The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (8 page)

But Swift didn’t wait for any reply: “We had signed up nights for a week, and we were there with some grad students, up all night with coffee, talking, looking at the sky to see that signature glimmer. Five nights passed before we realized it wasn’t coming back, and then another night before Van Meehern ran outside and just looked up at the sky. Damn cold. Never trust a woman or a comet, Manday.”

“Was it Jupiter?” Manday asked, although he knew this story, and knew Swift’s old expression. He knew what was missing from the story, too: the real grief of Dr. Van Meehern that night, something they all had felt at four in the morning when the lenses showed nothing, a strange sadness over empty numbers; forgetting, in that cold air, the people whom they loved or ought to love.

Swift poured wine happily, never mentioning that embarrassing sight of his friend under the dark sky, weeping. “Who knows? Did it break up, or was it too big? Did it shoot out into space? It’s lost. So, as for 1953 Two, who knows?”

“Here is to 1953 Two,” Manday proposed, lifting his glass. They toasted, old friends, and talked in very specific, mathematical terms about the stars and clouds of dust, a nonsense topic they could float in harmlessly.

The doorbell rang again, rhythmically—
shave-and-a-hair-cut
— someone funny must have arrived. Grad students.

Up in the loft of the barn, Lydia was missing her sister and, specifically, missing the pot they had smoked together over Christmas on Alice’s last break from boarding school. Part of her parents’ fight over custody had ended in Alice, a thin, gloomy, guitar-playing girl who wrote verse plays in a flowered notebook, being sent off to a boarding school near Mendocino. This was a perfect, King Solomonlike solution to the adults’ wrangling, but baffled both sixteen-year-old Alice and her sister. But Alice hadn’t really changed—she had grown harder, of course, picking up the sixties’ remaining scent of rebellion and breaking out of Mendocino anytime she could, but really she was as dreamy and distant as before. The last time Lydia saw her sister, just a few months before, the older girl had dispensed with her former sororal cruelties and lit up a joint for them to smoke together in their room after dinner. It had been a bizarre evening. Their parents had insisted on having Christmas together despite their obvious animosity, so the two girls had sneaked off to their room and, with the low rumble of voices below, leaned out of the open window, coughing, laughing (Lydia was not really stoned but thought she was), and then used a purple magic marker to draw smiley faces on their jeans.

Lydia had a wooden stash box up here in the barn, but it was empty inside. She was still enough of a child to play at things, just as she’d baked plastic muffins in a cardboard box, now she was pretending to smoke her invisible joint out the cracked window of the loft, the bats adjusting their dark wings above her. She should have loved the freedom of suddenly being the only child, alone with her father, having escaped from the city this weekend to wander the farm without the threat of her sister making her eat green strawberries from the mud. But of course that’s not what she felt. She was eleven; she longed for change but was afraid when it arrived, and this year without her mother or her sister was stretching on and on like an endless rehearsal.

The dusty air above her seemed like the smoke from her invisible joint, and she posed on her stomach in the hayloft, legs crossing, scissoring behind her, head leaning on a hand and inhaling her pretend adulthood. Lydia wasn’t a quiet or contemplative girl, but was the kind who had to be entertained constantly, either by an adult, another child, or by herself or nature. She wasn’t meditative and bookish and could barely make it through a teen magazine without tossing it out the window and bursting through the parlor, singing something, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” anything. To the frustration of her father.

So she was active even while lying quietly in the loft. She could see her father through the window of the kitchen, and three longhaired graduate students in T-shirts (one of them seemed vaguely cool to her, in a peasant skirt and braids, but the others were worthless), all of them holding covered dishes or spelt bread or something. They were always polite and ill-gendered, the men too wispy and effete, the women loud and almost mustached. It made Lydia glad she wasn’t there among them—there would be the usual bizarrities of conversation that upset her, the insistent phrase “let me show you something" that always preceded a grainy photograph of Mars. She could see the whole of the house, its craggy shape partly restored, the field dark with old rain and hazy with light, the sky diamond-bright just now, and all the plain broad world below it.

