I turned the ring over. It was the exact same size as mine. The stone had the same dullness.
“What is this?” My voice came out a little too high. I walked over to the other bedroom. “Sir?”
He glanced up from his curled position by the bed. “Perhaps you can show me,” he said, “how to alter my mail settings.”
I held the ring up to the light. “Where did you get this?”
He sat taller, squinting. “Is that the ring?” He beamed at me. “Oh, good! I was wondering where that was! It’s not a photo, but there! There’s a piece of her, right there.”
“Where did this come from?”
“That’s Nina’s,” he said. “That is Nina’s ring.”
“But where did she get it?”
“She gave it to me on her last visit,” he said, face glowing. “She wanted me to have something of hers.”
“When was her last visit?”
“Four years ago,” he said.
I turned the ring over. It had a scratch on the underside, where mine had had a scratch, too. A very, very similar, if not exact, scratch.
“This is my ring,” I said.
“Oh no,” he said, straightening up. “That is my daughter, Nina’s. She gave it to me. She got it at a street fair.”
“I threw it in the river,” I said.
He frowned. “She said it was collateral, for our next meeting. She loves that ring. Reminds her of the sun.”
I stared at him. He had a petal stuck to his cheek, and he looked like a boy who’d been out playing in the meadows.
“Or maybe it was five years ago,” he said.
The ring slipped around in my hand, just as mine had. I’d watched it sink past the bright water, into the current.
“Have you ever been to the Kern River?” I said.
“The Corn River?” he said.
“In California. Kern.”
“I’ve never been to California,” he said. “What is that look on your face?”
I held the ring tightly. “I had a ring just like this,” I said. “And I threw it in the Kern River. Last summer.”
“I’m sure it was a different ring.”
I opened my hand. The yellow stone deepened to orange in the upper right hemisphere; I used to call it 80 percent yellow, 20 percent orange. The same slightly tweaked setting: a band of silver, not quite symmetrical.
“I threw it in the Kern River as my way into adulthood.”
He wiped the petal off his cheek, and it drifted to the carpet. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nina gave me that ring off her finger five years ago and told me to keep it for her until her next visit.”
“But she couldn’t have had it five years ago,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I was wearing it.”
“But that’s just what she did,” he said.
I closed my fist around the ring. “Come on! Is any of this Nina stuff even true?”
“Of course it’s true!” he said, and his face washed out a little, panicked. “That’s her ring.”
“But this is my ring, too!” I waved it in the air. “Down to the scratch on the inside! Down to the shape of the stone!”
He shrank against the side of the bed. Meekly, he said something about how she’d taken it off her finger, and how she’d bought it at a street fair in Cairo, and how she didn’t like to use a calendar to make plans, and his words were trembling but insistent, and I had no idea if Nina was real, or never born, or if there could be two rings exactly the same, and he finished what he was saying and slumped down against the bedspread and closed his eyes.
“She told me to keep it for her for a while,” he said, in a low, hollow voice.
From outside came the distant sound of an owl. I slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit, just as it had fit before. Slightly loose, but held in place by the knuckle.
“I bought this ring at a sidewalk sale in Fresno,” I said. “In high school. Age fifteen. And I wore it for five years. And then last summer I was on a trip with my family, and I threw it in the Kern River because it was finally time to grow up. I kissed the stone, said goodbye to being a kid, and threw it in. Then I cried a little and went back to join everybody.”
I twisted it on my finger, as I had for years.
“Here it is again,” I said.
“Do you want to keep it for now?” he asked, in a tired voice.
“No.”
I slid down the door frame to sit on the carpet. I closed my eyes, too. “I’m not Nina.”
“No,” he said.
“I’m Claire,” I said.
“Howard.”
We let the names fill the room.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
I sat there for a while and maybe even fell asleep again for a few minutes. When I woke up, I went to his bathroom and splashed water on my face. Went to his bedroom and returned the ring to the drawer with the nail clipper. Went back to the doorway of the smaller bedroom. His head was resting on the bed of petals, and his eyes were open. He looked a little older now, heavier, quiet.
“Here.” I picked up the book of Ohio flora. “Here, Howard. Come on. Let’s put them back.”
We spent the next half hour placing six petals per page, alongside photos of Ohio marigolds and chestnuts and elms. Many of the petals had crunched into triangles on the floor; those we swept up and put into one of the empty drawers.
After we were done, he walked me downstairs, out onto the porch, and down the steps into the star-clear coldness of night. It must have been two or three in the morning.
“Thank you for the lightbulb change,” he said.
“Thanks for the tea.”
He nodded. We looked out past the dirt lot to a road beyond where the houses ended. It was a road that no one drove on unless they were very specifically going to either the recycling plant where Hank had been headed or to the Russian grocery complex. Another owl hoot came rolling at us from far away.
