Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  My father had been working on the house for a month and during that time I’d come to think of him as a basement beast, dull and thudding, afraid of light, his pockets filled with sawdust. For a while, he indulged me in this, lumbering up the stairs with a roar, twirling me through the air, letting my mother transform him with a kiss. At dinner, he smelled always of the basement damp. “You beastly man,” my mother cried, because she had once wanted to be an actress. I took to saying this too, pursing my lips and putting one hand on my hip the way I’d seen her do. “Stop that at once,” my mother said. “No one likes a coy child.”

  I had begun to admire a pink plastic dollhouse at the toy store. It had an elevator and a heart-shaped pool. “Soon,” my father told me. “Very soon.” I could hear my mother crying when he came up from the basement at night. The bedspread he had bought for her was covered with orange flowers. In the afternoons, while she slept, my mother pulled the covers up over her head so that one of the flowers covered her face. I was terrified of the flower, but I knew better than to wake my mother. At night, I could hear her walking through the hallway and down the stairs. Sometimes my mother opened or shut the window outside my door. After a while, my father would get up and say, “Anna, what are you doing? Come back to bed.” Then I would hear the soft swish of her slippers and the door easing shut.

  I knew that my mother was listening for the sound of our house settling into sleep. Each night, while we slept, shingles fell off our roof like eyelashes. The spindly trees outside my window leaned into the wind. Still, they branched like fish bones against the sky. Rain fell through the roof and into a pail down the hall. Long before my father had started on the house, he had built me ships out of kits. Ships for all the seven seas, he said. Black Sea, Dead Sea, Red Sea, he sang into a song for me. My father said that once a ship had listed on a windless sea for months and when it crashed ashore it was filled with ghosts. He told me of the creatures, half woman, half bird, whose voices sped like arrows through a sailor’s heart. My mother grew restless, listening. “That’s such an old story,” she said. She called me to her, but I wanted to hear about the great eyeless fish that lived in the depths of the Sargasso Sea. “They might be as big as horses,” my father told me. “No one has ever gone down that far.”

  “Why eyeless?” I asked. “Isn’t there anything to see?” My father shook his head. “There’s no light in water that deep,” he said. “The fish find their way by vibration alone.” He kissed my mother then, once, twice. I closed my eyes. Before I was born, they had traveled around the world together, and sometimes it seemed that they went away again and forgot me.

  One night, while my father worked on the house, my mother let me come into her room and fold clothes with her. We put socks over our hands and turned them into electric eels that slithered across the flowered bed. Mine was black and my mother’s was gray. The eels danced through the air; my mother made a clicking sound whenever the black eel came too close. I thought we looked happy in the mirror that hung on the closet door. My mother looked as if she had slept well the night before. The rain had stopped and I knew that the sound she liked best was the sound of the wind in the trees. My mother took the sock off her hand. She wrapped my head in one of her scarves. “Now you look like me,” she said. “If only you didn’t have your father’s nose, we’d be just alike.” She laughed, covering my face with the scarf so that only my eyes showed. “There,” she said. “Perfect.”

  The next morning, I went into the bathroom and found the shower drain covered with half-dead flies. It was already late for my bath and I was afraid if I went to get my father my mother would come in and see them. When I tried to pick them up with a washcloth, they buzzed fiercely. “Don’t bite me, don’t bite me,” I whispered like a charm. I could see their greenish wings and the tiny thread-like hairs on their legs. I picked up my mother’s perfume bottle, then heard the bedroom door open. I turned the lock and sprayed perfume all over the flies. My mother tried the door. “What are you doing, Grace?” she said. “Open the door, please.” I sprayed more perfume, but a few legs still twitched. “Grace!” my mother yelled. I took the top off the bottle and emptied it into the tub. The black flies were shiny with perfume. None of them moved. I waited a minute to be sure, then picked them up with a tissue and flushed them away. I hid the empty bottle in the back of the cabinet and washed my hands twice. When I opened the door, my mother’s fist was raised to pound on it. “What have you done in here?” she said. “Have you been playing with my things?” Suddenly it seemed the room was filled with perfume. My mother yanked open the cabinet. When she found the empty bottle, she shook me until my shoulders hurt. “I only overslept a little,” she yelled. “You’re old enough to take a bath by yourself.” She let go of me and slammed the door. I could see a bit of her robe had gotten caught in it. I leaned over to touch the pink, but before I could, my mother opened the door and slammed it again.

  But that afternoon she came to my room and said, “Today we are going to see your father by the light of day.” We crept through the hallway and down the stairs. We burst through the basement door. My father looked up, startled. He’d shaved off his beard and his face looked shiny and strange. He had a chair pulled up to a little radio and was listening to a ball game. The dollhouse sat on a table across the room. The wood was unpainted, the windows shutterless; it had no roof or back to it. My mother said, “What on earth have you been doing down here?”

  My father straightened in his chair. “I was just taking a break,” he said. “I’m actually much farther along than it looks.” I fingered the small tools lying on the table. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bug dart behind the house and hide there. My father smiled at me. “We wanted to see you by the light of day,” I said.

