Among the Ten Thousand Things: A Novel

by Julia Pierpont

  Kay made a face. “It’s ugly.”

  “Well, good, you can’t have it.”

  She chose the Star of India, a milky blue sapphire with a star blooming out from its center. “Five hundred and sixty-three carats,” Jack read. He whistled. It looked like it would be warm to hold.

  They went quickly past the meteors, more things Jack might take home with him; the early monkey people so shamefully naked; and the American Indian collection, totem poles and grim little masks carved from wood.

  At last they reached the butterfly conservatory, with sun-lamps that hung from the ceiling. Their eyes had to adjust at first to the colors—magenta and violet buds, so many greens on broad, waxy leaves—but then the butterflies emerged, or their eyes became able to see them. Shapeless white ones fluttered plant to plant like bits of tissue. A monarch perched very still on a plastic dish of something netted.

  “It’s eating,” Kay said. “They eat with their feet.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We did them in school.”

  Beside a sign that read DO NOT DISTURB FEEDING, a brown-and-black butterfly was unrolling its tonguelike thing onto an orange slice. White stripes and orange dots festooned either wing.

  Standing over a stained-glass-looking one, blue with black trim, Jack said, “You know people frame them, hang them up. No taxidermy required.” He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

  She clapped both hands over her mouth, and Jack thought something was wrong, she was avoiding his eyes. Only then he looked to where she was looking, a little down. There was the monarch, moored but so gently on the uppermost button of his shirt, near to where a bowtie might be. It opened and closed its wings. Other visitors began to notice, to gather around him and pull out their phones for pictures. Jack stood still as he could, and proud, smiling like an idiot for other people’s photographs, smiling because he could tell that his daughter was smiling too, behind her hands.

  They’d reached a good moment, at the museum, though a lot of the warm feelings dissipated once they hit the streets. It was an observably later day than the one they’d stepped out of, and the hurt that for Kay had begun that Sunday, the distance Jack had felt from her ever since, these things were reintroducing themselves now—they both could feel it—as the streets grew more familiar and as they got closer to home.

  Where, at home, Deb was packing and Simon was shouting.

  “It’s not fair. You can’t do this to people.”

  “Simon, if you get a suitcase together now, Donald can still come over, he just can’t sleep here.” Deb was on her knees, half-engulfed in the hall closet, where they kept luggage and warm but ugly coats. She’d made her first very big decision. Classes, her own and her children’s, had ended, and she would take the three of them to Rhode Island. To Jamestown, and the little house they owned with Gary, which they hadn’t gotten around to renting out this summer.

  She’d received a call not an hour before from Susan Haber, the mother of those awful twins. Her girls had brought something home with them, something Kay had written. Disturbing in nature, she’d said. Disturbing how?

  “Well, sexual,” Susan had said. “Obviously inappropriate.”

  “That doesn’t sound like her.”

  The Haber woman had read some excerpts: “Jerry wants Elaine to show it to her. Elaine says, ‘Oh God, I’m so—’ ” Susan coughed, and the words did sound like someone Deb knew.

  She’d talked herself into Rhode Island in the (minor) frenzy she’d worked up waiting for Jack and Kay as the time under the TV changed from five to six, and in her head she’d talked everyone else into it too. Izzy had asked where they were summering. So? Here was summer. They’d meant to go every year. So? The last time they’d gone she’d been breastfeeding Kay. But what about the plumbing and pipes and gas or electric (she wasn’t sure if it was gas or electric or if it could be both)? What about the breakers? Well, what about them? I’ll hire someone, I’ll hire someone!

  She bought three tickets for the next morning train.

  Unlucky for Simon to walk into that, Deb’s electric atmosphere. His day was shitty already. He and Donald had stopped for burgers at the diner down the hill. With classes over, it was more crowded than usual, and they’d had to stand at the counter while Simon tried not to get caught watching Jared and Elena together in a booth that could have seated four, and might have, had the Confucianism presentation not gone so badly. Mr. Dionisio had given them a B, low in the world of oral presentation. It wasn’t the grade, he knew, that bothered Jared, who was already in at Emory, but that the script had come across stiff and embarrassing. Another group had handed in 108 blank pages on their topic, Zen Buddhism, and got an A.

