Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle Page 2

  The Time Capsule

  Nineteen hundred and forty-four. In a year the Japanese would surrender but Rhoda did not know that yet. She was worried sick about the Japanese. Forty years later she would smell a fig tree beside a bakery and remember how her swing looked down on fig trees during those fateful years while she waited to see who would win the war.

  It was not an ordinary swing. It was the tallest backyard swing in Seymour, Indiana, thirty feet high, constructed of tall pine uprights sunk in concrete shoes. The rope was an inch thick. There was a seat of solid pine fitted into the rope by hundreds of hours of Rhoda’s relentless swinging. She could swing holding a doll or a sandwich. She could swing standing up or sitting down. She could swing so high the ropes snapped at the top. Every morning she would come down the back stairs and across the yard and get in and take off. Off we go, she would be singing. Into the wild blue yonder. Climbing high into the sky.

  One morning in August she was swinging more slowly than usual because she was thinking about fate. Anything could happen to anyone at any time. That much was clear. You could be on the losing side of a war. You could fall in love and get married. Hollywood could come and get you for a movie star. Your mother could die and leave you her rings. You could die.

  Rhoda stopped the swing. She dragged her toes in the dirt. No, she would never die. She was not the type. It was probably a lie like everything else they told you. She smelled her arms. They smelled alive. She lifted her head. She tossed her hair. To hell with death, damn it all to goddamn hell. She concentrated on the fig tree above the sandpile. Let them come with death. She would smash them in the face. She would tie them to a tree and beat them with willow whips and jump in her plane and take off for the island where her mother waited. She dug her toes deeper in the soft, loose dirt beneath the swing. Red dirt, as red as blood, not dark like dirt in the Delta, like black dirt and black skin and rivers. This was the red dirt of Indiana, where they had to live because a war was going on. This was the war and everyone must do their part. She leaned far out of the swing until the ropes cut into her arms. She dug her toes into the dirt until her sandals were covered with it. Then she pushed back off into the sky. She pumped with her arms and legs. She went higher and higher, this time she would go forever, this time she would flip the swing over the uprights and come plummeting down.

  It had been a bad summer. First Gena’s sister told her blood was going to come out from in between her legs one week out of every four. There was nothing she could do about it. No one was excluded. Then her father took her and her mother to see The Outlaw with Jane Russell and made them leave at the part where Jane was warming her boyfriend’s body in the haystack. “I’ll keep you warm,” Jane was saying. “I’ll save you.” Big Dudley had grabbed them up and dragged them out of the theater. He was furious with Ariane for exposing Rhoda to filth.

  But the main thing was the newsreel. The news from the Pacific did not look good. Americans were dying on every island. It was possible they would lose the war. Rhoda stopped the swing. It was time to make a time capsule. She must leave a record so future generations would know she had been here. She got out of the swing and dusted off her dress and went into the kitchen. Mrs. Dustin was there, the German lady who worked for the Mannings now that they were someplace where there weren’t any black people. Mrs. Dustin wasn’t nice like black people. She only worked for them because she had to. She didn’t even love them. “Stay out of the refrigerator,” she said now. “Your mother doesn’t want you eating between meals.”

  “I need this matchbox,” Rhoda said. She took it off the stove and dumped the matches on the table.

  “Don’t take that,” Mrs. Dustin began, but it was too late. Rhoda was out the door, the sash of her pinafore trailing behind her. She was dressed up today, wearing a green and white checked dress and an organdy pinafore. She had a green velvet ribbon tied around her wrist to ward off the story of the blood coming out down there. Down there, down there, down there. Do not put anything down there. Do not stick anything inside yourself down there. Wash your hands before you touch yourself down there. There was a wonderful quality to her mother’s voice when she talked of it, scary and worried. Now, on top of everything else, there was this goddamn story about the blood. “It happens to every single girl,” Gena’s sister had said. “No one can escape it. You can never go swimming again. You have to have this big lump of absorbent cotton between your legs and it hurts so much you have to go to bed.” The minute Rhoda got home she had fallen down on her knees beside her bed to beg God not to let it happen to her. As usual there was no answer, so she got up and went to find her mother. “Why would Gena’s sister tell you such a thing? I can’t believe she told you something like that,” Rhoda’s mother said.

  “Then it’s true?”

  “No, it’s not exactly true. It will be a long time before it happens to you and it doesn’t hurt. It’s God’s way of making us able to have babies.”

  “Blood comes out from in between your legs?”

  “Yes, but not for a long time. Rhoda, you are just a little girl. You don’t have to worry about this yet.”

  “I hate God. I hate His guts. That’s just like Him to think up something like that.” She left the room. When she got to the door she called back across her shoulder, “I wouldn’t have your old God for all the tea in China. I think He looks like hell in that old robe.”

