The Magic of Found Objects

by Maddie Dawson

  “Oh my God,” I say. And I laugh. “Would you just look at this!”

  It’s so fantastical, so stunning in its whiteness—like the world has been taken over by forces beyond anything we could imagine. This is a Snow Hurricane! I feel something in me just give way—all the tension about Gabora and Darla’s calls. Like nothing is what it seems anymore. I can’t seem to stop laughing. I turn to Adam, and he’s laughing, too. His eyes are saucers.

  “Hang on!” he says and takes my hand. “Let’s make a run for it! I just want to play in this stuff!”

  And so we do—it’s amazing, and for a moment, we’re running and laughing and slipping and sliding in the blowing snow under the streetlights, as it piles up in doorways and on palm trees, on flowerpots.

  People have come outside their apartment buildings and hotels to look at it, and who cares that it’s the middle of the night? It’s like winter wonderland stuff; you almost think that Santa Claus will show up, and Adam and I ice-skate on the sidewalk all the way to the hotel.

  And when we arrive, the desk clerk is shaking his head at us. “I think the world has gone crazy,” he says.

  In the elevator, Adam reaches over and brushes the snow off my hair. He bites his lip.

  “You have snow on your eyelashes,” I say, and I raise my hand and touch his face. The snow is really ice crystals. It’s stuck in the curls of his beach hair. “This is nothing that your surfer hair could ever imagine, I bet.”

  “My hair is ready to call 9-1-1,” he says softly. He puts his hand up to my cheeks. “Your eyelashes, too . . .”

  It is a romantic gesture that I know well from my New Hampshire life. That kind of touching of the face, the need to brush snow off ostensibly, but really a need to touch. Touching and gazing at the same time.

  The elevator rumbles to a stop, and the bell dings, and the doors slide open. We walk down the hall, our wet shoes tromping along on the carpet roses, in the hush of the sleeping hotel.

  Our rooms are not far away.

  I make myself say good night. I say I will see him in the morning.

  He says, “You know what? Being as how the universe—Tenaj’s universe—is seemingly out of control, and we’re now pretty much in free fall, I think there’s more fun to be had. What do you say we get our hats and boots and go outside and slide around in the snow some more?”

  I want to say yes.

  “Come on,” he says, seeing that in my face. He sees everything. He knows it all. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event, snow in Charleston before Thanksgiving! It’s like magic out there, a magic world—snow in the palm trees. Snow in the mimosas. And how often are we going to be this tipsy?”

  He actually says the word tipsy, which is such an old-lady word, I tell him. It’s like what Gabora would say about herself after some time with her flask. And what’s with Gabora anyway? She was going to sleep! And then she got upset—after I left? So upset that her wicked daughters had to come and fetch her?

  “Forget Gabora,” he says. “Let’s go have fun. This is like apocalyptic stuff out there. I think, as young people, it’s our solemn duty to have all the fun possible right now.”

  He leans against the wall next to my hotel room door, smiling and looking down into my eyes. He looks lit from within, that’s what. He looks like there’s a fire burning inside him; the light from it shines out from his eyes.

  There’s a moment—I feel all my resolve slipping away. But I know what would happen, and there are forty-seven reasons why it would be a bad idea. He’s too young for me. And he’s a coworker. And I have already allowed him to say too much to me. And I have told him too much about myself.

  And I am engaged.

  Those are only the starter, surface reasons. The rest lie just beneath the surface, reasons I will contemplate later, in shame.

  But I am hesitating, and his face comes closer, questioning. And I must give off some signal, because all of me is yearning toward him, and then his lips are on mine, and we’re suddenly kissing, pushed against my door, and it’s so perfect, sudden-but-not-sudden, so soft and full and perfect, and I am dizzy.

  That’s it. All there is to it.

  Say yes, says the universe.

  But there’s this other voice, more strident. Did you not just tell Judd Kovac that you were going to marry him? And is he not now celebrating with your family while they wait for you to show up and celebrate, too?

