Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

“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.

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.