  He turned off the radio. “Come give me a kiss, Grace,” he said. He held out his hand, but I shied away from him. “Please,” he said.

  My mother laughed. “Don’t tell me your charm is failing you, Jonathan? It’s not as easy as all that?” Like a deer, she darted across the room toward him. “My sweet,” he said and kissed her, but still he smiled at me.

  “I thought you should know,” I said, “that I don’t even want that house anymore.”

  “Is that so?” my father murmured.

  My mother started up the stairs and I followed her. “Don’t look back,” she said, laughing. “You’ll turn to stone. To salt, I think.” I ran to the top of the stairs with her. Below us, I could hear my father moving through his room.

  The day I turned eight, my father finished the dollhouse. He bounded up the stairs, holding it. I was in the kitchen with my mother making a cake. The cake had turned out too tall and I had frosting on my face and all over my hands. “Don’t touch, don’t touch,” my father said, carrying the house outside.

  It was almost perfect. My father set it on the front steps to compare it with its model. I shrieked to see my house so small, to see his hand come through the door and greet me like a friendly dog. The house was the same blue as my house; its windows were shuttered as if against wind. There were ten steps leading to the second floor and a tiny pail in the hallway to catch leaks. When I tipped over the pail, water spilled out and pooled onto the floor. My mother said, “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you? Don’t you think I know what you’re trying to do?”

  The only room he’d forgotten was the basement; where the door for it had been, there was only a wall. I touched the spot where my father’s door would be. I thought he might have tricked me with a secret latch, but when I pressed the wall nothing happened.

  The dollhouse was rigged so that the lights came on whenever I opened it. Inside, wooden furniture shone beneath the lights. There were rugs and curtains and even a fireplace. My mother said, “Does it ever turn off? It looks so strange, lit up like that.”

  But I liked the house best lit up; the empty plates and chairs, the tiny fireplace, lay as if in wait. Someone has gone away, I would think, or, Someone is about to knock on the
door.

  All day long, I opened and closed the house. I broke two plates and knocked over the water pail before my mother took it away and put it on a high shelf. “Don’t cry, Grace,” my father said. “Tomorrow, we’ll go to the store and buy you plates the size of pennies.”

  My mother went to her room. That night at dinner, she turned to me and said, “You two are just alike. You’d be better off without me.” She said this quietly, as if we were alone, but we were all three there, having cake.

  My father said, “Don’t be ridiculous, Anna. What’s the point of ruining everything? Let’s all sing ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”

  “It’s not my birthday,” my mother said, pushing her plate away. She left the table and got the car keys from the hook by the door. “Wait,” I said, following her.

  Outside, it was snowing. My mother didn’t speak to me. She just unlocked the car door and belted me in. My father stood in the doorway, saying something, but I couldn’t hear him with the windows closed. As my mother pulled out of the driveway, he ran in his sock feet toward us. I could see his mouth saying my name. He looked funny standing alone in the snow and I turned to watch him as we drove away.

  On the road into town, I saw two abandoned cars. One had a door coming off and the other was missing a tire. Whose cars were they, I wondered, but my mother didn’t know. Later, when we passed the train station, she pointed to a man getting into a taxi and said, “I should have married a man like that.” As she drove, she pointed out other men she might have married. There seemed no end to people she could have been happy with. I grew tired of the game and began to sing.

  “Quiet,” my mother said. “No singing in the car.” She put her hand over my mouth.

  “Take me home,” I said when she took her hand away. I was thinking of all the things my father might build me next. I thought I would ask him to make me a whole town. He could start with the driveway and the road leading out, then the post office and the train station, the school yard and the railroad tracks. All this I put into a song and sang.

  My mother stopped the car. “We will sit here,” she said, “until you stop singing.”

  I opened the door and got out of the car. My mother stared at me for a moment and then drove off. I stood on the curb and waited for her; then I saw the taxi that the man my mother had wished for had been in. I went up to the window, but there was only the driver inside. I opened the door and got in.

  “Well,” the driver said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  I gave him my address. “There’s some money at my house,” I said. “My father will pay you whatever you want.” I gave him the address again, but this time my voice sounded muffled.

  “You’re a strange one, aren’t you?” he said, but he started the car. The meter clicked on. I already owed him sixty cents. “Why don’t you have a coat on?” he asked, as he pulled away from the curb. I didn’t answer. I was thinking of the blue house at home and the click it made as it opened and shut.

  The driver stopped and waited for the light. I considered getting out, but I didn’t have any money to pay him. I thought of my fish-shaped purse lying under my bed, heavy with quarters. The light turned green. Snow fell. From the back window, I could see my mother’s car coming around the corner. It careered across the icy street, then slowed down at the place where I had waited. I saw the car back up and then inch forward and then my mother got out and stood where I had been, her hair filling with snow.

  There was no one home when we got there. I took the spare key from under the mat and got my fish purse so I could pay the driver. But when I tried to give him my quarters, he threw up his hands and drove away.

  Just after the taxi left, my mother’s car pulled up. She parked in the middle of the grass and ran into the house. When she saw me, she cried and said my name again and again as if I was still lost and she was looking for me.

