Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  “One day she’ll write a book about it,” my grandmother said with pride.

  “She’s the smart kind of quiet,” my aunt agreed.

  They speculated about whether I would be an artist or a professor—mysterious, impressive jobs that they knew nothing about. They worried constantly about money, and promised me that by the time I grew up, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about.

  None of this made sense to me. I kept my secrets to myself—the only reliable way, I thought, to make them disappear. But my relatives believed in a different magic: if their own errors could be the kindling for my success, if an ugly story could become fearsome, undefinable art, then at last it would have nothing to do with them.

  My aunt told me about the hitchhiker she had fallen in love with, had never really fallen out of love with. My uncle told me how he got the ugly burns all over his back—he refused to take his shirt off, even in the ocean—and the nightmares he’d had ever since. My cousin, an electrician in Santa Clara, told me how many women he’d seduced while their husbands weren’t home, and my other cousin said that seduction was a generous word for it. He’s our step-cousin, the real cousin assured me. My niece, who in our knotted family tree was older than me, called me each time she got a new kind of high.

  “Don’t ever do what I’m doing,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  A few years later, when I was almost sixteen, my grandparents sent me across the country. I had lived with them for as much of my life as I could remember, in the middle of Los Angeles. Our house was small and white, surrounded by plants that had more spikes than leaves. Prickly pear and aloe and the dusty yellow brittlebush. Once a year, the artichoke bloomed, a green grenade turning purple, bursting open to reveal a magenta crown.

  It was the same house that my mother had grown up in. When I was ten months old, she’d followed a bird-watcher to South Africa and never returned.

  “They were in love,” my grandmother said, sometimes incredulously and sometimes mournfully. The bird-watcher was rich—he’d chartered a plane to New Zealand to try to glimpse the famous takahe—but he wasn’t my father, whose name no one seemed to know.

  A few times a year there were messages from my mother, photos sent to my aunt or uncle, never to me. The turquoise chest of a bee-eater or the unbelievable tail of the sugarbird—twice as long as its body. A penguin rested on its belly, neck outstretched and expectant, like a baby still glued to the ground. My mother herself never appeared in the frame, though sometimes the edge of someone else did: a shoulder, a sneaker, a finger pointing at something we couldn’t see. The photos made my grandmother mad or sad, and it was too tiring to predict which; my aunt and uncle had learned to keep them out of sight. But I was considered a willing audience—a necessary one, even.

  “You should see this,” someone would say, and I never said Why?

  The birds were all a little garish, and their strange, excessive beauty seemed like a sort of danger. How could you survive with feathers like that?

  One night, after wheeling the trash to the curb, my grandmother returned with news from the neighbors. Luke, the boy across the street, was leaving home. He was fourteen, and already a battery of tests had proven that he was smarter than both his parents. A famous school in Massachusetts saw the tests and said that he could attend for free.

  I had known Luke my entire life, but I had hardly ever heard him speak. He wasn’t like the other boys on the block, who blared music through open windows and revved the engines of cars they weren’t even old enough to drive. Luke looked young—muscleless, an unchiseled chin—but he took linear algebra at the community college, riding his bike back and forth in the evenings, the bag of books on his shoulder tilting him perilously to one side.

  My grandparents liked Luke. He was polite and hardworking. But he didn’t really belong, and so I could tell they were a little afraid of him, too. They knew what happened, or thought they knew what happened, when people decided they were going places. They imagined South Africa, New Zealand, no letters, no phone calls. They knew what the secretary bird looked like—four feet tall, a crown of feathers like exclamation points—but would they recognize their own daughter in a crowd?

  So it was a revelation to discover that Luke would be taken away but then sent back—improved and also returned. They believed in the promise of rolling lawns and navy blue uniforms and distinguished alumni. One president plus a few governors, his father bragged while emptying the recycling bin.

  When Luke left in September, our street got no louder and no quieter, but each week one of his parents appeared with the trash can and good news. The food was excellent. The teachers were strict. Luke’s roommate had met the Poet Laureate. (My grandparents had never heard of the Poet Laureate.) By October, it was decided that I should leave, too. I took a many-hour test at a school on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. Halfway through, the girl in front of me vomited, splattering my shoes. A few people stared, then turned back to their multiple choice, noses plugged. Eventually, someone guided her out of the room, and part of me envied her escape.

  In the end, there was no space at the school in Massachusetts, or maybe no money, and so my grandmother found a school in Vermont instead. A glossy brochure promised mountains that turned orange and red every year. I wasn’t interested in leaving home, but I knew that resistance would be unsurprising, and I wanted no part in teenage fury. When my aunts and uncles took up fury on my behalf—you’re sending her away?—I became even more compliant. Among the school’s graduates, my grandmother assured me, there were a few CEOs and a famous flautist.

  “A flautist?” I asked.

  “An artist,” she said, smiling expectantly, waiting for me to share her delight. “You love art.”

