave me a head start. “Catch me if you can,” she’d say just before she streaked ahead. It was the same thing when we played checkers. She bet me a nickel a game and always won. Already, I was six dollars in debt to her. Don’t be a poor loser, Grace, she said when I complained.

  I climbed in the car. My mother retrieved her purse from where she’d hidden it under the seat. “At least they didn’t take the keys,” she said. The car smelled musty, as if we’d been gone for days. My wet legs stuck to the vinyl and squeaked when I moved. My mother put her driving glasses on. It felt funny, being naked inside the car. I covered myself with a map of Vermont.

  “Clothes are the only thing that separates us from animals,” my mother said. “Clothes and a sense of shame.”

  “Why can’t animals talk, then?” I asked. My mother frowned. She didn’t like it when I interrupted her.

  “Bees,” she said. “Don’t forget about bees. They do a special dance to tell each other where the flowers are. Whales, too. They sing songs made of clicks that rhyme like words. These songs tell where the whales come from and where they want to go. Then there was the gorilla who learned to swear in sign language. Stupid toilet face, that gorilla liked to say.”

  My mother rolled down the window and stuck her head out like a dog. The yellow bus passed by. It was the first day of school. I wondered if the driver knew I wasn’t going this year.

  I rolled up the window. The air outside was cold. Even with the windows closed, it crept in through the cracks in the door.

  “Your grandfather was a nudist, did you know that?” my mother said. “There’s a picture of him at a ball in New Orleans wearing only a top hat and cane. Emmett Elliot Wingo III. Once he drank champagne from a lady’s shoe.”

  “Why a shoe?” I asked. My mother waved my question away. She was like Edgar about questions. If you asked one she didn’t like, she pretended she hadn’t heard.

  There were no other cars on the road. My mother drove carefully through town. She used her turn signal every time. She stopped at all the stoplights. Shyly, I examined her body. She had her purse over her lap, but the rest of her was smooth and white. She caught me staring and laughed. “Whatcha looking at, mister?” she said.

  We turned onto our street. Her breasts swung back and forth as she rounded the corner. Mrs. McKenzie was pulling out of her driveway and almost hit us. She turned to wave, then saw my mother driving along with just her glasses on. She dropped her hand and drove past without looking. Once she had complained about the broken-down car we kept in our driveway. “Stupid toilet face,” my mother said.

  My father was cutting up fruit for cereal when we got home. “Oh, Anna,” he said when we walked through the door. My mother went to the bathroom to wash the sand from her hair. When she came out, she had a towel around her waist but nothing on top. I thought of the Amazons who lived in the jungle and cut off one breast so they could shoot a bow and arrow as well as a man.

  My father sighed. “Where are your clothes?” he said. “Please tell me you didn’t drive home like that?”

  My mother took the bowl of cereal from his hand. She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” she asked.

  My father shook his head. He went to the window and pulled down the blinds. “You have to think about what you’re doing, Anna. Anything could have happened. You could have been pulled over. The car could have broken down.”

  “Don’t be silly,” my mother said, though her car often did. Just the week before, we’d had to have it towed from the other side of town.

  I went upstairs and got into bed. I tried to sleep, but I wasn’t tired. I sat up and examined the place on my foot where the monster had touched me. There was a red mark on my heel the size of a dime. When I pressed it, it turned white, then slowly back to red again.

  I went into my mother’s room and got the camera out of her bag. I held my foot up to my face and took a picture. When it came out, I wrote the date on the back and put it in the drawer.

  SEPT. 9: ORIGIN OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  What became the Sun was once a vast glowing mist that spun freely in space. For billions of years it swirled through the dark, drawing dust and rocks and ice to it. As it grew, the gas inside this cloud condensed and soon its shape began to change. Its edges flattened and its center bulged. A dark ball of gas burst from its core and into space. This was the newborn Sun, which scientists call a protostar. Around it, the cloud of dust and gas it came from continued to spin. Over time, pieces of rock came together inside and formed larger globes of liquid rock. As they cooled, they became the planets of our solar system and the moons that circle them.

