Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  In one corner of the closet was a model of the solar system made out of construction paper and wire. In another, a chart showing how man evolved from apes. There was a record player covered with albums marked “Music Dept.,” and a jump rope labeled “P.E.” On the floor was a small bird cage with Barbie and Ken inside, eating plastic food, and this was called “History.”

  Edgar dug out the home-school books my father had bought for me and spread them across the floor. He leafed through them until he saw something he liked, then put a bookmark on the page. One of them marked a picture of the famous balloon that had burst into flames and fallen from the sky. Edgar explained that this was because it was filled with hydrogen instead of helium and showed me the formula for each gas. Later he brought in a dead frog and dissected its soft heart on the kitchen floor. He told me that the blood of insects was yellow and the blood of lobsters blue. That night, he gave me homework from The Great Wide World. Write a report about the lives of children in distant lands, the book said. One page, double-spaced.

  I looked through the different chapters. There were Turkish kids herding goats and Chinese kids burning money for luck. There were English kids rolling wheels of cheese down a hill and Mexican kids eating cakes shaped like skulls.

  None of this interested me in the least. I decided I would write a story about the girls in India who had been raised by wolves. This I had read about in the “Man or Beast?” chapter of The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained. There was a picture of the girls that I had cut out and glued inside my notebook. In it, one of them crouched on all fours, howling at the moon. Her eyes were red and her hands and feet were covered with fur. Kamala, wolf girl of India, the caption said.

  The book said that the wolf girls had been captured in 1920 by a local priest who saw them in the wild and thought it his Christian duty to humanize them. One day, he went with some other men to the abandoned termite mound where the wolves made their den. As soon as the men began to dig, two wolves ran out of the hole and escaped into the woods. The third, a female, attacked the priest and was shot to death. Inside the den, the men discovered two small girls, approximately two and eight, curled up with a pair of wolf cubs. They killed the cubs and took the girls to the church orphanage, where they tried to teach them to read and write and pray. For months they tried, but it didn’t work. The wolf girls were afraid of light and ran on all fours through the hallways. They ate only raw meat and growled at the nuns. The youngest one, Amala, lived for less than a year. Kamala lived longer, but she never learned to speak properly. Even after she learned to walk upright, she only knew wolf words.

  About her, I wrote:

  No body knew woof words but woofs and so the girl was allways sad in the house where the nuns lived. Her sister was dead and the other woofs too. The nuns said You must speak clearer Jesus will help you. But the woofgirl just stopped talking and played only with a ball a person gave to her that was blue. The End.

  I showed my report to Edgar.

  “How do you expect to learn anything when you fill your mind with garbage?” he said. He crumpled up my paper and threw it in the trash.

  My mother came into the room. She had her bathrobe on and her eyes were red. “What’s garbage?” she asked.

  Edgar blushed. “Perhaps garbage is a bit strong. I just meant …”

  “Let me see.” My mother picked up the paper and read it. When she finished, she looked right past him as if he wasn’t there. “That will be all, Edgar,” she said.

  That night, she came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. “There was a gazelle boy too,” she told me. “He lived in the Sahara and was never caught because he ran so fast.”

  “Did he have fur?” I asked.

  “No, he was naked and had long black hair.”

  And what happened to this boy, I wondered. When he got too old to run?

  “The gazelles left him beneath a tree,” my mother said, “and one day the lions came for him.”

  SEPT. 25: ORIGIN OF LIFE ON EARTH

  When the Earth was new, it was covered with oceans, but nothing lived in them. Only a few elements, forged in distant stars, filled the warm water of these primeval seas. Over time, lightning struck the water and caused these elements to combine. This created amino acids, the basic chemicals from which proteins are made. Proteins are the building blocks of DNA, which carries genetic information for every living thing. It is DNA that allows organisms to make copies of themselves and so to live.

