The Meaning of Isolated Objects Page 5

  She put the tray with the cozy-covered teapot and two mugs on the floor beside them. There was a little bowl with dark chocolates. Her mother had loved them too.

  Aunt Jessie took one chocolate, then Wendell took one. They popped them into their mouths at the same instant and waited while they warmed against their tongues. Sips of tea. They couldn’t open the first box until the chocolates had completely melted down. It took a minute. Aunt Jessie signaled with a nod when hers was done, and Wendell, with great care and ceremony, lifted the lid to the fuchsia box.

  They always did that one first.

  The box was filled with mementos of her mother’s youth: report cards, all A’s; a green leather diary that was only written in a few times; two blue ribbons she’d won in a horse show; a packet of letters from her pen pal, a girl who lived in Sweden; lots of birthday cards and postcards and movie stubs; and, Wendell’s favorite, a photo album.

  The photos were very old. Aunt Jessie slid the tea tray away while they looked at them. There were pictures of her mother when she was a little girl: holding Aunt Jessie as a baby, riding a white pony, wearing a long green dress with a wrist corsage and standing with a dark-haired boy ugly only because he was not her father.

  Aunt Jessie laughed when they got to the one with Wendell’s mother standing on her head, a big goofy grin on her upside-down face. Aunt Jessie turned to Wendell and touched her cheek. “You look a lot like her, Wendell. But her hair was redder than yours.”

  She tried not to remind her father. He stared sometimes and looked away quickly, as though slapped. Like there was something in her face he couldn’t bear to see.

  They put the things back in the box and replaced the lid very solemnly, because Aunt Jessie said it was a way to honor the memory of Wendell’s mother. She didn’t go further, but what she meant was, not like your father, who refuses to remember her one little bit.

  Aunt Jessie was wrong about him not remembering, but she told Wendell not to tell about the boxes, so she didn’t.

  The cobalt box had things in it from her mother’s college days. She had gone to the University of Virginia and wanted to be a psychologist, but then she met Wendell’s dad and married him before she graduated. Aunt Jessie seemed mad about that, like maybe he had done something he wasn’t supposed to. Like her mother would still be alive if she hadn’t met him.

  Aunt Jessie didn’t exactly say those things out loud. But the way she handled the letters from Wendell’s father to her mother - “My dearest Lynnie,” some of them began. Aunt Jessie sniffed as Wendell read it out loud. The kind of sniff that meant “hmmph,” or something, and Wendell knew.

  Even with Aunt Jessie making the little noises Wendell enjoyed the cobalt box. She loved reading what her father had written to her mother, the little names he’d invented for her, the way he told things about his training in Williamsburg. She wished she could read what her mother had written back, but he said one time he didn’t know what happened to those letters. He didn’t save things the way her mother had.

  There wasn’t a photo album in the blue box, but there were loose pictures and postcards. She laid them out across the rug while Aunt Jessie fussed with the tea cozy. Her mother with a college roommate. At the beach with a bunch of girls. Her mother and father, arm in arm, on a pier. Aunt Jessie looked away but Wendell smiled at that one. That’s the man she was supposed to be with, not the ugly high school boy in the fuchsia box.

  She could tell they had loved one another by the way they held their bodies close, how big their smiles were. It made sense that they’d gotten married and had Wendell, even if the rest of it didn’t. That she had died. That he had never let her go.

  She moved on to the postcards. One a sketch of something called hoodoos. Another an image of white sand with people standing on a hill. Her father had only printed her mother’s name and address and a big xo where the note should be, but her mother had written something on the hoodoo card. Important!!! Something happens here, some kind of magic.

  Wendell always asked what that meant, and Aunt Jessie always said, “I have no idea, Wendell.”

  Aunt Jessie was relieved when Wendell finished with the blue box. She moved it away quickly and they ate another chocolate.

  The last box was Wendell’s favorite. She waited a moment before opening it. This one held the only things that tied her to her mother: the photographs of her, big and round with Wendell inside, connected by a pulsing cord.

  In the photograph her mother smiled, hands on the ripe swell of abdomen, palms down, as though she was touching her baby. Wendell found some sense of peace with this photograph in hand. Floating inside her mother, a glimmer of light filtered through the fabric of her dress, the touch of her fingers and palms gently pressing, the rhythmic thump of her heartbeat. Zen. In sync.

  There were wedding photos, postcards from Europe, where Wendell’s mother and father honeymooned, slips of paper with her handwriting, an elegant script that made the menial lists seem more important than they were.

  Baby names. For the nursery. Things to do.

  She was fascinated by these minutiae from the life of someone she had never known. She sat and pored through the contents of the box as though she had uncovered a chest full of treasure, every single time. By then it must have numbered in the hundreds.

  It wasn’t too far back to the little house in the hill country of Texas. She knew already where she was, which direction was which, but it was ingrained in her to check. She stopped, removed the pack she’d carried as far back as she could remember, took out the trusted compass, double checked.

  This is how you survive, Wendell-girl, food, fire, shelter, water, navigation, medicine.

  She could survive. Her father had taught her all she needed to know in that regard. But she wanted more. She wanted to thrive and revel and transcend.