  When the cosmic calendar started again, my mother took me down to the football field behind my father’s school. First we put down a red beach ball at the goal line for the Sun. At the thirty-six-yard line, we left a mustard seed for Mercury. Next we sorted through a bag of peas to find the smalles
t and the largest one. The smallest pea, we placed sixty-seven yards downfield for Venus. Downfield twenty-six yards more, we put the larger pea, Earth. My mother paused on the sidelines, calculating. “The moon should be placed nine inches away from Earth,” she said. “A pinhead will do.” She gathered up our things and walked to the edge of the field. With a measuring tape, she marked forty-two yards farther down. Past the track and into the sand of the high jump. In the middle of the sand, she put a BB shot. And this was Mars. “Back into the car,” my mother said. She drove up parallel to the football field, lining our car up with the beach-ball Sun. “Watch the odometer, Grace,” she said. “In exactly one fourth of a mile, we’ll stop for Jupiter.”

  I watched the odometer. It only took a minute to get there. Jupiter was an orange at the edge of woods. We drove another fourth of a mile along the trees. Then my mother got out and left a tangerine for Saturn. A half a mile more to leave a plum for Uranus. Then Neptune, a ping-pong ball, two-thirds of a mile away. When we were two miles from the Sun, we put a mustard seed down by the side of the road. “Poor Pluto, all alone,” my mother said.

  When we got home, we watched the season’s debut of my uncle’s show. For the finale, the question girl wore a sun costume and spun across the stage. My uncle stood stiffly in the lights, wearing a bow tie. “Yes?” he said when she appeared.

  WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF THE SUN WENT OUT?

  There would be no light or heat. It would always be night. Plants and animals would die and nothing would grow. It would get colder and colder. Ice would cover everything. It is likely that we would freeze to death before we starved. Even as we speak, the Sun is dimming. Already, it is a hundred times less bright than it once was. Still, there is no need to worry. The Sun will continue to shine for five billion years.

  The lights came up. The stage filled suddenly with dancers costumed as planets. They spun around and around the question girl. The music swelled. When Jupiter leapt into Neptune’s arms, my uncle held up his hand. “Thank you, that will be all,” he said.

  My mother threw a shoe at the TV. “Thief,” she muttered. She got up and paced around the room. A number appeared at the bottom of the screen: Questions? Call me at 1-800 SCIENCE, it said.

  My mother went into the kitchen and slammed the door. “Peter Davitt, please,” I heard her say. I put my ear to the door, but I couldn’t make out the words. Later she came out of the kitchen and turned off the TV. “Of course, he won’t admit it,” she said. “He wouldn’t even talk to me.”

  “Admit what?” I asked.

  My mother picked up her shoe from the floor. “Don’t play dumb with me, Grace.” She called Edgar and asked him to baby-sit for me. “I’m going to the lake,” she said, “and I don’t want company.”

  I waited on the front steps, wondering which Edgar it would be. But when he arrived, I wasn’t sure. This Edgar wore his hair slicked back in a tiny ponytail like a girl’s. He had on black jeans and a T-shirt that said “Eat the Rich,” with a knife and fork crossed underneath.

  My mother smiled at him. “I almost didn’t recognize you,” she said. “You look very ominous today.” She touched her hand lightly to his shirt. “A gift from your father, I presume?”

  Edgar blushed. We’d seen him in the marina once, tying up his father’s boat. Capitalist Tool, it was called.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I ordered it through the mail,” he said.

  My mother put on her sweater. “I’ll be back before dark,” she told him. She didn’t say anything to me.

  As soon as she left, Edgar got out the old picture albums from the den. There was a picture of my mother he liked to look at whenever she left the house. He knew which album it was in but he always looked through them all from start to finish anyway.

  The picture had been taken in New Orleans, where my mother had lived when she was a girl. In it, she is throwing beads to a crowd from a rose-covered float. Her eyes are hidden behind a mask which she holds to her face with one hand. Above her hangs a moon made of papier-mâché. There were other people on the float too, but someone had cut out their faces so that only my mother’s remained. All that’s left is a pale hand behind my mother’s head and a banner that says Mardi Gras Sweetheart, 1968.

  My mother had promised that one day she would take me to New Orleans to see the riverboats and the beautiful parades. Also, the alligators in the bayou and the snakes that dropped from trees. She said one of her earliest memories was of her father killing a water moccasin with an oar. Agkistrodon piscivorus, he had called it, and she’d thought he was speaking Annic, but later he told her this was the snake’s Latin name.

  I showed Edgar a picture of my uncle with a python wrapped around his neck. He’d flown the snake in from a zoo and had it drugged before the show; even asleep, it brought the ratings up.