“One more thing,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. His voice was still low, but for some reason, now that we were out of the house, it sounded less wavery and broken than it had upstairs; its reediness reminded me of wind whistling, like its own sound now instead of a diminishment.
“Yes?”
“Drop the documentary filmmaker,” he said. “Go to Arlene. Stay friends with Arlene.”
I shrank under his hand. “What?”
“He’s in there rolling his film, cutting and rolling, and never thinks of you,” the old man said. “Not once. Not ever. She is thinking of everyone. She is a good friend. A good friend is rare. Go to her. Ed loves Arlene because she is a good person. He may have a friend, someone you’ll like. Go to Ed, ask him. Ask her. Eat dinner with them. Bury vegetables. Why not?”
He stood straighter. In the far distance, headlights rounded a corner, coming our way.
“What?” I said again, sharp.
“You don’t have to start with a hundred people having sex,” he said.
I watched the headlights come closer, the approach of big metal-music inside. I could have stepped into the street, flagged down the car, and asked for a ride home. The headlights illuminated the man, his elderly hunch. Then it was gone.
“Have you been stalking me?”
“No,” he said, smiling a little. “You found my door, remember?”
“Did you look in my purse?”
“You don’t have a purse,” he said, which was true.
“Did you hunt down my ring?”
“You threw it in the river,” he said. “How would I do that?”
I couldn’t think up an answer. “Is this what all the air pushing was for?”
He sniffed.
“Or the tea?” I asked.
“Is just good plain barley tea.” He slapped his arms from the cold, and we stared into the night together.
“By the way,” I said, “it’s Fred.”
“Fred?”
“Arlene’s guy. Is Fred, not Ed,” I said, smiling at the ground.
“Fred?” he said, nodding, frowning. Then he patted my shoulder goodbye and turned to let himself back in.
When I arrived back home, Arlene was up, making late-night waffles. She did this sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. Her face was scrubbed clean, and she looked smaller, and about ten times more vulnerable, without that blush on her cheeks and careful mascara.
“Hey,” she whispered when I came in.
She was whisking batter in a bowl and soon would be pouring it into the new waffle iron her father had sent from his kitchen supply store in Asheville. As on most evenings, she was wearing her oldest pink bathrobe, with embroidered suns on each lapel. Her mother had embroidered those suns there, as a gift to Arlene before college. Arlene, unlike most people our age, wore it with pride. She had moved past and through its symbolism, and now to her it was just a nice bathrobe.
I leaned on the cabinets, next to her. I could hear the steady, hunky breathing of Fred in the next room.
“How was your night?”
“Okay,” I said.
She looked up, whisk in hand, brow furrowed.
“I went to a war protest.”
“There was another one?” she said, disappointed.
“A bad one,” I said. “A fake. I saw a hundred people have sex and then get their wallets lifted.”
“No kidding?”
“And then I had tea with an old man who had dredged a river.”
She raised her eyebrows, curious. I told her a brief version, leaving out the part about his daughter. I also left out that I’d gone into his house, alone, and pretended instead that I met him at a late-night teahouse.
“He dredged the river to find your ring?”
“No,” I said. “I made that part up.”
“I bet it was a different ring,” she said.
“Looked exactly the same,” I said. “Same scratch. Same silver tweak.”
“Weird.” She wrinkled her nose. Only then did I see that her eyes were red, and that she kept dabbing them with a wet tissue, which in clump and formation looked a whole lot like the same tissue she’d been using earlier in the day.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You can use a new tissue.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s only water.”
I didn’t ask why she’d been crying. I figured she probably had a good reason.
“Arlene,” I said.
“Yeah?”
I didn’t know what to ask her. How to be a person? On the first day of school, she had sought me out: saw me, made a beeline, and held out her hand for hello. “You have such great hands,” she had told me. My hands? She’d held one up and pointed out the shape of my fingers, the squareness, the good knuckles. “You were watching my hands?” I asked, and she said that during the orientation activity, when we had to wave at airplanes for some reason we could not recall, she had noticed my hands waving because they seemed like the hands of an interesting person. In the fall, she would be doing the Peace Corps or Teach For America, depending on which program took her first. Arlene, who made sure every used item went into the right bin because she wanted all things, everything, to find its way back into the world, new.
She was standing right next to me with her tissue. I put my head on her shoulder. Closed my eyes. “Will we stay friends?”
“Who? You and me?”
I nodded. The room smelled like waffle batter.
“What do you mean?” she said.
Those embroidered suns lit my eyelids, shining up from her bathrobe. “We have nothing in common,” I said.
“Oh, shush.” She started to laugh. “Human. You human. You silly human,” she said, leaning her head against mine.
Origin Lessons
We met the new teacher for origin class. He was tall, with a mustache. He was our last resort. The family-genealogy class had failed. The trip to the zoo to look at monkeys had failed. The investigation of sperm and egg in a dish had failed. All were interesting, but they were not enough. Where did the sperm come from? Where did the monkey come from? Where did Romania come from?
