The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  “What are you even talking about with this? Are you thinking of getting married?”

  “Just answer the question. I’m asking for a friend.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re thinking about getting married again. Wait. This couldn’t be Judd, could it?”

  “I said I’m asking for a friend,” I say.

  “Did Judd propose? Oh my gosh. He did, didn’t he?”

  “Well, in a manner of speaking . . . yes, I guess you could call it that,” I say. I’ve reached my apartment building by now, and I wave to Tobias, the doorman, and get in the elevator. (Judd isn’t here to make me take the stairs.) “We’re sort of sick of dating, and we are such good friends, and he said that he thinks romantic love is nothing more than a recipe for disaster, and that we’d be good parents, and we should move our lives along.”

  I unlock the door to my apartment, and Mr. Swanky jumps down from the couch, where he’s been snacking on my bedroom slipper. He comes over, wagging his tail, and he licks my hand, asking forgiveness. My slipper, he says, was asking for it.

  “Let me get this straight. Is this just for having kids? Or do you love him?”

  “Do I love him?” I say slowly. “That’s the big question. I mean, we hang out together all the time. It’s just not . . . what I would have expected, you know. No . . . fireworks. It’s good. Comfortable. He says that’s the best kind. So I guess my question is: Do you think this is the best kind?”

  She takes a deep breath, and my heart clutches. We’ve never ventured into a discussion about the fireworks kind of love versus the comfortable kind, and I suddenly feel weird about asking her this question. I wish I could take it back. After all, poor Maggie is married to a man who broke her heart by cheating on her. Presumably he voted at one point for fireworks, with my mom, and then he had to change his mind.

  And also, even more dangerous territory here: Maggie never got to have her own kids—a topic that I know instinctively is off-limits. I’m not sure if they ever tried and couldn’t have a baby—or if Hendrix and I took up so much space in their lives that there was no room for a Robert/Maggie baby. Sometimes I wonder if she ever thinks she would have been better off if my dad had just stayed the hell in Woodstock, and then she could have found a different man and probably had her own kids, and she wouldn’t have had all this heartache. It had to have occurred to her.

  I feel awful bringing it all up.

  She says, “Well, I’m not so sure you two don’t love each other, to tell you the truth, and you just don’t know it. Maybe you’re expecting it to look different, so you don’t recognize it.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I go into the kitchen and open the refrigerator and decide finally on some tired mushrooms and peppers for dinner. “That’s legit. I’m sure I’ve been contaminated by romantic comedies. I can’t picture Judd chasing me through airports, trying to keep me from getting on a plane and flying away from him.”

  She laughs. “No, I suppose not. But, honey, we know he’s from a good family, and we know he’s not a serial killer, which was what I’ve been really worried about, you know. That you’d meet some New York guy that none of us had ever heard of, and that you’d fall in love before you realized his tendencies to murder people in their sleep, like what happened to a poor girl on the news—”

  “Hey, I’m a better judge of character than that,” I say, getting the paring knife out of the drawer. “I haven’t even dated any serial killers. And I’ve been on forty-four dates in the last year.”

  “This is what keeps me up nights. Thinking of you on forty-four dates with strange men.”

  “You and me both,” I say. I tuck the phone under my chin and cut the stems off the mushrooms. “Believe me, it wasn’t all that much fun. I’m just coming home from the forty-fourth one now. With a New York City firefighter. Should have been great. But wasn’t.”

  “And did you really think you and some anonymous firefighter were going to immediately find—what? Passion and sex? That’s what you’re going on these dates for?”

  “Mags. Of course that’s what I’ve been going on these dates for.”

  “But is that more important than a companion you feel good about? Somebody you know and trust to always have your best interests at heart? Maybe you’re the one discounting love, did you ever think of that? Love is what you’re left with when all that goes away.”

  “Okay, then, now we’re getting somewhere,” I say. “You’re decidedly, then, in the category of marriage can work between friends. Yes?”

