Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  When I got back to the car, my mother was revving the engine. “What took you so long?” she asked. I threw the photo albums in the back seat and she took off down the road like a woman chased. As we passed the old pier, she took a picture of the frozen lake. “Goodbye, monster,” she said. She didn’t slow down again until we crossed the state line. “We’re home free now, Grace,” she told me as we left Vermont behind.

  On our second day, my mother left her purse on top of the car at a rest stop. By the time she realized what she’d done, we’d been driving for miles. I started to cry. “Don’t start with me, Grace,” my mother said. She turned around and drove back the way we’d come. She drove so fast the trees began to blur, and I was happy, thinking we were headed home.

  We came around a bend in the road and there was the purse, spilled out into a ditch just past where we stopped. All the money was there. The credit cards too. Only her lipstick was broken, and even that, my mother said, could be fixed. We stopped at a hamburger stand to celebrate. My mother paid for everything with the unstolen money. Afterwards, she made a show of putting her purse in the car. “Only good luck from now on,” she said.

  We saw an odd thing along the way, a restaurant that had burned down except for one booth. We climbed over the burnt tables and had a picnic there, but when I bit into my sandwich it tasted like smoke. Where’s your spirit of adventure, Grace, my mother said when I complained.

  As we drove, my mother described what we would have seen if we had traveled through North America fifteen thousand years ago. Glaciers would have covered most of what is now New England and Canada, she said. There would be huge spruce forests and vast lakes across much of the Great Plains. Enormous expanses of juniper, pinyon, and oak would cover the Southwest. There would be woolly mammoths roaming the plains, as well as mastodon, camels, and four-horned antelope. In the Grand Canyon, there would be mountain goats, and on the great flats of Utah, musk oxen. If we traveled back in time, we’d see beavers the size of black bears, rodents the size of sheepdogs, and, in the Southwest, large lumbering sloths the size of giraffes. To hunt them, there would be lions, cheetahs, and two kinds of saber-toothed cats. “Just think, all this in America,” my mother said.

  We drove and drove, stopping only to eat. My mother didn’t seem to need to sleep at all. She talked excitedly about all manner of things. She told me about a tribe in Africa where the women married stones instead of men. She told me that the day before Michael disappeared he’d had a blue target tattooed on his chest. She told me her grandmother had had six toes on each foot and because of this wore shoes even at the beach. Whenever I pointed out motels to her, she said, “Let’s just go on a little farther, Grace,” and so I dozed in my seat, waking suddenly to the lights of cars and the sound of my mother’s soft voice in the dark. On the endless back roads of the South, she taught me how to say my name again and again until it unhinged itself from me and disappeared into the night.

  In Georgia, we fought beneath the light of a giant peach. I wanted to have our picture taken, but my mother liked to pretend we were invisible wherever we went.

  Later I saw a dark cloud skimming across the sky like a dragonfly and it seemed strange to think that my father was looking at a different sky or not at all. When my mother stopped for gas, a piece of paper fell out of her purse and dropped on the ground. I picked it up and put it in my notebook. When we finally stopped to sleep, I took it out and read it again. You get money when you need it, the note said.

  I often found notes like this that my mother had written, and it was like finding a bottle with a piece of paper inside. That night, she told me the old story again about the woman who had been left behind on a desert island by the man she loved. She waited for him to return for many years, surviving on seaweed and sand, until at last she grew so small she could fit herself inside a bottle and roll into the sea. Who found the bottle, I wondered, but my mother said no one knew what had happened to it or where the woman had wanted to go. A fish could have swallowed the bottle, she said, or it could have been dashed against rocks. Other possibilities: sharks, mermaids, lonely sailors at sea.

