Among the Ten Thousand Things

by Pierpont, Julia

  Simon left his beer bottle to buoy with the cigarette butts and, trying hard not to seem brave, sat down beside her. So that he became the hammock’s lowest point, so that Teagan rolled a little onto him and for a moment their legs pressed.

  Smiling, she asked, “Want to see something?” and stuck her tongue quickly out at him.

  “What?” he said, not daring to laugh. She did it again, slower this time, and Simon could see a hole where she’d had it pierced. “Whoa, that’s. When’d you get that?”

  “A while ago. Manny did it for me. He’s an idiot. Anyway, my mom made me take it out.”

  “That sucks.” He thought for what else to say. “Do you get, like, food stuck in it sometimes?”

  “Gross,” she said, but laughing. “Sometimes. My mom’s a bitch. Well, we’re Catholic.”

  “Yeah, if I did that, my mom would be all,” but he didn’t know what she’d be.

  “But you live in New York.” She said it like it was worlds and not an Amtrak ticket away.

  “It’s not that great.”

  “Have you been to the Chelsea Hotel?”

  “No. I mean, I’ve seen it. But I think it’s being renovated or something.”

  “I just used to watch this movie a lot about Sid and Nancy. It’s stupid. Do you like them, the Sex Pistols?”

  “Sure, yeah. I mean, I’m not, like, super into them.”

  She nodded. “Anyway. My mom wants to move, but it’s like, to her sister’s in Providence.”

  Even in the shade, with the sun mostly gone from the sky, her skin held the summer in it. He saw that her blond hair was lots of blonds, a banana when it is first peeled and then at intervals after, as the air rusts it brown. Warm came off her shoulders, smelling like smoked suntan lotion.

  “Tell me something,” she said, though for a minute it had seemed they might do without talk, without anything to remind them that they were strangers to each other.

  He asked, “What should I tell?” and she said, “A story,” and he said, “About what?” and she laughed and said, “Anything,” so automatically he started to tell her Everything, why they were in Rhode Island really, his dad’s affair and the box he’d found (in this version he had found it).

  “I thought that guy at lunch was your dad.”

  “Who, Gary? No, he’s my mom’s—I don’t know. I barely know him.”

  And No, he had no idea what was going to happen, only it was Good for Them to Get Away, good for his mother and his sister, to get perspective (and, he didn’t think he’d meant to, but the way he was telling it made it sound like a decision he’d made for them, as man of the house, which actually he kind of was).

  The sky and Teagan’s face got dark listening to him. She looked worried, a little impressed by what he had gone through, and it was pretty much exactly the reaction he’d been looking for in people, this, except then, when she asked where his father was now and he said “Who knows?” he might have given her the wrong idea, based on what happened next, which was, she touched his back and said, “I don’t know where my dad is either.”

  This, where they were sitting, was her grandparents’ porch, her grandparents’ house where her mother had grown up. She had an older brother, Brady, in the army. Only twenty but married, with a daughter who lived with his wife’s parents, in another town. “We don’t get on, though. My mom calls Vanessa ‘the mother and the whore.’ ” Men passed through from time to time—“like your Gary”—but never stayed. Her father, she said, had been gone forever already. Since she was seven.

  “But you remember him and stuff?”

  “Duh. You remember seven.”

  He wasn’t sure. The years all fused together without major milestones. Seven might have been the age he went to the set of Sesame Street, where his father’s friend designed Muppets. Simon remembered that Oscar’s trashcan, from which he’d hoped to collect souvenirs, had been trash-free and carpeted, also that Mr. Snuffleupagus was kept hanging from the ceiling.

  So, seven.

  Teagan pressed a pointed foot against the porch floor and started them rocking. She had a small, white scar on her chin, and he asked her where it was from.

  “A swimming pool one time.” Another kid had pulled her under.

  “Ouch.” What little space there’d been between them subtracted itself. One or maybe both leaned in, he knew only that first the space was there and then it wasn’t, as if God or someone had pressed the delete key, and when they kissed it was the only sound, the suck of air as their lips arranged themselves against each other.