  It takes everything I have to stop, but I do. I do because if I don’t, it really will be the apocalypse. I say no, and I pull away. I am not going to be the kind of person who goes back on her word, who changes her mind, who gives in to a moment like this.

  I am not my mother.

  I make myself look tired and disinterested. He knows I am not, but I yawn and stretch. I see the way his eyes are locked onto me, the way he’s tilted toward me, outstretched, like our bodies are having the real conversation. But then I break free of the spell. I have this desperate need to get away from him, but the key card is stuck in my purse and I can’t find it right away, so I’m standing there, fumbling and trying not to look at him. When I finally find it, I say good night and leave him there and go into my room and close the door hard, and then I am so overcome with emotion and passion and confusion and yes, maybe tipsiness, that I slide down onto the floor and sit there against the door, my legs stretched straight out in front of me, and I take deep breaths, deeeeeeeeeep breaths, one after another.

  This is not love. This is not what love looks like.

  I can give a little speech in the morning—too many Snow Hurricanes to drink, too much snow. Whew! I will say. All that dancing, and fun talk. We need to pretend this never happened. Go back to the way things were.

  Sorry if I misled you.

  Sorry if we got to talking about love too much.

  Things got out of hand.

  Sorry.

  And, to myself: love is a decision, not a feeling.

  But what I want—what I really, really want to do—is to go to his room, kiss him again, look into those eyes, and then . . . well, I want to rip his clothes off. Lick him. Make love to him. Then curl up in his arms and laugh and sleep. That’s all. Just that.

  At one point, I even get up and start to turn the handle to get out of my room, but then I make myself stop.

  Don’t make things worse, I tell myself.

  I finally fall asleep around three thirty, only to be awakened when a text message comes blaring in around four a.m. I bolt awake, thinking it might be even more disasters.

  It’s Tenaj. A particular kind of disaster, to be sure.

  Whether you know it or not, she writes, your life has just taken off in an amazing direction. I know this because my life is doing the same thing. Also I don’t know if you’ve ever really thought about this, but the more fun you have, the better you are at life.

  At five o’clock, she writes, I doubt if those Puritans who have raised you have let you in on a little secret: The whole universe is your playground. You were meant to be happy.

  I stare blearily at the phone. I have exactly one dot left of power, and then the screen goes dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  After I left Woodstock with Maggie and went back to the farm, I stayed mad at Tenaj for a long time. I settled into life on the farm. My father was somewhat contrite. When I came into the house after Maggie collected me, I expected him to yell, but he didn’t. He hugged me, technically speaking, although if there were ever a way to hug somebody without truly hugging her, that would be Robert Linnelle hugging his daughter, Phronsie.

  He said he was glad I was back. He said he was sorry that things got so out of hand. He said I could go to the prom and to graduation. He wasn’t exactly loving, but he looked at me with a bit more grudging respect. I knew that Maggie had made it all possible, and I was grateful for that. I was also worn out from fighting, and I was madder at Tenaj than I could ever have imagined being.

  At graduation, I was the valedictorian. I scrapped the “we ar
e the future” speech that the administration had okayed, and instead went all out on how people shouldn’t let their dreams get stifled. I believe I might have said, “Don’t stay in a small town if you want to go big, and don’t simply accept the life that got handed to you because you’re too scared to do what’s calling you! Live for yourself because tradition is just another way of saying, stay in your place! Dare to hope for more.” At the end of the speech, I said—and I do remember this part, “I’ll tell you one thing. After two years at the community college, I’m getting the hell out of here and going to New York! You can come and visit me there if you want to!”

  My classmates—all seventy-four of them—stood and yelled and threw their caps in the air. There were some boos. But mostly from drunk people who didn’t have aspirations to leave New Hampshire. They mostly wanted to drink a lot, drive fast in their cars, and have lots of sex with each other.