  On the train into Manhattan, Simon had for once been appreciative of his friend’s talent at one-sided conversation, which today confined itself mostly to his position on a variety of superhero franchises. Thank fuck that Simon hadn’t said anything yet about what had happened with Elena, who since that Monday had ceased to know him at all. A common thing in high school, selective social amnesia, especially among pretty girls. Donald got off the train two stations early to pick up his copy of 2K with the plan of meeting back at Simon’s house.

  That plan was being challenged now, and he would not give it up. “What do you mean? There’s nothing in Rhode Island!”

  “There’s country there. There’s water and trees.” She pulled a dusty duffel from behind two tubes of Christmas paper. “There are lighthouses. Will this work?”

  “You’re not listening to me!” He kicked the air behind his mother, which she could not see, and stomped his foot, which she could hear.

  “Simon, come on!” She stood to face him, brushing the floor from her clothes.

  “I never have anything. Don’t you think I’ve been through enough?”

  “This is what we’re doing.” She didn’t shout, but she didn’t have to. It was enough of a change just to sound this way, severe.

  “Jesus, fuck.”

  “Stop.”

  “Fuck, it’s not fair, fuck.”

  “Stop.” There, she’d shouted. Also, she’d grabbed him by the arm, very hard, and held it until he pulled away.

  “Ouch.”

  He went to his room, and when she came in a few minutes later, he was packing. Her voice was changed again, back to soft. “Sweetie? Sy? You can still have Donald over tonight, you know? Just not to stay.”

  “It’s fine. I don’t want him to come here.”

  “But you two could still—”

  “I already told him no, okay?” He was grabbing clothing by the armful and dumping it into the rolly suitcase they’d bought him a few years back. There were still airport tags looped around the handle from the London trip.

  “Okay. Well, if you change your mind.”

  “I still think this is the stupidest fucking thing.”

  She went back out to the living room, to knot toiletries inside produce bags from Fairway, and to watch the clock until Jack and Kay came home, ten minutes later. Deb studied her daughter, who didn’t look at all changed from that morning—those words she’d written nowhere on her face—and she didn’t want to embarrass Kay, didn’t want to broach the subject the wrong way. When she announced her decision, Jack raised every objection she’d rehearsed already.

  “What car will you use?”

  “We won’t need a car.”

  “If there’s an emergency?”

  “They have taxis there too.”

  “You know how much work that house is going to need?”

  “I know, cobwebs! I’ll deal with it.”

  “What about the pipes? Something bursts? I’ll stay out of your way here.”

  “Sy’s too old for camp and Kay doesn’t really like it, right?”

  Kay took her cue: “Not really.”

  “And I hate this city,” Deb added, and went to pack her closet.

  “You don’t,” he said, following her. In the bedroom he shut the doo
r and asked, “Why?”

  “Because, I can’t—it’s too confusing right now.” She swung open the closet, disappearing behind the mirrored door, which reflected the made bed and bookcase behind.

  “Why is it confusing?”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m just saying the fact that you’re confused, that means something. You don’t think that’s a good sign that means something?”

  “I don’t think we can have any kind of signs.”

  “But we should deal with this together.”

  “If we do that, then I won’t make the right decision.” Knocking the closet further open so that Jack was faced with his own reflection.

  “How do you know what’s the right decision?” Jack moved closer in the mirror, saw himself say, “If being with me is going to influence you, how is that wrong?”

  “You can’t force me into this.”

  “Who’s forcing? At all?” He’d gotten loud again without realizing. Wasn’t he calmer than this? Wasn’t he much, much calmer than he seemed? “Come on, I know. Don’t go. Don’t be out there alone.”

