The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (13 page)

“I would like to propose a toast!” her father shouted, and his voice sprayed into the cluster of lipsticked women and dispersed them, leaving Lydia alone on the slate patio, breathless, giggling, quite alive.

“This toast may sound grand,” he said, “but forgive me.” He was standing taller than them all, raising a mug of beer that had long ago lost its frost (though three more sat in the freezer), and seemed a little bit surprised that everyone had turned so quickly to listen, leaving his daughter and her dance behind. He was used to others listening—he was a professor, a commander of attention, an old ham— still, it left him silent for a second as Lydia, covered in kisses, watched. His daughter loved him, how he was larger than any other man in sight, left a silhouette against any sky, how he never twitched or fidgeted like other adults, how he was bold with her mother, how at night sometimes he whispered his scientific German to her while she was on the edge of sleep. She loved how with a word he could draw everybody in, Jupiter-like.

“I would like to propose a toast to comet 1953 Two!” There were
Hear! Hears
!
and little claps from the drunken adults. “I know that sounds self-serving, but she’s the birthday girl tonight and by god we’ll toast her.”

There was a shuffling and clinking sound as people moved to get their glasses, or, discovering they had lost or drained theirs, hustled to find more. Denise was proposing to share her husband’s glass of wine, and Lydia was on all fours now, struggling across the patio for her Coke. Glass and plastic were lifted into the air as people laughed, someone yelped as she was pinched, and some other young man’s voice cried out “Let’s hear it!”

Swift stood still, smiling under his grizzled beard, arm raised in the pose of an old statue. He looked up, and there was Mars directly overhead, beaming pinkly from the constellation Virgo. The other planets were scattered across the sky as well, invisible to the eye, but on the southern horizon the constellation Centaurus could barely be seen, and Swift had a hope just then that they might see a meteor or two at that moment, because it was rare to glimpse the constellation this far north, and it was the night of meteor showers, of remnants from the comet he was now openly adoring. Swift looked up at the sky; it looked back down; they were old friends.

“To comet 1953 Two,” he began.

“Comet Swift!” someone shouted.

He pointed with his other hand. “Now don’t get me started on that one!” It was some old joke within the department, a false joke about his modesty. “To comet 1953 Two, on the evening of your aphelion … somewhere"—he motioned toward the universe with his glass—
"out there.”
People laughed. “At least we
hope
it’s near your aphelion, because if my calculations are wrong again, the Nobel for 1977 is definitely out.”

More laughter.

“But we wish you the best of luck on your coldest day. May you not be approaching Jupiter too closely.” More calls of
Hear! Hear!
from the crowd. “May you not run out of gases and come back too faint to see. May your coma be bright, and your orbit predictable, and may we meet again around this time six years from now. Lydia will be eighteen by then, Denise will be—how old will you be, Denise?”

“Twenty!” came her joking voice from the crowd.

He bellowed a laugh. “If only it worked that way, dear. Well, sixty-four, I’ll be sixty-four when you see me next. I’ll be old and ugly, so be kind. We’ll see you then!”

Dr. Swift raised his glass and everybody followed. Some just drank, and others, insisting on touching each glass with theirs, walked around the bundle of people clinking and talking, making the superstitious round. Swift drained his glass and lifted it again before he turned around. Perhaps he was worrying that he had said something tonight he would regret, something he didn’t remember now. It tugged at his brain, as if he’d left his oven on—he had said something terrible, earlier when he had been more drunk, and to whom had he said it? Had he grown this old? Perhaps he was going through his list of people, mentally checking off their names. Perhaps, also, there was much more on his mind tonight. He had a young woman pour him more wine and he moved off out of the light.

Lydia lifted the needle, removed the record from the player and slipped it back into its cover (accidently ripping the sleeve), watching them all dispersing. Some shift had occurred in the evening, and people revealed more of who they were—some couples were no longer walking but leaning against walls, standing in the darkness under trees, the younger ones, nervous and whispering and, most of them, fretfully in love. Others seemed too tired to move, caught with whomever else was sitting in a deck chair nearby. The moon had set, and so others, more active, were at the rooftop telescope, visually searching the darker regions of the sky for comets. They were the comet hunters, the obsessives who could not leave a clear, moonless night unwatched or they would lie in bed, restless, regretting a night on which they had surely missed the find of the century. Swift’s toast, various loves below, their children—these were forgotten once the moon had set, and so the comet hunters could move the telescope across the heavens in an attempt to catch the fuzzy evidence of some cold star approaching. Denise, propping her sleeping baby in her lap…. Dr. Manday, invisible, asleep, dreaming of a prison window…. Lydia watched them all.

