Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “You have a dentist appointment?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then why…never mind,” he said. “You keep doing good at school, okay?”

  The doorbell rang. “Pizza’s here,” Ella said.

  “What kind did you get?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, have a piece for me, okay? Pepperoni.”

  “What if there’s no pepperoni? Josh likes sausage and Mom likes mushrooms.”

  Ella hated both these things and hoped perhaps her dad would remember and comment on the injustice. But he said, “Have a piece for me of whatever it is.”

  Ella nodded, which her father couldn’t see. Her mother paid for the pizza and, after putting it on the counter, reached for the phone. “Be careful,” Ella said to her father. “Don’t be naive or anything.”

  He laughed. “Okay, sweetie. Back atcha. Don’t be naive.”

  There was sausage and mushroom but also plain cheese, which wasn’t as good as pepperoni, but it was something. Josh’s friends began to arrive. Ella stood with her back to the wall so no one could make fun of Duncan Hines poking out of her backpack. “Take your pizza upstairs,” her mother said, handing her a grape soda, a paper plate, paper napkins. Ella was never allowed to take food upstairs.

  She carefully set the pizza on her bedroom floor next to the pile of animals. “There’s something I have to do,” she told them. “I’ll be back soon.” Downstairs, she could hear her mother chatting with the women dropping their sons off.

  Her mother’s laughter, or perhaps just the thudding of her mother’s heels on the cupboard, conjures Ella’s father up from the basement into the kitchen. They hear his footsteps starting at the bottom of the wooden stairs and wait for them to rise. His presence has long since ceased to be special. Ella is grateful only when she remembers to be. In church sometimes. At Thanksgiving dinner. He has left the Reserves and with the extra weekends he builds furniture. He has a workshop in the basement, loud saws that allow him to stay hidden and oblivious, that give him an excuse to say he never heard any boy at the door. Ella’s mother says he spends too much on tools, but he owns his own shop now, auto body and detailing, and there is enough money even for the saws.

  “How was the movie, sweetie?” he says, and Ella shrugs.

  “I finally met Liam,” her mother says.

  “Finally?” In Ella’s mind they’ve barely been together.

  “He’s perfectly nice. He was very gentlemanly.”

  The dough kneader, Ella thinks. His laughter. She looks balefully at the blender on the counter behind her mother, the cord coiled around it.

  “I was saying I could have brought out the baby pictures,” her mother says. “The Blanket.”

  “What blanket?” her father says. There were so many of these moments when he first came back, reminders of gaps that could be dodged or backfilled but never completely erased.

  “I thought you got rid of him,” Ella says. “That’s what you said, that he was making me too upset.”

  “Of course,” her mother says. “I forgot.”

  In the kitchen there is a long, awkward silence. Ella wishes Josh were here to throw something at somebody, to rip himself open accidentally. “So what did happen to him?” Ella asks. “Could you have brought him out?” Nine years and this is the first time she’s asked this question.

  “No,” her mother says. “No, I couldn’t. I didn’t think about it. It’s been a long time.”

  Ella’s father steals the soda out of her hand, trying to break the tension. He takes a long swig, asks what she’s doing having caffeine so close to bedtime. She looks at him, his effortful smile, pale dust on his jeans, wood shavings caught in his bootlaces. She remembers to be thankful. There was a time she could have lost him and she didn’t. Her story is not that kind of story. She can forget the way he hides downstairs, the way he sits inside of silences. She could throw her arms around him but doesn’t. She is not the little girl anymore who would do that, dance unselfconsciously on top of her father’s shoes. She is wearing flip-flops, and she kicks one off. She presses her right foot on top of her father’s boot, brief and light as a kiss, and hopes he understands.

  Ella turned the doorknob of her mother’s room and there, folded neatly beside the sewing machine on top of the dresser, was Blanket’s body. She screamed, and her mother came running to find her unfolding Blanket and pressing the hemmed, amputated edges to her lips. There was nothing familiar left. Blanket spilled limply in her arms. “He’s dead,” Ella said. “He’s dead.”