  * * *

  —

  Vermont was a place I had considered on the map only because of the way it was wedged next to New Hampshire, a ragged-edged lover with no way to the water. I lived in a red-brick dormitory, in which the bedrooms, like many of the classrooms, had ornate fireplaces you weren’t allowed to use. My roommate was summoned home after two weeks—her father’s indictment appeared in the newspapers—and so I lived alone. The classes were all too difficult. I took algebra while everyone else took geometry. I encountered Old English, which didn’t sound anything like real English.

  In the field behind the headmaster’s house—white columns, a garage that hid an unknown number of cars—there was a farm, or what we called a farm: a chicken coop, a lettuce patch and an herb garden, a pregnant mare. The headmaster himself was a history teacher who’d once been a lawyer, but his wife believed, above all, in nature. She gardened in her husband’s old dress shirts and said that some things had to be learned in the mud. She also taught ecology, which soon became my favorite subject: the creeping retreat of glaciers, the universe contained in one palmful of soil. The world, she told us, was not a globe but a web. Everyone in the class was assigned a small plot of land, no bigger than my grandmother’s kitchen, in the forest beyond the tennis courts. Not to own or even to tend, but just to know, backwards and forwards. As if it were your home, she said—because it is.

  There were boys and girls at the school but there were more boys. I disliked competition, so I ignored it. In the afternoons, when classes were over, I retreated to my piece of land, walking its imaginary perimeter again and again, until the sound of twigs and leaves under my boots was unbearable, like too-loud chewing, and then I sat still, shivering, to give the silence its due. On one of the last days before the clocks turned back, I was sitting there hugging myself, when a girl I’d never spoken to appeared at the edge of my plot. She was tall and skinny and her face was crowded with freckles. She leaned against an oak tree, which I had determined—unscientifically—to be the oldest tree in sight. Its bark was thick and cracked like a topographical map.

  “Hey,” I said, holding my k
nees. “Get off my land.”

  The girl smiled. She turned her face into the bark and tilted her chin, so that she was looking straight up the trunk. She stood there for a few seconds, and then she did—she got off my land. She had bright red hair that I watched disappear through the trees.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I made myself busy, raking leaves into a pile in the center of my plot, sorting small sticks and big sticks and four heavy logs, which I used to mark the land’s borders. Dirt floor, wood walls. It became a clean square in the forest, a space to fill in. And when I left, I stopped at the tree and put my chin where her chin had been. I gazed up as far as I could: empty branches, grey sky, so many fingers grasping at air.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, I walked around the square but I didn’t go inside it. I waited for her. The day after that, a colt was born. The headmaster’s wife made the announcement in the morning, and after breakfast we all leaned against the fence and watched it run its first wobbly circles. Its legs were slick with blood and looked snappable. A boy with white hair and white eyelashes—he wore sunglasses most of the time, even in the shade—said it looked afraid, and everyone agreed.

  On the third day, she was standing in the middle of the square when I arrived. New leaves had fallen, bright ones, not yet brown and dry or brown and wet, and I picked them up one at a time as I approached.

  Her name was Madeleine. I already knew so I never asked. She touched my body like it was a door to someplace, pushing and pulling, holding me—I had never been held—but also trying to get past me, to whatever it was that was there on the other side. She put her mouth around my breasts and in my armpits and at last between my legs. She took her shirt off and kept her pants on. When she pulled away, suddenly, she crouched on the ground, her face scrunched up in an expression I couldn’t read—like a child’s face, full of the pain of an unknown resolve.

  We sat there for a while, leaning against the neat stacks of wood, the dirt cold and exposed. Whatever it was that I had been preparing for seemed suddenly laughable—unbelievable. But she was the one to laugh. A rough, unyielding laugh that had nothing to do with the sound of her voice, or the sound I had heard at the back of her throat—a sort of gurgling, as if pleasure were something liquid inside her.

  I stayed in the woods until the sun went down and three of my fingers lost all their color. I thought about the colt and the mare and the white eyelashes and the freckles all over Madeleine’s face. I recited these things, memorized them, because it seemed to me that one day I would need them. Baby, mother, boy, girl. Blood, hair, skin. Or perhaps it only seemed this way because they were slipping away—an orange head receding through the trees, a horse already smooth and steady on its feet, already unremarkable.

  * * *

  —

  When I returned home that summer, I told my grandmother there was nothing left to learn in Vermont. She didn’t fight back, but she made me tell her about the seasons. She invited my aunt and uncle for dinner, and I told them how the trees had seemed most alive to me in the winter. The branches encased in ice made me think of what was trapped inside, the current of something—I pictured veins—keeping it warm. Sometimes, I told them, the weight of the snow bent the trees until they almost touched the ground. They reared up if you shook them free, like the ecstatic loosing of water off a dog’s back.

  “What about the fall?” my aunt wanted to know.

  “All those colors,” my grandmother said.

  I hesitated. They didn’t know as little as they pretended. The hills around us turned yellow every year, the grass crumbling between your fingertips. There was frost some mornings and occasionally the biblical assault of hail. They had seen snow in the mountains.

  I shrugged.

  “Don’t be selfish,” my aunt said.

