Cinnamon Life

            “Did you know that humpback whales have the most complex system of communication on Earth?  Besides humans, I mean.”

            “Why do you do this?”

            “Do what?”

            I sigh, a thin sound stretching across the breakfast table like white cloth.  She doesn’t look up from the paper, and the print reflected in her tortoise shell-framed glasses unnerves me.  “You know what.”  I put my fork down on top of my eggs and toast.  “We were having a conversation.  Why do you change the subject?”

            One small hand scoops Cinnamon Life into a waiting mouth while the eyes remain buried in the NY Times Science section.  “I just mentioned how another animal on this planet – an animal that many people believe to be as intelligent, if not more intelligent, than us – communicates.  Isn’t communication what we were talking about?”  She looks up, finally, and wipes ragged fringes of bangs from her forehead with her wrist, still clutching the spoon, overhand style.  “I don’t see how that’s changing the subject.”

            My mouth opens, but no words come out.  The pressure from our stares meeting each other is enough to break the table in two.  She knows what she’s doing.  I know what she’s doing.  She knows that I know what she’s doing.  And she knows that she’s going to win.  My eyes drop back down to “Hagar the Horrible” and she digs into her cereal bowl again, her eyes disappearing behind articles about nuclear fusion and greenhouse gasses and genome mapping and a thousand other things I’ll never understand, nor ever want to.

            “Hmm,” she says, as much to herself as to me.  “I didn’t know that Andromeda was bigger than the Milky Way.”  She smiles at me, dripping milk down her chin, which she promptly catches with a sleeve.  “That’s good to know.”

            “C’mon,” I say.  “You’ll be late for school.”  And for the twelfth day in a row, I know that I’ve been outsmarted by an eight-year-old.

***

            I pull up behind a school bus with dozens of children streaming out the door like rabbits from a hutch.  She waits until they’ve all moved away before turning to me.

            “Did you know that the light we’re seeing right now left the sun eight minutes ago?”

            “Do you know the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”

            “No, I don’t.”  She looks at me, waiting for the answer, waiting for another piece of data to store behind those too-big-for-her-face glasses. 

The smirk with which I asked the question fades back into the blank face she’s used to.  “Have a good day,” I say.

            “I’ll do what I can,” she replies, shouldering open the heavy door of my Buick and slinging her gigantic leather schoolbag onto her back.  As other children race past her to the playground, she plods to the school’s ancient glass double doors and disappears inside. 

***

            Dinner is tuna fish sandwiches.  Again.  We’re out of pancake mix, and my culinary expertise is, well… not so expert. 

            “I’m going to try to learn some of your mom’s recipes this weekend.”

            She shrugs and dabs at the corner of her mouth with a napkin.  “Tuna’s good food.  You know, the tuna heart is very unique among bony fishes.  It’s larger, it pumps more blood.  The tuna is a fascinating fish.”

            I drain the last of my beer and look at her while she looks at her sandwich.  She looks at it as if she can see the actual fish from which this meat came, as if she’s on the deck of a boat, tracking it with radio tags, ready to study its migratory behavior.  Or something like that.  “Right,” I say, and walk my plate to the dishwasher.  “You should probably go do your homework.”

            “Should I?” she says, before stuffing the last of the sandwich in her mouth.

            “Yes, you should.”

            “If you say so.”  Before she puts her things in the dishwasher, she rearranges seven other plates and a bowl, and what I thought was a full load becomes two-thirds of that.  “I’ll be in my room if you need me.”

I just barely hear her deliberate steps up the stairs as I turn on “Jeopardy.”

***

When I walk upstairs later to grab a sweatshirt, she’s in the office, clicking away on the keyboard faster than I could imagine typing.

“I thought you were doing your homework,” I say from the doorway. 

“Steve,” she says, not turning to me, “I think we both know that I don’t need to do my homework.  I’m solving calculus equations in the margins of my long division workbook during class.  My teacher doesn’t even check my homework.  She doesn’t know how to.”

I can relate.  “Still, shouldn’t you be doing something besides playing video games?”

“This isn’t a video game.”

“What is it?”  I see the screen flash through a dozen different shots, moving through a three-dimensional world.  “Some kind of virtual reality… um… thing?”

“Yes,” she says, turning her head.  “Some kind of virtual reality thing.” 

I notice for the first time that her feet are swinging back and forth above the ground, like two tiny pendulums, alternating with one another.

“Can I help you with something?  Because I have a hard time concentrating when you’re peering over my shoulder like that.”