  “He can’t die,” her mother said. “He’s a blanket.”

  Of course he could die. He’d been dying already, unraveling into threads and dust and laundry detergent. But now he was like an old house burning to the ground before it could be allowed to collapse. Ella had failed to protect him. The mission had come too late. Her mother was a murderer, but so was she. Her mother took Blanket’s corpse from her, like maybe if she hid him, Ella would calm down, but Ella kept wailing, barely able to breathe, and her mother rubbed exasperated, angry circles on her back until Ella imagined the skin over her shoulder blades splitting like Josh’s arm.

  She woke up later in bed, in her nightgown, her throat aching and her eyelids gummy. Her mother sat on the floor in a cone of light from the bedside lamp. She was peering into her lap and did not look up to notice Ella had woken. Her mother looked warmer, softer, in the light from the pink lampshade. A small piece of metal with a sharp, curved point glinted in her hand. The house was quiet so it must have been very late, Josh and his friends exhausted and silent downstairs, the murder games concluded. Ella’s mother held Blanket up farther into the light, trying to undo the new stitches. But Blanket’s flesh was too fragile. Where she pulled, the old fabric gave way before the new thread. A hole opened up and another and another and her mother swore softly, pressed her hands together, crumpled the corpse. Ella said nothing, did not reach to touch her mother’s hands or head, so unusually low, at Ella’s eye-level. She looked at the part in her mother’s hair, the pale scalp and the tiny holes where the hair began. You’re naive, she thought. You’re very naive.

  This night would come back to her for years, feeling more and more like a dream. It came to her when her father returned, at the ceremony in a local gymnasium, balloons and confetti. It came to her when she talked to her brother before he left for basic training about that year their father was gone, and they realized they had completely different memories of that time. “I cut my arm on a BMX bike,” Josh said. “Not on the swing set.” Neither she nor Josh could recall how the story with the thief had ended. Growing up had been so far a great un-knowing, an erosion of the facts that had once seemed very clear and precious to her. Ella forgot, eventually, whether she really saw her mother crying on the floor trying to undo what was already done or whether she’d only wanted to see her mother crying. She forgot the rage and grief she felt, the satisfaction at her mother’s unhappiness. It was childlike but incandescent, furious, alight in a way she worries sometimes she’ll never be again. She wants to know if her parents have ever felt that way, but she doesn’t want to ask. All the possible answers are bad ones: That they never have, and she’s a little monster after all; or that they did once, but age leached it from them; or that adulthood holds such pain and rage that Ella knows nothing yet. That so much worse is still to come.

  That night in the kitchen, Ella decides she does not want to press the issue. She does not want to know one way or another if Blanket is still in a box somewhere in the house, if he ended up at the Goodwill or in the trash. After all, he’s been dead for years. She once thought that when she grew up she would be able to choose what she felt, one single, practical, voluntary feeling at a time. Naive, she thinks now. That was naive. She says good night to her parents, hugs them both, leans into her mother’s softness and her father’s sawdust and flannel, embarrassed by how eagerly they hold her. That night she dreams the memory, her mother white-draped an
d ancient, herself the child she’ll never be again. It no longer feels like a puzzle piece, a sharp corner or edge. It is a scalloped question that could fit anywhere. There is a chorus of whispers, ancient weaver women whose names were on that week’s mythology midterm: Penelope, Arachne, the three Fates—spindle, rod, knife. There is no blade that mends, they sing. Only the thread going forward. Only our readiness for the cut.

  On the Oregon Trail

  My husband, Elias, was a banker, so we left with more than most. A total of sixteen hundred dollars to spend at the outfitters—three yoke of oxen, two thousand pounds of food, boxes of bullets and spare parts: tongue, axle, wheel. Two sets of clothes for each of us.

  “What kind of clothes?” the children asked.

  “Who knows?” I said. “The store sold only ‘clothes.’ In sets, though. That’s something.” They asked what we would eat. “Food,” I said. “Just ‘food.’ Make your peace with it.”