  He flew from Kabul to DC, then drove to Williamsburg and debriefed before finally hitting the road to Culpeper. Reality happened in layers. First he was heading home to Lynnie, who always had something good simmering on the stove. A glass of Scotch, bed readied for lovemaking. He let himself float back to the past for a few miles. Her skin, the kisses. He still got hard thinking about it. Certain point he shook it off, moved on to the next layer.

  Driving to get his daughter, exact same way he had all those years, wearing a fine film of dread at seeing Jessie’s accusing eyes in the half-hour it took to get Wendell packed up and out the door.

  He was sunk deep in that memory and then it lifted. Wendell was grown up and gone. There was no one to hurry home to.

  Just as soon be working as driving this dark road to nothing but an empty house. The echo of a little girl’s voice. The neatness of the house screamed: it wasn’t a home. There was no one there.

  He did what he always did after being away. Walked the perimeter, dropped his duffel outside the bedroom door. Kept going to the end of the hall. Lynnie’s study. He’d cleared out her magazines and donated the stash of wool. But what she’d hung on the walls remained: a Monet print, two black and white photographs she had taken of him when they got married, a map of the state of Virginia, old and yellowed, the edges crumbling inside the frame.

  The photos revealed a time in his life when he had been happiest. Early on in his training, dating Lynnie, a woman he had never thought to find. She had caught him smiling, with shining eyes and relaxed shoulders. He had been looking right at her. Now the younger happy Scott, still innocent of what life would bring, gazed into the eyes of his older self. That young man had no idea what was coming. Not a clue that he would be unfaithful to the woman he loved, would lose her, would get lost in work that existed only in the mind but took its toll physically nonetheless.

  He pulled his eyes away from the photo and glanced around Lynnie’s room.

  The chair she’d found at a flea market, table and lamp adjacent for reading. The long and narrow oak worktable marred by a crack he’d put there one night, angry and jealous over a neighbor man’s offer to mow
the lawn while he was gone.

  Her collection. Figurines and miniatures. When he first met her she had maybe thirty items. They had argued over the room. He’d been jealous of the figures, back then he’d seen them as her longing for something unrelated to him. Then he’d taken over. Made it all about him. She made a rule, only one each trip.

  The collection grew as he traveled. He built shelves from ceiling to floor on one wall. Lynnie kept them dusted and arranged. She used to walk in the room and pick one for the table by her easy chair. So I can see it on its own, she’d say. Different days she’d have different figures on her little table. Indicators of her thoughts and mood.

  In earlier years he’d tried to read them, wanting to know everything in her head. Later the figures became accusatory and more about him than her. Nothing she had done. His own projections. He’d stopped looking.

  After she died the cleaning was his job. The handling of each item, the dusting. It was almost like cleaning his guns.

  When Wendell was a toddler he had to lock the room to keep her out. Once she understood the words gentle and careful, he’d let her in. She’d grab one of the figures and sit with it clutched tight to her chest.

  At some point the dusting became a comfort, the thing that settled him in. Infusions of Lynnie. His fingers slid over the small surfaces she had touched, and he felt calmed.

  He was preparing himself to make a phone call he didn’t really want to make.

  “Yes, sir, she’s fine.” Tristan paused, then spoke again. “We haven’t been in touch for several days, but I’m sure she’s okay.”

  “Do you think I should go get her?”

  “That’s between you and Wendell, sir.”

  The boy’s voice was solid. Scott was glad to know Wendell had someone like him in love with her.

  “I don’t suppose you could get her to marry you and settle down.” He said it and then regretted the words. No need to rub it in. She was on some fucking cross-country lark. They both knew it.

  Tristan cleared his throat. “That’s what made her run off.”

  Scott stripped down and lifted weights in the spare bedroom. Went for a run and took a shower. Ordered food in, sat on the front porch and waited for it with a beer in his hand. He kept seeing a brown-haired man on a motorcycle and resisted the urge to sketch the image. He had a bad feeling but blew it off.

  Dinner was Thai noodles with a book at the kitchen table.

  He resolved himself to the long night ahead. Opened the laptop and checked email. He typed a short one to Wendell.

  Let’s take a drive out west, Wendell-girl. I’ve got some time.

  He hit send and waited, then checked mail, as though she’d have read it and responded already. He checked about ten times in a row. His finger made circles on the track pad, the cursor spun like a dervish on the screen. Down to the tool bar, Safari, Internet Explorer, click. Scrolled down the bookmarks. Website. Forum. Chat room.

  The way he occupied his mind on long lonely nights in Culpeper.

  There was a woman he met up with sometimes, screen name of imurdestiny. She looked to be mid-thirties, safely out of the age range of daughters and dead wives. She did have red hair, but he forgave himself that detail. They went private fast and she typed what she was doing, what she would do to him were she with him.

  With webcams and computer cameras and speakers, they could have carried it so much further. But he preferred his own images. He leaned back in his chair and read the words popping up in the box and then let his mind make the pictures. Then he emptied that out and traveled to where she was and watched her type. Her red hair was down on her shoulders and she was fully dressed, doing none of the things she was typing on the screen. It was that revelation that got him off.