  Deb looked at him, her arms full of soft, woven things. “We won’t really be alone. We’ll have Gary.” She hadn’t meant to bring Gary into this. She’d gone off script.

  “You don’t know he’s there now.”

  “He will be. We spoke,” she said and went back out to the hall.

  Jack’s wife and his old college roommate spoke. Another of the small things that alienated him, in increments, from his own life, like coming home to find the furniture rearranged. Like the time the corner bagel shop had closed without warning. The bagel shop had become a hat store had become a place for pet accessories, tiny tubed sweaters and gold leashes.

  He was being subtracted from everything, like a character made to look at the world, how life would go on, after he died.

  The kitchen table does not disappear because the room is empty and the doors all closed, and other people’s lives go on without you in them.

  Fine. Fine except Kay, in the corner, was thinking of things she wanted to say. At the museum she’d faced down the idea that liking her father required treason against her mother. She’d faced it down and found she might not have to feel that anymore. For a moment she’d seen the way out through all that had happened, which was like looking down one end of a bendy straw: tricky. She couldn’t see it anymore—she’d lost it somewhere on the walk home—but it had been there, flashing, when they were with Brown Bear.

  It was something her mother couldn’t see and her brother wouldn’t try to, but she was not like Simon, she let things be taken away. Worry bullied her insides until she was back in her room, packing and putting on her PJs. Worry brought out the quiet in her. She lay down on her bed and listened to the sounds her family made.

  In the kitchen the stove clicked on. Rice slid in all its pieces from a cardboard box. The printer was running in the back bedroom, and she could hear the cheerful chimes of text messages arriving on the other side of the wall.

  Her father, eating in the living room, fork to plate. Hard to get those stubborn bits. Her mother, carrying a sheet of paper to the fridge, snapping it on under a magnet. In Simon’s room there were fewer friends to type to. People were going to bed.

  Her mother on the phone with Ommy.

  Her father turning pages of newspaper.

  Her brother, talking without talking, late into the night.

  Kay didn’t think she’d slept at all, only then it was light out, and there was her mother dressed and ready and Simon sitting under a storm cloud in the kitchen.

  They were out by the elevator, her father supplying the saddest send-off from the door, when Kay threw down her bag and demanded they stay.

  No. She didn’t. But she might have.

  That would have been one way for life to go, of the thousands of ways it could splinter and fly off; it might have meant a new branch, or tree, if they hadn’t gone away or if they’d taken Jack with them. If they’d gone the next day, the next week. Even if she’d said something and Deb had not listened to her. That would have meant something too. But Kay, like her mother, was slow to make decisions. She didn’t trust her judgment and was afraid of being wrong.

  So Kay was still in the hall, throwing down her bag, even as she was in a taxi, her legs crowding the hump of the middle seat, her mother to one side, printed e-tickets folded carefully around the bar codes, her brother on the other, turned aggressively toward the window. Something pounding on the radio filled the silence and still she was in the hall, saying no, her eyelashes sticking together in points, her crying bringing out that vein in her forehead and her dress gathered up in small fists she pressed into her sides. In the cab they hurtled downtown fast—it felt fast—even as everything outside slowed. They leaned against a long, lurching turn onto Seventh. A man on a street corner stepped off the curb, his coffee cup held up and away like a torch. The cabdriver’s name was Mamadou. And Kay was still in the hall, her brother holding the elevator, her mother bent down in front of her, clutching her mother’s face and saying, Listen.

  They went. They were away two weeks.

  Jack went too, a day or three later, though not to where they were. He brought the cat in a carrier to Ruth’s, where it moaned, homesick, and scratched the back wall of the closet, behind the coats.

  —

  For eighteen days the apartment sat empty. Fine dusts and pollen collected on the windowpanes and the mirrors stood with no one in them. Nothing in or out of the closed-circuit space. Only the wireless went on, invisibly complicating the air.

  Folds in the mostly made beds sank deeper into themselves. Stains stayed stains, in the hampers and dresser drawers. In the kitchen, a milk-clouded spoon fixed to its bowl and magnets drifted down the refrigerator.