  We left Independence in April and saw the first tombstone before we reached the Kansas River. Timmy, Susan, and Edgar, our children, ran to read it. Here Lies Stinky, it read. He Stinks.

  “That’s not very nice,” I said.

  “I bet Stinky does,” the children said. “Stink. Now he does, anyway.”

  The graves were endless: Toot, JoJo, Boogerface. Here Lies a Dork. The children had no sense of solemnity. They read them all, howling: Farty McButt Farts Oxen. Turd Is Dead HAHAHA. Only one bothered them, fifty miles east of Fort Kearney. TaraRoxx Died of Pooping, they read, then asked, “How do you die of pooping?”

  “It’s called dysentery,” I explained. This terrified the children, that too much poo could be deadly. Dysentery, they whispered to one another, the way they might once have said Werewolf back in Illinois, or Skunk-ape, or the way they said Indians those first nights on the trail. They tapped one another on the shoulders as we tried to sleep and hissed: Dysentery.

  The journey would take four months or five, people had told us. Leave too late and we wouldn’t make it over the mountains before winter. So we left too early and watched the snows turn to heavy rain. The Big Blue was running high but there was a ferry, fifty dollars to cross. We paid it. Caution was one thing our money could provide.

  Timmy went down with the typhoid three weeks in. We tried everything: moved slower, ate better. We rested for days and when he didn’t improve raced to Chimney Rock to rest there. We tried to trade, but there was no medicine to buy. There was never any medicine. Outside of Chimney Rock, the trail began to climb, the beginning of the Rocky Mountains. Timmy died outside Fort Laramie and we had to bury him next to someone named ChezyPizza.

  Elias started to hunt more after that, like he’d given up on ever reaching Oregon. It had been hare and buffalo on the plains, now squirrel and deer in the forest, bear if he got lucky. He shot wildly for days on end and the carnage was immense: Too much meat to carry back to the wagon. Too much meat that went sour in the heat days later. An embarrassment of flesh. For some reason Elias always left the skins, the fur and leather, the things we could have traded. “We can’t take them,” he said. “I don’t know why. We’re just not allowed.”

  August was boiling, even up in the mountains. The meat clotted in our mouths and I imagined my children turning into bears on this strange diet, sharp teeth and rank breath. They would growl and lumber and stink. But they would not be afraid, I thought. They would no longer whisper Dysentery and Typhoid in the shadows when the campfire went out. They’d begun to ask if we could just turn around, or build a house where we stood. “We can’t,” I told them. “Are you familiar with Manifest Destiny?” If the journey had been educational, all they’d learned were the harms that could befall them: the storms, the diseases, the drownings, the wagon wrecks, the broken limbs.

  The Green River, drained by the heat, was running low. Wagon after wagon forded it easily before us, and we were nearly across when one of the oxen slipped. Two hundred fifty pounds of food, three sets of clothing, a wheel and an axle, eight boxes of bullets, and Edgar. We didn’t leave a headstone; we’d lost the heart for it. We needed to trade for an axle but days passed until someone asked for something we owned. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you want?” we begged them all. “Can we just show you what we have? Can we pay you in cash?”

  “Your money’s no good,” they said. “Just isn’t. Only works at general stores and rivers.”

  At Fort Hall, the new axle broke, and broke again, and we paid someone a hundred and fifty bullets and three sets of clothing for another. We would have been left traveling naked were there not fewer of us now to clothe. We paid the Indians at the Snake River to guide us across; what was our money worth now? Nothing, if we never made it to our destination. Even if we did, some clerk would total our account in Oregon City and say, Not too impressive, considering what you left with. Did you know there are farmers who do it with eight hundred dollars?

  The trail was an evil joke in the miles to Fort Boise. Susan, our last, ate berries she’d found and made herself sick. When we let her ride in the wagon, she fell off and broke her ankle. She got the measles next. We rested for days, as if rest could heal her. It was all we could do. Wagon after wagon passed us. “You’d best get on,” they said. “Winter’s coming.” We stayed where we were and Susan died anyway.