  That was the day before. Today Rhoda was on the offensive where fate was concerned. She went down the back stairs, holding the matchbox in her hand, and up on a rise to a place where she had been digging a foxhole the year before. She had abandoned the project because of a book she read about a little girl who went blind from staring at the sun. She had stayed inside for weeks after she read it. The shovel was still there. She picked it up and began to dig. Her hands were so strong and so valuable. Her mother was a princess, her father was a king, she was so wonderful and valuable. She must never die or be lost in any way. She dug as fast as she could, thinking of things that must go into the capsule. A picture of herself, the picture she sent to Margaret O’Brien after seeing Journey for Margaret. A man had left his luggage in London so that Margaret could get on the plane and fly to safety. I would do it, Rhoda decided. I would leave all my worldly goods behind to save a little girl. She dug awhile longer, imagining it. Then she dropped the shovel and took the matchbox inside to fill it up. She walked through the French doors and into the living room of the high-ceilinged stucco house someone in Seymour, Indiana had copied from a picture of a French château they found in a magazine.

  Rhoda took down the photograph album from a shelf and dusted it off with her skirt and found the photograph she wanted. It was a picture of herself sitting on a Persian rug in a white dress. Yes, it would do to carry her into the future. She tore it out of the book and sat down at her mother’s desk to write the message.

  My name is Rhoda Katherine Manning. I weigh 82. We are in a war. They might come at any minute. I have auburn hair and brown eyes. I was born on a plantation in the Delta and as soon as the war is over I’ll be going back. Mrs. Allen’s son died in the war. She has a gold star in the window and I go and visit her quite frequently. The pope wouldn’t let her be my brother’s godmother. She isn’t allowed to go inside our church. No one tells me what to do. I am just like my father.

  Well, I see I am running out of paper. When you find this think of me. It is summer and the sun is shining and everything is fine around here so far. I will include my fingerprints.

  Yours truly,

  Rhoda Manning

  She looked up from her writing, stuck her thumbs in the inkwell, added her thumbprints, blew the ink dry, then rolled the message up into a scroll. She went into the kitchen, got some wax paper, covered the scroll with it and added a rubber band. Then she went up to her room to see what she could find to put in the capsule. She chose a picture of Alan Ladd, a string of beads, three pennies and an empty perfume bottle. She arranged the things neatly in the matc
hbox and pushed the cover shut. There. That should give them a pretty good idea of what Seymour, Indiana was like in nineteen forty-four. She marched back out to the garden and began to dig again. The smell of the earth came up to meet her, cold and fresh. A robin called. A breeze touched her face. It was perfect. Rhoda sat back upon her heels and thought about the inside of the earth, how many things are buried there. Valuable things you could find, things you could eat. She put her face in her hands, sank back deeper on her heels, thinking of her victory garden, how small and tough the carrots were, what a disappointment. Dudley had laughed at her carrots. He said a rabbit wouldn’t eat the carrots that came up in her patch. Dudley. Why did they like him so much? Why was he so good? Why did he always get away with murder? Why did he have all the friends?

  He was coming across the yard toward her now, wearing his jodhpurs and his riding boots. He stopped, one hip cocked out, his black patch over his injured eye.

  “Get out of here,” she said. “I’m doing something.”

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s a time capsule.” She handed over the matchbox. He opened it and looked inside.

  “You ought to put your scout pin in. There ought to be something about the scouts.”

  “Well, I don’t have anything else. That’s all that’s going in.”

  “This is going to rot. You ought to get a tin box.”

  “Just mind your own business.”

  “I’d use tin if I was you. You want me to get you a can?” He was getting his hooded look. Rhoda grew wary. There were no meaningless encounters between Rhoda and Dudley. Every word and gesture was charged with meaning and intent. There was no meager stuff here. It was the world they were fighting for.

  “Just mind your own beeswax,” she said. “Just leave me alone.” He backed off. He actually walked away. Turned his back and walked away. Rhoda dug a few more inches in the ground, stuffed the box in the hole and covered it with dirt. Then she got up and went into the house to see what he was doing.

  He was in his room with the door shut. There was the sound of shuffling, the sound of muffled voices, muffled laughter. Rhoda pressed her ear to the door. Laughter again. It was Cody Wainwright. They were doing something. They were talking about their secret things. She would use the hidden passageway behind the stairs. They would never know she was there. She could stay there for hours without a sound, hot and close in the little alcove behind his room.

  She climbed down through the small door and into the crawl space between the dormers, walking on the two-by-fours. She sat down on the crossbeams. She prepared to listen. Nothing was going on. They weren’t talking. They weren’t saying anything. Someone laughed. It was Dudley. Yes, it was Dudley laughing. Cody laughed back. Silence. Only silence. They turned the radio on. It was hot. Before long she would breathe up all the air. She would die back here and no one would ever find her. She got up and beat on the wall of his room. “I hear you in there. I can hear every word you’re saying. I heard everything you said.” Then she climbed back out the door and turned around to face them. “I heard you,” she said. “If you hit me I’ll tell her everything you said.”

  “You’re a nasty bad little girl,” Dudley said. “You are as bad as anyone gets to be.”

  “Let’s take her with us to the sweetshop,” Cody said. “Let’s get her a lemonade.”

  “She’s been out in the yard making a time capsule with her picture in it.” Dudley laughed and turned his back on her. “That’s how much she likes herself. She thinks someone’s going to be interested in her after she’s dead.” He laughed again, a dark vicious laugh, and took his friend’s arm and left her there.