  Scott never knew what those miniatures really were. He assumed I just liked them, their smallness, the tiny details. Over the years he filled the shelves he had built. Every time he went away for work he came home with a new figurine. Each one was its own puzzle. What he had been thinking when he bought it, where he’d been, how long he’d been gone.

  I doubt he ever knew it but the shelves, the pieces of wood he’d cut and sanded and stained and rubbed with beeswax, were what I loved best. I frequently stood in the study and ran my fingers along the wood, as if I could summon his touch, finding some way to be with him when he wasn’t home and I had no idea where he was or when he’d be back again.

  Later, I used the figures as they accumulated, placing them on the small table by my chair as if the table were a tray full of sand. I made little scenes, and I wrote in my blue notebooks. In my own way I tried to make something of the time alone. Tried to make sense of his absence and our lives and how it had come to be that the man I dreamed up could be found and lost again in such a way that part of me never changed. I was still that little girl waiting for the dream to happen. Still trying to discover what message I was supposed to convey.

  At Jessie’s insistence I took up gardening, seriously, continuing the hobby I’d loved as a girl. The flower beds became a new way to mark time. Planting and watching for seedlings to appear, then for plants to mature and bloom.

  Easier than waiting for a husband to return.

  And there was knitting, which I learned in a group in Culpeper.

  There were six of us in the group. Two of the women were older, and willing to teach the rest of us, young married women needing something to do.

  Melly and I became obsessed; we often took little trips in search of unusual yarns and needles. Melly was with me when I found the bamboo needles, which became my favorites, and she was my willing accomplice when I bought most of the yarn that’s in my stash.

  I keep it in my study, in two big trunks. Skeins and skeins, in colors and textures that make me hold my breath with delight every time I open the lids and look.

  Those trunks have become treasure chests to me. Something about having all that yarn makes me deeply happy and content. Melly said it like this: “Some people drink martinis, other people smoke cigarettes. We have our yarn stashes.”

  Melly was my best friend in Culpeper. She never pushed me to talk about where Scott was, or why I didn’t know the details of his work. She met him, of course, and seemed to intuit why I was willing to stay home and wait. It made sense to her. I needed someone around me who understood that.

  I loved my house. It was just big enough to be roomy, but small enough I could get it clean from one end to the other in a couple of hours. Which left all my time for knitting and planting and tending my garden beds.

  Nights with the windows open so the chill could find its way inside. Scott liked sleeping that way, the two of us made our own warmth beneath the blanket. When he was home I often stayed awake most of the night, watching him and writing in my notebook.

  His face so soft in the moonlight. His shoulder makes the shape of a mountain, the shadow of a ridgeline on our bed. His beloved mountains. Why does he go so far away when he loves it here so much?

  I was so in love with him it terrified me to ask. I didn’t think I could bear the answer.

  Wendell sat on her back steps, reading the new letter that had appeared in her mailbox when she walked out to the road after dinner.

  i have had dreams of you for many years now, but it is probably just as well that i wait 'till later to tell them. in all of them you have recognized me. not that that is accurate, or pertinent, or even important, but it is there, and that the dreams have even that much constancy (though there is much more than that) lends credence to this gnosis where you are concerned; that i know you, have known you ever. that we have shared a life, or a great deal of one, at some point.

  Just as she got to the end, movement caught her eye. Slowly, carefully, she lifted her head. A nine-banded armadillo paused at the edge of the yard. She knew about armadillos, that they were not hard, as they appeared, but soft, and shed tears if you caught them by the tail. They ate beetles, grasshoppers, centipedes, and bore four genetically identical you
ng, all the same sex. They crossed streams by walking along the bottom. She had longed to see one, and there it was. The little armored creature looked at her briefly and then trotted away, disappeared into the scrubby trees.

  She took a drive with the radio turned off, windows open wide so the rush of air blew her hair around and around. Tristan wasn’t the man from her girlhood dream. It was the author of the letters. It only made sense that they were from the one man she’d met since arriving in Texas, but she couldn’t think of any valid reason he would have to lie about writing them.

  It was possible there was someone else, perhaps someone was in the Co-op the day she met the other man, and watched, close enough to hear their conversation. She had been so full of thoughts about that man, that day. Anyone could easily have followed her home without notice.

  She wondered if she should be scared, but in fact, she wasn’t. There was no sense of danger. Her father had taught her to listen to her gut, and right now her gut only felt intrigued. Not afraid.

  The sun was hanging low in the sky, sunset, and she thought briefly of heading down to the Guadalupe riverfront to see the bats fly out from under the bridge. But then that idea got caught up in the crosswind of the front seat and blew right out the passenger window.

  On the lonely road by the house, a little mound of something lay on the side. She pressed the brake and pulled over.

  An armadillo, its head caved in, one narrow rivulet of blood.

  The dream.

  For some reason this made her cry.

  At the house the laptop was warm and inviting, and her IM to Tristan went through with a little ping.

  There have been two anonymous letters in my mailbox today. A man I met in the food co-op.

  He IMed right back:

  I’ve been by your apartment two days in a row, and your Aunt Jessie has called twice. Where are you?