  Now childless, we traveled as fast as we could, trying to make up lost ground. One ox died from the pace. Another died in the first blizzard of the year. A third died for lack of forage after the snow fell. In another life, I thought, this might be funny. We crawled to Oregon City with fifteen pounds of food, two sets of clothing, and a dying ox. There was a last stretch of river we had to travel, the wagon a caulked rectangle.

  We capsized. Elias hit his head on a rock and drowned. The ox made it across along with exactly twelve of our bullets and three pounds of food. I traded them all for clothes enough to cover me. The bystanders who fished me out of the river told me not to feel sorry for myself. “You made it,” they said. “You’ve won.”

  I thought then of the general store in Fort Laramie months ago when we had money still, but Elias had wanted to barter. “Why did you kill so much?” the trader asked, wrinkling his nose at the nearly spoiled meat.

  “I don’t know,” Elias said. “I am driven. I am forced. I am spurred to do these things that make no sense.”

  “I’m sorry about your little ones,” the trader said.

  “‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods,’” Elias said. “‘They kill us for their sport.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?” the trader asked.

  “Don’t mind my husband,” I said. “He was a banker. He’s had more education than’s been good for him. Who ever knows what he’s on about?”

  It was a disloyal thing to say, I feel now. I knew exactly what Elias meant, and I loved that he knew lines of Shakespeare. He had recited me love sonnets once, back in Illinois, when we were young and green. Greener than grass, greener than the treetops in the damp Willamette. The valley spread beneath me when I finally made Oregon. Greener than this, God, I thought. What were we thinking, and why did You make us? What business did a banker have shooting bears?

  All Over with Fire

  Thereza told him to call her Jenny, her English name, the name she once chose from a list in a school textbook.

  “Can I call you Theresa?” George bargained. “Tess?”

  Thereza shook her head. “I’m just—Jenny, in English. Jenny, when I’m with you.” She smiled and squeezed his leg under the table. The Hostinec U Kocoura had wide wooden tables, and her hand did not reach farther than his knee.

  George wondered if this meant that Thereza was really someone else entirely, someone she did not wish him to know or speak with or touch. “Who were you in Russian class?”

  She’d never taken Russian, she said. It wasn’t required anymore by the time she was old enough to enroll.

  “And you didn’t choose to take it?”

  “Why would I? Losers la
nguage.”

  George tried to hear where an apostrophe might be, whether there was a single loser or many. Was Thereza making a sweeping statement of national superiority or did she consider speaking Russian a more personal failure, like picking one’s nose in public?

  “What if I asked you to call me Jiři? That’s the Czech version of George, right? My landlord told me.”

  “You can’t even pronounce it properly. You are not allowed to have a name you can’t pronounce.”

  George wanted to volley the serve, but her pronunciation of Jenny was aggressively correct, the English J bouncing like a hard rubber ball each time she said it. “Then who is this Jenny person?”

  “She drinks tea,” Thereza said, wrapping her fingers around her glass of beer as if to conceal the contents. “She eats biscuits and says, ‘How do you do?’ just like she learned in her lessons.”

  “And who is George?” George asked her.

  “I think he has a big American house, with a yard for the children to play in, and a car he drives every day to work. He has a dog that is yellow and happy. So American! I think he has a wife too—but maybe she is not so happy.”

  “The kids are both away at college, and the dogs are brown. Two mutts.”

  “And the wife?”

  “Oh, she’s happy sometimes. Just not with me.”

  Thereza finished her beer and returned the glass to the table with a hard thunk. “Would you like if I took you sightseeing tomorrow? I am a good guide. When I was a student I worked at the castle, giving tours.”

  “I’d like that very much,” he said. As they parted ways at her tram stop, she leaned in and kissed George on the tip of his nose. He wondered if she’d simply mis-aimed or whether she’d meant to confuse him. After all, he’d thought he was going on a dinner date with Thereza Lenhártova and she’d turned out to be a Jenny. Bait and switch.