Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

by Carole Firstman

  Silence, then the faint sound of something ruffling against the receiver on the other end. Click. Charlotte again, no doubt.

  “Who?” I said into the disconnected line. “Donald? No Donald here. You must have the wrong number. Uh-huh. You too.”

  Forty-Eight

  My father still watched me, stiff-shouldered in the wingback chair with his hands folded across his stomach, flashlight wedged between his knees should I require more reading light, butterflies tacked to the wall above him.

  The letter rambled about what my grandfather did for a living, where the family lived, how many degrees my dad got in college, yadda, yadda, yadda. And then:

  Sandy, dear, please understand that I am not trying to pry into your personal life. I believe that you made the right marriage decisions, and I respect them. It’s just that I love you deeply; forever and beyond forever.

  Not I’ve remembered you fondly all these years, or I’m writing now because I came across your photo and wondered if you would still remember me. No. It’s a goddamn I love you fucking deeply, for fucking beyond forever.

  Here we go again, I thought. And we still had Charlotte to deal with.

  You see, if this had been a one-time deal, it wouldn’t have been be so bad. But my father’s behavior ensures that the pattern will repeat. All the time, over and over. If it’s not one woman, it’s another. And it’s constant. Some think he’s charmingly dorky. Some get creeped out. Some marry him. Others take advantage of him. I suspect Charlotte started as the former type (“What a charming old man!”) then morphed into the latter (“This old fart’s practically begging to be ripped off, so why not me?”).

  Okay, okay. I know I need to calm down. I’m going off the deep end here. I mean, this is textbook Psych 101 stuff, right? Father pushes daughter’s buttons (even though he’s unaware he’s doing so), and daughter totally overreacts. But why does this make me so crazy?

  “Maybe you could not stare at me right now,” I said to my father across the coffee table.

  Don’t ask me simply to forget you. I could no more forget you than I could forget myself, or my God. God knows, I have loved you this way for over half a century.

  Get ready:

  You are more precious to me than the air I breathe. You are more beautiful to me than sunlight on spring greenery; more magnificent than moonlight on the snow-covered Sierras. You are the most beautiful of all possible beautiful women;your precious beating heart is the prime mover of my entire cosmos. You are the epitome of creative perfection.

  You see? This is exactly why I get all antsy at Save Mart. At any moment, the counting of Susan B. Anthony coins could change shape, turn into “precious beating heart.” Things can get out of hand at any time, any moment.

  Next sentence:

  Since the beginning of the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, you are the definitive actualization of the goal of cosmic evolutionary history.

  Okay. His Big Bang spiel I’d heard a million times.

  Yes, there is more cosmic evolutionary history forthcoming. In the end we shall all be sublimely beautiful angels in the presence of God.

  But angels in the presence of God? Never.

  No one can begin to comprehend how beautiful eternity will be. In our ethereal non-physical bodies we will be able to fly through space faster than the speed of light. We will explore the entire cosmos with its hundreds of billions of stars, and hundreds of billions of galaxies each with hundreds of billions more stars.

  He’d cycled through several religions during his life, called himself many things—Jewish, Fundamentalist Christian, Christian Scientist—but for the last thirty years or so, atheist. No angels, no God, no temple, no church, no Santa Claus, no Christmas gifts, no Easter baskets, no Hanukkah dreidels. The first year he lived down the street from me in Visalia, we all bought him Christmas gifts (I gave him a book, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time). He didn’t give a single gift, not even to his two young granddaughters, with whom he lived in the same house. The second year, he announced at Thanksgiving dinner, “By the way. I’m not buying anyone any gifts this year because I just bought myself fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of educational DVDs from The Teaching Company. I’m broke now and I can’t afford to buy gifts. So don’t get me anything. I don’t believe in Christmas anyway.”

  I can hear the waiter calling me: “Bitter, party of one, your table’s ready.”

  Please tell me where your interests lie...

  You never ask about my interests, I thought.

  You live in wine country; perhaps you are owners of a winery in Santa Clara County.