  “Well, let me put it this way. I think it can work between you and Judd,” she says. “I always thought he was such a nice kid. He’ll take care of you, that’s for sure.”

  “Ugh. I don’t need taking care of,” I say. Old argument.

  “I know you don’t. But you know what I mean. Everyone needs taking care of. Can’t you take it in that spirit instead of getting offended? He’ll be your partner. He’ll be there for you, as you young folks say.”

  And then speaking of people needing to be taken care of, I can hear my father’s voice in the background. Asking her a question. She needs to get off the phone and make him some food. Or just pay him some attention.

  Just like that, the call is over. My dad comes first. Always has, always will.

  Before she hangs up, she whispers into the phone, “Just say yes. And bring him home for Thanksgiving. Promise me.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  As soon as I get off the phone, I call the memory care center at Hallowell House just because I miss my grandmother, and sometimes I can reach her if she’s having a good day. She might be in the sunroom right now and they could take the phone over to her because she’s doing fine, and why yes, the nurse on the floor will tell me, yes, she might like a call from home.

  “It’s your favorite granddaughter!” I always say when I get her.

  And she used to say, “Ah, my darling. You aren’t just my favorite granddaughter, you’re my favorite human!”

  But it’s been months now since that has happened. Mostly, if I get her at all, she tries to talk to me and then gets frustrated that she can’t make the words come out like she wants them to. There are long gaps. I don’t mind the gaps; I’ll wait patiently for however long it takes for her to get the words out. But it’s hard on her. She was always so smart and so precise in her speech, so good at articulating her feelings, that I can’t even imagine how tough it must be for her to be stuck inside her own head, with so many words already gone.

  Sure enough, that’s what today is like. They hand her the phone. I can hear her breathing, hear the little noises she makes.

  “Bunny, I miss you!” I say. “And I have some news!” I always feel like I’m shouting when I talk to her, as if all it takes is a louder voice to reach her. “Judd and I—do you remember Judd?—he and I are going to get married! Isn’t that wonderful?”

  There’s a little mewing sound. Like she’s crying.

  “Bunny? Are you okay? I’ll come and see you at Thanksgiving! Like I always do! We’ll have dinner in your dining room and then I’ll bring you home with me to see the rest of the family! And that’s when Judd and I are going to tell everyone!”

  “Oh,” she says. “Ohhhhh.”

  There’s a muffled sound, the phone falling onto her wheelchair perhaps. And then after a moment, someone must have come and picked it up. They hang it up again, and I’m there with only silence.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I was five years old the day I finally got up the nerve to ask my grandmother if my mama was dead. I whispered the question in case I wasn’t allowed to know. Nobody ever mentioned my mama anymore.

  But Bunny wasn’t one of the people, like my daddy and Maggie, who had so many rules about stuff you could and couldn’t talk about. She let me spend as much time in the Bunny Barn as I wanted to. I sat on her lap while she read me stories or put my hair in braids.

  Her barn was my favorite place to be because it smelled good in there, like new
sawdust and lemon Pledge and oatmeal cookies. There were shiny floors and new lights in the ceiling. Bunny had made the workmen put in a window seat, which she said was just for me, and we sewed a blue calico cushion. Hendrix was not allowed to go near the window seat, or so I told him; it was just for me and Bunny. He didn’t want to anyway. Hendrix had the fields and the corncrib and the other barn. He had Daddy; I had Bunny.

  In the barn, the air felt like it was soft and pink. My stomach didn’t hurt when I was over there. At my house, just across the yard, the air sometimes felt all gray and cloudy, and it was hard to breathe sometimes.

  When I asked her the question about Mama, she was ironing some shirts. I felt her stop and turn and look at me. She took a deep breath like something sad was stuck in her throat, and she said, “No, no, honey. Of course she’s not dead. Your mama is just fine.”

  I said this next part very, very carefully, smoothing my dress over my knees, and not looking at her. “Then why doesn’t she come and get me and Hendrix and take us home?”

  “Well, sweetie, this is your real home now. With me and your daddy and Maggie.”

