3770 words (15 minute read)

Spooky Action At A Distance

The principal of Chloe’s school had read about her mother’s passing on her AOL homepage and had given her a two week furlough from finger painting. Mourning leave, she had called it. That gave us our days together, gave me more time look for the cracks. I knew Chloe was processing all this, knew the event must have scorched her tiny neural pathways in numerous and indelible ways. But other than that one time when they had come to take her mother’s body, she had not cried. I had a hunch why I had become Pellet. Daddy meant Mommy. And without Mommy—

But her lack of demonstrative emotion, her almost formal adherence to the marvelous movements of her mind was as spooky as it was enchanting. I should be talking to her. Or at least sitting in some Santa Monica therapist’s office listing to some one else talk to her. Instead I settled for another round of twelve dollar pancakes at Dupars. She waited until she had laboriously chewed through two whole bites of her short stack before she spoke.

“Who called last night?”

“What makes you think some one called?”

“I heard your phone.”

“You didn’t hear my phone you were sleeping.”

“Was it auntie?”

“Why do you ask that?”

“Is she mad at us?”

“She just doesn’t like the way we do stuff.” She nodded lightly. I was grateful when she changed the subject.

“What do you think a shedded snake skin would taste like?”

“I don’t know. Hair or fingernails, probably.”

“I think it would taste like chips,” she said with an insightful glint in her eye. “Like a long potato tubey-like chip.”


That night, Chloe waited in bed, her book poised, listening to the conversation I was having on the phone. I had recognized the ring again as my sister’s. But this time I answered.

“Mom is really upset.”

“I bet,” I said, trying to sound vague, the heat of Chloe’s eyes on me like twin irons.

“Carl said it would be okay if we took Chloe for a while.”

“Took her where?” Chloe shook her head frantically. I held up a finger to stop her.

“Here. With us. Just for a awhile. Until you figure out what you’re going to do about the house.”

“No,” Chloe said out loud.

“Is she still up? Doesn’t she have school tomorrow?”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“Can you at least tell me when the memorial service is going to be? Please? So I can at least plan for that?” It was her secretary voice, the voice that had come to my endless defense so many times before when we were kids, the clipped and clear diction so deft at cutting through the briars of quotidian chaos.   

“Listen,” I said. “I’m gonna go.” I clicked off before she could answer.

“I don’t want to live with them,” Chloe said flatly. “I want to stay in my own house.” 

“You’re not going anywhere, Crumb.” I laid down on her bed. I had built it myself, off her shady instructions to make something “Aladdin.” It was all Moorish curves in bright pinks and oranges, crowned with gold painted balls. We were pressed together closely, my large body trapping her under her pink sheets. Her open book was huge atop her small chest. I could see it rise and fall with each of her nervous breaths. I recognized it. H. H. Arnason’s “History of Modern Art.” I had won the book when I had been Chloe’s age back in 1976, a trophy as cumbersome and heavy as a crateful of old toys, presented to me as a first youth award for painting by the Newport Beach City Arts Commission. It was particularly unwieldy when I lifted it off her as it was open to the back, the section dedicated to assemblage, what Arnason referred to as Return to the Object. At the far right corner of the open page was a black and white photo of John Chamberlain’s 1963 Silverheels. The sculpture was little more than a compressed fan of welded auto metal. It had not moved me at all when I was her age. But Chole had clearly seen something in the collusion of derelict bumpers and dented car doors I had not. She had drawn a reverent and yet ecstatic circle around it, a sloppy sun in yellow, green and carmen colored crayon.

“Are you mad I drew in your book?”

“No, sweetie.” Relived, her small face brightened.

“Did he make that out of real cars?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did be get them?”

“I don’t know. Probably some junk yard.”

“So people had driven in those cars?”

“Probably.”

“And then something happened to the cars and he got them?”

“Sure.”

“What happened?”

“What do you mean what?”

“Did the cars get into a crash?”

“They could have.”

“And people were in them when they crashed?”

