Coming of Age at the End of Days Read online

  The boy smiled at Anna, but stopped when he saw her face. This time she let her expression show. She was not stupid. She knew she was being infantilized.

  “Ridiculous,” Anna said, speaking for the first time, using one of her father’s favorite words.

  The boy saw that he had failed. He was no dummy, either. “Can I go back to the game now?” Anna asked.

  The boy had other plans. He scrambled to his feet. “I’ll show you something, I’ll show you something I’ve never shown anyone else,” he said. He was speaking in a very low voice. He took Anna by the hand and led her to his house. They waved to a woman that Anna assumed was his mother, who was kneeling in the yard planting red flowers. Geraniums, Anna knew from the sharp, unpleasant smell that her mother hated. The boy opened the garage door and took Anna inside the garage’s dark coolness. It was very neat. Like most of the residents on the Street of Children’s Names, the boy’s family didn’t park cars in their garage, but used it as storage space. A refrigerator. A stand-alone freezer. Tools hanging on the wall. Boxes stacked into a tower, edges perfectly aligned. The boy dragged a lawn mower from the corner to the middle of the floor. His hands shook as he turned the mower on its side, exposing the mechanical underbelly. “Look at this,” the boy said. “Look at this.” A tremor in his voice. He reached out and nearly touched the bright blade. Anna heard him swallowing. “When you turn this on, it shreds anything that comes near. Toes, fingers. Once, I ran over a baby bird,” he said. “This is a very dangerous piece of equipment.” But from the way he said the word dangerous Anna understood he meant evil. She recognized terror when she saw it.

  “I have to mow the lawn every Saturday,” the boy said. “It used to bother me. But now I come here, I turn the lawn mower over. I touch the blade like this.” And he reached out with his index finger, pressed the tip of it against the blade. He closed his eyes. With a quick, hard motion he pulled his finger across the blade. It sliced. It drew blood. Just a little. The boy had been careful. He held out his finger to Anna so she could see the red line in the flesh. Next to it, pale white lines from earlier cuts. Battle scars. “After I do this, it’s okay. I can mow the lawn,” he told Anna, and she could see this was true: his fear had dissipated, his hands were now steady.

  A ritual. Anna understood rituals. She believed in them. Her mother, before performing a piece, always stroked the piano keys as if petting a cat. Before going to sleep at night, Anna herself turned a full circle in bed, like she’d seen some dogs do. These rituals were potent. “You throw those rocks,” the boy said. “Or something. You’ll figure it out. You’re a smart kid.”

  The boy flipped the lawn mower over and led Anna back outside. “You can do this,” he said, and this time he was not patronizing her. His name was Jim Fulson. He lived in C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E.

  “Thank you, Jim Fulson,” Anna said, and this made him laugh.

  “You’re welcome, Annie Franklin,” and he took her hand for a minute in a warm squeeze. They both looked at the tree the other children were congregating against as it shuddered in the wind. “You’re on your way now. There’s no looking back,” Jim Fulson said. Anna had believed him.

  5

  ANNA SEES DR. CUMMINGS WEEKLY. Dr. Cummings is compassionate. She understands. She is wise in the ways of girls. Especially teenagers. Especially good girls gone suddenly bad. Who, like Anna, rotted overnight. Who have begun to noticeably stink. In cases like this we advise swift and early intervention.

  Dr. Cummings gives Anna her space. She respects Anna’s silences. Dr. Cummings empowers Anna, believes she can in fact be empowered. Though she will sometimes need to be hard on Anna. She knows how to read the tea leaves. If Anna’s skirts are too short, Dr. Cummings will understand she is too eager for male approval. If Anna doesn’t use makeup, Dr. Cummings will know she is sending signals to other girls. That she’s not a threat. That she deserves their sympathy and pity, not their natural instinct to reject the Other, the outsider, from the flock. Showing belly, like a dog would, Dr. Cummings laughs. Most of Dr. Cummings’s metaphors involve animals, her analyses lead to one conclusion: Power games are being played by the pack. Dog eat dog. Top cat. Slippery as an eel. Playing possum. Barracuda behavior. The morals of these stories come down to this: Anna should accept that her problem, as Dr. Cummings calls it, is due to a simple misalignment with her herd. “Hunt with the pack,” Dr. Cummings says. “Do it physically, with enthusiasm. Even if it’s just an act at first. All else will occur naturally. The heart and the mind always follow the body.” As she utters this heresy, she smiles, waits for Anna to challenge her.

