Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Praying for deliverance, I suspect,” my uncle said. He handed me a casserole wrapped in foil.

  We carried all the food inside. My mother met us at the door with a kiss. “Pete, Fe, lovely to see you,” she said. She went into the kitchen and checked on the turkey. My uncle watched her from the doorway. If I squinted, I could make him look like my father, but whenever I did this, it made my head hurt. He came up behind my mother and whispered something in her ear. She smiled, but she didn’t speak to him.

  “Anna, Anna, Anna,” he said. “Are you ever going to forgive me?”

  My mother made him a drink with an umbrella, a sword, and two olives in it. “A peace offering,” she said. She had only just started speaking to him again. When my uncle didn’t pick me to be on his show, my mother gave him the silent treatment for weeks. If he called, she hung up on him. If he came over, she didn’t say a word. One night, after he’d gone on and on about the authentic Japanese garden he planned to build, my mother snuck into his backyard and filled his new pagoda with garden gnomes. Be reasonable, Anna, my father said.

  In the next room, my father put on a record. I could hear him talking to Aunt Fe about colors. He was explaining something to her about the spectrum of light, but she kept interrupting him. My father was a winter.

  “Go, Daddy-o,” the man on the record yelled. My uncle took my mother in his arms and danced with her. She put her head to his chest and sniffed his shirt.

  “Your personal hygiene has gone to pot since you became a celebrity, Pete,” she told him.

  My uncle laughed. “It’s not my fault. I was born without a sense of smell. You’re half hound dog, I think.”

  My mother spun out of his grasp. She looked pretty, dancing. “Drinks, everyone,” she called.

  Aunt Fe came in, carrying a bowl of peanuts.

  “How goes it with the birds?” she asked my mother. She was wearing a flowered scarf that kept slipping off her shoulders. It fell on the floor and I picked it up.

  My mother sighed. “One of the last two dusky seaside sparrows in the world died last week. The surviving bird has no mate, so for all intents and purposes that species is extinct.”

  “Isn’t that a shame.” Aunt Fe opened the oven door and looked inside. “I’m glad to see our bird’s not on the endangered list this year,” she said.

  My mother looked vaguely out the window. “Where has Edgar disappeared to?” she asked me.

  I found him on the back porch with Alec. Alec had a deck of cards and was showing him a trick. “Pick a card, any card,” he said.

  Edgar picked a card.

  “Now put it back in the deck without showing me.”

  Edgar did this as well.

  With a flourish, Alec shuffled the deck, then turned over the top card. “Is this your card, sir?” he asked.

  Edgar shook his head.

  Alec frowned and turned over the next one. “Perhaps this is the card you have chosen?” he asked.

  “No, it is not,” Edgar said.

  Alec began flipping over cards faster and faster. Jack of hearts, queen of spades, seven of diamonds, five of clubs.

  “No, no, a thousand times no,” Edgar said. He picked up his book and went inside. Alec followed him, but Edgar closed the screen door between them. “Before you ply your trade again, I suggest you master the sleight of hand required,” he told him.

  After Edgar left, Alec threw the pack of cards into the driveway. “What are you looking at?” he asked me. Then he went back inside too.

  I gathered up the cards and examined them. Some had small folds on the corners, and one was marked on the back with an X. After a while, Mary came out and sat beside me. It was time for dinner, she said. She tilted her head and looked at me critically. “You should brush your hair better,” she told me. “The part is crooked and it sticks out on the sides.”

  Grooming was important to Mary because she believed her portrait would one day appear on a dollar bill. The summer before, she had sent away in the mail for a kit to start her own country. Marydom, it was going to be called. It wasn’t ready yet because there was a lot of paperwork to do, she said.

  She took out a brush and ran it over my hair roughly. She brushed my ears and forehead too. Finally, she put it down. “I give up. You’re hopeless,” she told me. She went inside and I followed her. “There you are, silly girls,” my mother said.