  He was observing more than he should, sitting outside himself and trying to drum up a laugh when there was an especially loud smacking, or when her top teeth tapped his lower ones, which happened. The laughing was to show he knew when things had not gone the way they were supposed to. But she seemed to want him, this perfect girl. She wanted him. She had her reasons. He did not know them.

  He thought if he told someone about it, it would not have sounded like much, just kissing, but it wasn’t just. Already hot, they became sweaty. He was learning what he had never known about girls’ bodies, that there was so much more there than the parts that get talked about. A whole person around those three or four places you were supposed to focus on. A neck that pulses under his thumb when she angles her head to kiss him there. A hip, where it is sharp in front when she is on her side and where it gets softer, further back, making him think of a pitcher’s mound, the way it fills his palm. There are places that flutter and flex and so much symmetry.

  They pushed and pulled at each other in the hammock that drew them both together, and the world turned blue around them. When the yellow light ticked on in the living room, Teagan fell apart from him, saying something about having to start dinner. She walked him out along the porch that was like a moat around that house, and Simon had to be careful not to trip into pots and vases in the tall, black grass.

  She’d whispered goodbye to him at the house’s edge, stopping short of the front window. “Hey,” she said, her bright attention snapped to him. “Come back tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” he answered, and it was a real thing he could carry home with him, real as a pot, or a vase, lying out on the grass.

  Kay, from the upstairs window, had watched him go. Her shoes were on already. Into the closet she said, “Stay,” and pulled the door almost closed, dragging a chair in front of it. Her mother, out in the garden with Gary, had only waved as she passed. There were new rules in Jamestown—there were no rules: Kay could go where she pleased.

  It’s hard to follow a person who doesn’t know where he’s going. Simon would slow and look around every couple of streets, so that she was always ducking around corners and once behind a too-narrow tree, feeling herself in a movie. Outside a gently bowed house with a junky yard he appeared no less confused, actually scratching his head before realizing this must be it. Kay waited behind a fence wrapped in plastic netting and counted Mississippis in her head.

  At ten-Mississippi Simon was still not inside but looming like a scarecrow on the porch, looking down at his feet. Kay squatted low and looked back between her legs. Behind her stood a rickety swing set with yellow seats and rusted chains, one post tilted an inch up off the ground.

  By twenty-Mississippi the house had swallowed him up.

  She stood now, feeling the quiet of the street. Suddenly so loudly quiet. She’d followed her brother—why?—just to see what would happen, but she couldn’t, of course, see; she wasn’t invited. In her front pocket, she felt the hard of Simon’s phone. She’d borrowed it while he was dressing, saying she wanted to play Falling Gems, and he had forgotten to take it back. If Simon had caught her following, she would have said it was to give it to him.

  She wandered, past the church and the library with its sign that read RESUME WRITING TONITE 7, then came to a row of outdoor tubs under a clay-tiled roof. Rubber tubes dipped lazy into the water, collecting little air bubbles like straws in soda, or drifting up and brea
king through the surface. That was where the gurgling came from, so many soft brooks in a row.

  It was a whole world to which she wasn’t invited, sometimes.

  Sitting Indian-style on the concrete, the knobby outside parts of her ankles hurting, she pulled the phone from her pocket and found his name.

  On the third ring, she heard her father still clearing his throat. “My boy!”

  “It’s me,” Kay said.

  “Pumpkin! I’m so glad it’s you. You know I’m thinking of you a lot, all the time. How are you?”

  “Fine,” she answered, scratching a twig along the ground. It was over orange sodas with her mother that she’d made up her mind to call, that she could talk to her dad and it wouldn’t have to bother anyone. “Where are you?”

  “I’m driving. I don’t know if Mom told you, I was in Arizona. I’m going to visit your Grandma Phyllis.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “No no, just ah, a few things to sort out at the old house. How about you? Where are you?”

  She described the concrete and the tubs of water.

  “The basins! Old-fashioned Laundromats. People used to wash their clothes in them, before washing machines.”

  “Really,” she said doubtfully.