I look down, because I can’t look at those glasses.  Leaning against the frame of the door, I examine my shoes.  They need polish.  I don’t have any polish.  “I was just…”

“Just what?  What is it that you want, Steve?”  She swivels the chair back around to face the screen and begins scrolling through windows again.  “Look, I’m trying to make this work, alright?  But you have to cut me some slack.  I’m doing everything I can for you.”

“I have to cut you some slack?!?  You’re serious?  You actually just said that?”  I step into the room and spin the chair so she’s facing me.  “Listen here, young lady-“

“Could you be any more condescending?”

“You’re goddamn right I could.”

Her glasses act like security gates to her eyes.  I’m trying to stare my way through them.

“You know, eye contact is only effective as a deterrent if you’re viewed as a threat.  I’m not threatened by you.”

I want to say something tough, something stern, something like, “Well, you should be,” like my father would have said to me.  But I know she’ll just laugh at me.  “Fine,” I say, letting go of the chair.  “Go back to your video game.  Do whatever you please.  I’ll stay out of your way.”

“I told you, it’s not a video game.”  The mouse flies across the screen again, dragging windows from unseen corners, expanding some, collapsing others.  “It’s a virtual topographical map of the surrounding 50 miles, integrated with video capture from traffic lights and toll booths and cross-referenced with hotel records in the area.”

I watch her click and scroll through, changing angles, highlighting areas, entering codes.  “What’s all that for?”

She begins to sigh, but stops herself.  “Because I’m trying to find where my mother could have gone, Steve.  She needs to be found.”  Her hand is too small for the mouse.  Her fingers have to move faster on the keyboard because they’re too short to be in the proper places.  Her feet swing faster.  “I have to find her,” she whispers.

“Marjorie?”

“Yes?”

“Marjorie.”

Her hands pause.  Her fingers stay on the keyboard, ready to begin their flurry again at a second’s notice, but she’ll give me that second.  “What?” she says, turning her head and viewing me from the corners of her eyes, around the glasses.

“Your mom’s not coming back, Marjorie.”  I hadn’t said it out loud before. 

“Of course not.  Not on her own.  That’s why I have to find her.”  The fingers begin flying again.  They falter.  I see her reach for the “delete” key for the first time.

“She doesn’t want to be found, Marjorie.  By either of us.  I looked.  The police looked, and they’re still looking.  I want her to come back, too.  Believe me.  I miss her as much as you do, but she won’t come back – she won’t be found – unless she wants to be.”  The streetlight outside the office windows flickers for a moment.  I watch her face, wedged between the flashing of the screen and the flicker of the light, from dark to light to dark to light to dark. 

“The typical chimpanzee stays with its mother for five to seven years.  If we look at mammalian parent-offspring relationships on a scale reflecting the complexity of the animal and the time spent in parental care…”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense.  My mother knows it doesn’t make sense.  And she knows that I’ll find her, and we’ll make it make sense again.”

I reach my hand out to her shoulder, but pull it back.  “What if that doesn’t happen, though?”

All the windows close, and the monitor shuts off.  The feet stop swinging, and the hands retreat to be folded under arms.  She slides out of the chair without a sound and turns to face me, not like a child, but like a miniature adult.  Like a miniature of her mother.  At the corner of her right eye is a small, glistening spot.  Just when I think that it might be a tear, it disappears, swallowed back to where it came from.  Without unfolding her arms, she walks past me, back out to the hallway, and I only hear the faintest creak as the door to her bedroom shuts.    

***

At 3:30 am, I’m still awake.  The house makes noises all night like a living thing that doesn’t know how to speak, and I can’t interpret its sounds.  I reach out to my nightstand, to a framed photograph lying face down, and I start to lift it.  I let it drop again and roll over to stare out the window.  That street light is still flickering.

***

At 6:30, I’m dressed and walking to the kitchen.  I don’t wake her yet.  I don’t want to.  I wonder how the school would view me if I let her stop going.  I’m not her parent.  How much parenting is a “legal guardian” supposed to do?  I am guarding her; she seems to take care of the rest by herself.  And even if she did need me for something, I’m sure I wouldn’t know how to do it.

The Times is on the front step and I unwrap it as I walk down the hall to the kitchen, pulling the science section out and tucking the rest under my arm.  The sun is still low, and the kitchen looks almost red; this light is warmer than it should be this time of year.  At either end of the table is a bowl of Cinnamon Life, with a half gallon of milk in the center.  She’s standing, waiting for me.

“I don’t know how to make eggs,” she says.

I put the paper down.  I search for something to say.  I shrug.  “Cereal’s good food.”

I pour the milk for both of us.