The Physics of Imaginary Objects (Pitt Drue Heinz Lit Prize) (9 page)

Experts Recommend the Missionary Position

When they make love, Jake lights incense from Tibet. Mercy wears her kimono with the embroidered rabbit. To know it is the proper time, she uses a digital thermometer made in Germany. She places a dense Swedish foam pillow under her hips. The sheets are antique linen bought in Paris; they are worn thin from years of loving and washing on the part of a French farmer and his wife. Waiting on the bedside table is a pot of tea, the leaves harvested in Africa, packaged in cheap pastel paper boxes labeled with the names of ailments, and located in the grocery store's natural foods section. The rug is from Iran, the bookshelf from West Virginia. The condoms Jake used were made in Canada and have maroon wrappers; now, they linger in his sock drawer like love letters. The white-noise machine has many components, some from Mexico, some from Taiwan. Next to the teapot is a small fat rock that they found on a beach in Texas. Afterward, Mercy lies still and listens to the Williams-Sonoma egg timer tick off the minutes with metallic pings; this is the sound of hope. Under the bed: months of dust. It is bad luck to sweep there when trying to call a child home. It is bad luck to throw anything out.

Why Mercy Makes Hats

The mystery of them—the old-time tilt and shadow. Black netting casting constellations over noses and cheeks. The fedora's come-hither modesty, the pillbox's nod to convention. Her grandfather owned a millinery shop in Des Moines sixty years ago. He had a blond-ringletted girl front for him, and he ordered hats and gloves from New York and San Francisco. They came in paper-board boxes cushioned in pink-tinted newsprint, smelling chemical, festooned with small hard fruits that popped white foam if pressed too hard. During the war, when the hats were all plain straw and skimpy felt, he ran a black market in silk stockings, which he kept under the counter in industrial-sized rat poison tins. His customers would kiss him thanks—waxy, crimson prints that earned him eye-rolls and gelid roast beef at home. The store folded in the late sixties, and he folded soon after, when Mercy was just a child, hardly old enough to remember his stories, the boater he constructed of blue typing paper, the lethal dust that sifted from a stretch of silk.

They Say Love the Skin

The sidewalk outside the coffee shop is littered with handbills promoting garage bands and diet supplements. Sometimes Jake is so quiet, especially in the car, that Mercy wants to run into something just to get a reaction. Her friend Morris says he spent his Saturday night hunting down cough syrup for his son. He went to three drugstores with the child strapped in his car seat, wheezing angrily. “The doctor said only brands without dextromethorphan.” Mercy brushes a beetle off her napkin. Its wings open, glossy and iridescent, as it drifts to the table leg. “And then he won't touch anything grape-or cherry-flavored. Three years old and he already knows his own mind.” Morris tells how he left the child in the car, shuddering with phlegm and weariness, while he went into each store. He says people were giving him dirty looks, but what do they know about a sick child. At the last drugstore, the one where he finally found the right medicine, bubble-gum-flavored, a man in an Army jacket stopped him on his way in. He asked Morris to buy him Evan Williams and knew exactly how much it cost. He had it in coins. “He said they didn't want him coming in there anymore.” Mercy sees the way her life is going to go: coffee with friends, silent car rides, plucking stray hairs from her face, shopping trips to large cities. Morris hits the table with the flat of his hand. “I bought for him, of course. I bought for him.”

September Nights, the Sky Blushes

Mercy reads the web forums moderated by female nurses and fertility experts with porn star names: Tiffany Titus, R.N., Ginger Mellon Bonaparte C.N.M. They are having a spate of what used to be called Indian summer. Even with the windows open and fans roaring, the house is steamy. Weeds are rotting in the drainage ditches, and by mid-afternoon, there is a haze in the air, stagnant clouds sifting down. The liveliest thread on the websites is about “motility issues.” “Have hubby take a cold shower thirty minutes before sex.” “Have hubby drink a cup of coffee—give the spermies a boost!” Baby talk for the childless. Mercy and Jake take turns watering the grass, clusters of gnats sticking to their knees. They have become superstitious about pleasure. She has spent hundreds of dollars on lingerie in the last eight months; the snap of elastic makes her think of her credit card. The weatherman is perpetually saying that this is the hottest year on record. At night, in the dark bedroom, sweat rises at the smallest touch. Mercy hangs her satin corsets and filmy underwear on the clothesline in the corner of the backyard, where they bulge and twist with the barometric pressure, as if trying to seduce the air.