  “I used to get a lot of premium thinking done down around those basins. It gets much darker out there, not like New York. Here, why don’t you hold me up to the water? I want to hear it.”

  Kay got up on her knees, bearing the sharp pain, and swung an arm over the side of the nearest bath, angling the phone at the corner that bubbled. When she brought it back to her ear, her dad was saying, “That’s a sound you don’t forget.”

  “Dad?” Between her fingers the twig bent and broke. “When are we going home?”

  “Where’s your mom? Are you with her?”

  “I’m alone.” She was surprised how sad it sounded, the way she said it.

  “Does she know you’re calling? Honey, you there?”

  “I think I have to go now.”

  “You know we can talk whenever you want. You don’t need to ask your mom.”

  “I have to go before it gets dark I love you bye.”

  The drive, some thousand miles, would take him two days. He slept a few hours at A Day’s End Lodge in Las Cruces, making the rest up with naps, some-hour intervals in empty lots. He spent magic hours smoking by the side of the road, the sun slinking up or down the sky. Sitting on a rock or the guardrail, a few yards from where he’d pulled over, and the car sitting waiting for him.

  The cigarettes he smoked in chains. He’d never been a real smoker, just around drinks and other people. With no one to talk to he watched the paper brown and burn, smoke curling and uncurling, mingling with the painted lines on the road. At a tag sale near a gas station he bought a set of longhorns, seven feet across, bound together with cowhide. He drove with them levitated in the backseat, rested on the open windowsills, points peeking out.

  Whenever he rode out of the country station’s range, the radio would start to autoscan, searching for stronger signals. Spanish talk scrambled with Chopin scrambled with Evangelical preacher people for miles. Sometimes the poor radio couldn’t find anything. Some places, nothing was out there.

  Deb couldn’t sleep. The pillows lumped too hard under her head and each position felt like a pose she was holding. Instead she sat, switched on the light, and stacked her enemies the pillows up behind her. So unyielding before, they were fine now, perfect for leaning and for reading. Gary at some point had stocked all the nightstands in all the bedrooms with books; here were historical novels about Pompeii and the Chicago World’s Fair.

  Good Gary. If only she could like his boring fucking paintings of boats.

  He’d been so great with the kids over dinner, planning the next day’s trip. Great with Simon, mostly, who was suddenly almost chatty, and full of questions—about fishing, of all things. Boys and boats. Who knew?

  Those stupid paintings.

  Or maybe they weren’t so bad. Maybe she’d been thinking Jack’s thoughts.

  —

  In the next room, Simon and Kay were also up, though neither knew it of the other. Simon faced the wall, poring over the time he’d had with Teagan frame by frame, poring over the girl herself inch by incredible inch. He flexed his arm muscle, pressed into the mattress with his fist. Trying to rehearse their next meeting, he invented answers to questions that kept changing. There was this fishing trip tomorrow. Maybe some kind of story would come from that.

  —

  Kay had noticed the change in her brother at dinner, and how her mother had seemed so pleased by it. It shouldn’t have made her feel left out—she didn’t see why it should have—only it did, not least of all because she thought she knew the real reason he was happy, that it had nothing to do with fishing. There were just too many secrets.

  And today she’d made one of her own, calling her dad.

  —

  Deb still wasn’t tired at all. Sure, it was night, but that didn’t mean she had to lie still in bed watching the dark inside her eyelids. Also, sure, hard and unhappy things were happening, but she didn’t have to hold still for them either. Why not not sleep? Why not not be sad? No need to be all-the-time sad! Everyone thought she needed this time to mope and to cry, but wouldn’t it be great if she didn’t? The important thing was to stay on your own side. Remember whose side you’re on.

  —

  So only Gary slept, or was presumed asleep, who could say.

  “Mother.” Jack could feel Phyllis idling behind the front door, unsure. He’d parked the car midway up the drive and stopped to pluck a yellowy green clover, three leafed, from a seam in the pavement. Now, among the guardian mallards of the porch, he looked up and down, past hedges, across striped fields of grass, where lawn mowers ghosted pale ribbons, for the first stirrings of neighborhood watch. “It’s me. It’s Jack. I’m outside.”