“I don’t know, Crumb. Stuff happens to cars all the time.” I folded the book shut and dropped it to the floor and laid back down with her. There was evidence only of Chloe in her room. An empty breakfast bowl with a skin of evaporated almond milk at its bottom. Dried out markers without their caps. Bits of construction paper in once bright colors, scrawled on or torn to reveal the tiny threads of their crude pulp. A spoon with a pale crusty kiss on its tip. On her floor, a cartoonish slut of a naked Bratz doll  seemed to have lost some sartorial challenge with a sly and proper vintage repro Barbie, still dressed in her pencil skirt and pill box hat. Chloe’s dress-up dresses where strewn around her rug and furniture like fairy bunting after a long passed parade. The room smelled of comfortable musk, old house smell and dirty sheets, all rounded from the brink of total neglect by the sweetness that came off her skin and hair. There was life in the room. Something brave and quiet and curious in the percolating air.    

“What do you think would happen if we didn’t get to keep this house?” I said cautiously. This was the last conversation I wanted to be having. The house had been a part of us, had gone through all our changes, survived two equity lines of credit, had financed us and sheltered us, inspired us, was one of us.

“Did auntie say we couldn’t keep it?”

“Auntie didn’t say anything.” 

“But we live here,” she said in that sharp simple way of hers. “And what about the kitchen you made? Don’t you want to keep that?” I could smell the hot puffs of peppermint tooth paste from between her teeth.

“I know, Crumb.”

We were broke. The life insurance would pay off the medical bills. My wife’s SAG pension would keep us flush in Mac and Cheese and toilet paper. My business wasn’t thriving. Who wanted whimsical children’s furniture in the wake of folding banks?

“But I was born here. You and Mom were married here.” Her little seal body was tucked into the Halloween pajamas she wore year-round. My question clearly made no sense. Suddenly I wasn’t sleepy and I didn’t want her to sleep. The house was our last recognizable herm in this new landscape, our one comfortable compass. We couldn’t lose it.

Suddenly, I knew how I was going to do it.

“You want to see something?” I asked, sitting up from her bed. “Something good?”

“Can we eat it?”

“No, but it’s still good.” I slipped off her bed and ran into the office. I came back smiling brazenly. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

“What is that?” she asked looking at the sealed envelope in my hand. I held the envelope out toward her. She furrowed her little face and the words marched into her eyes. “Bank of America?”

“Yes,” I said grinning wildly.

“Card member...what’s that word?”

“Information.”

“Card member information ...what’s that one?”

“Enclosed.”

“What’s in it?”

“Something marvelous,” I beamed. “Something truly marvelous.” I tore open the envelope and pulled out the perforated sheet of credit card checks. “Look at that. Three of them. Isn’t that incredible.”

“They’re money?”

“Sort of. 2.99%, my little Crumb. As much as we want for a mere 2.99%.” She tried to smile, to share my glee over the dangling introductory rate, but the numbers made no sense to her. “Don’t you get it? We can stay here. We can keep the house. At least for a while.”

“Are we poor?” she asked. The checks felt haunted now. I let them drift to the surface of her comforter.

“Your mom was sick a long time, Crumb. And her sickness was expensive. That’s one of the reasons we brought her home and took care of her ourselves. She couldn’t work when she was sick and I turned down a lot of work to be with her.”

“I didn’t know we were poor.”

“I’m not saying we’re poor. I’m just saying until things turn around we need a little help. And 2.99% is probably the best we’re going to get.” She let this settle, her way, laying back and nodding slightly, the small rasp of her breathing audible in the room.

“We must do it properly, Pellet,” she said finally. “We must be gracious.” She picked up the sheet of checks and tore one off. She pressed it over her face and mumbled something through the bleached paper and then sat up. “We need candles.”  

She had folded and unfolded the check several times when I returned with the candles. The check now looked scarred, cross hatched with a series of white healed wounds. She broke her vintage Barbie into a sitting position, its bendless knees splayed under it at a sharp angle, and placed the check in its stiff arms. She placed a candle on either side of the doll and nodded for me to light them. Small flames danced palely in the electrically lit room.

“Thank you 2.99%,” she said soberly. “Thank you for letting us stay home.”

I had saved us. That was me, the bedtime magus who waved his out-of-work fingers and made the good dreams come. The sober and scared suburban alchemist who thought he could transform junk mail into gold.


We both went to bed after our little ceremony but we couldn’t sleep. Not the way we had. Not without her. It couldn’t have been later than eight-thirty, nine o’clock. I couldn’t remember the day. So I snuck back into her room and told her about Saturn. 

“We can see it, you know. It’s the one with the rings.”

“Neptune has rings, too.” she said. “But they don’t go around the belly. They kind of spin down.”

