The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  They are both still alive.

  I am sitting in their kitchen, drinking coffee with my grandmother. Grandpa’s asleep in the back of the house, and has been since I got here. He has taken to sleeping quite a lot. Grandma only once talked about what it would be like for one when the other was gone, but it wasn’t very complicated. There were no metaphors. She said, “It will be hard.”

  I sometimes come here to see them. I stare at a fork on the table. I have no set routine and never tell them when I’m coming. I roll my Toyota into their driveway.

  Grandma says, “Have I told you about my test tubes?”

  I look up from the fork.

  She is wearing a long summer dress, yellow and blue and white, and I look across the table at the wrinkles at her neck. The sun is coming through the window and making a white glow over her head. She’s eating a peach. She’s cut it into slices and has them on a white plate. The knife is on the lemon tablecloth beside it.

  “No.”

  “When George and I moved here I got the idea into my head,” she says, “that I wanted to collect a sample of water from every lake in Wisconsin, and label every lake. It was my way of dealing with leaving Texas and coming home, I think. You can get used to strange situations and strange places. Texas was like that—I never wanted to live there and when the time came to leave I was furious. So much that everything old suddenly appears stranger. Do you understand? And when the idea came to me I thought about all of the test tubes with pieces of masking tape on them as the labels.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not all,” she says. “Some, though.”

  “And did you label them?”

  “I did. In the basement of the old house, George built a rack for me, and every sample I took was labeled. You could walk down there and it’d feel like you were in a laboratory. If you looked closely you would see that it was more like the laboratory of a child, of course, but that didn’t matter. It was amateur science.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “That was the problem with the entire idea. Not a problem, exactly, but let’s just say that was a limitation of the idea. George and I would go out on the weekend—I’d take the map and circle a lake, and we’d drive to it. We’d camp if we needed to or come back in the evening if it was close enough. We’d have a picnic.”

  “It sounds nice.”

  “George thought I’d lost my mind.”

  “Because that was it?”

  “Because that was the whole idea. There was nothing to do afterwards. Still, it was great fun while it lasted.”

  “But they’re gone now?”

  “They are,” she says. “When the house burned down ten years ago all of them got eaten up by fire. I was here when that fire started, you know. I was in the shower. I got out, got dressed, and didn’t smell anything odd until I was in the kitchen. Then I went down into the basement to see and there was the fuse box and some of the old wires in the back storage room, all ablaze. Do you know what I did?”

  “Run?”

  “No,” she says. “I didn’t. I took a handful of the lakes inside of test tubes and started pouring them, one by one, onto the fire. I’d turn over White Potato Lake right onto a flame and there’d be a hiss, then I’d take the cork off of Silver Lake and try to splash it onto another hot spot, and it’d be the same thing. Except new flames were coming up. I didn’t have enough water. On the second try I came back with more test tubes and thought I’d try to cast a spell, and that if I did it right, when I poured from a tube the whole lake would be in the sky above the house, and it would drop down, all at once, and stop the fire. We had photos, we had the old furniture. So many things. I was crazy down there.”

  “I take it your spell didn’t work.”

  “My spell didn’t work.”

  Grandma smiles, looking down at what’s left of her peach.

  Only a couple of slices and the pit. She slides the plate toward me and I take a slice as well. “We lost so much in that fire,” she says. “It’s amazing to me. You think these memories are inside of you and it doesn’t matter. When you lose the things you realize it’s not all inside of you.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Hm.”

  We hear the footsteps then, and we look up and watch the door as Grandpa comes into the kitchen. His footsteps are sliding, scraping footsteps, and when he is past the countertop I can see that he is wearing his slippers. The rest of him is dressed in his usual comfortable fall outfit. Corduroy pants and a white shirt and a cardigan over the top of it. My grandpa’s hair is everywhere.

  Grandpa says, “It seems my nap has ended.”

  “We were just talking about my old nutball idea,” says Grandma. “About the test tubes.”