And here was some man, some stranger coming toward her, struggling through the weeds. He was tall, with curls of long coppery hair, and moved so oddly in the grass, working his hands and fingers to part the tall garlic flowers, the stalks of seeds, but keeping his body stiff and upright away as if he were made of glass, as if the slightest pressure from a blade of grass would shatter his chest. She watched how he went, avoiding nests of wild roses and gopher holes—he seemed to have an extraordinary eye—banking like a river, meandering so wide across the field until it seemed as though he planned to cover every inch of it before he reached her.

He stopped, raised an arm of his plaid shirt to show it covered with burrs. She tried not to laugh. There was something about this man, though, that made even Lydia pause and think. Something un-laughable, really. He was so different from the other people at the party. Maybe it was because he didn’t look desperate or scared while hip-deep in this swamp of thistles; he merely looked out of place, determined, fixed on crossing. Just as Lydia herself might look. And that was it: He was ordinary. Here was that rare thing in her father’s crowd: an ordinary man.

Soon he was in the barn, and his easy breaths made it clear he’d forgotten all about the weeds. “Tycho!” he yelled, hands around his mouth in a cone. “Tycho!” Lydia kept silent above (as silent as she could, though one foot kept nervously tapping against the straw). He was calling for her dog.

In the granular darkness of the barn, his hair had lost its metallic shimmer and looked dull, brown, with the vague swirl of a bald spot. He was young, though—just thirty this month, newly a father, with the glow that only a young man would have at being a father— amazed, glad at his own life, that he has come to this. He had never enjoyed the instability of youth, the hidden parts of love, and was relieved to have arrived here: a son, a wife, a house. They gave him a contentment he would not relinquish easily. Lydia saw none of this—she saw an adult calling foolishly into an empty corner, hay dust settling on his head. In a moment, she leaned over the loft and shouted “Boo!” so that the man fell back against a post, facing her astonished, hands limp. Above them, alive things shifted. And then the retriever came bounding in, barking because he was missing something here, and pounced carelessly on the man, who rolled him over on the ground and scratched him.

“There you are!” the man yelled in a childish voice. “I got you!”

“Who are you?” Lydia was leaning fully over the loft now, aware of the danger, aware of how she might seem dangerous to this new person.

He didn’t look up, but kept petting the dog, as if she weren’t noticeable, as if she weren’t amazing and frightening up there in the loft, as if he were through with her. “Who wants to know?”

“That’s my dog, and he doesn’t like you to scratch his ears.”

He paused for a moment. “Does he bite?” he asked. Tycho whined.

She tossed straw down and watched it float in the air, hoping it would reach him, land on his shoulders; but it took off under her, out of her sight. “Oh, come on,” she said, then asked, “What’s your name?

“Adam. What’s yours?”

“Alice,” she told him plainly.

He smirked and stood up, letting the dog lick at his fingers. He said, “Well…
Lydia …
they sent me to get your dog.”

She was furious; she’d tried this trick before, and it had worked. Now she was embarrassed and felt like scooting to the back of the loft. “Why?” she asked. “I wanted him in here with me.”

Adam was poking through a box of tools now, pulling out rusty objects, not looking at her again, and it made her more furious. He said, “Your dad wanted him to do some tricks for us, so he sent me up to get him. Is that your hideout?”

“Oh, come on, I’m eleven. I don’t have a hideout,” she said, pulling out her Kim voice. “It’s a barn.”

“Sorry. What are you hiding up there, though?”

She struck a formal pose, hands on her knees, rolling her eyes. She had found a new tack here. “Are you one of my dad’s students?” she asked regally, looking away from him. “I
adore
students.”

“I’m not a student. I don’t know anything about astronomy. I’m Dr. Lanham’s husband.”

“You’re Denise’s husband.”

“That’s right. You know her?”

It was funny—she didn’t, though she had of course just now said her name. It was something Lydia would learn, later, that everyone she’d met before she was fifteen would diminish in her memory into just three aspects. Manday, whom she knew so well and talked with often at the university, would become just a funny man with a birthday cake; a wad of blue cotton candy beneath a Ferris wheel; a dark, fat body in a swimsuit near the ocean. The rest would all disappear. Denise was the same—a necklace, a book, a friendly black cat—and that was all. Adam she would remember better; but this conversation in the shifting light of the barn—these words that he would recall so clearly—would be lost to Lydia.