  In New Orleans, there is always a parade, my mother said. The day we arrived, we came across one outside the farmers’ market. A woman dressed as a tomato danced with a green-bean man. Roving vegetables smashed pumpkins in the street. There was wheat in everyone’s hair. Two drunken carrots trailed the parade, holding each other up. The woman’s lipstick was smeared. Her stalk of a hat was half off. She was a pretty blonde, but tired-looking. She wore white heels and an anklet that caught the sun. The carrot spun her into his arms. Her hat flew off. She slipped on the pumpkins in the street. He pulled her up and kissed her. A float passed by, filled with beautiful maidens, waving from a palace of corn. As it turned onto the main street, a huge pillar of corn fell off and rolled into the gutter. My mother rushed out to get it. Later she tied it to the top of the car and we drove around until it got dark. “We’ll start a new religion,” my mother said. “People will come from miles around to see our miraculous corn.”

  That night, she read aloud to me from the book of dreams. There is no better dream than to dream of corn, the book said.

  We rented a furnished apartment in the Garden District for fifty dollars a week. There were leaks in the ceiling and mice in the walls, but still we liked it because of the balcony overlooking the street. My mother put the miraculous corn in the window so that people could see it as they passed by. Someone might knock on our door and ask to touch it, she explained. My mother slept lightly with her shoes on just in case, but no one ever did.

  One morning, we got up very early and went to the cemetery where my grandfather was buried. I was curious to see this place because he had died in his sleep just three weeks before I was born. “Oh, Papa would have liked you,” my mother said. “He never liked your father, but he would have liked you.” My grandfather studied metaphors, she explained. He wanted to know why the brain compares things. Whenever they’d go for drives, he’d make up songs for my mother along the way. The road is a ribbon, he sang. The moon is a pie. My father was a long walk in tight shoes, he told her the night before he died.

  When we got to the cemetery, the sky was still gray. My mother parked on a side street and lifted me over the locked gate. I went around to the front and let her in. We wandered in and out of the little grass paths, looking for Emmett Elliot Wingo III. We looked all over the cemetery but we couldn’t find his name. Someone must have moved him, my mother said. She took out a handkerchief and held it to her face. The graves were odd-looking, like little houses raised off the ground. This was because the city was below sea level, my mother explained. If the graves were in the ground, a flood might come and wash the dead people away. We passed a stone tomb with small bottles and dishes of food laid out on its ledge. These were gifts for the lwas, who were the spirits of the dead. They liked food and liquor just like real people, my mother told me. At night, the voodoo priests came to the cemetery and left offerings for them.

  Some nights we lay in the tall grass of the abandoned lot across the street and pretended we were in the country. My mother pointed out constellations through the haze of heat. The rough grass scratched our arms and legs. We had to squint to miss the streetlights and the chicken place on the corner. From the sidewalk, there were voices. A few feet away, a man passed, singing. He stopped and threw up in the street. Across from us was a crumbling brick building. An orphanage, the neighbors said, but there were never any kids around. Just pink flyers in the street each morning that said, “Pregnant? Alone? Who can you turn to?”

  The man who lived next door to us was named Mr. Candeau and worked as a professional positive thinker, he said. This meant he traveled around the city lecturing kids about how important it was to stay in school. The day we moved into the building, he gave me a blinking button that said, “I am the future!” which I kept in a box under my bed. Mr. Candon’t, my mother called him, but not to his face.

  O
ne day, when we slept through flooding rains, Mr. Candeau banged on the door to tell us to move our car. To do this, we had to cross the river of our street. We went out barefoot. In moments, we were drenched, the dark water up to my waist. My mother picked me up and carried me across the street, laughing. The sidewalk was full of people. Everyone rushed around, water streaming down their faces. The chicken place on the corner had been appointed an island and clumps of people huddled beneath the smiling chicken sign. By the time we made it to the car, the water was up to the door handles. My mother bailed it out with a coffee cup and discussed the possibility of electrocution. We decided to risk it. She turned the key and the good car started. We half drove, half floated away in search of higher ground. Along the river, the wind lashed the green trees back and forth in the rain. Lightning cut the sky. Cars filled every possible lot. My mother kept driving, her bare feet underwater. “How happy are we?” she asked me, and the answer was, Happy as clams.

