The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  And then when it seemed like we would be in the car forever, we suddenly turned and drove on something that sounded like little rocks being thrown everywhere, and I stood up on the seat so I could see, and in front of us there was a little house with the lights all on, and a porch with rocking chairs. And I saw an old woman coming out of the front door—Bunny, though I didn’t remember her then—and she was shielding her eyes in the headlights until Daddy turned them off.

  She came out to the truck and opened the back door just as Daddy was doing the same thing, and I heard her say, “So you got them. Are they okay?” He didn’t say anything, but just handed us to her, one by one, and she hugged us and we buried our heads in her sweet-smelling neck and her fuzzy blue bathrobe, and there was pink and softness.

  And that was how I met Bunny again, although she tells me that I lived there with her long ago when I was just a baby, and my mama and my daddy were both there in New Hampshire until my mama got mad and left.

  “You don’t remember that,” she told me. “But I have loved you ever since you were just a little teeny tiny baby. Even before you were born, I loved you.”

  For a while after that, it was just us and Daddy and Bunny living in the farmhouse while we waited for what was going to happen next.

  I thought that what we were waiting for was for my mama to come and say that she and Daddy loved each other, and that we would all live together. Or maybe she was just going to come and get us. She had said she would come, I told Hendrix. I said to him: we just have to wait. Daddy and Bunny seemed like they were waiting, too. We were all a houseful of sad people who weren’t where we were supposed to be, and something had to happen, but nobody knew what it was going to be.

  Hendrix and I had our own separate rooms during the waiting time, but every night, we made a nest of blankets on the floor in my bedroom, and we curled up together on the floor. Hendrix was a boy who cried a lot, and his nose was always running, and he jumped when there was a loud noise, and it was my job to keep reminding him that we were going to be okay and that Mama was coming.

  I told him stories at night in the dark, about Mama coming back, and Daddy loving her and laughing. I said that everybody loved Mama so much, and Daddy was just upset for now, but he would remember soon and then they would be together again. And he would laugh and be regular nice Daddy again.

  But then before Mama could get there, this woman Maggie started coming over, which Bunny said was such a good thing for everybody, especially Daddy because they had been boyfriend and girlfriend a long time ago, she said, and it was nice that Maggie was going to love him again.

  “And you are going to love her, too, because everybody loves Maggie!” Bunny said.

  I did not love Maggie at first. She talked baby talk to Hendrix and me, even though we were almost five by then. And she thought a lot of things were important—like wearing your hair in a tight high ponytail and keeping your fingernails clean. Fingernails! I couldn’t believe it. Fingernails were for digging in the dirt.

  But then I saw that Maggie coming over had been what we were waiting for that whole time. Not Mama at all. And now it had happened. When Maggie came over, Daddy smiled a lot and wore his hair slicked back. Sometimes we all even danced in the living room, and Daddy acted silly and would pick us up and spin us around. I still wanted Mama, but I also thought it was kind of good the way he was when Maggie was there. He didn’t look like somebody who had a bad stomachache all the time.

  And then one day they sat us down and told us they were going to get married. Everybody had on big smiles, and Maggie hugged us, and Daddy said there was going to be a wedding in the garden. Maggie said we’d get to wear fancy clothes, which Hendrix did not want to wear, but I did. I said I wanted to wear a pink shiny dress with lace and a twirly skirt, like I had seen on television one time. Maggie said that would be fine, and also she would find some little white patent leather shoes if I wanted, too. Which I most certainly did.

  The wedding was on a hot, sunny day, and lots of people came, and Hendrix and I did the Chicken Dance, and people laughed and clapped for us and ate a lot of food and said it was so great that now we had a new mom.

  I think that’s when it hit me what had just happened. One minute I was flapping around like a chicken, and then I heard the news that Maggie was now my new mom, and I started to get that funny feeling again. Like I wasn’t going to get back to where I was supposed to be.