  “But she said she would come and get us.”

  She put the iron down on the ironing board and wiped her hands on her apron and looked at me. “The truth is that your mama and daddy both agreed you should live here with us. Your mama misses you, but she thinks this is the best place for you. And you and Hendrix will go and see her every summer when she doesn’t have to work so hard and can put all her attention just on you.”

  I wasn’t sure how far I could push this, but I took a chance and said to her, in a very low voice, so low that maybe she wouldn’t hear it at all, “I heard him tell Maggie that my mama is a bad mother. He said she’s a witch. The real kind.”

  “Oh,” said Bunny, and the air around her head turned a different color. “Well, she’s not a witch. Your mama is a very nice person. She’s just a little bit different from some other people, but that is not a bad thing, and your daddy knows that. He didn’t mean that, I’m sure.”

  But Bunny hadn’t been there the day when Daddy came to visit us at Mama’s house and then made me and Hendrix go home with him. She didn’t know how mad he was. He did mean it.

  Usually when Daddy came to visit, it was kind of a nice time. He sat on the porch, and we sat on his lap, and he talked to Mama and to all her friends. Sometimes he played music with everybody. Sometimes he was having such a good time that I thought he might stay, but then he didn’t. He always said he had to go back to the farm, but that he’d come again to see us.

  But then one day he showed up when we were playing outside in the field next to our house, and it was the day after our birthday—we were four now!—and Hendrix and I wanted to run over to his truck to hug him. But as soon as he got out of his truck, I got scared because his face was hard and angry, and he didn’t even say hello. He said, “What are you doing outside by yourselves?” in a voice that was so hot and mad it was like it burned a hole in the air.

  “What’s going on here?” he said. “You’re filthy. And your hair is all tangled, and you’re not wearing any clothes.”

  “I am wearing my queen dress,” I said to him very sternly. “Maybe you can’t see it.”

  He walked over in a very hard way and picked us up, and his belt buckle scratched my legs. I was squirming trying to get down, but he gripped us tighter, me in one arm and Hendrix in the other.

  “You are wearing underpants,” he said. “And it’s dangerous out here by yourself!” He started walking with us toward the house. “Janet! Get out here! Damn it, Tenaj! Or whatever the hell you call yourself!”

  When he got to the porch, he put us down hard, and he kept his hands on the tops of our heads so we couldn’t run away.

  We had never seen him like this. I was too shocked to move.

  “What in the world is going on?” said my mama, and she came out on the porch. She was smiling at him, like she wasn’t scared at all. “Robert, I had no idea you were coming! Come on inside and let me get you something to drink.”

  I had never seen her be worried about anything, and she didn’t look worried then either. Everybody loved her. She wore long floaty dresses, and she was always finding things on the ground and then twisting them together or gluing them. She sold her artwork at fairs where she had a booth, and people would come up and buy them, and pet our dog, Starlight, and talk to me and Hendrix. We were always picking up things to give to her—rocks and feathers, pieces of metal or glass, and she’d take them and study them closely, her head right next to ours, and she’d say in her soft, soft voice, “Wow! This is so far-out. Why, thank you, my lambs!” She had so many names for us: we were lambs and cakes and honey pies and darlings and sweet patooties. Hendrix could be Henny Penny and I was either Baby or Fwonzie because that’s how Hendrix said my name. She was so very soft and calm. Her skin was warm and smooth, like she was made from sugar. Once we went to a fair and some man gave us cotton candy, and I thought, This is what it’s like to hug my mama. She was cottony and sweet and soft, and her voice in my ear, singing us lullabies or telling us to go and play, was always like something that could make you fall asleep just from hearing it. She had all the colors around her. Like the piece of glass that hung in the front window and spun around, casting rainbows across the room, skittering across the wooden floor.

  I knew she was going to make things better. She was even smiling at him so friendly-like; she would get him to be nice. “Robert? Honey? Let’s all come in the house and talk.”