  A)Delusional speculation.

  B) At what point would this woman feel she’s being stalked?

  How much travel have you done, either with Gary or with Samuel? My travels have been limited to Mexico and Canada.

  When my father and I had traveled to Mexico back in 1994, the let’s-get-reacquainted road trip to the desert caves of Cataviña, I understood that if we remained estranged, if he were to pass without my knowing him, without my having established new terms of engagement, adult to adult, I would later and forever mourn a missed opportunity. I would always wonder what made him tick. The thing is, though, to understand someone—to know where his interests lie—can be a risky deal. We don’t always like what we find. Or you may discover that you are not where his interests lie. Or maybe he’s interested, but he doesn’t express it in a way you can relate to. Maybe he simply lacks common social skills. Or maybe he’s downright self-centered.

  But still, oh, so vulnerable, too:

  I do a lot of imaginary traveling by watching the Science, National Geographic, and Discovery channels.

  As I sat on the sofa reading the letter, part of me felt sorry for him. I thought, Why does he need to reach so far back into his past to this person? Why does he bare his soul like this?

  Do you and Samuel and your kids enjoy television? How many languages have you mastered? I know you majored in French. What other languages can you speak? For my part, it’s only English and Spanish with fluency, and with Rosetta Stone, I am trying to master German, and perhaps Yiddish.

  While this letter crosses so many lines of decorum—its inappropriateness spans the galaxy—doesn’t my father want what all of us want? To know and be known. And here I am, dissecting my father’s love letter, splaying his words and my reaction for others to see. What does that say about me? It means I want you—the reader—to know what I know. I want to be known, too. When my father asks Sandy, “What other languages do you speak?” I’m not sure if that’s because he’s interested in her answer, or if that’s merely a segue for him to share something about himself.

  I remember one of the letters I would later find in my father’s office while snooping through his stuff, around the time I stole his scorpion:

  April 4, 1977

  Dear Rolf,

  ...I’ve been sort of depressed lately because it seems to me that I haven’t accomplished anything important in my career as a professor. When I was your age I thought that by the time I was my age I would either be dead or else a world-famous zoologist. Well, I’m 48 and still alive and nobody.

  As I read my father’s letter to his friend Rolf now, I’m close to the same age my father was when he pounded out those words on his Underwood typewriter. We hope our life adds up to something—has meaning and value. But what satisfaction can we derive from the mediocre accomplishments—not the big-potato Nobel Prize accomplishments, but the smaller ones, like mastering Yiddish or German—if we have no one to share our life with, no one to respond to that German phrase you memorized and rehearsed? What if your daughter is so weary from the mental acrobatics she performs during her interactions with you that she has no energy to stay and watch National Geographic together?

  Sitting in the dim living room with a manila folder in my lap, I wasn’t sure if I should be shocked on Sandy’s behalf—if I should intervene to lessen the fallout should my father take the letter-writing
to the next level (Will she be offended? Scared? Will her children read this and decide to take advantage of the old coot? Will he drive across the state and knock on her door?), or if I should congratulate him for locating an old friend (Perhaps she’ll be flattered).

  This is why I come unglued at the Save Mart checkout. At the bank. The AT&T store. Marie Callender’s. This letter, all that it represents, past and present, bears its full weight upon the double-helix suspension bridge tethering me to my father. The bridge sags, drops to the floor, and buries the line that separates us.

  My major interests are cosmology and evolution. At Cal Poly University my principal teaching responsibilities were biological evolution (on the sophomore level) and developmental biology (=embryology) for pre-professional students. Evolution and embryology are compatible subjects because they’re both about process. For me, Evolution is another word for Creation. Please write to me.