  A week later Rhoda’s father came home one afternoon and announced that they were moving to Terre Haute, Indiana, to build another airport. They had one week to pack up and be there. The War Department was going to build the biggest airport in Indiana and get this goddamn war over with. They were going to live in a famous writer’s house, a writer named Virginia Sorensen. The writer had a little girl just Rhoda’s age and Rhoda would live in this child’s room. They must hurry and put everything in storage. The war was heating up. There must be more airports, more pilots, more planes. Everyone must pitch in and do their share. They must tighten their belts, pack the boxes, get on the move.

  Dudley began to cry. He was afraid to go to a different school so soon after he lost his eye. Rhoda’s mother put her arms around him and cried too. Only Rhoda and her father did not cry. Only Rhoda and her father had enough sense to win a war. Rhoda took some boxes up to her room and began to throw things into them, singing as she worked. “Over hill, over dale, as we hit the dusty trail. And those caissons go rolling along. . . .” She threw in her movie star pictures and her music box and her false fingernail set and her Kiddie Kurlers and her hot water bottle. She threw in her books and started on her dresser drawers. All her nice white socks. The pair of ecru rayon pants her mother wouldn’t let her wear because they were tacky. She held them up to the light. There were stripes of ecru silk. She threw them in and finished off the drawer. A rumpled sheet of white tissue paper was in the bottom. She folded it and left it in the drawer. Jimmy got up out of a corner and came and stood by the boxes. He was her imaginary playmate. He had come to live with her when she was four, when her mother was in the hospital. He had stayed with her all that long year. He had sat with her on the fire escape of the apartment in Louisville, Kentucky, waiting for the bread man to come and bring the bread with the picture of the Seven Dwarfs. Rhoda hadn’t seen him in a long time. Now he was here, wearing his gray suit and white shirt and black tie, wearing his cynical look. “Well, I see we’re moving again,” he said. “I hope you don’t get a bad teacher like you did last time. I’ll never forget that day.”

  Rhoda stopped packing. She sat down on the bed. All her courage disappeared. The day she had come to Seymour to the new school, a fat, blond teacher had put her in the bad reading group. THE LOWER GROUP. Rhoda Katherine Manning, the best reader in the world, sitting in the back of the room. She had sat there all day until they found out she could read. “It could happen again,” Jimmy said. “Go find her. Make sure she knows. Go find her right now. Get it settled.”

  Rhoda found her mother in the bathroom packing the iodine and alcohol and Mercurochrome and hydrogen peroxide. “If you put me in a school that puts me in a dumb reading class I will kill myself. You had better be sure they don’t do that.”

  “Oh, darling.” Her mother closed the bathroom cabinet and sat down on the edge of the tub. “I’m so sorry. So sorry about everything. I’m doing all I can. I’m doing everything I know how to do.”

  “Just be sure about the school.”

  “I will. I promise I will. I’ll go with you the first day and take your test scores. I’ll talk to the teacher before you go there. Nothing will happen. I promise you. You’re going to live in a writer’s house, honey. She wrote A Little Lower Than the Angels. We’ll get all her books and read them. It will be an adventure. We must be brave, darling, we’re in a war.”

  “I know. You already told me that. How big a room?”

  “Plenty big. Your father said it had a blackboard. And Rhoda, don’t worry about the school. I will never let that happen to you again.”

  “It better not.”

  “It won’t. I promise you. Things can’t be perfect right now, honey. We have to get this war over. Our men are dying over there. We have to save as many as we can.” As soon as she said it Ariane regretted the words. It was not good to say dead or death to Rhoda. The child backed up and moved into the corner.

  “What does it mean to die? What happens to you?” Rhoda was near the sink. She could smell the alcohol and the Mercurochrome. It smelled like the hospital where she had had her tonsils out the year before. They had strapped her to a table and put a mask on her face and dripped sleeping gas on it. Her mother and father were in the hall. Nuns were all around her, holding her down. There was nothing she could do. Her life was in the
hands of nuns and strangers. Death will be like that, Rhoda thought. They will hold you down and drip poison in your nose and there will be nothing you can do and your mother will be out in the hall. She refused her mother’s hands. “I can’t stand to die,” she screamed. “I hate God. I hate it all so much. I won’t do it. They can’t make me do it. They won’t get me. I won’t hold still. I won’t go in there. Go to goddamn hell, that’s what I’m going to tell them. You won’t make me die, you goddam old God, to hell with you.”

  Her mother had her now. Her mother had her in her arms. “It isn’t like that, honey. People you love are up there waiting for you. You can be with Jesus. He died to give us everlasting life. He frees us from death.”

  “That’s a lie. None of it is true. Nothing you ever tell me is true.” Her mother dropped her arms. She sighed a long deep sigh. Rhoda was too much. Too smart for her own good. Too wild, too crazy, too hard to manage or control. She was a long way from the sweet little redheaded girl Ariane had ordered from Jesus. Thinking of Jesus, Ariane remembered her duty. She fought back. “You just calm down, young lady. You just stop all that talk right this minute.”