Celestial Inventories

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Laura overheard her mother and father talking about it one time. “I see things in her face,” her mother had said.

  “What do you mean?” Her father always sounded impatient with her mother.

  “I don’t know what I mean! I see things in her face and I can never remember exactly what I saw! Shadows and … white, something so white I feel like she’s going to disappear into it. Like clouds … or a snow bank.”

  Her father had laughed in astonishment. “You’re crazy!”

  “You know what I mean!” her mother shouted back. “You don’t even look at her directly anymore because you know what I mean! It’s not exactly sadness in her face, not exactly. Just something born with her, something out of place. She was born out of place. My God! She’s eleven years old! She’s been like this since she was a baby!”

  “She’s a pretty little girl.” Laura could tell her father didn’t really mean that.

  “What about her eyes? Tell me about her eyes, Dick!”

  “What about her eyes? She has nice eyes …”

  “Describe them for me, then! Can you describe them? What colour are they? What shape?”

  Her father didn’t say anything. Soon after the argument he’d stomped out of the house. Laura knew he couldn’t describe her eyes. Nobody could.

  Laura didn’t make judgments when other people talked about her. She just listened. And watched with eyes no one could describe. Eyes no one could remember.

  No, it wasn’t that she was sad, Laura thought. It wasn’t that her parents were mean to her or that she had a terrible life. Her parents weren’t ever mean to her and although she didn’t know exactly what kind of life she had, she knew it wasn’t terrible.

  Yes, she was born out of place. That was a big part of it. She didn’t enjoy things like other kids did. She didn’t enjoy playing or watching television or talking to the other kids. She didn’t enjoy, really. She had quiet thoughts, instead. She had quiet thoughts when she pretended to be asleep but was really listening to all her parents’ conversations, all their arguments. She had quiet thoughts when she watched people. She had quiet thoughts when people could not describe her eyes. She had quiet thoughts while gazing at Halloween Street, the glowing white house, and all the things that happened there.

  She had quiet thoughts pretending that she hadn’t been born out of place, that she hadn’t been born anyplace at all.

  Laura could have been popular, living so close to Halloween street, seeing it out of her bedroom window. No other kid lived so close or had such a good view. But of course she wasn’t popular. She didn’t share Halloween Street. She sat at her desk at school all day and didn’t talk about Halloween Street at all.

  *

  That last Halloween Laura got dressed to go out. That made her mother real happy. Laura had never gone trick-or-treating before. Her mother had always encouraged her to go, had made or bought her costumes, taken her to parties at church or school, parties the other kids dressed up for: ghosts and vampires and princesses, giggling and running around with their masks looking like grotesquely swollen heads. But Laura wouldn’t wear a costume. She’d sit solemn faced, unmoving, until her mother finally gave up and took her home. And she’d never go trick-or- treating, never wear a costume.

  Once she’d told her mother that she wanted to go out that night her mother had driven her around town desperately trying to find a costume for her. Laura sat impassively on the passenger side, dutifully got out at each store her mother took her to, and each time shook her head when asked if she liked each of the few remaining costumes.

  “I don’t know where else we can try, Laura,” her mother said, sorting through a pile of mismatched costume pieces at a drugstore in a mall. “It’ll be dark in a couple of hours, and so far you haven’t liked a thing I’ve shown you.”

  Laura reached into the pile and pulled out a cheap face mask. The face was that of a middle-aged woman, or a young man, cheeks and lips rouged a bright red, eye shadow dark as a bruise, eyebrows a heavy and coarse dark line.

  “But, honey. Isn’t that a little …” Laura shoved the mask into her mother’s hand. “Well, all right.” She picked up a bundle of bright blue cloth from the table. “How about this pretty robe to complete it?” Laura didn’t look at the robe. She just nodded and headed for the door, her face already a mask itself.

