Julia Pierpont - Among the Ten Thousand Things

Out she walked with her head down, not calling goodbye to anybody. Jack wanted to ruffle her hair but was afraid she’d pull away.

“So what’d you guys see at the planetarium?”

She shrugged.

“Isn’t it Robert Redford who does the space show there?”

“I don’t know.”

The afternoon was golden, sun filtered through the trees. They were on the edge of the park. “Hey, kid, it’s summer vacation. Want to go to the playground? I mean, to the pond there? Feed the ducks?”

She was watching her feet, fitting each step into the octagons that tiled the pavement.

“Where’s the fire?” He wanted them to have a nice time. “Ice cream stand over there.”

“No,” even though she did sort of want an ice cream. She was afraid that if she spoke more than a word at a time now, she’d cry. The day kept showing up in her mind in rushes, how on the tour her friends had kept as far as they could away from her and how at lunch they’d disappeared with her notebook into the bathroom. And how at the end of the day Racky had grabbed her with so much angry energy in her arms, like she was out for revenge, only Kay didn’t know for what.

They were passing the pink brownstone wing of the natural history museum when Jack tried again. “Let’s go in a minute. Let’s see Brown Bear.”

Kay was thinking she should have just said yes to ice cream, but she knew she couldn’t eat it in front of him. She didn’t want her father to have the satisfaction of meeting any one of her needs.

“Come on. We haven’t gone to see him in so long, he might be Gray Bear by now.”

She liked his bad jokes, but this minute she didn’t want to.

“Might be Geriatric Bear.” He felt her crumbling. “AARP Bear.” He’d recently begun receiving their mail at home.

A smile was near to forming on Kay’s lips, but really she didn’t want to smile. Smiling wouldn’t be true.

“Bet they’ve given him a cane.”

“Fine. Whatever,” she said, only to make him stop.

—

She waited for him on a hard stone bench under the Barosaurus while he bought tickets and found a map. They needed a map; it really had been a long time. They walked without speaking to the Hall of North American Mammals. Jack watched her out of the corner of his eye.

There was a deep-underwater feeling in the hall, lights barely strong enough to reach the green stone floors. The real brightness came from the dioramas, long-ago animals in faraway places. The bighorn sheep watched from rocky mountaintops. Two wolves were forever bounding through the snow. It was nighttime for the frozen wolves and their world glowed blue.

Brown Bear was really the Alaska Brown Bear, and really there were two, one up on his hind legs and the other on all fours, but it was the standing one they always meant, because of the way he faced them, looking interested and close to human, while the other chewed fish.

Something did seem changed about Brown Bear, though he was no older. Kay was the one who’d grown, and the bear was different to her for it. His claws, which had always been long and black, were longer and blacker and disturbingly thick. He was more real bear than she’d remembered, less toy bear and also less alive, as though her imagination could no longer animate him. Hadn’t he used to look directly at her? He looked now somewhere in the middle distance, and she got the feeling if she pushed him, he would tip over.

“Same Brown Bear,” Jack said. “You think he’s had Botox?”

She hadn’t wanted to show any interest, but she did ask what Brown Bear was like on the inside, and was he heavy?

“Not very, I’d imagine. You know, they take out all the organs — have they taught you taxidermy? Where they take all the blood and organs and everything out? They put formaldehyde inside to keep him looking good. Formaldehyde’s like Botox. Then they use a mold to make the form, so it looks just like the real thing. See how shiny the eyes are?”

“They’re real?”

“Glass.”

She reached down to touch the raised letters: ALASKA. “So it’s like what you do.”

“A little.” He wasn’t sure if he should agree to this. “A little bit. And this way he’ll last forever.” Jack leaned over to look at the bitten fish, how they’d painted the scales iridescent.

Brown Bear, whose eyes of course were glass, though Kay hadn’t realized it till now, it wasn’t his eyes that had changed but hers. She looked at her father, who’d changed too. She wasn’t sure why the things he’d done had hurt her, only that they had, but she could believe now, watching him, that he hadn’t meant to, and maybe that mattered. She was eleven, and it was hard to be eleven, but also she knew that eleven was young, and if they could stay this way, these ages always, like the bear, she wouldn’t mind, really.

There was an exhibit of live butterflies in another part of the museum, and they left Brown Bear to go to that. They stopped first in the Hall of Gems and the Hall of Minerals, where Kay wanted to look at sparkling things in their cases, pressing fingerprints over the amethyst and emeralds and yellow diamonds, pretending she was at Tiffany’s.

“Choose one thing in the room to take home,” Jack said, and she wondered if she’d played her game too clearly. “That one’s mine.” He nodded to the room’s highest point, up three carpeted steps where a block of brown-and-blue rock had been mounted. The rock was something weather had done to copper, with a rough enough surface to scrape you up bad if you heaved yourself at it.

Kay made a face. “It’s ugly.”

“Well, good, you can’t have it.”

She chose the Star of India, a milky blue sapphire with a star blooming out from its center. “Five hundred and sixty-three carats,” Jack read. He whistled. It looked like it would be warm to hold.

They went quickly past the meteors, more things Jack might take home with him; the early monkey people so shamefully naked; and the American Indian collection, totem poles and grim little masks carved from wood.

At last they reached the butterfly conservatory, with sun-lamps that hung from the ceiling. Their eyes had to adjust at first to the colors — magenta and violet buds, so many greens on broad, waxy leaves — but then the butterflies emerged, or their eyes became able to see them. Shapeless white ones fluttered plant to plant like bits of tissue. A monarch perched very still on a plastic dish of something netted.

“It’s eating,” Kay said. “They eat with their feet.”

“How do you know that?”

“We did them in school.”

Beside a sign that read DO NOT DISTURB FEEDING, a brown-and-black butterfly was unrolling its tonguelike thing onto an orange slice. White stripes and orange dots festooned either wing.

Standing over a stained-glass-looking one, blue with black trim, Jack said, “You know people frame them, hang them up. No taxidermy required.” He wasn’t sure if she’d heard him.

She clapped both hands over her mouth, and Jack thought something was wrong, she was avoiding his eyes. Only then he looked to where she was looking, a little down. There was the monarch, moored but so gently on the uppermost button of his shirt, near to where a bowtie might be. It opened and closed its wings. Other visitors began to notice, to gather around him and pull out their phones for pictures. Jack stood still as he could, and proud, smiling like an idiot for other people’s photographs, smiling because he could tell that his daughter was smiling too, behind her hands.

They’d reached a good moment, at the museum, though a lot of the warm feelings dissipated once they hit the streets. It was an observably later day than the one they’d stepped out of, and the hurt that for Kay had begun that Sunday, the distance Jack had felt from her ever since, these things were reintroducing themselves now — they both could feel it — as the streets grew more familiar and as they got closer to home.