  Before dinner, Aunt Fe said a blessing, even though my father asked her not to. He didn’t believe in blessings or in any kind of religion at all. It was just superstition, he said. But Aunt Fe insisted on saying grace because it was Thanksgiving. She closed her eyes and asked everyone at the table to tell something they were thankful for. There a long silence. Then Aunt Fe said she was thankful for the bounty of America. My mother was thankful for our family, and Uncle Pete was thankful that no one had given our turkey away. No one else was thankful for anything except for Mary, who muttered something about being treasurer of the fifth grade.

  My father seated Edgar at the kids’ end of the table, between Mary and me. As soon as he sat down, Mary wagged her finger at him. “I saw you,” she said. “You had your eyes open during grace.”

  Edgar didn’t answer. He took all his silverware off the table and wiped it carefully with the napkin in his lap.

  “I saw you,” Mary said again.

  Edgar stared at his plate. He cut his turkey into neat quarters and ate it. Then he ate his cranberry sauce, then his stuffing, then his roll. When all the other food was gone, he ate one miniature marshmallow and one yam.

  Mary poked him in the ribs. “Are you an orphan?” she asked.

  Edgar sighed. He put his head in his hands.

  “Is everything all right?” my mother called from her end of the table.

  “Just perfect, Mrs. Davitt,” he said.

  After dessert, Edgar excused himself. He thanked my mother for dinner and took his leave with a small bow.

  “He’s an odd duck, isn’t he?” my aunt said after he left. “And those shoes!”

  My mother sidestepped her and closed the door. “Edgar made those shoes himself,” she said.

  We went into the den to watch a tape of my uncle’s show. It was the season finale and no one had seen it yet. I sat up close to the TV with Alec. My father wandered in and out of the room, doing things. He bundled up the newspapers and took them outside. He changed a lightbulb and put away the mail. Then he oiled the place in the door that always caught. “Sit down. You’re driving everyone crazy,” my mother said.

  My father sat down on the window ledge away from everyone. He tossed a tennis ball back and forth from hand to hand. My uncle stood at the front of the room and introduced the tape. He showed us a picture of him shaking hands with the mayor of New York City. Then one of him kissing a beauty queen. Finally, he sat down and turned on the TV. “Here goes,” he said. “Remember, kids, let Mr. Science know what you think.”

  The theme music came on. There was a picture of the sun and then of an old man walking through a field of corn. The man had on overalls and a hat made of straw. He walked and walked without saying a word. Above him, the sky was a blinding blue. When the man reached the end of the field, he tore off an ear of corn and held it to the light. One side was bright yellow, but the other was spotted black. For a moment, I thought the man might cry, but he just threw the spotted corn back into the field. “Too much sun can be as harmful as too little,” my uncle said.

  Mary came over and sat beside me. “What’s this one about?” she whispered.

  “Corn,” I said.

  “It can’t just be corn. It has to be something educational.”

  “It’s just corn.”

  The question girl came out, carrying a steaming platter. My uncle took an ear of corn and bit into it delicately.

  “See,” I said.

  The question girl smiled and took the platter away. She was about my age and had curly blond hair that she wore piled
on top of her head like a queen. Two hundred kids had tried out for her part, but she had been picked because she’d explained the theory of relativity while twirling around on roller skates.

  The question girl stepped forward and began to speak in her smiling way. My uncle stood just outside the spotlight.

  ARE WE THE ONLY ANIMALS THAT GROW OUR OWN FOOD?

  Humans are the only animals intelligent enough to farm. Until the Neolithic Age, people lived as hunters and gatherers, often traveling great distances to find food. But then, around 8000 B.C., agriculture was invented. Experts believe that people in the Middle East were the first to discover that seeds from wild grains could be planted and harvested. This probably came about when a woman gathering food noticed that new shoots had grown from spilled grain. If it hadn’t been for the discovery of this sharp-eyed lass, we might still be following our dinner from place to place.