  —

  Then they came home, to the Ruth-gathered mail rubber-banded on the dining table and to everything—the graduated spines of books, rosettes on the living room rug—that looked suspiciously still.

  —

  The third week in July, the AC blew only hot air and they sat in front of fans.

  —

  Jack moved into his studio and then to a larger place in Sunnyside, Queens, with enough space for his work to live at home with him and for the kids to visit, when they were willing.

  —

  Deb moved, too: the bed to the opposite wall. Pillows at the foot of it.

  —

  For eleven August hours, they had the hurricane and bodega bags of ice.

  —

  Simon and Kay saw all the summer disaster movies in one trip to the Empire 25.

  —

  Jack and Deb stopped being married to each other.

  —

  That fall, Kay joined the field hockey team at school and spent the season on the bench beside the cooler, pressing grooves into the foam of her shin guards.

  Simon became more and more like (this). He carried his videogames into his room and hooked them up to Jack’s old college television, which he got out of basement storage.

  —

  New Year’s, and a new year.

  In Sunnyside, Jack began to work with smoke. He hung strips of paper like canopies from the ceiling and set fire to whatever was handy and burned powerfully, learning to make the blued white wisps rise in ways he wanted. He made the Manhattan skyline as it looked from a park on Vernon Boulevard, and the 59th Street bridge, its steel crosshatchings, from underneath like a zipper to the sky. Also the Shea Stadium parking lot and new baseball field, named for a bank. He held the smoking things high to make the darker marks, low and away for the flittering, coffee-stain singes. The kids spent one of their million weekends there, and the sliced hot dog and pasta Jack made for dinner tasted like burning.

  —

  Spring came and no one filled the ice trays. The glowing green clock on the oven fell an hour behind.

  Isabel Davey’s book came out. The author photo, Izzy in high-contrast black and white,
shoulders encased in something boat necked, made it impossible for Deb to find anything to wear the night of the party.

  Deb? It’s me. I tried your cell.

  It’s in the other room. In my bag.

  What are you watching?

  Jon Stewart.

  Good?

  Mmm. I haven’t really been paying attention.

  My Internet here is for shit. I can’t stream anything.

  You should call someone.

  I’ve gotta get the guy in again. But it’s these walls, though. They’re concrete.

  Listen. I can’t really talk.

  Okay, if it’s a bad time—

  That’s not why…Jack, hello? That’s not why.

  Okay, yeah. Jeez.

  —

  Halloween. Reese’s wrappers and the wicks of silver Kisses papered the streets like leaves. Ruth took Kay to Jack’s opening at a gallery in Brooklyn, where there was only wine to drink and no one their ages.

  In the kitchen, the oven clock synced back with time and Simon stood watching his Pop-Tarts revolve in the yellow hum. Deb said, “Maybe you should spend less time at sleepovers,” and Simon said, “Sleepovers, Mom, really?” He laughed and shook his head and said okay. She asked how was Donald anyway, and Simon laughed harder and said, “That fag.” She said, “Well, just please don’t stand so close to the microwave.”

  Jack bought himself a Christmas tree and carried it home alone, hand-sized hole clipped into the plastic netting, fingers to blisters by the time he got home (no gloves).

  —

  New year. Snowflakes looked like skeletons of something else.

  The oven clock became wrong again. Someone finally fixed it, so that the next November it fell an hour ahead. Kay auditioned for the school play, which was Our Town. She read for Emily and was cast as one of the mothers.

  Ruth died. Jack went to the funeral, sat at the back and didn’t talk much to anyone. Kay asked what did levayah mean and Deb shushed. “It means to accompany,” Simon answered, showing her the bright white face of his phone.

  Deb woke up earlier and earlier, at six or five-thirty. In the hall she turned the knob to Simon’s room, and if the door was locked she knew he was home. When she washed his hoodies they smelled thickly of spearmint gum, skunk, and burnt leaves.