“Well,” I said “Saturn is fat in the sky right now. And to average people who look up it just looks like a little light. But I can take you to a place where you can see it up close. Like, right there.” I held my curved fingers under her nose, shaking them slightly with what I hoped was the celestial majesty of an imagined planet. Her large eyes widened.

“Really? Can we go now?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Crumb.”

“Can this be my outfit?” she asked pinching the pumpkin print of her pajama top.

“That can be your outfit. Just get some shoes and a jacket.”

She chose heels, the low strappy ones she had worn under her flower girl dress at her Auntie’s wedding. They lolled on the passenger dashboard as we drove in the dark toward the 134. I could see the red flake of her toenail polish wink and retreat in the headlights of passing cars. It had taken one whole afternoon for her mother to paint them. Hours of concentration, as  she had tried to steady her weak fingers that held the tiny brush. She was breathing hard when she had told Chole not to touch them until they dried. I reached out to squeeze Chloe’s little thigh and almost missed our exit. 

We parked on an incline, sandwiched between a tricked out Nissan and a barely street legal Impala. Duck-walking Chicano boys from the East Valley swam in the vats of fabric that made up their Laker jerseys or surrender-worthy white undershirts. The bottoms of their baggy chinos were frayed like tassels, brooming the asphalt as they loped behind their goth girlfriends. They jerked their chins at one another as they passed, in greeting and cool assessment— tiny epilepsies of what’s up— as we all trudged uphill, drawn like moths to the bright lights and three domes of Griffith’s Observatory. There was a snap of carnival in the air as we approached the main lawn. Bodies swam in the shadows, chasing, cuddling, kissing, hot with sweat and pot smoke.  

 Almost no one was inside the main building. I showed Chloe the sprawl of color and bodies newly re-touched on the massive bowl of the ceiling at the main hall’s entrance. But she had no interest in the fresco. Her eyes went directly to the forty foot pole that was bolted to the middle of it. Foucault’s pendulum. She leaned over the circular railing and gazed at the sedulous trajectory of the swinging nipple at the end of the pendulum, little intakes of excitement escaping her as the nipple got closer and closer to knocking over a domino. But they weren’t dominos, they were spring-loaded pegs or something, each destined to fall once every ten minutes. She was captivated.

“Look at that, Pellet. It almost got it,” she said, pointing to the pegs. “What makes it swing like that?”

“I think it’s the earth’s rotation or something.”

“So it can feel the earth move. That long sweepy thing.” 

“What do you mean?” I asked with mock surprise. “Can’t you feel it?” I began to wobble a little. “Quick! Hold onto something.” I flung my hands to the pendulum’s railing, a silent era comedian on the deck of a riotously bucking ship. “The earth’s moving!” I caught the eye of the attendant in the planetarium’s ticket booth. She smiled at me indulgently. When I looked back to Chloe her smile was cool.

“That’s silly, Pellet. It’s not rocky like that,” she said grinning at me. “It’s softer. More slippery.”

I bought tickets to the last planetarium show of the evening and whispered she had seven more minutes to watch her pegs fall.

“Good,” she said, not looking at me. 

When the show was about to begin I had to drag her away. What was it in that pendulum’s heavy sweep? Safety? Predictability? Or a new rhythm hidden from me entirely.

The show was live. A man with a voice that could sell deodorant held up a glowing ball and sold us fifty-nine minutes of  Dolby big-bang and cosmic wonder. Chloe loved the seat that could only recline and gasped as the bowl above us blushed Wyeth pink before fading completely to light-pricked night. We watched the universe burst into being, watched it stretch out and yawn as the starry gasses slowed and coalesced into recognizable freeways and mountain ranges. We were out there, stuck to the wrist of a spiral arm of our own galaxy, unexceptional, remote, tricked into seasons by the timely collision that had halted the dinosaurs. All we seemed to do from a distance was dance, like demented waltzers stuck in a loop of perpetual Strauss.

 All we do is spin.

 It was wonderful.

Her grin was incandescent as we left the theater. I could tell something had broken loose in there, but I wasn’t sure what. 

We made our way to the outside, up to the observation deck cannoned with coin-operated binoculars. From this promontory the lights of Hollywood pushed harder than the stars above them. But we could still see the vaguely corporal dots of Orion before us. We could breathe, even in the gauzy air. We both felt lighter. 

“Do you remember coming here when you were really little?” I asked her. She kept her eyes on the shimmering distance. 