  “Yes,” says Grandpa. “That.” He has gone to the coffee maker and has begun pouring his own cup. We both watch him as he turns and comes toward the table. He moves slowly. He broke his hip three years ago on the golf course. Also: this has nothing to do with movement, but they had to remove part of his ear in August because of skin cancer. (They got it.)

  He puts his hand on the back of the chair and lowers himself down.

  “For a brief period of time we had a fabulous collection of lake water here. What your grandmother doesn’t know is that I once drank five of her lakes and replaced the water with tapwater.”

  Grandma stares at him.

  Grandpa has a little twinkle in his eye. He turns back to me. “I was working on the sump pump and couldn’t be bothered to go upstairs for a drink,” he says, shrugging. “Absolutely parched. I saw them and did it. No looking back. This was before giardia,” he adds. “I wasn’t worried.”

  “Do you know what you’ve done, George?” Grandma says. “All this time and I never realized it. How dare you?”

  “What?”

  “You’re the reason my spell didn’t work.”

  Grandpa looks at me, raises his eyebrows, and takes the last slice of peach.

  Now would be the time to tell you that somebody’s dying, but nobody is. All three of us are okay. We’re just here.

  My grandmother had another courter at the same time my grandpa was hovering around. This was 1938. The other man’s name was Sylvester Caddimis, and he was a big-shot welder who’d made it through the Depression by going to Chicago and doing unknown thug-work before coming home with cash in his pocket—enough to open a shop and set out looking for a bride. Grandma was dubious, but she liked his dark good looks and the shower of gifts and praise that Caddimis had heaped for months. My grandfather, fresh out of college, was in town to work on an engineering project for the summer, and he’d seen her and tipped his hat to her a number of times out on the street. One night there was a dance. Grandma and her friends were escorted by Caddimis and his friends, and they spent the first hours of the evening sipping punch and chatting; the men smoked cigars in the corner of the gymnasium and the women tried their hand at the Charleston. Then Grandpa came in, alone, his hair greased back, and stood far away from the crowds, alone, staring intently at my grandma, smoking cigarette after cigarette, stubbing each one out on the gymnasium floor until a small pile built up beside his shoe. And of course eventually Caddimis and his crew noticed this, and it wasn’t long before they’d gone up to Grandpa and had asked him what his intentions were, why he was hanging out in the dark, staring at women.

  “You a pervert or somethin’?” Caddimis asked him, and his crew all laughed, and then he poked Grandpa in the shoulder.

  Grandpa turned around and punched him once, in the center of the nose. Caddimis crumpled to the ground. Then he stood up. Without a word, he turned and left the gymnasium. The story sometimes includes an epilogue; they say my grandfather hit him so hard that Caddimis just walked directly to his car and drove all the way back to Chicago, nose bleeding the whole way, never to be heard from again.

  “Those test tubes remind me of something else,” Grandpa says. “A time I went up to the border, not with your grandmother but w
ith a friend of mine, a man named Jack Dawson.”

  “Oh good lord,” Grandma says. “Not this.”

  Grandpa ignores her and goes on: “He’d fought in Europe and I’d fought in the Pacific and so sometimes we compared our stories or just talked about the war in the way that veterans such as ourselves tend to talk about it to this day. Your grandmother had the flu but she sent me up to get her water from a lake called Pumpkin Lake. Just on the border of Michigan. It’s on the map. Have a look for it. You see your grandmother had no interest in water from lakes in the U.P., but as long as they were in Wisconsin, she wanted them. Why that was, Bea, I will never understand, of course. States are a figment of somebody’s imagination. Care to elaborate?”

  “No,” says Grandma. “I do not.”