  Laura left the house that night after most of the other trick-or-treaters had come and gone. Her interest in Halloween actually seemed less than ever this year; she stayed in her bedroom as goblins and witches and all manner of stunted, warped creatures came to the front door singly and in groups, giggling and dancing and playing tricks on each other. She could see a few of them over on Halloween Street, not going up to any of the houses but rather running up and down the short street close to the houses in Idareyou races. But not near as many as in years past.

  Now and then her mother would come up and open her door. “Honey, don’t you want to leave yet? I swear everybody’ll be all out of the goodies if you don’t go soon.” And each time Laura shook her head, still staring out the window, still watching Halloween Street.

  Finally, after most of the other kids had returned to their homes, Laura came down the stairs wearing her best dress and the cheap mask her mother had bought for her. Her father and mother were in the living room, her mother having retrieved the blue robe from the hall closet.

  “She’s wearing her best dress, Ann. Besides, it’s damned late for her to be going out now.”

  Her mother eyed her nervously. “I could drive you, honey.” Laura shook her head.

  “Well OK, just let me cover your nice dress with the robe. Don’t want to get it dirty.”

  “She’s just a kid, for chrissake! We can’t let her decide!” Her father had dropped his newspaper on the floor. He turned his back on Laura so she wouldn’t see his face, wouldn’t know how angry he was with both of them. But Laura knew. “And that mask! Looks like a whore’s face! Hell, how can she even see? Can’t even see her eyes under that.” But Laura could see his. All red and sad-looking.

  “She’s doing something normal for a change,” her mother whispered harshly. “Can’t you see that? That’s more important.”

  Without a word Laura walked over and pulled the robe out of her mother’s arms. After some hesitation, after Laura’s father had stomped out of the room, her mother helped her get it on.

  It was much too large, but her mother gasped “How beautiful!”

  in exaggerated fashion. Laura walked toward the door. Her mother ran to the door and opened it ahead of her. “Have a good time!” she said in a mock cheery voice. But Laura could see the near panic in the eyes above the distorted grin. Laura left without saying goodbye.

  A few houses down the sidewalk she pulled the robe off and threw it behind a hedge. She walked on, her head held stiff and erect, the mask’s rouge shining bright red in the streetlights, her best dress a soft cream colour in the dimness, stirred lightly by the breeze. She walked on to Halloween Street.

  She stopped on the bridge and looked down into the creek. A young man’s face, a middle-aged woman’s face gazed back at her out of dark water and yellow reflections. The mouth seemed to be bleeding.

  She walked on to Halloween Street. She was the only one there. The only one to see.

  She walked on in her best dress and her shiny mask with eyes no one could see.

  The houses on Halloween street looked the way they always did, empty and dark. Except for the one, the one that glowed the colour of clouds, or snow.

  The houses on Halloween street looked their own way, sounded their own way, moved their own way. Lost in their own quiet thoughts. Born out of place.

  You could not see their eyes.

  Laura went up to the white house with the neatly trimmed yard and the flowers that grew without care. Its colour like blowing snow. Its colour like heaven. She went inside.

  *

  The old woman gazed out her window as goblins and spooks, p
irates and ballerinas crossed the bridge to enter Halloween Street. She bit her lip to make it redder. She rubbed at her ancient, blind eyes, rubbing the dark eye shadow up into the coarse line of brow. She was not beautiful, but she was not hideous either. Not yet. No one ever remembered her face, in any case.

  Her snow-white hair was beautiful, and long down her back.

  She had the most wonderful house on the street, the only one with flowers, the only one that glowed. It was her home, the place where she belonged. All the children, or at least all the children who dared, came to her house every Halloween for treats.

  “Come along,” she said to the window, staring out at Halloween Street. “Come along,” she said, as the treat bags rustled and shifted around her. “You don’t remember, do you?” as the first of the giggling goblins knocked at her door. “You’ve quite forgotten,” as the door began to shake from eager goblin fists, eager goblin laughs. “Now scratch your swollen little head, scratch your head. You forgot that first and last, Halloween is for the dead.”