Mercy and Jake Fight in the Kitchen

He leans against the sink. She sits on the lip of the cabinet that holds the good china. Neither one of them ever bothers to polish the silver. He has just come back from a run and is shirtless, skin swelling from heat and salt. His nipples are perfectly aligned, only slightly darker than his skin, wrinkled like eyelids squeezed shut. The dog eats its food without looking up. These are long, happy fights. Jake says, “Her hair is clearly red; how can you not see that?” Mercy says, “The plot wasn't even consistent.” They switch positions mid-argument. Mercy chops carrots; Jake scoops out the rice. He levels the grains in the metal measure with his fingertips. They listen to Billie Holiday or the evening news as they cook. A little sadness makes the water boil faster. Another forest fire, a mudslide, an earthquake. A suicide bomber in a hotel pool. An air strike on a wedding party. When the flour tips off the counter onto the linoleum, their footprints materialize like magic, ghost steps, a diagram for dancing.

A Season of Darkened Parlors

This is the year of nine hurricanes. Mercy loves the whole system of it, the alternating names that transform the storms into petulant cousins or strange great-aunts and -uncles, the visitors who will not leave. She would not be so sanguine if she didn't live halfway across the country where the storms peter out in flurries of rain and hail. As a teenager, Mercy read only tales of true love and stigmata stories. She Googles “hurricane names,” finds the FEMA-for-kids website, and is happy to live in a country that packages disaster for children. In dreams, faceless lovers and mysterious wounds still appear—fantasies of being chosen. She learns that only women's names were used for hurricanes until 1979. She learns that the list for Atlantic hurricanes may include French, Spanish, and English names. There is no explanation of which languages may be drawn upon for Pacific hurricanes. The romances she has given up, but she can't resist a good stigmata. On the satellite photo, a hurricane is an ephemeral thing, a veil of spinning mist. Sergio, Olaf, and Georgette. Flossie, Seymour, and Wallis. Visions of silent-film stars and bingo nights. Recently departed distant relatives summoned as if in séance, safe in a circle of clasped hands.

Mercy Employs Three Women with the Names of Saints

Catherine B., Catherine P., and Bridget crimp and sew and harden hat forms all day in a rented storefront downtown next to the bank. They are thirty years older than Mercy and call her
honey pie
or
sweetpea
when they are angry. They wear gasmask-like filters when they work with fixatives or fire-retardant. Mercy tells them her troubles; the buzz of the sewing machine loosens her tongue. One day, the mayor stops by on his tour of local businesses, and the Catherines fuss over him and force him to eat a brownie. Bridget ignores him because of the zoning decision that allowed a Walgreens to be built at the corner of her neighborhood. From her office upstairs, Mercy hears Catherine B.'s seal laugh and smells acrid whiffs of sizing and scalded coffee. She provides them with health insurance and Christmas bonuses and a refrigerator stocked with Diet Coke. They give her advice-column stories of surprise babies and chocolate-flavored calcium chews. They are hopeful and resigned at the same time. They get calls on their cell phones from their grown-up, moved-out children and their retired husbands that involve phrases like
cream of mushroom soup
, and
the third time's the charm
, and
it was there yesterday.

At the Grocery Store, Mercy Selects the Super-Sized Bag of Corn Chips

It is autumn and late at night and the moon is shriveling like a mum. Mercy buys olives, soda water, bright red pistachios. She has cravings; sometimes she licks salt off her index finger if there is nothing else in the house. The store is air-conditioned and fluorescent. There is a frost warning for tonight. Mercy and Jake wrapped their shrubs with burlap, and now it looks like a row of decapitated heads rings their house. The sliding doors at the front of the store whisper. Mercy has a hard time triggering automatic things—doors, faucets, towel dispensers. She spends a good portion of her time in public waving her hands at electronic eyes. In the fish section, the banks of ice are barren. The salad bar is lidded and dark. An old woman in a motorized cart is parked in the produce area. “There is no cilantro,” she says plaintively. Mercy weighs limes in her palm. “There is no cilantro,” the woman says again, this time as if in warning. Mercy brushes her fingertips across the paper skins of garlic, lifts a cantaloupe to sniff. Don McLean serenades the wide aisles. Somewhere, loaves of bread are rising.