  “Jackie?” The locks came undone, and the front hall revealed itself in pieces, new ivory bookends bearing up the same old books, and his mother, thinner, hair more black, inky, like she’d taken a Magic Marker to it. Didn’t anyone tell her how ridiculous it looked? Someone should tell her. Charles.

  “Mother, you look well.”

  Phyllis said it was such a surprise to see him, and come in, Jackie, what are you doing here? Would you like a drink? Something? Charles, he’s out—you know he goes to church to get everything ready. Will you come to service? Well, sit down.

  “My, but it’s a surprise.”

  She called questions to him from the kitchen, where she never let anyone. Only Charles now had been granted access, every few weeks, to make his storied and bland jambalaya, which he packed into Tupperware and kept too long in the freezer.

  No, Jack was not coming from New York. Tempe, in Arizona. I know you know where Tempe is. Yes, just passing through. No, Tempe isn’t so close to Houston. New York’s fine. Deb’s fine. The kids.

  Phyllis came into the living room with heavy crystal glasses trembling, tonic water over ice. Charles had gotten her off drinking, and tonic was the only thing she’d touch. Said everything else tasted like kid stuff. She went back again and brought out a saucer of saltines.

  “Now, when are you going back?”

  “I just got here, Mother.”

  “Oh, don’t be bad,” she said, sitting on the opposite end of the new blue-and-white-striped sofa and crossing her birdy legs. “It’s only I wish you’d called ahead. And things with Deborah?”

  “Everything is excellent. You make it like I can’t come here—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous—”

  “Like I can’t come here without something being wrong. You make it this great imposition. When I thought it would be a nice visit.”

  “I only wanted to know how much to buy at the market.”

  “I don’t need anything. If I need something, I’ll go out and get it myself.”

  “Should I make up the guest?” She held her drink
out in front of her face like a boxing glove, like it was her chin that was made of glass.

  “I’ll stay in my room.”

  Jack ate a cracker and watched Phyllis watch for crumbs. He held the plate out to her, knowing she wouldn’t take any. His mother had started out beautiful and had stayed that way, pin thin, all through Jack’s childhood. The general consensus back then, which she’d encouraged, was that Phyllis Shanley was a woman of remarkable self-possession.

  It didn’t have anything to do with restraint, though. It was never about not doing exactly what she wanted. Food simply didn’t hold any interest for her, and she’d subsisted, through age seventy-five, on a mostly liquid diet.

  “Well of course we are so glad to have you, Jackie, just surprised.”

  —

  In a house perpetually renovated, so much history sanded down and refinished, it almost passed as a show of tenderness that Jack’s old room had gone untouched. Almost passed as proof that the child was missed. Almost, but didn’t.

  Jack could hear how it didn’t in the breaking sound the door made, unsticking from its frame as though the two had grown together, fused into wall. In the room he could smell how much it didn’t, could taste it in the mildewed air. The difference between what’s kept and what’s left. Jack’s room had been left. Not saved but cordoned off.

  He stood staring at an old poster over the bed, an illustration of an airplane in a mass of white clouds, Mick Jagger’s mouth tattooed on the tail, his tongue out at you, AMERICAN TOUR 1972. There was not much to look at besides. The bed itself seemed miniature. The quilt flattened and thinned and its paisley swirls, kidneys in utero, flat too, another pattern he knew by heart.

  When the hour came for Phyllis to have her bath, Jack pussyfooted into the kitchen and ferreted out the twisted sleeve of saltines from a cabinet over the sink. He ate them in the new blue-and-white chair that matched the sofa and let his eyes glaze over a week-old Chronicle on the end table.

  When the garage door hummed open in back of the house, the floor and every wall hummed with it. Jack recrossed his legs and continued to scan the articles, one hand sliding the remaining four crackers into his mouth and tucking the plastic sleeve, half-folded, into his pants pocket. When the back door opened, Jack was inspecting newspaper columns, the shapes of them, like bar charts.