  The tape stopped. Everyone applauded. “Wait,” my uncle said. “That’s not the end.” He got up and fiddled with the TV; then he turned and saw my father with the remote control. “Okay, kid, what’s the problem?” he asked.

  My father cleared his throat. He rewound the tape a little ways. “Are we the only animals that grow our own food?” the question girl asked. “Humans are the only animals intelligent enough to farm,” my uncle said.

  My father paused the tape on the last word. “It’s just that, strictly speaking, that isn’t true,” he said. “There seems to be a small error in your research here.”

  My uncle got up and poured himself a drink. When he turned around, his face was red. He smiled at my father. “Care to explain what the hell you’re talking about, Jonathan?” he said.

  Aunt Fe put a hand on his arm. She gestured in our direction. Uncle Pete closed his eyes. “What the heck you’re talking about, I mean.”

  My father leapt up from his chair. He went to the bookcase and took down a book called The Big Book of Ants.

  “Ants!” my mother said happily.

  My father opened the book. His hands shook a little as he looked for the passage he wanted. “Ah, here it is,” he said and began to read.

  Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on their slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die.

  My father closed the book. “I just wanted to alert you, Peter. I thought it would save you the embarrassment of receiving corrective letters.” He held out the book, but my uncle waved it away.

  “I doubt even among my one million viewers there are many ant experts.”

  My mother laughed. “Oh, Jonathan’s hardly an expert. You’re the one who always says he never amounted to much.”

  My uncle got up and announced he was going for a walk. But as soon as he got outside, we heard the car start. It roared out of the driveway and into the street. My father mumbled something and shook his head. I wondered if my uncle might be communicating with him telepathically. Identical twins could do this I had read in The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained. Sometimes when my father was talking to my uncle he’d shake his head violently as if a message was coming through.

  The pause button on the TV went off and there was the sound of applause. Alec clicked through the channels one by one. He stopped on a commercial featuring a singing toilet seat and hummed along. “Don’t be an idiot,” Mary said.

  My mother went into the kitchen and I followed her. When my father passed by, she made a face at him. “Without them, they would die,” she said in her silly deep voice. My father laughed, holding his stomach. “Stop that,” he told her, but he didn’t mean it. Every time she said it, he laughed again.

  The day he proposed, my father took my mother to see King Tut’s tomb in Egypt. It was their first vacation together. For days beforehand, my father was so nervous he couldn’t eat. On the way to the airport, he fainted and ran off the road. My mother took the wheel and steered them to a stop. In the tall grass, my father lay with his head on the dashboard like a dead man. My mother took the ice from her drink and touched it to his wrists and neck. She pricked his fingers with a safety pin. When my father finally came to, he started the car and drove off without a word. Are you all right, my mother asked him. Just fine, my father said. They drove on in silence. Clouds of dust filled the air. Halfway to the airport, my father discovered his pinpricked hand. I thought I was dreaming, he said.

  In the Valley of the Kings, they waited in line for hours and he took a picture of her posed in profile like an Egyptian queen. Once inside, my mother tried to cut off a small piece of the mummy’s wrapping and set off an alarm. A guard came and escorted her into a back room. When they finally let her go, she was not allowed to keep the Band-Aid-sized piece of cloth she had snipped off with her sewing scissors. Later, beside the pyramids, my father got down on one knee and said, I want to marry you, Anna. You’re the only woman I’ve ever met who never bores me.

  Afterwards, my mother insisted they go dancing to celebrate. They found a little café at the end of a winding street. There was wine there and a small band. An old man taught my mother a complicated Egyptian dance. You are very beautiful, he said. My father sat alone at the bar, watching them. His feet were covered with blisters from the long walk to the pyramids. The band began to play faster, then faster still. My mother came over and took his hand. Dance with me, she said, and my father did. Later, at the hotel, when she took off his shoes, she was surprised to find them filled with blood.