  That life began at all was just a piece of luck, my mother said. And the luck was that the Earth was exactly the right distance from the Sun. A little bit closer and all the water would turn to vapor; a little bit farther and it would turn to ice. She took out a piece of paper and drew a picture of the solar system, then erased the planets one by one.

  “Why are you doing that?” I asked her.

  “Too cold, too cold, too cold, too cold, too cold, too cold, too hot, too hot,” she said. Finally, there was only the Earth left. My mother gave me a marker and told me to color it blue. Afterwards, she tacked the picture to the wall in the living room. “Do you see now how it’s just chance that things worked out this way?”

  My mother got out her old photo album and turned to the first page. There was a picture of the Mardi Gras where she’d met Michael, then one of the school they’d gone to in Vermont, and another of the car he’d used to drive away. Next came the raptor center where she’d worked in California, and one of her boarding a bright blue plane. After that, it was all Africa.

  My mother flipped through the photographs until she found a blurry one I’d never seen. This was a picture of the day she decided to marry my father, she said. On that day he had helped her get her truck out of the mud. It was the rainy season in Tanzania. She was always getting stuck somewhere, but no one ever stopped to help. In the picture, my father has a stick in his hand to scrape off the mud. My mother has one foot out, as if she could kick the tires free. She’s laughing and her hair is in a braid. If it weren’t for all that rain, she said, there might never have been me.

  OCT. 2: FORMATION OF THE OLDEST ROCKS KNOWN ON EARTH

  The oldest-known rocks are crystalline. They were created when a molten lava called magma cooled and solidified. On the parts of the Earth that had no water, these rocks were weathered and worn down by violent storms. Some of them crumbled and were carried off by the wind. They settled in basins and at the bottom of the sea. By studying such rocks, scientists were first able to determine the age of the Earth.

  On the windowsill, my mother kept a collection of rocks from around the world. Each one had a story to tell, she explained. One might be a fragment from a meteorite. Another had been walked on by dinosaurs. She took off her wedding ring and laid it beside them. “Imagine,” she said, “how the first person who found a diamond inside a rock felt. He must have thought it was put there just for him.”

  That night, my mother played a trick on my father. She hid her wedding ring in a drawer and waited to see how long it would take him to spot her bare hand. Six days passed, but he didn’t notice. My mother froze her ring in an ice cube and served it to him in a drink. “Don’t you realize I could have choked to death?” he asked her when she fished it out for him.

  In Africa, my mother said, there is a city made entirely of diamonds that is known as the City of Death. This is because no one who scales the walls of this city ever returns alive. On the far side of the wall is a diamond palace and beside this palace a smooth clear lake. This lake appears to be water but really it is crystal polished to a shine. Fortune seekers, exhausted from their long climb, dive into this lake and to their death. And that is why the word “diamond” comes from the Greek word adamas, which means unconquerable.

  Later my mother came into my room and sat on the edge of my bed. She was in her old bathrobe and her wedding ring was on again. Diamonds were always dangerous, she told me, because they inspire such greed. In the Sahara, there were once beautiful hills composed entirely of them.
One day a king and his army were crossing the desert when they stumbled upon this shining place. The king said, “If you take, you will regret it, but if you don’t take, you will regret it too.” His men scattered across the hills and soon what he said came to pass. Those who took some diamonds regretted not having taken more. Those who took none regretted not having taken at least a few, and those who took many regretted it most of all. They were so weighted down by their bounty that they fell behind the others and died of thirst, my mother said.

  A shadow passed over the wall. I looked up and there was my father standing in the doorway, a glass of milk in his hand. “Don’t you think you should let her get some sleep, Anna?” he said.

  The next morning, my mother folded back the paper and left it beside his plate. Buy milk, the circled words said. This was a variation of the silence game, I knew. My mother knew how to play, but my father didn’t. He sighed when he opened the paper and saw the black ink. “Is this really necessary, my love?” he asked. But nothing he said could make her speak. That afternoon, milk appeared. The kind my mother liked, in the glass bottle with the raised letters on the front. When my father came into the kitchen, she poured him a glass. I watched him drink. One swallow was all it took. When he handed her the empty glass, his mouth was rimmed with milk. My mother wiped his face clean with her hand. There was a clinking sound as the glass touched her wedding ring. “Cheers, Jonathan,” she said.