  But he was too mad. He started telling her that he had no idea she let us play outside unsupervised, and that we weren’t safe here anymore, and we were dirty, and we weren’t even dressed—and she said we were perfectly happy and fine, but then, while she was talking, he put us in the truck and told us to stay there, and he went in the house with her. And Hendrix and I sat there very quietly, but the seat was hot on our bare legs, so after a while we got out of the truck and sat in the dirt instead. Hendrix was crying and he said we should run away, but I wasn’t sure.

  I told him Mama would make all the bad stuff go away. She had a lot of ways of making things okay, like when we were hungry or tired, or sick of having her work. She had cushions and pillows and good things to eat, and she could sit with us and comb our hair with her fingers. She was always talking to people and laughing.

  “I don’t like him,” said Hendrix.

  “Mama will fix him,” I said. “He loves Mama. He was kissing Mama one time.”

  We watched the door. We could hear yelling voices inside, and Mama’s friend who liked to make soup, Stony, came out of the house and got into his truck without even seeing us. When he backed up, Hendrix got up to go see where he was going, and then there was a loud scary sound from the truck stopping, and Stony jumped out to see if we were okay, and we were—we hadn’t been anywhere near the back of the truck, but after that everything went even worse anyway. Suddenly our daddy was there waving his arms and shouting, and Mama came outside and tried to make him calm down, but nothing was going to calm my daddy. He was that mad and shouting. He said we could have been killed. A woman named Petal who lived next door came and took me and Hendrix to her house for a while and fed us some lunch, and then a little bit later when we were playing and drawing pictures, our daddy came over and said we were going home with him.

  “Is Mama coming, too?” I asked him, and he said no.

  I put my hands on my hips and I stared at him as hard as I could. “I want Mama to come!”

  “You come with me and get in the truck,” he said. “Now.”

  “Why are you taking us?” I yelled, and he said because it was best, that’s why. I wanted to tell him that we were not dirty and that we loved to play outside in our underpants and that we didn’t want to go with him, but he was not a man who listened. I said I wouldn’t go with him until I said good-bye to our mama, but he didn’t think that was a good idea either. I could tell he didn’t know about good-byes bei
ng important—we even had good-bye songs we sang when somebody was leaving, even to go into town for a little while—and so I tried to tell him we had to sing the song, but he kept saying no no no no no. And so then I just ran around him and into the house and I hugged my mama, who was crying, and I was crying, and then he came in and said she had to get it together, so she started trying to act like everything was fine, which scared me even more because her voice was all different and didn’t go with the look in her eyes at all, it was all caught up in her throat, and she said she’d see us soon, that everything was okay, and we would have lots of fun in New Hampshire. The way she said it meant that she was not happy at all and we were not going to have lots of fun in New Hampshire, whatever New Hampshire was. She said she was sorry about the yelling, but we had a nice daddy and a really nice grandma named Bunny, and to please tell Bunny hi. She gave me an extra-long hug and she whispered in my ear that she would come and get us, and then Daddy came over and said that was enough, and he took me out of my mama’s arms and put my red shorts and purple T-shirt on me even though those two things did not go together at all, and he put Hendrix into some stupid-looking sailor suit that somebody had given him, and then he took us to the truck and put us inside once again. And we rode for a long, long time in the backseat of the truck with Daddy driving and driving and driving without even putting on the radio one time. I cried for a long time in the backseat. I was crying for so many things, but mostly for my mama sitting there in the house without me to collect rocks and sticks for her in the field and to hug her in the morning, which she needed me to do. Also, my daddy’s truck smelled funny, like animals, and there were pieces of hay on the floor that stuck to our feet. It got dark, and headlights would come into the truck and ride along the ceiling and then disappear, and I stopped crying and watched them all very, very carefully and wouldn’t let myself fall asleep like Hendrix did because I had to watch to see if Daddy was going to be dark green again, or if he would just be quiet brown worried Daddy, being lit up every now and then by the lights of the other cars coming toward us. Even then, I could see the muscle in his jaw working itself up and down, up and down.