  WHEN WE

  MOVED ON

  We tried to prepare the kids a year or so ahead. They might be adults to the rest of the world, but to us they were still a blur of squeals that smelled like candy.

  “What do you mean move? You’ve lived here forever!” Our oldest daughter’s face mapped her dismay. Elaine was now older than we had been when we found our place off the beaten path of the world, but if she had started to cry I’m sure I would have caved. I hoped she had forgotten that when she was a little girl I’d told her we’d stay in this house until the end.

  “Forever ends, child,” her mother said. “It’s one of the last things we learn. These walls are quickly growing thin—it’s time to go.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t see anything wrong—”

  I reached over, patted her knee and pointed. “That’s because the house is so full there’s little wall to be seen. But look there, between that sparkling tapestry of spider eggs and my hat collection. That’s about a square foot of unadorned wall. Look there.”

  She did, and as I had so many times before, I joined her in the looking. I was pleased, at least, that this semi-transparent spot worn into our membrane of home provided clear evidence: through layers of wall board like greenish glass, through diaphanous plaster and thinnest lathe, we could see several local children walking to school, and one Billie Perkins honoured us with a full-faced grin and a finger mining his nose for hidden treasure.

  “Is that Cheryl Perkins’ boy?” she asked. “I haven’t seen her in years.” She sounded wistful. It always bruised me a bit to hear her sounding wistful. I’ve always been a sloppy mess where my children are concerned.

  “You should call her, honey,” her mother said, on her way into the kitchen for our bowls of soup. My wife never tells you what’s in the soups she serves—she doesn’t want to spoil the surprise. Some days it’s like dipping into a liquid Crackerjack box.

  Elaine had gone to the thin patch and was now poking it with her finger. “Can they see us from out there?” Her finger went in part way and stuck. She made a small embarrassed cry and pulled it out. A sigh of shimmering green light puffed out in front of her, then fell like rain on the floor.

  I handed her a cloth napkin and she busily wiped at the slowly spreading stain. “They just see a slight variation in colour,” I replied. “It’s more obvious at night, when a haze of light from the house leaks through.”

  She smiled. “I’ve noticed that on visits. I just thought it was the house sparkling. It’s always been …” She stopped.

  “A jewel?”

  “Yes. That’s not silly of me? I always thought of it as the ‘jewel on the hill,’ so when it seemed to sparkle lately, to look even more beautiful than ever, I thought nothing of it.”

  Of course she has been using this phrase since she was a little girl, but I said “What an interesting comparison! I’d never thought of it that way before. But I like that, ‘The Jewel on the Hill.’ We could paint a sign, put it up on the wall.”

  “Oh, Daddy! Where would you find the room?”

  This was, of course, the point of the conversation, the fulcrum about which our future lives were to turn. A painting can become too crowded in its composition, a brain too full of trivia, and a house can certainly accumulate too many plans, follies, acquisitions, vocations, avocations, heart-felt avowals, and memories so fervently gripped they lose their binding thread.

  All about us floated a constellation of materials dreamed and lived, attached to walls and door and window frames, layered onto shelves and flooding glass-fronted cabinets, suspended from or glued to the ceilings, protruding here and there into the room as if eager for a snag. There were my collections, of course: the hats, the ties, the jars of curiosities, monstrosities, and mere unreliabilities, the magazines barely read then saved for later, and later, all the volumes of fact and fiction, and the photographs of fictive relatives gathered from stores thrift and antique or as part of the purchase of a brand new frame, bells and belts and pistols and thimbles, children’s drawings and drawings of children drawing the drawings, coloured candles and coloured bottles and colours inexplicably attached to nothing at all, my wife’s favourite recipes pasted on the walls at levels relative to their deliciousness (the best ones so high up she couldn’t read them clearly enough to make those wonderful dishes anymore), and everywhere, and I mean everywhere, the notes of a lifetime reminding our children to eat that lunchtime sandwich as well as the cookie, don’t forget piano practice, remember we love you, and please take out the trash. Our notes to each other were simpler and less directive: thinking of you, thinking of you, have a great day.