  Anna tells her nothing.

  Her mother sits in the waiting room, listening to Hindemith. Her eyes closed. As Anna’s mother will only wear open-toed sandals, even in winter, waiting patients voyeuristically watch her toes curl and uncurl in an agony of sensory pleasure. So engrossed is she that Anna picks the check her mother had already written and signed out of her lap and carries it back to Dr. Cummings without her mother noticing. “Next week,” Dr. Cummings says, and her voice is warm, inviting. Anna has disappointed her again. Anna has nothing for her, or anyone, hasn’t for nearly five months now. Anna nods and exits to rouse her mother from her silent ecstasy.

  They continue feeding Anna pills. Small round white ones. Large pink oval ones. But Anna knows better than to take them. She shakes the pills in her hand, watches the colors bounce before she disposes of them when her mother isn’t looking. Dr. Cummings is beginning to talk about wiring Anna to a machine, shooting her through with electricity. “It’s very safe these days,” she tells Anna’s parents, who are horrified by the idea. “And it’s the most effective method overall, the efficacy is remarkable, really.” She talks about prognosis, outcomes, likelihoods. She talks about risk factors. Safety measures. Anna’s parents raid her closet, take her belts. They hide all the razors. She doesn’t mind, she’s hidden her other implements away. Anna knows her time will come, that opportunities will manifest themselves.

  For I am passionately in love with death. Where did Anna hear this? She doesn’t remember. But the phrase resonates.

  Dr. Cummings begins issuing commands. “Go through the motions. Get out of bed. Get dressed. Take a shower and wash your hair. You’ll feel better.” Anna disagrees. It is better to remain dormant. Avoid the sunlight. Avoid her mother’s music. Even staring at the spot on the wall next to her bed is too much for Anna to process some mornings. She shuts her eyes and shudders, waits for the familiar plummeting feeling that inevitably follows.

  One day, at her mother’s insistence, Anna tries. She takes her cello out of its case. She presses the index finger of her left hand onto the D string, but she can’t pin it tightly enough against the fingerboard, her nails are too long, she hasn’t cut them in months. Her mother brings her the nail clippers and stands by until Anna has trimmed all ten nails, takes the clippers away again. Once more, Anna places her finger on the string, this time making contact between her flesh and the wood of the fingerboard, the string cutting into her tender skin no longer hardened by calluses. She picks up the bow with her right hand, it feels heavy and clumsy, and she only draws it halfway across the string before losing strength. She had quit her teacher, quit the school orchestra, quit the quartet she’d been playing in since freshman year. Everyone had at first been kind, but most people lose patience quickly, Anna discovered, when you stop responding to social cues. People feel insulted, take it personally.

  Her mother chose an easy piece for them to play together, the Haydn concerto in C major, first movement. Yet Anna’s hands are sweating, her fingers slide off the strings. Her bow shears off without drawing a solid note.

  “Try again,” her mother says. Her hands connected to piano keys, connected down through the floor up through Anna’s cello to Anna herself. There is a connection there. Anna feels it, attempts to gather her resources. She is drawing the bow across the strings, she is moving her finger
s. She keeps playing because of the connection. She is playing badly, but when she stops that connection will be lost. She would sit here forever with her bow on the strings if she could, her umbilical cord to her mother, holding on for dear life.

  6

  FIGHTS NOW OCCUR FREQUENTLY IN Anna’s family, fights of a sort never seen before in their household. Anna is at the center of them. Anna is somehow the instigator, she can do it without saying a word, her joyless presence alone has the power to drive her parents into a frenzy of mutual recriminations while she slips quietly away to her room.

  Her father, always volatile, becomes insufferable. So ­Anna’s mother says. He is no longer gentle when talking to Anna, openly berates her for not trying. He seems determined to break Anna. Unusual, her mother says, whatever his moods, it’s unlike him to deliberately hurt her.

  Anna remembers a previous exception to this. Five years ago. Anna’s eleventh birthday. She was in the passenger seat, next to her father, who was driving. “We need to tell you something,” Anna’s father said. He said we but he was the only other person in the car.

  As usual, Anna’s father was going too fast—55 in a 35 zone. He considered the posted speed limit to be the absolute minimum acceptable velocity, drove faster when agitated or elated. Anna’s mother was at work, tuning the rarely played baby grand pianos of Hillsborough, Woodside, Portola Valley. Anna’s father had taken the day off to celebrate with Anna. They were on their way to the miniature-golf course in San Carlos where they were going to play two games, then hit the arcade. This was their birthday tradition.