He sat in a chair at the front of the rug.
We began all at once, everywhere, he said.
We sat quietly, waiting.
Has he started? someone whispered.
Yes, he said. I have started. We began all at once, everywhere.
We thought about that.
But before that?
He shrugged. Goes beyond what we know, he said. All we can know is the universe.
I thought we started in a dot, someone said.
He shook his head. He brought out his lunch in a brown bag from his briefcase.
No dot, he said. A dot is at a point, and if at a point, things are also not at that point.
We watched as he chewed a baby carrot.
A very well-packed dot, someone else offered. From which all things hurled free. Not unlike a suitcase.
Nope, he said. Everywhere, all at once.
Then what? someone asked.
After that? he said. Well, at first, it was fast. Everything accelerating fast. Everything wanting to get out.
Get out of what?
Poor wording, he said. Just rapid acceleration. Then it slowed down. Now expansion is accelerating steadily.
What expansion?
Oh, the universe is expanding, he said, wiping his mouth. We found that out in 1929. From Hubble.
We nodded. This made sense. It had been in a suitcase and then—
No suitcase! he said, stomping his foot. All at once, everywhere!
Someone started to cry. Someone else pushed Martha into the rug.
How about this, he said. He put away his lunch bag and opened his briefcase again and brought out sock puppets to show us personified matter and radiation. So, he said, what happened was that, after around four hundred thousand years, everything slowed and cooled, and matter grew lumpy due to gravity, and radiation stayed smooth. Before that, the two lived evenly together.
He wound the two socks together and then moved them away from each other, and the lumpy sock got all lumpified, ready to form galaxies, and he stuffed a battery-operated lightbulb inside the smooth sock so that the light beneath the fabric radiated.
Nice, we said.
The origin of galaxies, he said, with a flourish.
Are those your socks?
No, he said. I bought the socks at a store.
Won’t the lightbulb burn the sock?
No, he said, coughing. It is a specially insulated sock.
Are we accelerating right now?
Yes, he said.
Edgar grabbed on to his seat. I feel it! he shouted. He fell off his chair.
The teacher removed the socks from his hands. We can’t feel it, he said. But everything is moving away from everything else, and it does mean that, in a few billion years, even our beautiful neighbors may be drifting out of reach.
He looked sad, saying that. We felt a sadness. In a billion years, our beautiful neighbors pulling away. But, surely, we will not be here in a billion years. Surely we will be something new, something that might not conceive of distance in the same way. We told him this, and he nodded, but it was wistful.
He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look.
This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We’re seeing back in time.
No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today.
No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you’re seeing is time.
Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart. What we’re seeing is space.
It’s space, yes, he said. It’s also time. You’re seeing what has already happened.
That’s absurd, we said, though we did not move.
We make bigger tel
escopes, radio telescopes, he said, to see back all the way. We can go back thirteen billion years now! Almost to the Big Bang.
No, we said.
Yes!
You can see all that way back?
Yes!
And? we said, sitting up. The suitcase?
We pictured it at the end of a telescope. The longest, biggest telescope ever made. A tiny suitcase, of a pleasing brown leather.
Well, he said, leaning on the side wall. We can see very close to the beginning, but at around 400,000 years, the universe goes opaque.
We almost tossed him off the roof then. We were right there at the edge.
It’s true, he said. We can see all the way to about year 400,000! Can you believe that? But before that, it’s veiled.
We stopped to consider this. The universe began in a veil.
Like a bride? we said.
He smiled for the first time that day.
Sure, he said, relenting. Like a bride.
And she takes off her veil at 400,000?
She does, he said. We see her quite well after that.
So who’d she marry? we ask, settling ourselves at his feet. When a bride removes her veil, it’s the moment of marriage.
I don’t know, he said, scratching his head. Everything? Us?
The Doctor and the Rabbi
The doctor went to see the rabbi. “Tell me, rabbi, please,” he said, “about God.”
The rabbi pulled out some books. She talked about Jacob, wrestling the angel. She talked about Heschel and the kernel of wonder as a seedling that could grow into awe. She tugged at her braid and told a Hassidic story about how it is said that at the end of your life you will need to apologize to God for the ways you have not lived.
“Not for the usual sins,” she said. “For the sin of living small.”
The doctor sat in his suit in his chair and fidgeted. Although he had initiated the conversation, he found the word “God” offensive, the same way he disliked it when people spoke about remodeling their kitchens.
“I’m sorry,” he said, standing. “I cannot seem to understand what you are saying. Are you speaking English?”
“English?” said the rabbi, closing a book. Dust motes floated off the pages into the room and caught the light as they glided upward. She wrinkled her forehead as if she was double-checking in there. “Yes,” she said.