  Best regards,

  Bruce Firstman

  “You can’t send this,” I said. “Tell me you haven’t mailed it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s inappropriate.” What an insufficient word, inappropriate. His lifetime of inappropriate behavior caught up to me at that moment. And here I am, still going apeshit over one more stupid letter, one more stupid assumption, one more breach of social decorum. And because I’m overreacting to my father’s eccentricities—I mean really, he’s not hurting anyone, and he’s not doing anything that bad—I’m the one who looks stark, raving mad. I’m the lunatic. I’m the out-of-control daughter who overanalyzes an old man’s heartfelt letter to his long-lost friend. I’m so embarrassed—I know better than to do this. What’s wrong with me that my father can still stir up all this drama in my head?

  He grunted and smiled through clenched teeth. His head wobbled left to right like one of those cartoonish dolls you adhere to the dashboard with a suction cup.

  “It’s too much. It sounds creepy. What will her husband think?”

  “I don’t know why that matters. Here,” he said, handing me one of the enlarged photos from Kinko’s. “The face of perfection.”

  Forty-Nine

  Later, after calming down, I wondered whether the perfection my father saw in Sandy’s image was really a reflection of himself. Perhaps he recognized parts of himself in her photograph, aspects worthy of adoration, worthy of divine inclusion. I suppose he’d fallen in love with the idea of this woman, a smooth countenance untarnished by age and experience and opinions of her own, adoring eyes gazing expectantly into the camera’s shutter, eager to know him, appreciate him, understand him. But he never really knew her—so how could he love the person that young woman had become some fifty years later? I suppose my father was lonely, in need of a soul mate, a companion with whom he could share the rest of his days here on earth, and whom he might find again after his death. When he talked in his letter about being “sublimely beautiful angels in the presence of God...able to fly through space faster than the speed of light,” I think I understand this version of immortality he yearned for, in spite of the purple prose and dubious theology. Don’t we all want to live forever? Don’t we hope for something more, something bigger than our earthly selves? Maybe that’s why we invent creation stories—if we can figure out where we came from, perhaps we can figure out where we’re going. If we once staggered shamefully out of an intelligently designed garden (remember the song my father sang, the record I scratched: I’d like to build the world a home and furnish it with love, grow apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtledoves...), then maybe there’s a chance we’ll return again. Or, if we emanated from a cosmic explosion, then perhaps our atoms, once they’ve dissolved, will crash again, detonate anew, and “fly through space faster than the speed of light.”

  The face of perfection.

  My own petty jealousy crouches inside a tiny box buried in my chest (it sits alongside the ring-sized box of panic from the day I swam the Amazon). It pushes against the lid, threatens to spring forth like a demented jack-in-the-box. Why shower the stranger in this old photograph—and other strangers, too—with unconditional adoration? Why not my mother, when she was your young wife, nineteen years old with a newborn baby, living in a tent in the backyard? Why not your daughter on her eleventh birthday when she handed you a gift, the songbird T-shirt? A bar of soap? Really? I still carry the tune of that certain song in my head: I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to hold it in my arms and keep it company. And I still carry the secret with me, that I was the one who scratched your record the morning after you returned from your night on the town. I rubbed my finger into the record because I didn’t know how to express my jealousy, my bitterness over your physical absence the night before, your emotional absence that morning and every preceding day of my life.

  How could that be? I checked it in the store.

  I don’t know.

  The face of perfection.

  As I sat on the couch across from my father, reading his soul-baring letters to an unearned and unrequited love, the paper butterflies on the wall behind him seemed to swarm around his head, flapping their paper wings like bone-dry laundry broken free from the line, whirling furiously through the desert winds of San Vicente. I recalled the night my father and I watched the meteor shower in the courtyard of the Mexican motel, and how he lectured about the Big Bang and the origins of the universe, how he explained the cosmos in a way that accounted for me, a Carole-centric universe where atoms crash, then dissolve, then reassemble again. The universe, life on Earth—scorpions, butterflies, people—continually shifts from one shape to another, either gradually, like Darwin’s theory of adaptation, or suddenly, like Gould’s spin on punctuated equilibrium theory. It’s the same for relationships between people, too—our connections shift, our circumstances change, our needs evolve—sometimes slowly, sometimes in an instant. But here’s the thing: beneath the glow of the meteor shower that night in the desert, my father remained oblivious to the domestic life buzzing around us—men sharing a laugh as they leaned against an open pickup truck, women hanging laundry on the line. In contrast, I was interested in him, and in the children kicking a soccer ball against the courtyard’s cinderblock wall, and the fact that I had become a real-life version of the fictional Holly from Land of the Lost, living a real-life adventure to recover lost time and familial experiences. Searching for my lost father.