The Catherines Sew Grandchildren's Costumes on Their Breaks

“Please not the fake fur,” Mercy says. “We just had those machines oiled.” Felt pumpkins, candy corn onesies, Red Riding Hood with ruffled panties—things to be gobbled. This is how the Catherines talk about the babies, as delicacies. “I just want to eat him up,” they say. And, “Her hand is so perfect, I could bite it off.” Hungry, aggressive grandmother love. Mercy knows the feeling, the ache in the jaw at the sight of a plump baby, the urge to chew and chew until that sweet thing is a part of her. When she was a teenager, they set up an X-ray at the mall on Halloween; kids in plastic skeleton outfits peered into the monitor at their ghost candy, waited for a needle or razor blade to fluoresce. Jake buys the most lumpish pumpkins he can find, the underrepresented pumpkins. Halloween night, they have few visitors. Their house is old and dark with a tipping porch, set back from the street. Morris comes with his son, who is dressed as a caterpillar or a leech. Mercy and Jake give him too much candy and go back to the doorway with their Tupperware bowl of packaged offerings, hoping their friendly silhouettes will draw the children. It's a pastoral scene: the scent of cider doughnuts and burning leaves, hollowed squash blackened by leftover citronella tealights, recorded moans blowing across the yard on wisps of nylon spiderweb. Miniature gods and demons drift down the street, demanding their empty sacks be filled.

Mercy and Morris Visit the Newly Painted Water Tower

It used to be striped rusty red and white, tea-stained and molting over the town. The pale blue paint makes the tower fade into the sky, and the town's name, stenciled in large black script, seems to float unmoored overhead. Morris's car is filled with burger wrappers and cases of generic diet cola. Mercy nudges a sock under the floor mat. Morris has been divorced a year; his beard is unkempt and he clutches her shoulder whenever he makes a joke. The scaffolding is still up on the north side of the tower. “Let's climb,” Morris says. The layers of paint are lumpy on the cold rungs and her sandals slip before catching. Once they reach the top, the town is spilled before them, so quiet that she hears the courthouse clock hiccup before it chimes the half hour. She hiccups too, suddenly absurdly aware of time's passing. Morris puts his hand on her shoulder. “It's nothing,” she says. They eat lunch in the car. Morris takes a carton of cut-up vegetables and a shaker of salt substitute out of a paper sack. Mercy has a bagel and a child-sized yogurt for which she has forgotten a spoon. He crunches away at half of a red pepper, and she thinks how bitter-sweet it is, the belief in self-improvement.

The First Real Snow of the Season Comes on Thanksgiving

The streets disappear, and Jake and Mercy hole up in the house watching the sci-fi channel. That evening, they unearth the snowshoes from the garage and head toward dinner at Jake's department chair's house. They take the shortcut over the golf course, leaning into each other as they slip down hills, and come out on the main street almost directly across from Mercy's shop. The electricity has held, and her hats glow in the window display like alien spacecraft, quivering in the draft. Other people are out on their snowshoes as well, whole families with babies bundled into carriers and dogs bobbing in the drifts. There is a carnival atmosphere, the scent of woodsmoke and roasting bird, the carrion yells of the children flinging snowballs. Jake takes her hand; the warmth radiates as if they are holding the heart of a small animal between them. When they get to the house, they unpack Ziplocs of nutmeg-scented mashed sweet potatoes from Jake's bag, their contribution, along with a bouquet of icicles pilfered from the bus shelter's overhang, sharp as knives, already melting.

Where Mercy Goes on Her Lunch Break When She Feels the Need to Escape

In the medical park next door there is a Japanese garden in the atrium. Koi swim in a black plastic pond surrounded by philodendrons. She imagines herself on Mount Koya, the smell of cedar, the saffroned monks. Sick children have stolen the rocks from the Zen garden; people have put out their cigarettes in it. The plants are dusty and neglected, and the miniature trees have outgrown their shapes. In the corner is a lovely green-tiled fountain, topped by a perplexed Buddha. Mercy meditates to its plashing and the ding of the elevator. People file in coughing and file out rustling prescriptions and sample packets. Her favorite fish is the white one with pink blotches that flails out of the water periodically to ram the other fish as if angry with the world. She loves this forgotten garden, the surly fish, the elevator behind her grinding its vertical path, a string of chakras spinning, the way it flings its doors open each time it returns, even if nobody waits.