  OCT. 9: DATE OE THE OLDEST FOSSILS KNOWN TO MAN

  The oldest creatures preserved in fossils looked like small mushrooms and were found all over the shallow sea. They were made up of billions of blue-green bacteria living together in layers on the ocean floor. Scientists named them stromatolites, which means stone mattress, because of the way they lay together like sheets on a bed. They first appeared on Earth more than three billion years ago.

  My mother drew a mushroom on the board. Then she erased it and drew another one.

  “Pay attention, Grace,” she said.

  I scuffed my shoes along the floor. Already I was tired of the calendar. We weren’t even up to the worms yet, and dinosaurs were months away.

  My mother said my homework was to find out how fossils were made, then write it up in a report. As soon as she turned her back, I closed my notebook and put it away. Who cares about fossils, I scratched on my desk.

  It was hot in the black room. My mother talked on and on about the sea. I could see kids from the neighborhood coming home from school. I didn’t remember their numbers anymore, but I still remembered their names. Billy McAllister was It, and everyone else was running away. They ran past the blind girl’s flower beds, then around the corner toward the lake.

  After a while, Jo Pace passed by on her bike. She had on overalls and her hair was cut short and crooked like a boy’s. She pedaled fast, standing up off the seat as she rode. I knew she was headed to the junkyard, where she lived with her father and a hundred broken cars.

  In real school, I used to give her half my lunch every day because she was saving up to buy a horse. When she got the horse, she was going to run away to Montana and be a cowboy, she’d told me. In the summer, her father let her sleep outside in a huge tire that had once been part of a trailer truck.

  “Grace, are you listening?” my mother said. She closed the window and pulled down the shade.

  The stars on the wall started to glow. My mother stretched her arms out wide. She was talking about the universe again. I put my head on my desk and breathed in the wood smell. My pencils clattered to the floor, but I didn’t pick them up.

  My mother whirled around. “What’s going on?” she said.

  I threw my notebook across the room. It landed at her feet with a thump. “I’m sick of the stupid universe,” I told her.

  “The universe is sick of you too,” she said.

  A bat is not a bird, my mother corrected me. It was Halloween. I wasn’t allowed to trick-or-treat until we had given away all the candy. If we left it on the porch, people might take too much, she said. My mother had painted her shoes leaf-green. I wished it were snowing outside so that her shoes would be white again.

  I went to the window. Outside, masked children moved from house to house. My mother was a flower and I was a bat. Flowers were not last things, but still she liked them.

  Just after dark, the blind girl came to our door dressed as a fairy princess. Her cane had been covered with sparkles and turned into a wand. I was afraid she would recognize the sound of my shoes if I went to get the candy. “We’re out of candy,” I said.

  My mother came into the room, carrying a bowl. “You know Becky, don’t you?” she asked me. She filled her jack-o’-lantern with candy. I stood very still in my spy shoes.

  My mother walked the blind girl to the door. I could see her father waiting outside on the steps in his yellow rain boots. I remembered a witch I’d seen on TV who wanted the wing of a bat and the eye of a newt. Wing of a bat, eye of a newt, she’d chanted, sweeping the floor with her magic broom.

  I closed my eyes and tilted my arms like wings. I flew toward Becky, knocking her to the floor. “I’m as blind as a bat,” I told her, giggling.

  My mother helped her up and gave her extra candy. She went outside and spoke to the blind girl’s father. Then she came back and put all the candy away. She shut the windows and locked the door. When I asked if we could go out yet, she held me upside down until I cried. “See how bats sleep,” she said.

  The next morning, Edgar came over, carrying a stack of flyers. “I’ve decided to become a Futurist,” he explained. He stood on the front steps and read aloud to me.