  My mother had a scrapbook that she’d kept from the trip. On the first page was the picture of her as a queen, and a postcard she had saved from King Tut. The postcard showed a pile of gold jewelry and a mummified cat with a pink tongue. It was the sweetest thing you’ve ever seen, my mother always said about the cat. Once she told me about the curse that had befallen everyone who disturbed the king’s tomb. One of the explorers had had his canary devoured by a cobra the day after he unsealed the chamber. Another had died of an insect bite to the face. The night that this happened, the man’s dog, who was thousands of miles away, let out a terrible howl and dropped dead. But the worst was the very last. There was a woman explorer on the trip and she alone seemed to have escaped harm. Twenty years passed without incident. Then one morning she went up to the attic and hung herself with a piece of laundry line. The note she left behind said: “I have succumbed to a curse that has forced me to depart from this life.” This was my favorite part of the story and my mother indulged me by telling it again and again. “And to think,” she said, “that this woman was a scientist just like your father!”

  Sometimes I worried that the curse would fall on our family too. But my father said that this was just superstition. Superstition was when you believed in supernatural powers, I knew. It was crossing your fingers for luck or not stepping on a crack or going to church to pray for your soul.

  I had never been to church because my father had vowed to raise me a heathen. A heathen was a godless thing, my mother explained. In some parts of America, it was against the law to be one. On Sundays, I watched from the woods as the Christians drove by. The women had on dresses and the men wore dark suits. Sometimes I threw rocks at their cars and waited to see what God would do. Nothing much, it turned out.

  One of the cars that passed by every Sunday belonged to my teacher, Mrs. Carr. She always wore a hat and gloves and looked straight ahead as she drove. I was careful to hide behind the trees so she wouldn’t see me. I had an idea that she didn’t like to be watched. Sometimes when she wrote on the board, her fingers trembled violently. As soon as she sat down, she’d clasp them together and hide them beneath her desk.

  I was a
little afraid of her. She was so old her skin was transparent, and one of her eyes was clouded over like milk. My mother told me that she lived all alone in a dome-shaped house at the edge of the lake. Her husband had built it for her and it was supposed to be powered by the sun, but sometimes it didn’t work. When it rained, Mrs. Carr brought blankets and a pillow and slept in the nurse’s office at school. In her purse she carried a small radio so she could listen to the weather reports. “Shh,” she’d say, holding it to her ear. “I think there’s a storm front coming in.”

  Twice already that year, I had made her cry. Once when I stole her radio and once when I told her I didn’t believe in God. “What a terrible thing to say, Grace,” she said. “Don’t you realize you’re named after God’s greatest gift of all?” That night, when I asked my father if this was true, he called Mrs. Carr an ignorant fool. He threw down the paper and paced around the room. “Calm down, Jonathan,” my mother told him, but it was too late. Already he’d dragged the phone into the living room.

  I knew my father was going to call Mrs. Carr and read to her from his favorite book. The book was called Know Your Constitution! and my father carried it with him everywhere. This was the book he quoted from whenever he wrote to the newspaper.

  My mother got up from the table and closed the door. “Poor woman,” she said.

  In the next room, my father was yelling something. “Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the separation of church and state,” I heard him say.

  The next day my father gave me a copy of the book to give to Mrs. Carr. Don’t be tedious, Jonathan, my mother said, but he slipped it in my backpack anyway.

  When I gave her the book, Mrs. Carr frowned and put it away in a bottom drawer. I told her that I had been named after my mother’s aunt, who had red hair and choked on a biscuit when she was just twenty-one. “Is that so?” Mrs. Carr said.

  After lunch, she gave me back my “Ways to Be Safe” paper with red marks all over it. We were supposed to write about the policeman who had visited our school last week, but I had written about The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained instead. I told about the man in California who was struck dead when a hunk of meat fell from the sky, and the woman in Texas who burst into flames on top of a Ferris wheel. Also the baby in Oregon who was born half chicken, half boy, and pecked his mother to death.