“She’s been to my house before, I think,” she said, not really sure who they were talking about, although she knew the name. A blond woman?

He told her that his wife had been a student once, back when Lydia was a little girl, back even before he knew her. Now Denise worked for the government, doing experiments that had to do with the sky, publishing papers when she could. These were boring, adult details, and she wasn’t listening to them at all.

“You got a kid?” A son.

“How old is he?” she asked.

“Just a year,” he told her, and she felt disappointed; she liked the weird toy quality of babies, but she’d hoped there would be another girl her age at this party, instead of the usual crowd of dull, stunned-looking five-year-olds. Somehow she imagined that a young man could have a child of twelve or thirteen for her to talk to.

They talked for a while in the barn while the other party went on in the house, where there was all the laughing and nervous nonsense while everyone downed their first drink hastily, hoping it would catch and create its effect as soon as possible. Torches were being lit in the yard as the light grew dim, as clouds covered the sun and caused a chill wind to blow across the field, picking up the stray stalks and flowers Adam had broken, scattering them into the road. The two only talked a little while, and she thought he found her interesting, intelligent and fascinating in her vantage in the loft. She mentioned her dance class.

“What do you do?” she carelessly asked him at one point, leaning on her knees, feeling very adult and clever.

He merely laughed, saying, “You don’t care what I do, you’re eleven,” and it was very true and made her angry and embarrassed. That’s when he took the dog, said, “Don’t take any wooden nickels!” and walked off through the cool twilight toward the house.

Lydia sat stunned by her own stupidity; to act so falsely just to impress him, without even thinking. Who was that who had spoken? Her, really? Sometimes, in conversation, it seemed as if she had no control over her own words, as if she were reaping the words that someone else had planted. It happened around friends when she was trying to be clever, and around adults when she didn’t know what they wanted her to say. Who was it talking? It made her nervous; everyone else seemed, like Dr. Lanham’s husband, so easy, so quick and confident with words. It was not that way with her. Perhaps she was what her father always secretly feared: not very bright.

It would be the Swifts’ catastrophe if it were true; the curse would stay for generations. There was no worse insult, late at night around the fire, than to call a friend or colleague “stupid.” To the family, sitting shocked while sipping their chocolates or brandies (when they were all still together), it wounded the ear, sounded as cruel as “kike" or “nigger.” Someone had to correct the family member and whisper,
That’s terrible, they aren’t stupid, they’re just slow.
And why was it so terrible? Call someone dull or preening or ugly, and everybody laughed, nodded, agreed. But call them dumb, and you had claimed they lacked the only quality that mattered in the world: intelligence. In the Swift household, it showed everywhere: the family Scrabble contests, the math quizzes on their breakfast napkins, the long botanical nature walks (her mother’s doing) where every minute some new branch was bent for identification, the
New York Review of Books
stacked in the bathroom as the only reading material. This wasn’t pressure; to the Swifts, this was fun. You fought at dinner over nothings. You lay in the sun and bothered everybody else by reading your book of poetry aloud. You stood in bookstores and cooed like a child over a first hardcover edition of Will and Ariel Durant. It was normal, essential to be intelligent. To the Swifts, it was the primary quality of being human.

But what if she weren’t? What if Lydia preferred to lie on Kim’s carpet and sigh over teenage movie magazines? What if it turned out that, at eleven, the age when Lydia’s mother had bred a new variety of fern in her basement vivarium, what mattered most in the world to Lydia was her pair of carefully patched and decorated jeans? What if her bad grades in school weren’t, as her parents believed, a sign of her boredom with classroom trivia, a rebellion against the academic zoo, but rather just herself—little rusty-haired Lydia—sitting at her desk and staring at the mimeographed quiz, knowing only answers three and seven? What would that mean? Surely the hot earth would split open and swallow them all.