  But the next day the car mildewed and stank of river water. The phone was cut off because my mother had stayed up all night calling Africa. Not to worry, my love, she told me. Money could be found. The phone would come back on. Someday we would drive our sweet-smelling car home, saying, We always thought of you. You never for a moment left our hearts.

  There was a bar down the road from us called the Bitter End where my mother liked to go. We went there after dinner almost every night because the bartender let me play the jukebox for free. Sometimes he danced with my mother when a sad song came on. His name was Wink, she said. Just like an eye. He told us how he had come to New Orleans for Mardi Gras when he was just sixteen and never left again. Everywhere we went in the city, people told us this same thing. I came here ten years ago for one Mardi Gras, said the waitress, the cab driver, the hot-dog man. And just look at me now.

  I liked to sit at the counter and watch Wink tending bar. He never stopped smiling and he talked almost as fast as my mother did about all sorts of different things. “Your highness,” he always called me, as in “Would your highness care for a soda pop today?”

  Behind the bar were pickled eggs in a red jar that looked like medicine. My mother ate them with a dash of salt for dinner and claimed they were her favorite thing. I always asked if I could try one, but she told me they weren’t for kids. Wink brought me a bowl of peanuts instead. That Wink, my mother said.

  The only bad thing about New Orleans was the heat. At night, we filled bath towels with ice cubes and held them to our wrists. When it was too hot to sleep, my mother read to me for hours from the natural history of St. Hildegard. About birds, St. Hildegard wrote:

  Birds are colder than animals that live on the earth, because they are not conceived in such intense and heated desire. Just as birds are lifted up into the air by their feathers and can remain wherever they wish, the soul in the body is elevated by thought and spreads its wings everywhere.

  My mother decided to take me to the zoo. The world-famous zoo, as it was billed. Once inside, we wandered from animal to animal, hanging on the cool bars, pressing our faces to the glass. It was impossibly hot. The monkeys swung listlessly from their pretend trees. We rested under a sign that said “Welcome to Africa, Home of the Lions.” My mother told me about an elephant named Buddy that had escaped from a circus in Philadelphia and trampled a boy to death. “My head hurts. I’m tired of this sun,” I said. Inside the Reptile House, kids threw pennies at the alligators’ heads. Loud music blared over the speakers. After a while, we gave up on the animals and went to the refreshment stand, where we sat under umbrellas and drank lemonade. Nearby, peacocks roamed between the tables, sidestepping the screaming kids who tried to grab them.

  We went home and tried to take a nap, but it was too hot. It was always too hot. Too hot for the park, too hot for a bike ride, too hot to get in the car. I dreamed of the perfect swimming hole, cool and clear, where fish darted past my feet and there were no snakes skimming across the dark water. The next day my mother surprised me with a little wading pool shaped like a turtle. We dragged it onto the balcony, then filled it cup by cup with water from the sink. When I looked down, there were smiling fish between my toes.

  In New Orleans, my mother said, you could fall in love with a zombie and never know until it was too late. The man who worked at the grocery store was a zombie; so were the garbage man and the woman who sold stamps on the street. It was the nature of a zombie not to know that he was one, she explained. A person became a zombie when a voodoo priest came to his grave and dug him up with a magic spell. Then he took him away to work for free, because a zombie will work and work without complaint. In Haiti, zombies worked cutting sugarcane, but in America they worked at all the jobs no one else wanted, my mother said. They worked in the fast-food restaurants and in Laundromats. They cleaned houses and sold shoes. Sometimes they worked at tollbooths on highways and you glimpsed them for just a moment as your car passed by.

  “What is the magic spell?” I asked my mother. “How do you get away?”

  “Each person is made up of five things,” she told me. “There is your physical body, which is called the corps cadavre, and the n’ame, which holds the body together. Next comes the gros bon ange, the life force which animates a person, and the ti bon ange, which is what we would call the soul. But most important of all is the z’etoile, which is your star of destiny. When a person dies, the z’etoile flies up to the sky and stays there, storing a person’s destiny for future incarnations. You might come back as a person or a dog or even a tree. It all depends on what your star of destiny says.”