  But Anna’s father was not himself. He had been like this all morning. Anna’s parents had one of their unusual fights the previous evening. No shouting, Anna’s mother is difficult to engage in that way, she always shrugs off the inconvenience of anger by humming atonally or fingering a melody on the piano. It drives Anna’s father mad. Always quick to anger, he usually cooled down fast, but not this time. He’d slammed his door so hard getting into the car that Anna’s teeth jarred. He didn’t say anything until they were on 101.

  “You were conceived in a petri dish,” he told Anna just as they passed Moffett Field, past the huge empty dirigible hangar. “You were not conceived in love.”

  The words came out hard.

  He’d promised to stop at the In-N-Out Burger in Mountain View for cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes, but he drove right by the exit.

  “You’re eleven, you’re old enough to understand,” her father told Anna. “You’re old enough to take it.”

  So she was a test-tube baby. Anna was startled, but not upset. She mulled over this in silence. They had learned about it in biology. The very first test-tube baby had given birth to a test-tube baby herself not long ago. Anna had liked the symmetry of that. Finally, Anna asked what her father would consider a stupid question. She can see from his face. “Where?” But she wanted to know. She is hoping for some exotic locale. Perhaps she is Spanish? Zimbabwean? She’d always checked the citizen box for U.S citizen, always put down her birthplace as San Jose on official forms.

  “You were created in a lab in Daly City, California,” her father said. She was put off by his disdainful tone, by the unspoken idiot at the end of his sentence. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

  “Don’t you want to know why?” her father asked.

  “Okay, why?”

  “I was sterile. I had the mumps in college. It’s rare to get it that late, but it happens. And it nukes your testes.” He wasn’t embarrassed to say this, and Anna wasn’t embarrassed to hear. Her parents openly joked about the insipid pleasures of marital coitus. Her mother was prepared to buy Anna birth control whenever she asked. Sex sounded like a bodily necessity that settled the nerves and produced happy endorphins.

  The story her father wanted to tell came out gradually. He was growing calmer now, and Anna suspected that he was regretting his anger. He always did. Anna loved her father. He still sang silly songs for her when he suspected she was blue.

  Bananas in pajamas are coming down the stairs

  Bananas in pajamas are coming down in pairs

  Bananas in pajamas are chasing teddy bears

  Her father’s voice became noticeably softer, more hesitant. But still he continued on. He kept stopping to look at Anna to gauge how she was taking it. She leaned forward in her seat, hungry for details.

  Anna was one of six eggs extracted from her mother and fertilized with a stranger’s sperm. Her parents chose her for her looks and her agility, from a dish containing six five-day-old blastocysts. She was the fastest-growing, and the biggest. She was ready to burst from her shell. She was the one they chose. She was the chosen one.

  Anna asked what she most wanted to know. Her father was waiting for it. “So who’s my father?”

  “I am.” His voice again raised. He pressed on the accelerator. They’d reached Redwood City, drawing near to their destination, but he sped up rather than preparing to exit, was swiftly passing all other vehicles. “And don’t think about chasing after your so-called real father. I’m your real father. This is not like an adoption, where you can search through records when you’re eighteen. Your mother and I agreed to destroy the documentation. We thought you should know the truth, but we didn’t want you harboring some romantic idea of finding the sperm donor.”

  Anna said nothing. She wondered who her father was arguing with. It wasn’t her.

  The sperm donor was a fantasy picked out of a database by her mother, Anna’s father told her. The sperm donor had been chosen, too. He was chosen for his photograph, for his physical beauty and resemblance to a boy Anna’s mother had once been infatuated with. He was also chosen because he was a gifted musician, because on his bio sheet he wrote that he loved Mahler, just as her mother’s first lover had.

  “You knew this?” Anna asked.

  “Of course not. Your mother told me she picked a donor who was as intelligent and good-looking as I was. I couldn’t see the resemblance. But she insisted.”

  “Maybe she was telling the truth.”

  “Maybe I was cuckolded, plain and simple.” The speedometer was above 90. Her father did not want her reassurances. Usually he was less difficult to placate, the balm for his rages typically within easy reach. “Of course it hasn’t mattered,” he said. “Not one bit. I sulked for a few days after she told me. This was a month before you were born. I drank heavily for two weeks after that. And then I forgave all. By the time you arrived I had accepted it.” He did not sound forgiving. He did not sound accepting. He pressed harder on the accelerator: 100 miles per hour.