  Maggie was tall and had bony elbows and knees, and there was never a spot on her lap that felt right. And she was always working, working, working, always rushing—washing clothes, hanging them out on the line, collecting the eggs, planting flowers, working at the farm stand, cooking dinner, sweeping, dusting, setting the table, washing the dishes, giving me and Hendrix baths. She had strong, hard hands and a look on her face like she meant business. Things had to be done. She hummed while she worked, a sound that reminded me of a bunch of bees. I didn’t like bees.

  “I like things to be clean and neat around here,” she said. “We’re going to spiff ourselves up.”

  That was what we did all the time: we spiffed ourselves up.

  And even if you saw a feather on the ground, or a piece of glass, you shouldn’t pick it up, because there was nobody who would say, Wow! That’s so far-out!

  Nobody to turn it into a piece of art.

  Here, you didn’t touch stuff on the ground because it was dirty, and it was trash.

  In the fall, when Maggie took us to register for kindergarten, she told the lady at the desk that our names were Frances and Henry. “Those are better names because people know those names already,” she explained to us. “When you’re Frances and Henry, you’ll fit in better here. And you want to fit in, don’t you?”

  She bought us little toy license plates for our bikes with those names on them, just to prove her point. “See? They don’t even have your other names on the license plates in the store.”

  So the day I asked Bunny if my mama was dead and she said she wasn’t, I said, “Well then, will you take me to see her?”

  She got very quiet, like for a minute she was thinking of saying yes, but then instead of yes, she said in a bright, almost crazy voice, “I have a good idea. Do you want to make a picture about how much you love her?”

  “That is not a good idea,” I said. “Because how is she going to see the picture when she isn’t here?” I worried that Bunny might be a little bit silly.

  “Maybe you could just look at the picture yourself, and that could remind you of how much she loves you.”

  “No,” I said patiently. I was going to have to explain everything to my grandmother. She didn’t know anything. Finally I said, “But you know what would work? I could make a little magic tube that I can talk into and she’ll hear me when I talk, and I can tell her stuff whenever I want.”

  Bunny laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

  So we made a tube from the toilet paper cardboard thing, and I decorated it with stick-on stars that Bunny had in her kitchen drawer, and she wrote my name and then I made her write my mama’s name: “Tenaj.” And then I drew hearts and purple flowers and a big yellow star.

  “So I’ll talk to my mama right through here where this star is, and she can hear everything I say,” I explained.

  “Okay,” said Bunny. “I think this is a brilliant idea.”

  “It’s magic, that’s why,” I said.

  After that, I would get under my bed and talk to Mama. I told her everything—that Hendrix and I were fine, and that we loved her, and she should come and get us. Maybe she should come in the night and we could sneak out and see her, and then she could take us back to her house. We could bake bread again, and I could smear the butter on it, like I used to do, and she could laugh and tell me again that I was her favorite butter-spreader because I did it just right, putting on lots and lots of butter. And then we could make necklaces out of the sparkly pieces of rocks that we glu
ed together.

  I waited. But even though cars would sometimes go by in the night, and I’d hear the hum of their engines from far down the road, Mama never came back for me.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At precisely four o’clock that Sunday, Judd and I are standing on the stoop at our friends Russell and Sarah’s Brooklyn brownstone, holding appetizers and a bottle of wine, and we are looking around at Brooklyn the way Manhattanites always look at Brooklyn: like we’ve landed where dreams go to die.

  The air even seems odd here, what with trees and bushes everywhere. Not enough truck exhaust. No screeching of brakes or sirens. And the sidewalks are filled with families with strollers, with older kids zooming along next to them on scooters.

  “Are we going to have to move to Brooklyn, too, once we decide to have kids?” Judd says. “I mean, I think the leaves are a nice touch—but it’s a hell of a long subway ride back to Manhattan.”

  “I think it’s the law,” I tell him. “You get to be a Manhattanite up until you decide to procreate—and then you’re required to move to either Brooklyn or New Jersey. But we’ll resist. We have perfectly reasonable apartments, and we just have to decide which one of them we’re going to live in.”

  “Scofflaws,” he says. “I like that about us.”