It was all too much, and too far from what she had wanted coming here, days before, on some ancient wish for a gold earring in the straw, a nest of birds with a sky-blue hemisphere of shell. Lydia had to struggle between what was easy to dismiss in these adults and what she longed for. They were ugly, arrogant, constantly wrong on politics, ignorant of fashion or life outside an observatory dome; pretentious, selfish, prone to laughing at their own awful jokes; and yet she stood below them, holding her record album, observing them and— this infuriated her most—longing to be just like them.

Why
just like them?
Look at them. Look at the woman with the braids, disappearing just now into a dark path, walking quickly, the white skirt folding over itself—look at her confidence despite her plainness. When had Lydia ever seen this in a woman before? Her own mother, beautiful, talented, sitting at her desk drawing a leaf in pen and ink—she used to turn and stare at the mirror, whispering, taunting her own image. Her sister, glum, growing fat, was becoming a great caterpillar in jeans and a trail of smoke. Yet here was this intelligent woman—here they all were: the skinny astrophysicist with a vague mustache, the fat blonde gamma-ray photographer laughing with her hand on a man’s knee—they were going to be all right. They had all the outward signs of failure, what Lydia’s friend Kim called the “mark of the dork,” yet you could never break them, or tree them like a cat. Talking, laughing, even singing to a crowd, they were still recluses; they lived privately in their minds where you could never reach them. They were brilliant. It was all around—brilliance— if you could only see it with the naked eye. Lydia had to leave.

She would go to the barn. She would tempt Tycho to come in with her, and they would spend the night there together on a bale of hay. It would be a world away from all this.

On her way out to the field, she had to work her way through some clusters of people, and the first was immersed in quiet conversation (the marijuana being passed around again as a young grad student strummed a guitar) with Denise at its center. She was relaxed, touching her son with just one hand as he lay sleeping, leaning her head against the pillow of the chair and looking up at the sky as she talked. Lydia envied her. She listened.

“Oh, I grew up with all the Easter trimmings—the hats, the grass in the baskets, the chocolate egg hunts and the dyeing—but it’s kind of a dumb event, don’t you think? Mostly seems like a holiday about interior decorating. What I miss are the seders I used to be invited to. Don’t you miss those?”

A woman in the crowd: “Well, we’re having one this year….”

“Really? See, that’s wonderful. Lucky—at least you eat your eggs in salt water. I’m stuck with pink dye.”

“Well… I mean, would you like to come?”

“Oh no—I couldn’t.”

Lydia could not have imagined that once, years before, Denise’s mother had given her money to forget, or that now Denise paid her own wages. She could not see a woman who had striven to forget the boy who’d fallen from the cliff. Or the man whose hand she held. All Lydia could see was a woman who was happy now, with a husband, a son, a career. There was no glimmer that once a man Denise might have loved stood wet with fog in her doorway, his face tense as a fist, holding something dear that she refused to consider. That once she’d closed a door and picked another way to live. Denise laughed and held her son close to her.

Lydia passed by, staring, the pot still dull in her mind. To her, people were just what they seemed to be right now—Kim, hilarious now and popular, would be thrown over for another friend within a year’s time, and there would be no nostalgia or wringing of hands over it. Kim would no longer suit her; Lydia did not weigh old times, or forgive moods or family problems or bad talks on the phone. She was in the present moment only, and the present felt very different for her, very unlike that of these languid scientists with their wineglasses and smoke. For them, the present was a hinge between the past and future, but for her it was a wide, clear plain in which to act. No wonder she misunderstood their happiness.

She stumbled across the man who had come into the barn. She remembered his name was Adam, but he seemed so different. Here he was merely Denise’s husband, a scientist’s spouse, bored and a little drunk. He swayed his head side to side as he talked, weary, closing his eyes at moments while his lips kept moving, and one hand stayed in the air before him, pointing and pointing at his ideas. An ordinary man. He wore a fisherman’s cap now (the wind had been driving him crazy) and it made his face sharp as a gem.