  Edgar shuddered. “I hate snakes,” he said. He looked at the picture through squinted eyes. “Is that your father or your uncle?”

  “My uncle.”

  He nodded. “I should have known.”

  I flipped the pages until I found the picture I liked best. It showed my mother as a little girl, dressed in hat and gloves, playing with a dead duck someone had given her. On the next page was a faded photo of my grandfather as a young man; the light slanting through the curtains made it seem as if smoke was coming from his head. Once my grandparents’ house had burned to the ground, but he had rebuilt it to look exactly the same. I liked to think that this was a picture of the day the fire had started. I’d read about spontaneous combustion in The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained and knew that people could go up in smoke just like that.

  Edgar got tired of looking at the albums. We had reached the section where all the pictures were of me. This was the part I liked best, but it always bored him. “First tooth, first bike, blah, blah, blah,” he said.

  He took out a book from his backpack. The Futurist Manifesto, it was called. I stood behind him and read over his shoulder. “Stop that,” he said. “Go find something to do.”

  I wandered into the kitchen, but there was nothing to eat. Just some ginger ale and an old casserole in the back, growing mold. I called Edgar in to see, but he didn’t want to come.

  “I specialize in poisonous mold,” he said. “The kind that climbs up walls and makes it difficult to breathe.” He turned the pages of his book noisily.

  I sat on the sofa and picked lint off my socks. Edgar moved his lips a little as he read. Sometimes he let out a laugh like a snort.

  “What’s a manifesto?” I asked him.

  Edgar answered without looking up. “A declaration of beliefs.”

  “Do I have one?”

  He laughed. “No, but your mother might. She probably has a drawer full of them.”

  “Does my father?”

  Edgar frowned. “Definitely not,” he said.

  Later he read to me from the Futurists’ manifesto.

  We will glorify war, militarism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, the beautiful Ideas that kill, the scorn of women, bridges like giant gymnasts stepping over rivers sparkling like diabolical cutlery, large-breasted locomotives, the slippery flight of airplanes whose propellers have flaglike flutterings!

  He closed the book. Outside, it was getting dark. I could hear the light footsteps of my mother coming up the walk.

  “What do Futurists believe?” I asked him.

  “They believe in machines,” Edgar said.

  SEPT. 14: FORMATION OF THE EARTH

  In the beginning, our Earth shone like a star. It was white-hot and consisted of luminous gas. There was no life on the Earth then. No water or land. But as the Earth cooled, a crust formed around its molten core. Further cooling created water, which later became the primeval seas. And it was in these dim waters that life on Earth began.

  My mother had a birthday party for the Earth. It was 4.6 billion years old, so no candles, she said. She made a cake and covered it with blue-and-green frosting. I ate the ocean and she ate
the land. Afterwards, we watched my uncle talk about kangaroos on TV. When was he coming to visit, I asked. One of these days, my mother said.

  That night, my father came home from work and threw his papers on the table.

  “Watch out for the frosting,” my mother said.

  We’d planned to clean up after the party, but after the cake, we were too sick to move. I felt worse than she did because oceans covered seventy percent of the Earth.

  My father moved his papers, which were smeared with blue and green. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  My mother explained about the party. “I ate all five continents,” she said.

  He fixed us ginger ale and gave us heartburn tablets to take. “I still think you had a better day than I did.” He took off his tie and folded it across a chair.

  My mother wiped off the table for him. “What happened?” she said.

  “They’ve started a prayer circle at school. Teachers and students meeting at the picnic tables just outside my office. When I protested, they said it was freedom of expression.”

  My father shook his head. He took out Know Your Constitution! and flipped to the back of the book. “I referred them to the chapter on church and state, but they weren’t swayed. Faith is a gift we’re asked to share, they told me. I’m considering calling the ACLU.”

  My mother made a face. She threw the last bit of cake away. “Still, it’s better to believe in something rather than nothing, don’t you think?”

  My father took off his glasses and blinked in the light. “Not at all,” he said.

  The next morning, my mother called in Edgar to substitute because she hadn’t slept well. “Where does your mother keep her lesson plans?” he asked me as soon as he came in. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I showed him the closet with the books my father had ordered for me. One showed a circle of smiling children holding hands around the globe. The Great Wide World, that one was called. Another was titled The Story of America, and another, Amazing Math! My mother had taken one look at these books and packed them away. Oh, these will never do, she said.