  I’m a little nostalgic for the days when all our friends lived in Manhattan. Before a few of them took off for New Jersey, there were eight of us, four couples, who got together at least twice a month to hang out. We went to avant-garde Broadway shows, to microbreweries in Red Hook, to the Rockaways for suntans and Mexican food on the beach. Once we took a road trip and got rooms at a funky hotel in Niagara Falls. It had been lovely—even though now that I’m really remembering it, also awkward as hell. They were all in love, having sex like rabbits, and I was there with Judd, who was just a friend. They’d go off to bed, and Judd and I would sit in the bar and nurse our martinis and watch sports.

  He presses the buzzer for 3B, and says to me in a low voice, “Here’s to a new baby in the world. Let’s just hope Russell and Sarah haven’t killed each other by now.”

  “It didn’t sound good the last time I talked to her,” I say. “He’s against disposable diapers and pacifiers.”

  “And he says she’s gone psycho on him,” Judd says.

  “I’m not sure Russell can be domesticated.”

  “We’ll do this so much better,” he says. He smiles, but I notice he doesn’t lean over and kiss me when he says it. It’s the kind of remark a person would expect to be accompanied by a kiss on the forehead at the very least.

  We get buzzed in, and we go tromping up the stairs to the third floor. Judging from the number of strollers and car seats in the hallway—as well as the noise from every apartment we pass on our way up—it’s clear that the residents of this Brooklyn apartment building have very healthy reproductive lives.

  “It’s humbling when you see this many strollers in one place,” says Judd. “Look at this one. A jogging stroller! I think we should get one of these, so we can run in the park with the baby.”

  “You know what I picture? We’ll be in the park, and you’ll take the baby for a run with the stroller while I sit on a bench and work on my novel and wait for the two of you to come back.”

  “Your novel?” he says. “That’s what you think of?” He gives me a little sock in the arm. “Since when is that the most important thing in your life?”

  “Judd, it’s very important. I work on it all the time.”

  “Okay, okay,” he says. “So you’re writing it. But when are you going to be finished with it?”

  “Look, I’m making progress, okay? I do have a full-time job, you know, and when I get home, I’m tired. Also, it’s hard, and I don’t have anybody to read it.”

  “Good Lord, all these excuses,” he says and laughs.

  I notice he doesn’t offer to read it. Which is fine. I know it’s not good—not yet. I’m stuck, is the truth of it. The woman in my novel comes home from work one day and finds her husband in bed with someone else, and I want it to be a funny story—even uplifting—but it just keeps drifting over into being morose. I gave this woman a great job and jokey best friends, and I even provided her a wonderful renovated kitchen, but she still just cries. The last dozen pages are her complaining to a psychiatrist that she feels like she doesn’t believe in love anymore.

  She and I share so many losses, all from just one man leaving. Trust me; I see what I’m doing here.

  Now I look over at Judd, doing his little going-upstairs dance, jabbing at the air like he’s in an imaginary boxing match.

  Okay, I tell myself, so what if he never reads my pages or understands what I’m trying to achieve? He’ll cheer me on in his own absent way. And the best part is that I will never be in danger of falling madly in love with him and getting hurt. I won’t ever be writing a novel about him. It just won’t happen. My heart will be so perfectly safe.

  I reach over and touch him on the arm, and he turns and smiles at me.

  The noise level starts to increase the closer we get to their door, which is thrown open by Russell. He’s wearing a screaming baby tied to his chest and looking like an extra in Night of the Living Dead, except that his hair is perfectly combed and gelled. His hair is sort of his trademark.

  The apartment is a disaster zone, which is so unlike Sarah’s usual way. I mean, to be honest, before Russell came along—sure, there was clutter. But it was fun clutter, Sex and the City kind of clutter: wineglasses on the coffee table, copies of Cosmopolitan magazine, high heels artlessly kicked off and landing in two different directions, some lacy laundry strewn about here and there. Even after she and Russell got married, they had sort of a modern hip/cool couples clutter thing going: their sweaters and hoodies resting adorably together on the ottoman, like the laundry itself was also in a relationship.

  But this. Overturned baby bottles. Spilled milk. It’s the smell of we’re-in-over-our-heads and why-didn’t-anyone-warn-us, of tears and sleeplessness. There are whiffs of recrimination and regret.