  I wanted very much to see a zombie. Everywhere we went, I looked for the glazed eyes and listless walk which were the telltale signs. The only thing that would bring back a zombie’s memory of his former life was the taste of salt, my mother said. Because of this, we always carried packets of it in our pockets and in the glove compartment of the Purple Pig.

  We saved salt to put in the time capsule we were making too. My mother had gotten the idea for it from my father’s show, the one about the space shuttle that broke up into different parts. One of the parts was a silver time capsule that shot like a bullet into space. Inside it were books and photographs and a letter from the President. Also, packets of seeds in case the people on other planets were starving to death. One day we might land on Mars, my father said, and be surprised to find it covered with wheat.

  I wanted to launch our capsule into space, but my mother said it would just fall back to the ground, so we were going to bury it, instead. Already, we’d dug a hole in the backyard and covered it with leaves. We’ll have to write a note, my mother said, explaining everything.

  We put a box on a table in the middle of the living room. Every day, I thought of something new to put inside it. So far, I’d put in my “I am the future!” button and a cockroach I’d shellacked with rubber cement. A dinosaur would recognize a cockroach, my mother told me, and one day aliens will too.

  Mostly, she put pictures in the box. There was one of my parents getting married, and another of all of us at the beach floating around in inner tubes. My mother said that one day these pictures won’t make any sense because no one will get married or swim in the ocean anymore. Everything will be inside, she told me, and we’ll all live in huge buildings connected to one another by tunnels. When you want to see a wild animal, you’ll go to a special museum and put quarters in a machine for a light to come on and shine on a wolf or a bear or a bird. As long as you put in money, the light will stay on, but if you stop, even for a minute, the room will go dark. By then, our skin will be thin as paper from staying inside and we won’t even remember that we once told time by the sun. All the tunnels in the buildings will lead to subways which will be the same, only faster. You’ll just touch a button when you want to get on or off.

  One night, my mother put all the photographs from the album in a plastic bag and wrapped it all the way around with tape; then she put everything in another plastic bag and wrapped it up again. By the end, there
was so much tape you couldn’t see the pictures anymore. Just a little piece of my father’s mouth that she had missed before. After she went to bed, I went back and scraped the tape off his eyes, so he could see in the dark.

  On my mother’s thirty-fifth birthday, we buried the time capsule in the backyard. The box was made out of a special kind of metal that could survive any kind of disaster known to man. It could survive a terrible fire or an earthquake or another age of ice, she said. Someday, a thousand years from now, someone would dig it up and know that we were here.

  We went to the bar to give Wink some cake, but for once he wasn’t there. “Where could he be?” my mother asked. “Do you think he’s left us all alone?” We drove to the railroad tracks near his house and watched the trains roar past. He could be on that one or that one or that one, she said.

  When we got back to the apartment, my mother couldn’t sleep. Something was wrong with her heart, she said. At night, she could feel it racing and had to lie very still until it stopped. Also, she had a cut on her knee that wouldn’t heal, and this was proof that something was wrong. She pulled off her Band-Aid and showed me her knee. It was purplish blue where she had banged it on the coffee table playing horse. “Blue is the real color of blood,” I told her, “but it turns red as soon as air touches it.” My mother pinched at the skin on her knee. “You’re just like your father, aren’t you?” she said.

  The next night, when we went to the Bitter End, there was a new bartender there. “Where’s Wink?” my mother asked. The man behind the counter shrugged. He had a handlebar mustache and small dainty hands. “Eloped to Las Vegas with some girl, I think.” My mother excused herself and went into the back room. She snapped a pool cue and broke the clock. The clock had white horses on it that ran toward a waterfall. They stopped running when the glass cracked. My mother came back and threw twenty dollars on the bar. “What the hell?” the new bartender said. My mother checked her lipstick in the mirror behind him. Then she drove us home in the stinking car.