  “I see a cop,” Anna said. She didn’t, but her father immediately braked and checked his mirrors. One more speeding ticket and he could lose his license.

  Anna thinks of her five siblings, frozen on that day. According to her father, so advanced is the technology and so ambiguous the laws and ethics, the embryos are probably still frozen and viable. Her brothers and sisters, locked in an industrial freezer in Daly City. She could claim them. She could even give birth to her own kin someday.

  But she was chosen. Her parents wanted her, Anna. If a younger sister or brother were ever defrosted, implanted, and nurtured until birth, she could taunt them with that fact. Mom and Dad loved me best. The simple truth.

  7

  ANNA’S MOTHER ROUSES HER ONE Saturday morning to go to the farmer’s market. At her mother’s insistence, Anna changes out of the T-shirt and shorts she has been wearing for four days. That the sun is shining when they step outdoors is an active reproach. Anna instructs her feet to step, one in front of the other. See, others do it. A brilliant Saturday morning, and the parking lot of Anna’s old middle school is covered with tents full of vegetables and fruit. A man is playing fiddle, accompanied by a vocalist on guitar. The singer has the microphone amped too high and leans in too close, his words are impossible to distinguish, he seems to be wailing in some ancient tongue.
The adults are clapping and smiling broadly but small children are distressed by the noise, some beginning to cry.

  The farmers running the stands all know Anna’s mother. She is in her element. She can be relied upon to know which kale is the freshest, which apples are truly organic, whether the fish at the fish stand is local or flown in from Seattle. Other shoppers listen to her banter with the farmers. Anna tires of towering over her dark, petite mother, of listening to the talk of mulches and soil and irrigation. She retreats to the periphery of the market with the smokers, blinking against the light and gagging a little amidst the fumes. It’s hard to breathe. But it’s always hard to breathe.

  “Smell this, sweetie,” her mother comes over, holding up a bouquet of cilantro. But Anna can’t detect anything special. ­Anna’s mother puts her hand on Anna’s arm. She has been doing this a lot lately, Anna suspects on orders from Dr. Cummings. The hand never lingers, but drops off after a few nonresponsive seconds.

  Against health regulations, a small white dog is off leash and is running around the market, yapping at ankles. Anna’s mother hates dogs, hates the way they smell, that they invade your personal space. She swats at the dog as if at a fly. “Shoo.” But this creature is less a dog than a little lamb, complete with soft woolly hair and long floppy ears. It is adorable. People are exclaiming. Even Anna can see why.

  The dog approaches Anna, bumps its way around her ankles. She feels sinewy muscles and bones, sharp edges. She contemplates the creature, and then, exuding enormous effort, reaches down and attempts to touch it. But it shies away, scampers off to another person. It knows. Everyone, every thing knows. She is untouchable.

  Her mother assigns her tasks. “You get the tomatoes and the potatoes, I’ll get the apples and lettuce.” She gives Anna twenty dollars, then hesitates, takes it out of Anna’s limp hand, and puts it in Anna’s front pocket for safety. She gives Anna a push and Anna wills her feet to move. She enters a stall piled high with potatoes. Small, large, oblong, misshapen, purple, gray, white. Other shoppers are picking up specimens, marveling at their color and quality and unusual shapes, but Anna simply takes a plastic bag and dully begins filling it. Then it happens. That cruelest of all things. A flash of normality. A glimpse of life as other people are experiencing it. For an instant the scene changes from sepia to full color, Anna is assaulted by the bright hues, the earthy smells, she feels the buzzing energy of the crowd. Anna puts her hands on a pile of orange-tinted potatoes, feels their coolness, their strange bumps and rough hollows. She holds one up to her cheek, sniffs it. And for a minute Anna thinks sheer willpower can do it, can vanquish the melancholia. A simple mindset adjustment, a quick wrenching of perspective, and she could be out of misery and into the light. It is all her fault. She has simply been looking at things the wrong way round. The world really isn’t so sad, so dead. It has all been a terrible mistake. Hers. Then, just as suddenly, the vision passes. Back to sepia, back to pain, even more pain after such a moment of grace. Anna drops the half-filled bag of potatoes on the ground and leaves the stall, manages to find a place on the curb between the tomato stand and an Indian spice concession and sits down. Her sense of smell has dulled again although she sees, as if in pantomime, passersby stopped mid-step by the aromas. She puts her head in her hands and does what she so often does these days: weeps.