  Let’s break away from rationality as out of a horrible husk and throw ourselves like pride-spiced fruit into the immense distorted mouth of the wind!

  And this:

  Oh! maternal ditch, almost to the top with muddy water! Fair factory drainage ditch! I avidly savored your nourishing muck, remembering the holy black breast of my sweet nurse … When I got out from under the upturned car—torn, filthy, and stinking—I felt the red-hot iron of joy pass over my heart!

  When my mother woke up, I gave her a flyer. She read part of it, then threw it away. “Those aren’t even his own words,” she said. “Edgar comes from a long line of decadent and overbred people.”

  When pressed, she compared him to a Dalmatian she once had who was afraid of vacuum cleaners and teacups. I showed her the picture of a speeding train he had drawn for me.

  My mother tacked it to the refrigerator with a piece of tape. “Edgar needs his driver’s license,” she said.

  She told him she would hire him as our chauffeur so that he could practice for his test. From then on, he drove us to the lake and the raptor center and the store. On weekends, she took him out to the old highway and he practiced passing imaginary cars. “Watch out for that truck,” my mother said whenever he drifted across the yellow line.

  He was supposed to always drive with an adult, but some days when my mother stayed late at work she let him pick her up.

  Edgar drove fast, seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour, but still we were never on time. This was because of the bumps. If you started listening for them, they never stopped. Some sounded like metal striking metal, but others were dull thuds, the tire crossing something in the road. “Did you hear that?” he’d ask me as we headed out of town. It didn’t matter what I said, because he always asked again. “Listen,” he’d say, slowing down. “Did we just hit something?”

  Once he asked me on a day when we were already late to pick up my mother because of the rain. I shook my head. No, nothing. Edgar’s hands were white on the wheel. I watched the odometer click around. It had been fifteen miles since the last bump. Suddenly Edgar swung the car around. He drove back the way we had come, past the church, over the bridge, right to the edge of town. He pulled over where the bump was and got out of the car. “Wait here. I’ll just be a minute,” he said. Edgar walked down one side of the road and then the other. He crawled over the guardrail and lo
oked into a ditch. When he came back, he was sweating. “It was nothing,” he said.

  That night, we were an hour late to pick up my mother at the raptor center. When we got there, the lights were off and she was standing alone in the parking lot holding a newspaper over her head. The paper was so wet that the ink had bled and run down her face. She got in the car and slammed the door.

  “I’m sorry,” Edgar said. “Something came up.” He didn’t say anything about the bumps, so I kept quiet, too. There had been five that day.

  “Something always comes up,” my mother said. She turned on the heat as high as it would go, then sat hunched over, shivering. Rain drummed on the roof. My mother shook out her hair like a dog.

  Edgar drove carefully through town, stopping at all the lights. When he passed the woods, he tried to point out a whisky jay to her, but she wouldn’t look. In the driveway, he touched my mother’s wrist. “See you tomorrow, Mrs. Davitt?” he asked. My mother shook her head. “Consider yourself fired,” she said.

  A few days later, Edgar stopped by to give her a pie he had made. It was sunken on one side and burnt on the top. My mother was in the garden when he came around. “Go away, Edgar,” she told him. “I don’t have time for you or your sorry pie.”

  He moped around the driveway until I called him in to see the globe my mother had given me. In the black room, he spun it again and again. “Africa, Asia, Russia,” he said. We sat at my mother’s desk and ate the pie. On the board was a lesson from the week before: Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms).

  “That was the day that all the trouble started,” Edgar said.

  “How long? How long?” I asked each night at dinner. My father had promised to build me a dollhouse, but already it had taken longer than he’d said. Every morning, he got up at seven and packed a bag lunch to take to the basement. Then he stayed in his workroom until my mother called for him at six. When I asked why he didn’t go to school anymore, my mother said it was because he had told a Catholic boy that God was really a monkey.