  For a few weeks, my friends from school called. They lived in New York and New Jersey and sometimes the calls came while we were still asleep. My grandmother answered in a fog. She brought me the phone in bed and watched from the doorway while I talked. Her hair, which she coiled into a tight bun every morning, hung over her shoulder in a single thin braid, like a snake. The conversations were halting. I pictured my friends in big backyards—electric green grass, golden dogs—or else on golf courses.

  “Next time,” I told my grandmother, “tell them I’m not home.”

  “You’re always home,” she said.

  “Say I’m unavailable.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “Is that the truth?”

  I nodded. I spent the summer biking and drawing and slowly beginning to paint, because these were things I could do alone. The paintings reassured my grandmother, who bought me acrylics and then oils, a wooden palette and paintbrushes made from weasels’ tails. I woke up early, while it was cool and bugless, before the neighbor’s radio turned on. In the afternoon, I spread the canvases all over the concrete yard to dry in the sun. I liked to go up to the roof and look down on them all like that, square after square of color, the flaws made small, almost invisible, from a distance.

  I decided to paint a portrait of everyone I knew. Some of them came to sit for me, because it seemed like an old-fashioned sort of honor. My uncle’s face, sweating with the effort of keeping still. My niece’s perfectly—unnervingly—frozen smile. My grandmother folded her hands in her lap and my grandfather kept scratching behind his ear. Others I painted from memory: the neighbor with the leaf blower, the cook from Vermont, the drama teacher at the school I was going back to. I sketched the girl at the smoothie place, whose hair hung in front of her face when she leaned over the blenders, hiding the ruby stud in her nostril. When I ran out of canvases, I crowded faces into the frame, cousins peering over each other’s shoulders, Luke’s face beside the profile of the boy on the corner, the one who’d gone to prison for holding someone else’s gun. And when I was done, I propped the canvases against the fence in the yard and we called it a show. My grandmother walked through slowly, standing for minutes in front of each painting, brow furrowed in her best performance of discernment. My grandfather was efficient. He looked one by one, sometimes leaning close—“Is this black or brown?”—and then he sat down in a plastic lawn chair, folded his glasses, and said, “Well, they all look just like you.”

  My grandmother turned around.

  “That’s it!” she said. “I knew there was something.”

  “Something?” I asked.

  “All the eyes are your eyes.”

  I stopped painting people after that, because I didn’t want to be surprised by my own face. My grandparents didn’t understand what had gone wrong. I filled a huge sheet of paper with grey squares and slightly less-grey squares. They looked at each other, worried.

  “Why don’t you go to the movies?” my grandmother said.

  “Why don’t you get an ice cream?” my grandfather said.

  I understood this to mean Why don’t you get a boyfriend, and so I ate cone after cone by myself, in something like defiance, until my stomach ached. The ice cream melted all over my fingers. I wiped my hands on my shorts.

  Once, late at night, I filled a water glass with Scotch. My grandmother kept the liquor under the sink, beside the cleaning supplies, because my mother had liked to drink. Poison, I was told. The Scotch was a grudging concession to my grandfather, who insisted on a splash over ice at the end of a meal. I drank until everything seemed muffled. It was a lonely experiment—the sound of my own footsteps shuffling at the other end of the hall—and I didn’t try it again.

  * * *

  —

  When I graduated from high school, my grandparents did what they could to get me to go to college. They used all the usual metaphors to describe my future: open doors, bright lights. They couldn’t afford tuition, but they promised other purchases anyway. A car, a computer, a minifridge, whatever it was a student needed.
I declined all this politely, and then not so politely. I said the things I had heard my classmates say—school was boring, school was pointless—even though what I really meant was that school was unkind.

  At the beginning of September, I hitched a ride to San Francisco. Our next-door neighbor, Tina, was driving all the way for the sake of a kitten. Tina was twice my age, but she didn’t look it. She wore torn jean shorts and painted streaks of electric color above her eyes. She’d been disappointed by life, my grandmother said, though none of us ever knew why. I told my grandmother that I would stay in San Francisco for a month, maybe two, that I’d be back, but she didn’t believe me. The first time my mother ran away, as a teenager, she wound up there, sleeping along the water.

  “She took a tent to the Embarcadero,” my aunt said. “Eventually she met some guy with an RV. He kept a llama as a pet.”

  “No, no,” my grandmother said. “He had a real house.”

  Her voice was cold, metallic. It was hard to tell whether she was defending my mother or accusing her.

  While we drove, Tina listened to a call-in show on the radio and chewed one stick of gum after another. The car smelled like cinnamon. The callers asked for advice about snoring husbands and cheating husbands, husbands who had lost themselves at the office or on the Internet, husbands whose second lives had been revealed like cockroaches writhing in the kitchen light. The host of the show was a woman who murmured in all the right places. She didn’t promise that the men would be changed or restored or even punished.

  “Now you know,” she said, her voice smooth and mild.

  The woman with the kitten lived at the top of a hill so steep the cars had bricks behind their wheels. Her house was all one color. The walls, the door, the window frames, the flower boxes attached to the window frames were all a single bright blue, a cloak tossed over the whole thing. And so when the woman opened the door, it seemed like she was emerging from under something—like she was uncovering herself. Black hair, white shirt, eyes the color of sand in the sun. She held the cat against her chest.