  I feel slightly dizzy.

  Sarah appears just then, and she has the look of a vampire who has been without blood for too long a time. Her eyes are rimmed with red. I want to reassure her that this is what life is all about, and that it will get so much better in time, but I’m afraid she’ll pull a tire iron out from underneath the pile of newspapers and kill me with it.

  I don’t even get to admire the baby, because as soon as I get my coat off, Sarah bursts into tears and drags me into the bedroom, where she tells me that Russell is the most useless human ever to be drawing breath and that she has made a terrible mistake in marrying him. He doesn’t even know how to operate the washing machine. He says he needs creative stimulation. He wonders when they’ll have sex again. She sits down on the bed and says, “Why did you guys let me marry him?”

  I don’t think it would be a good idea to remind her that Russell is a musician and an artist, and she fell so hard in love with him that she didn’t notice that he can’t even tie his shoes properly. He’s not a bad guy; he’s just a bit clueless about regular life things except for hair gel. He is not the person who is going to turn into someone helpful just because he succeeded at a little thing like reproduction.

  But I say none of that. Marriage is complex. We can’t solve Russell right now. Instead, I say, “Wait a second.” I hold up my hand. “Wait, wait, wait. How long since you’ve had any sleep?”

  She stares at me.

  “Sleep,” I say. “S-L-E-E-P.”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “You don’t even remember sleep, do you? You need to get in your bed. Right now. Get in your bed.”

  “I can’t. I’m having a party.”

  “Judd and I don’t qualify as a party. Take off your clothes and get in your bed, and I’m going to turn out the light, and you are going to sleep.”

  “The baby will get hungry.”

  “That’s why God invented bottles.”<
br />
  “It’s not that easy—the milk—”

  “It is that easy.” (I don’t know what I’m talking about, of course.) “You need sleep. I’m counting to twenty and then I’m turning out the light.”

  She finally gets in bed, and I cover her up with the blankets.

  “Stay with me,” she says in a tiny little voice. “Lie down beside me.”

  “Okay,” I say, and I kick off my shoes and get up on the bed next to her. “Your baby is really very cute,” I say. Actually, I haven’t gotten a good look at the baby, because she’s screaming so much, and Russell is walking back and forth with her like he’s in a walking road race.

  “I know. I like to just stare at her.”

  “Maybe that’s why you’re so tired. You’re staring at the baby instead of sleeping.”

  “Maybe.”

  We lie there for a while. There’s finally silence from the living room, thank goodness. Maybe Sarah can really go to sleep.

  “She’s quiet,” I say.

  “I still hate Russell, you know.”

  “I know. Can I ask you one little thing before you go to sleep?”

  “Yeah.” Her voice is muffled in the pillow.

  “Do you think I should marry Judd, even though we’re just friends?”

  She lifts her head up and looks at me. “Seriously? Does he want to?”

  “Yeah. He thinks best friends might have an easier time with this parenting business. He thinks romantic love is a hoax.”

  “Hmm,” she says. “I may not be psychiatrically intact enough to weigh in on this, but I say go for it. I mean, he knows how to do laundry at least.”

  “He doesn’t separate the whites from the darks.”

  “Phronsie. Shut the hell up and marry that dude. He knows where the washing machine is, at least.” Then she falls into sleep so deep it may actually be classifiable as a coma. I tiptoe out.

  When I go back into the living room, Judd is wearing the baby on his chest. He looks like a natural. I admit it: there’s something so sweet about a big, muscular, handsome guy all dressed up in a baby. He grins at me and points to himself. Willoughby has gone to sleep. Russell is also passed out on the couch, snoring with his mouth open and one arm flung out. His hair still looks good, I notice. I go into the kitchen and wash the dishes and wipe off the counters. I boil water for pasta and cook the lasagna Sarah was going to make, and then I fry up some ground beef and onion and add tomato sauce to it, and then I look in the fridge for mozzarella and ricotta cheese, but there isn’t any, so I tell Judd I need to go out to the bodega at the corner to buy some. He points to the sleeping baby on his chest and says, “I’ll go to the store. You gotta have you some of this lusciousness.”