  To my dismay, the woman replied to his initial letter and many letters thereafter. They corresponded for several years—I guess precious beating heart doesn’t bother everyone like it does me. She kept her letters quite brief, rather impersonal, and she specifically told my father several times that she was happily married, did not want to be contacted by phone, and had no interest in meeting up. I don’t know if it was on the day my father first showed me the letters or sometime after, but eventually he would show me where he often kept his folder of correspondence and photos: on his pillow at night, so he could imagine her at his side.

  The afternoon I sat on my father’s couch with the face of perfection in my lap, I didn’t know that a few years later he would call me from Mexico to say he’d decided to stay forever. I didn’t know he’d say into the phone, “I don’t have long for this world. I need you to ship me some things.” When he rattled off the list of things he wanted to me to send—his Great Lectures DVD collection from The Teaching Company, his Encyclopedia Britannica set, odor-free garlic tablets, and five pairs of leather shoes—he also requested the manila folder containing his correspondence to and from Sandy Lynn Milmoe and the photocopies of her black-and-white portrait. “I have the original photograph here with me,” he would say on the phone, “but I need the enlarged copies, too. I don’t sleep well here in Mexico. I need you to send me the whole folder.”

  Fifty

  (2013)—

  He has the folder.

  What he doesn’t have is the butterfly painting, the former nucleus of his butterfly montage. I kept it for myself. It han
gs on my living room wall now. Not long after he moved to Mexico and asked me to send some of this favorite belongings—not long after I stole the scorpion from his desk and ravaged his filing cabinets—he called again, telling me he had forgotten about a certain painting he’d left at the framing shop, and that I should pick it up for him. The butterfly.

  From where I often sit on my favorite corner of the couch, my gaze settles on two paintings that hang alongside each other on my living room wall: the butterfly, painted by my father, and a purple lady, painted by my mother some four decades later, sometime around 1995. The two paintings are diametrically opposed in every way possible: subject, medium, technique, style, and intent.

  The butterfly, a meticulously detailed and accurate rendition of a Western Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio rutulus) native to North America—including Baja, Mexico, where we frequently traveled as a family during my early childhood, and California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, where my father and I often hiked while he lived in my neighborhood—could pass as a scientific illustration in a biology textbook. The butterfly itself is one-dimensional, void of foreground and background, and there is no use of shading to create depth or perspective. The viewer of the painting peers straight down—through a microscope or magnifying glass, perhaps—onto a specimen long flattened between two glass slides. I wonder how my father achieved such anatomical perfection. I imagine he projected a photograph via slide projector onto the wall, then traced the details onto paper, creating a color-by-number diagram that could be filled in and layered with acrylic paint. I suppose it was a tedious job, one that took him several weeks, perhaps months.

  On the contrary, my mother’s watercolor painting is a freeform, rather abstract version of my great-grandma Grace, a craggy-faced woman wearing a purple dress and a red hat, her ruby lips pursed at the arch of a permanent scowl. On the realism-abstraction spectrum, I’d say the old woman, while leaning toward abstraction, certainly, sits somewhere near the middle of the continuum. Her jowls protrude at a sharp angle and span wider than her forehead, one shoulder concaves to the armpit, and both arms trail into the ether just above the elbow like a ghost summoning the energy to complete its manifestation. The perspective, though, creates depth: the woman’s nose, breasts, right arm, the turn of her head, the angle of her torso. A certain realism in perspective compensates for the watery scrawls, overlapping scribbles, and patchy globs of acrylic.