  Later my father came home and demanded to know where we had been. He had driven all over town, he said, to the raptor center and the lake and the grocery store, but we were nowhere to be found. I looked at my mother. Her eyes were still red, but she’d combed her hair and put some lipstick on. Tell your father where we’ve been, she told me. Nowhere special, I said.

  DEC. 16: FIRST WORMS

  Worms appeared on Earth more than six hundred million years ago. They were small, soft-bodied creatures that fed on nutrients at the bottom of the sea. But they were different from anything that had come before because they had heads with mouths and primitive brains. Also new were their guts and organs, arteries and veins. Today there are so many worms in the world that even if every other substance were to disappear from Earth the shape of our planet would still be outlined by them.

  A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me. Sometimes you went your whole life without knowing you had one and then suddenly it appeared. In Africa, the soul has the same shape as the body but cannot be seen. At night, it travels through the world while a person dreams. But it returns to the body the moment a sleeping person is touched.

  There was a skeleton on my uncle’s show whose name was Mr. Bones. Mr. Bones had no soul, I knew. He was scooped out inside like a pumpkin. His bones were yellowish gray and worn smooth in some places. When the question girl crashed him into the wall, his jaws shook as if he were laughing.

  At birth, a baby has three hundred bones. Adults have only two hundred and six because some fuse together. The average person has six pounds of skin. Fourteen muscles are required to smile. An eyelash lives one hundred and fifty days, then falls out. The heart beats one hundred thousand times a day. The brain sends messages at two hundred and forty miles per hour. The appendix has no real use. All this my uncle said on TV. But nothing about a worm.

  At dinner, I asked my father about the soul. Did it look like a worm, I wanted to know. Did it slither out of you or fly away?

  “No such thing, Grace,” he said. My mother rattled her silverware into the sink. In Africa, she told me, people believed that the soul lived on after death as a lizard or an antelope. And the very best souls lived on in the moon.

  My father got up and scraped his plate in the trash. “Remember that man who carried the lizard around in a box?” he asked her. “This is my brother, he always said.” He laughed and rinsed his dishes in the sink. On his back was a note my mother had pinned there as a joke. Dec. 17: Invertebrates flourish, it said.

  DEC. 19: FIRST FISH

  The first fish were jawless and had no true bones. Instead, their skeletons were made of cartilage. Their bodies were covered with bony scales and their heads encased in bony shields. They were awkward swimmers and very small. They lived by sucking slime and nutrients off the ocean floor. It was nearly five hundred million years ago that they first appeared on Earth.

  My mother told me that before I was born I had gills like a fish, but at the very last minute they went away. Babies have gills before they are born because they float in the womb like fish in the sea. Once in a blue moon, she said, a child is born whose gills haven’t disappeared. Instead, there’s a slit on the neck that opens and closes each time he breathes. My mother had known a boy in grade school who looked like this. Tommy Linden was his name, and except for his gills, he was ordinary in every way.

  I wanted to see this boy for myself, but my mother didn’t know where he might be. We went to the library to look through old phone books, but we couldn’t find his name. My mother found an old article about circus sideshows and read it aloud to me. There was one in Kentucky that claimed to have a mermaid, but the picture was too blurry to tell. I don’t suppose it’s Tommy, my mother said.

  The next morning, she brought home a mackerel and cut it open so I could see inside. It smelled bad and the gills were spotted with blood. Many fish would asphyxiate if they didn’t swim constantly, my mother told me. They had to keep moving in order to get oxygen through their gills and into their blood. She picked up the fish and looked into its dead eye. The worst nightmare she’d ever had was one
in which she swam and swam ceaselessly, she said. That’s quite enough of you, she told the fish. Then she threw it in the sink.

  DEC. 21: FIRST INSECTS

  Insects descended from marine worms and were the first animals to dwell on land. The first to venture out of the sea were scorpions, then spiders, centipedes, and a primitive sort of silverfish. In the beginning, they were wingless, but soon they evolved into many fantastic forms. If you had lived in the Paleozoic Era, you could have seen six-foot millipedes and dragonflies the size of crows. Also, a primitive spider the size of a wolf.

  My mother wanted to skip the section on insects, but I was interested in them. She read a little bit about centipedes from a book, but when I tried to ask her questions, she put it away. Instead, she told me a story about the day Sophie was born. On that day she was so happy she had written her a letter on a napkin, something about how she looked when she was brand-new, and everything that had happened on her first day in the world. But a nurse had thrown the napkin away while my mother slept and now she couldn’t remember the words. Had she written me a letter on a napkin too, I asked her, but she said that that was the sort of thing you only did when you were very young.

  I went upstairs and drew a picture of a giant spider. Then I taped it to the window in my room. Outside, it was pitch-black. The boy who lived across the street was at his window too. We stood looking at each other for a long time. He had on a white bandage that completely covered his hand and I wondered if he had a hand underneath it at all. My mother had told me that I couldn’t play with him because our street was much too dangerous to cross. My father said it was because the boy’s family didn’t believe in doctors and if I hurt myself over there I might die before anyone was notified.