  My father sat across from me at the graduation dinner and made a toast—“To my son, who knows the art of compromise and duty, and to my daughter, who won’t rest until she’s created a ruckus wherever she goes!”

  I raised my glass and looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you! That’s the nicest thing you could have ever said. I believe that the summer after high school, when you were my age, you might have started a few ruckuses yourself, if you recall! Named those ruckuses Phronsie and Hendrix.”

  My father sat back down in his chair, and Hendrix buried his head. I looked over at Maggie, who pursed her lips. Only Bunny looked directly back at me, and the look on her face was unreadable.

  I was known now as a Dangerous Force, a role I kind of liked. I was struttingly proud of the way I’d handled things, turning myself into someone who was not going to be contained. Unlike Maggie, unlike Hendrix, unlike my father—all sheep, as far as I was concerned. Even my father, after his oh-so-brief period of teenage rebelliousness, had turned into a slave to what people thought he should do. They, all of them, let themselves be dictated by duty. People asleep at the helm of their lives.

  That summer I worked at the farm stand selling sunflowers and corn and dream catchers and went out at night with my friends. I thought about Tenaj only rarely. I put away all the rocks and letters I’d written to her. I stopped dressing like her, and even took down a Woodstock poster I’d hung up years before, just to torment my father.

  My family stayed out of my way. I bought notebooks and wrote all the time, whenever I wasn’t doing anything else—ostentatious writing, I now see—making a big point of doing it at the breakfast table, during the slow times when I was overseeing the farm stand, and in the evenings when my father liked us all to congregate in the living room. I’d whip out my notebook and pen, and sit there, forehead creased, staring into the distance and then scrawling furiously as though some muse had landed in my head right at that moment and could not be turned back.

  Looking back, I am embarrassed by how I acted. Conceited, strong-willed. Obnoxious.

  And then one day everything changed. I was at the Bunny Barn, the only place where I could let my guard down and not act like I was the eighth wonder of the world.

  I was in my usual spot, lying on my back in the window seat, and she was doing her usual thing, ironing. My God, that woman loved to iron. She ironed pillowcases and underwear and dish towels. She said there was something about the back and forth motion, and the heat rising up from the sweet-smelling, just laundered fabric, that made her feel safe and in control.

  “There’s so much we can’t control in our lives, so many mistakes and problems, but when I’m ironing, I’m smoothing all the bad, hurtful things away,” she told me once. “We control what we can.”

  That day I was instructing her about how important it was to put thoughts down on paper before they slipped away. I said that in my opinion, solving problems didn’t come about through smoothing out wrinkles, although that was very nice if she wanted to do it, but solutions truly came only when a person wrote them down.

  “I write everything down,” I said proudly. “I’m documenting my life now, for the books I’ll write.”

  She made a little murmuring noise, which I took to be encouragement.

  “I’ve had some setbacks,” I continued, “and not being allowed to go to New York was a big disappointment, and I’m not going to sugarcoat that, but I feel I can get to the soul of myself this way. Find out what makes me tick.”

  “Phronsie,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. I went on then, about what it was like being the black sheep of the family, slightly misunderstood, when all I wanted was to be free. I was in love with my own words. I told her I now wished I’d bothered to act in the school drama productions because it was clear that acting in plays gave a person a sense of story, of inhabiting a character.

  “I want to inhabit characters,” I said. I had just thought of that line, and I took out my notebook to write it down.

  “Phronsie.”

  I felt the crash almost before I heard it. The iron had fallen to the floor, and Bunny was leaning on the ironing board with her head in her hands, and the whole wobbly board itself looked like it was going to go down. I jumped up and ran and yanked the cord out of the wall, and then I put my arms around her.

  She was so slight. When had that happened? Bunny used to be all soft and upholstered, and now she was like a rag doll that had lost half of its stuffing. Her face was white, and I walked her over to the window seat and sat her down and knelt in front of her. She was weaving a bit, and her eyes seemed wide and scared against her paleness.