“How you doing, sport?” he asked. The man next to him, in a tie, put on a patient smile.

“Nothing,” she replied.

Adam shook his head. “What? I said
how,
not
what.
You did a great dance back there, you’re real talented.”

The mustached man nodded, holding his cordial against his chest, saying, “Absolutely wonderful, dear,” then adding quietly, “and such an interesting song.”

“That song’s cool, and so are all your kisses,” Adam said, leaning down and pointing to the lipstick on her neck. “I can dig it, can you dig it?” He held out a palm.

“I can dig it, man,” she said and slapped his hand, laughing. He was with her now.

The man with the cordial spoke again: “Lydia, I’ve just discovered that your friend here is a fiction writer and a rogue, isn’t that what you said?”

Adam laughed, saying, “Oh, it’s true. I tell people things to make them do what I want. That’s what fiction is, making your readers feel a certain way. But it slips into life a little….” But he was away from Lydia again, far away in a conversation he had done dozens of times over the years, falling into an old clever act that did not include her.

She waited to see if the conversation would come back to her— “people are so willing to believe you"—but it did not, and though a few women came along and touched her shoulder, smiling at her, she was alone again. She did not understand Adam any more than she did his wife. She did not understand any of them. They seemed happy, brilliant, witty, experiencing all the bits of life that she desperately wanted, and she envied them their age; yet compared to them, it took almost nothing to make her happy. A pair of jeans. A new album. A call from Kim with news about a boy from school. These things would delight her beyond the adults’ comprehension, beyond their own memory of themselves. What did it take to make them happy? If hers was simple sugar, theirs was a recipe so complex it was almost not worth making. One could really live without it. And here was Lydia, more thrilled by the pot than anybody, it seemed, had ever been. But it was not, as she thought, because she was superficial, or (that terrible fear) a little vain and stupid. It was because, even so close to puberty, she was merely a child.

She waited at his side, and when Adam finally patted her head and smiled at her, she moved out of the group and off the stone of the patio, onto the dark blue grass. As she stalked away, somehow furious, somehow not caring, the world became quieter, starlit of course (were there any comets to be caught tonight, up on the roof?), and if you watched the black shapes of the cypresses against the lighter sky, you could imagine they were weeds washing back and forth in a dark tide. Jupiter had just risen, a bright light to the southeast—you could imagine, if you were Lydia, that there was a great deep-sea fish out over the horizon, and here it laid its trap with the luminous tip of its tongue: Jupiter. She looked out at the cypresses and the planet and could almost imagine the thing, jaw open, letting the dark water move the fringe on its back, waiting, shaking, trying to keep its tongue still for her. It was, perhaps, how her mother might have seen it.

Off to the left she heard some rustling, and in a moment she saw that, under an unbloomed dogwood, two grad students were making out. Not sex, not white limbs working in the darkness, but two young people in their warm clothes, lying together in the grass. She might have just missed some wonderful scene where he pulled a flower from a vine and showed it to her, and she took it from him, tore the petals from it nervously, and they sat in the grass, talking nonsense. Lydia might have just missed the pauses, the looking-away, the tattered flower tossed into the weeds, the quick breath as they caught each other’s eyes and thought,
It’s going to happen, it’s happening.
The relief of falling to the grass with someone you had never kissed before.

Lydia could only watch the slow frenzy of their mouths, their careful hands, and hear the quick solemn breaths. She was hidden behind a tree. The boy, she saw, was one of her father’s students, a quiet man in a plaid shirt, someone you would never notice. The girl she had seen for the first time tonight: long dark hair, a woolen cowl-neck sweater, eyeshadow that didn’t suit her—that was all Lydia could make out. How long had they known each other before this happened? Just hours, or months now? There was no way for Lydia to put them into a story, into any of the sorts of stories that interested her. There was nothing romantic about the two of them or their faces mashed together or the little noises they made. Lydia stood behind her tree and watched for a while, smiling to herself at what they said when they came up for air—"Oh Susan, you’re so beautiful"—and feeling very distant, foreign, buried under the earth. Yes, she was buried up to her nose. Lydia watched for almost fifteen minutes, scratching her jeans, until the young man took the woman’s hand and led her away to who knows what fate. Lydia was left to watch the patch of matted grass they’d left behind; it shone, wet with light, each pressed blade slowly uncoiling. She missed the life she’d had at ten.