  In one corner of the living room you could see where I had sat reading a year of my sister’s unmailed letters found in a shoebox after her death, each one spiked to the wall after reading, feeling like nails tearing through my own flesh. And near the windows kites and paper birds poised for escape through sashes left carelessly ajar. An historical collection of our children’s toys lay piled against the baseboards, ready for the sorting and elimination we’d never quite managed, and floating above, tied to strings were particularly prized bits of homework, particularly cherished letters from camp, gliding and tangling with the varied progress of the day. And the authors of those works, our precious children, preserved in photos at nearly every age, arranged around the ceiling light fixtures like jittering moths, filling with their own illumination as the ceilings thinned to allow the daylight in. Gathered together I thought each child’s history in photos could have been portraits of a single family whose resemblances were uncanny and disturbing.

  There were trophies mounted or settled onto shelves for bowling, swimming, and spelling, most candy bars sold and fewest absent days. And the countless numbers of awards for participation, for happy or complaining our children always did participate.

  Some of the collections, such as the spider eggs or selected, desiccated moth wings I couldn’t remember for sure if their preservation had been intentional. Others, like the gatherings of cracks in corners or those scattered arrays of torn fabrics were no doubt accidental, but possessed of beauty in any case and so needed to stay.

  These were the moments of a lifetime, the celebrations and the missteps, and I wondered now if our children ever had any idea what they both stepped in and out of on their average day in our home.

  “What’s going to become of it all?” our daughter exclaimed. She moved through the downstairs rooms unconsciously pirouetting, glancing around. She’d seen it all before, lived with all but the most recent of it, but blindness comes easy. I could see her eyes trying to remember. “You can’t just throw it away!” she cried, when a rain of doll’s heads from a decayed net overhead set off her squeals and giggles.

  “You kids can have whatever you like,” my wife replied from the passage to the kitchen. “But thrown out, left behind, or simply forgotten, things do have a way of becoming gone. Which is what is about to happen to you
r lunches, if the two of you don’t come with me right now!”

  Within the sea of salt and pepper shakers (armies of cartoon characters and national caricatures with holes in their heads) that covered our kitchen table my wife had created tiny islands for our soup bowls and milk glasses. I had the urge to sweep that collection of shakers off onto the floor, just to show how done with this never ending tide of things I’d become, but I knew that wasn’t what Elaine needed to see at that moment. She stared at the red surface of her soup as if waiting for some mystery to emerge.

  “Sweetheart, we just don’t need all this anymore.”

  “You seemed to need it before,” she said to all the staring shaker heads.

  “It’s hard to explain such a change,” I said, “but you collect and you collect and then one day you say to yourself ‘this is all too much.’ You can’t let anything else in, so you don’t have much choice but to try to clear the decks.”

  “I just don’t want things to change,” she said softly.

  “Oh, yes, you do,” her mother said, patting her hand. “You most certainly do. Everything has an expiration date. It just isn’t always a precise date, or printed on the package. And you would hate the alternative.”

  I’d been distracted by all the calendars on the kitchen walls, each displaying a different month and year, and for just that moment not sure which one was the current one, the one with the little box reserved for right now.

  Elaine looked at her mother with an expression that wasn’t exactly anger, but something very close. “Then why bother, Mom? When it all just has to be gotten rid of, in the end?”

  “Who can know?” My wife smiled, dipping into her soup, then frowned suddenly as if she’d discovered something unfortunate. “To fill the time, I suppose. To exercise—” She turned suddenly to me. “Or is it ‘exorcise’?” Without waiting for an answer she turned again to her soup, lifted the bowl, and sipped. Done, she smiled shyly at our daughter with a pink mustache and continued, “our creativity. To fill the space, to put our mark down, and then to erase it. That’s what we human beings do. That’s all we know how to do.”