  “So Jack and I drive up there north toward Pumpkin Lake. The highways at this time are not good. It takes hours and hours to get that far north. But it’s a pleasant time. We talk some about the war, but Jack tells me about a plan he has to start a bee farm and be a beekeeper instead of a bookkeeper. He tells me that it started as a little fantasy during his workday—he saw a bee on his lunch break once and had some kind of involved revelation—but then he figured out that one might actually be able to do it, and so he’d bought some land down in the southwest of the state and was planning on switching over to it after he learned everything he needed to know. Very interesting.”

  “This is not even the story, George.”

  “It is in the way I tell it,” Grandpa says to her. “Now. If you don’t mind, I’ll continue with my preamble.”

  “Please.”

  “You see Jack had killed a French woman accidentally. She was in her house, and he was shooting every which way, just thinking he was about to die and letting go. Except he didn’t die. He shot everywhere. Some tanks had arrived during his meltdown and cleared out all the Germans from the town. But he remembered the beginning of his shooting spree, and so later he went into a small house and found that he’d shot a 40-something French woman right in the head, through the wall. She was lying on top of her kitchen table in butter. An unusually large pad of butter, Jack always says.”

  “This is unpleasant.”

  “It matters for the rest of the story,” Grandpa says to her. He turns back to me. “So Jack had never been able to escape this. He killed many German soldiers and was shot himself and saw hundreds of men his age shot and blown up on Normandy beach, but he couldn’t escape the woman he’d killed. He talked about her all the time. I had a few of my own stories like that but I was never haunted in the same way. I was never in a place where there were any civilians, except on shore leave, and on shore leave, we weren’t shooting. And so anyway Jack thought these bees would somehow help him with his memory problem. With the French woman. He didn’t know why, but this is why he was so excited, and all the way up to Pumpkin Lake, he described to me how he and his wife would move, how you could deal with whole hives, how much money you could make with the honey. I listened, but once we got close to the lake I stopped listening to him and started listening instead to the sound the engine was making. I say to him, ‘You hear that?’ and he says, ‘I do,’ and just like that, the whole car goes dead and we drift over to the side of the road.”

  “What do you mean by dead?” I ask. “It stalled?”

  “More than that,” he says. “Everything went out. All the life fell out of it. And just before I get a chance to open the door and go take a look, we both hear this noise, and up in the sky, right over us, a UFO goes by.”

  I look at Grandma, who rolls her eyes.

  “Just goes right by.”

  “What do you mean? A plane?”

  “Like no plane I’d ever seen,” Grandpa says. “It was a circle, but without a middle, like a Life Saver. It wasn’t spinning. Just sort of hovering. And it was loud, grunting and grumbling like it was breaking down, too. It followed the highway for a little while and then darted off, over the trees. A minute later we were on our own. We both got out of the car and kept looking at the sky. I look over at Jack and say—and pardon me—but I say, ‘What in the fuck was that, Jack?’”

  “Jack looks back at me for a long time and says, real serious, ‘I need your car.’ He’s white as a sheet.”

  “‘Why do you need my car?’ I ask him.”

  “‘Because,’ Jack says, pointing up into the sky. ‘Hitler had those. Those are Hitler’s. He’s here.’” Then Jack starts looking around at the Michigan woods, like Hitler and Goebbels and all of them might be hiding in some bushes nearby.”

  “Just absurd,” Grandma says.

  “Now there is a base in the Upper Peninsula,” Grandpa says to me, “called Kinross. Earlier that year there was an incident. We had all heard about it in the newspaper. A plane had disappeared; there’d been another, different UFO encounter. A lot of the locals now treat Kinross like Area 51, and they say the woods are haunted up there, et cetera, because of it. I’m not sure how far away we were from it then, but Jack shook his head and told me that’s where he was going. Kinross. ‘The fate of the country may hang in the balance, George,’ he said. I told him he was an idiot. He got real quiet, and that’s the last thing I remember. I woke up lying in the ditch with an egg on the back of my head. Jack was gone.”

  Grandma leans toward me. “The man stole your grandfather’s car.” She shakes her head. “And beat him. Remember those two parts. I find it all very suspicious.”

  “This coming from a woman who was trying to cast spells to save her house?”