“Did you bring Mom here?” I was thrown by the question. Felt the stab of it before I answered.

“Yeah.”

“Did you stand here?”

“Near here.”

“And you kissed?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Was it the first time you kissed her?” I tried to make a welcome place for the memory. Tried to shave it of its thorns.

“No, Crumb. More like hundred and fifty-first time.”

“Ew.”

A line was forming, quietly near one of the rooftop domes that housed the hardware that gave the place its name. People stood semi-solemn in the dark, shuffling slowly forward into the  hollow of the observatory. The interior was pure pragmatism: exposed curved beams, a shelf with several clocks all declaring different times, a video monitor with a live feed of the distant planet we were all waiting to see. A mobile wooden staircase, set on heavy casters was set under the stem of the eye piece of the mounted telescope. People would mount these steps like a gallows, peering into it for a few seconds, faces raised afterward, flushed or disappointed. Chloe wanted to go up the steps alone. That stung a bit but I nudged her forward. A blond girl with a name tag smiled from the top of the stairs as Chloe climbed toward her. She helped Chloe bend to the proper angle then turned toward me and mouthed the word “dad”. I nodded and she motioned for me to follow. We all held our breaths as Chloe peered through the tube.

“Why does it wiggle like that?” Chloe asked the blond. Her question was almost a whisper but in the large silent room it burst out in near shout.

“Atmospheric haze, sweetie,” the blond said bending. “Our telescope has to look through all the layers of our atmosphere, like water in a glass, right?” Chloe bent down to look again. “Saturn is over eight million miles away. Can you imagine?” 

Chloe’s red lips mouthed “eight million” then she set her eyes on me. “Pellet,” she said suddenly. “You have to see this.” The blond smiled and I dipped my head. And for a moment we stood on the platform, the three of us like a false family, the clear little ghost of Saturn hovering under my eye like a hippy tattoo.

“Cool,” I said diffusively. The blond nodded and looked away. 

Driving home I wished she had fallen asleep. I was worried about returning home, the quiet house, the familiar surroundings now loud with loss.

“Aren’t you sleepy, Crumb?”

“Can I have some carrots when we get home?”

“You’ll have to brush your teeth again.”  

I realized as we drove that it would really just be us now. We had just done what normal people do. We had gone out into the world in a way we have have to go out forever. She and I. Pellet and Crumb.

Our insular status had shaped gradually, like a stalagmite formed from the mineral-laden drip of my wife’s slip into sickness. We had gone to a few birthday parties when my wife had been too weak to leave the house, just the two of us, a dry run of widowhood. But the stink of pity had been too strong. It slowed our steps, every mascara-ed eye on us like hot garbage. We dropped our presents like paid couriers and retreated without a word. I had a stack of un-rsvp’d invitations as my wife got sicker, phone messages about barbeques and get-togethers that were erased without comment. The waters rose around us and the invitations stopped coming.  

I parked the car under the burning street lamp, at the curb in front of our house. The street was quiet. Just the thrum of police helicopters in the distance. I din’t want to look at the street lamp. Or our dark house. I just wanted to sit there in the car, as if I had a place to go. As if I had a plan. 

“Can I have the keys, Pellet?” Chloe asked. “I have to pee.”

“I’ll let you in,” I said rousing. 


“Can I still have my carrots?” she asked, moving down the hall toward her room. There was a chill in her voice, the same detachment that had crept into her on the afternoon of her mom’s  prognosis.

For three days after we had gotten the news of her mother’s condition, Chloe had communicated in only the broken Navajo she had taught herself from a pamphlet she had checked out from her school’s library. When hungry she had said cha-le-gai lit be-la-sana, which literally translates into “sailor smoke apple”. When thirsty “apple” had become tkoh, which meant “water.” It had been infuriating but consistent. It was only when her mother’s nose had begun to bleed and wouldn’t stop for six hours that she dropped the act and exhibited the crippling yet communicative fear you would expect. 

I feared we were headed into similar waters when I crossed into the  kitchen and pulled a limp carrot out of the fridge. I don’t know how long I stood there with that limp carrot in my fingers. It could have been hour. I only know it was Chloe’s voice that brought me back. I somehow felt my feet under me, got my legs to work. When I got to the threshold of her room, I was stopped by what I saw, the cold carrot growing skin-warm in my hand.

Next Chapter: Square Sky