  My heart was thundering, horse hooves in my chest. I supported her head. I wanted to get her a drink of water, I wanted to call an ambulance, I wanted to beg her not to die right here, not now, not ever, and certainly not right in front of me. But I didn’t dare let go of her, or she’d fall down. I rested her head on my shoulder. I drank in the fragrance of her: the smell of her lavender/rose bath powder (she had a whole canister of it on her vanity table; she called it her one nod toward her past happy life as Gordon’s wife—this loose box of powder that every morning she’d puff out into the air while she sprinkled it all over her pink, just-showered body), and she smelled like ironing and laundry, and some muffins she’d baked earlier in the day, because she knew I was coming over.

  Then I just held on to her with all my might and listened to her breath gain its traction once again while I prayed she’d be okay.

  After a few minutes, she pulled away from me. Her face looked damp. It had been a spell, she said. That was it, just a spell. One of those things.

  “These happen to me sometimes,” she said. Never when there was anybody here, until now. She got over them after a few minutes, she told me. Nothing to worry about.

  She wanted to go back to ironing—to get control—but I said no. I said I needed her to come in the living room and sit with me on the couch. Besides, I told her, the iron was looking a little beat up after having flung itself to the floor.

  She laughed a little bit at that, at the idea of the iron doing its own flinging. And to my surprise, she agreed to let herself be led into the living room. We sat there on her big, wide blue plaid couch, and we held hands. Her hands were dry and crinkly and still so strong. I looked at them in the long silence, at their liver spots and their tendons, at the short, clipped, perfectly clean nails, at the ring she wore, the one that had been given to her by her mother. It was the ring she’d always told me would be mine someday.

  She saw me looking at it and wrestled it off her finger.

  “Here, help me take this off,” she said. “It’s yours. I promised myself I’d give it to you when you graduated from high school—which is when my mother gave it to me. About two hundred years ago now, I’d say.” She smiled. “But—I guess I forgot. Here. You take it now. It’s yours.”

  I hesitated. It seemed wrong to take even one thing from her. “Thank you,” I said.

  I slipped it on my index finger. It had a large blue stone and a gold band. I�
��d always loved seeing it on Bunny’s finger, but now I loved seeing it on my own hand even more.

  Except for the feeling of guilt in the pit of my stomach.

  “But I don’t want to take it from you . . .”

  “No, no, it’s yours,” she said wearily. “It’s always been waiting for you. I didn’t give it to you on graduation night because . . . things were a little tough then, as you might recall.” She stopped talking and took a deep breath. “That was a heedless, headstrong girl at the celebration that night.”

  I started to cry.

  She didn’t try to make me stop. She didn’t say anything comforting or soothing. She just sat there with me, and after a moment, she put her hand on mine, like she was looking into my heart and could see all the grief and guilt built up there in the caves inside me. Could see what I hadn’t found my way toward in my writing.

  “Phronsie,” she whispered after a while. “I think I know how you must feel. How difficult it is for you here. And how you’re pulled out of our world into another one. But, my darling, I would urge you to remember that we’ve all done the best we could here. Even Robert. He might be a little clumsy at it, he’s not perfect, but none of us have done it perfectly, have we? Not even you. You can leave us if you want to, but think about whether you might do it kindly. There’s a beauty and a completeness to our lives that you might not be able to see right now. I don’t think you have to set fire to what’s behind you in order to go. Don’t hurt your father’s feelings—or Maggie’s. Or mine.”

  I clutched her hand.

  She whispered, “Just take your place in the world with as much grace and gratitude as you can muster and try to see the best in us.”

  After that, things changed, not all at once but bit by bit. I settled myself down, stopped trying to prove who I was to the rest of them. I worked at the farm, helped Maggie with cooking, spent time listening to Bunny’s stories. I’d seen her disappointment in me for the first time, and I felt chastened. Like something inside me had been scorched clean.