  “That,” she says, “was different. I knew it wasn’t going to work.”

  “I’m not sure that gets you off the hook.”

  “But what happened?” I ask.

  “What happened is simple,” Grandpa says. “I got up and started walking south. Twenty minutes later I got picked up by a truck that took me to Lena. I sit around there for awhile, then hitch home. I come in, stained, starving, carless. Your grandmother is in the kitchen and takes one look at me and says, ‘Where is my Pumpkin Lake test tube, George?’ and I say, ‘I’ve been robbed.’ I tell the story to Grandma and she calls up Jack’s wife and tells her what Jack did and I don’t try to stop it because I know there’s nothing I can do. I eat, sleep, shower up, and mow the lawn. Next day I wake up and I see my car out there in the driveway, and I look inside and I see that there’s a full tank of gas, and so I drive over to Jack’s house and knock on the door and he opens it in his bathrobe and says, ‘I didn’t find him.’”

  “‘Who didn’t you find?’ I ask him.”

  “‘Hitler. Aliens. The UFO. Anything.”

  “‘Where did you go?’ I say.”

  “‘I drove around all day,’ he says. ‘I found nothing.’”

  “What I believe,” Grandma says, looking at Grandpa, who is looking down at his coffee cup, having finished his story, “is a little simpler.” She turns to me. “And it has nothing to do with any UFOs. I think they got drunk at some bar and had a fight.”

  “An interesting side note to this is that Jack did actually go south and start that bee farm,” says Grandpa. “We’ve been there.”

  “Lots of bees,” says Grandma.

  “Exactly what you’d expect,” says Grandpa.

  I think of the French woman. What ways can you put together a whole farm to her lying there in the butter in 1944, and then forward again, to a UFO flying overhead? Jack is the one who knows.

  “Is everything okay?” Grandma asks me. We are alone again; we’ve moved to the backyard, and I am watching her probe one of her flowerbeds for weeds, walking slowly alongside the black dirt like a cat, looking down. Grandpa is in the garage, working on his birdhouse. “Now?”

  “What do you mean?” I say. There are many ways to answer this question. The word “no” would probably work for all the different ways.

  “You’re sad,” she says.

  “Obviously I’m sad,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. “That’s not what I meant. But I
’ve been under the impression, these last months—I’ve been under the impression that you’ve been feeling better.”

  “I’m just visiting,” I say.

  “And your marriage? Is that it?”

  “I’m visiting.”

  “I see,” says Grandma. “I see. You know we appreciate it. That’s all I’ll say. I like to think of us as some kind of tonic for whatever happens to you. We’re always here. It doesn’t matter. That’s a nice thought.” She smiles to herself. “Did you know that George and I—please don’t tell this to your mother, because I truly think she was too blind to notice at the time—but George and I had our share of problems, long ago?”

  “What problems?”

  “We both had an affair,” she says. “One each. We have never once discussed it and I am sure we never will.”

  “But how did you—”

  “I felt it,” she says, “and then he felt it.”

  “Felt what?”

  “We have been married for 70 years. If you can believe that. Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “After 30 years you begin to feel things. You’ll see. If the two of you stay together, you’ll see. You move through all the lonely periods and the angry periods and the resurgence of the old romantic periods, and then you enter something new. It does feel like moving into a new home. At first like a vacation, then you realize you’re staying. It’s very hard to describe. Needless to say, secrets are no longer possible. George would walk in and I would see a thundercloud over his head from the time he came through the door until the time I saw him climb into his car the next morning, out in the driveway. I could really see it there. It had little lightning bolts and everything. It was gray. Obviously.” She raises her eyebrows at me. She is mad at me for saying “obviously” to her before. She hates it when people say “obviously.” I do, too.

  “What did you do?”

  “I waited. It stopped. Then I got my own thundercloud. And I told myself that I would stop mine, and I would wait and see if a new one appeared over his head, and if so, that would be the end.”