Read Online The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Andrew Sean Greer
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returned to childhood and her early successes at manipulation—that artificial smile she was flashing now, the giggle with a finger at her lip, the curtsy. But the tricks tended to cloy these days, and they rarely worked on him anymore. Yet, despite this Kim language, she had not come up with new stuff. It made her furious and confused, and she walked away looking for something to destroy in retribution.
Swift continued to work away at his onion, turning the rings ninety degrees so he could chop from a new angle. Everything had to be done in a particular way—you wouldn’t have guessed this about him if you’d caught him drunk and boisterous at a party, spraying rum into his beard, telling stories of Richard Feynman and those mathematical jokes—and even he wouldn’t have recognized or admitted it. He would have said that it was easy and obvious how to cut an onion: the best way. You might have said this was a sign of his genius, the outward show of his facility with stars and numbers, but the same obsession in a lesser man could just as easily have been taken as desperation. Because Swift was also desperate, moving on to his red peppers, half-listening for his daughter as she stomped around the house. He was afraid, despite all his efforts, that he had grown suddenly old.
It was 1971, and for so many professors like Swift, it was hard to read the newspapers and believe that this was the world they’d known. Bombs were everywhere: on airliners, campuses, even in the rest room of the Capitol. Science jobs were at an all-time low; Nixon had cut aerospace funding drastically, and then, inevitably, an Apollo mission had gone horribly wrong and the scientists themselves were blamed. Universities had closed down to protests after the invasion of Cambodia, and many of the male astronomy undergraduates, in a panic over the draft, had abandoned science and left for Canada and Denmark. Young professors led their students in protest; older ones shook their heads at empty classrooms. Science, the savior of the world a decade before, had become some kind of enemy, so how could men like Swift feel they belonged? He tried; he lectured against the war in his classroom, smoked pot with his students, bought trippy records they recommended and listened to them over and over until he found something to enjoy. He tried to feel some sympathy for the young.
Lydia was already outside. She knew very little of what was in the newspapers. She had stolen a handful of crackers from the table, and here she stood outside in a mist of crumbs. They were on their farm in Sonoma, north of the city—once her parents’ place, and now just her father’s; a weekend at the apple orchard in mid-March. Usually it was still cold at this time of year, officially winter, prone to fog and night chills that sent the spiders indoors to torment them, but nothing was for sure in northern California, and the late afternoon air was unseasonably warm and bright, birds wrestling in the budded trees, the weeds and grass of the field she stood in glowing greenly, smelling deeply of themselves.
They were there too early. They had never come to the farm in March before, but when her father suggested it, she had grown so excited that she puzzled even herself. She had friends in Berkeley, a birthday party to go to (Kim would be there), but there was something so secret and true about the farm, something so old in her that she could hardly resist it: the half-a-year of waiting, then that sudden reward that she was never able to predict (though it came every year, without fail) that first weekend when her parents, filled with relief, would pack food and coffee and drive off with Lydia and her older sister. There was the mysteriously long route across a bridge, the familiar water tower in white, then the old unchanged and cob-webbed homestead where her mother had always crept off happily with a book and her father paced restlessly through the fields in an old fishing hat,
Swift continued to work away at his onion, turning the rings ninety degrees so he could chop from a new angle. Everything had to be done in a particular way—you wouldn’t have guessed this about him if you’d caught him drunk and boisterous at a party, spraying rum into his beard, telling stories of Richard Feynman and those mathematical jokes—and even he wouldn’t have recognized or admitted it. He would have said that it was easy and obvious how to cut an onion: the best way. You might have said this was a sign of his genius, the outward show of his facility with stars and numbers, but the same obsession in a lesser man could just as easily have been taken as desperation. Because Swift was also desperate, moving on to his red peppers, half-listening for his daughter as she stomped around the house. He was afraid, despite all his efforts, that he had grown suddenly old.
It was 1971, and for so many professors like Swift, it was hard to read the newspapers and believe that this was the world they’d known. Bombs were everywhere: on airliners, campuses, even in the rest room of the Capitol. Science jobs were at an all-time low; Nixon had cut aerospace funding drastically, and then, inevitably, an Apollo mission had gone horribly wrong and the scientists themselves were blamed. Universities had closed down to protests after the invasion of Cambodia, and many of the male astronomy undergraduates, in a panic over the draft, had abandoned science and left for Canada and Denmark. Young professors led their students in protest; older ones shook their heads at empty classrooms. Science, the savior of the world a decade before, had become some kind of enemy, so how could men like Swift feel they belonged? He tried; he lectured against the war in his classroom, smoked pot with his students, bought trippy records they recommended and listened to them over and over until he found something to enjoy. He tried to feel some sympathy for the young.
Lydia was already outside. She knew very little of what was in the newspapers. She had stolen a handful of crackers from the table, and here she stood outside in a mist of crumbs. They were on their farm in Sonoma, north of the city—once her parents’ place, and now just her father’s; a weekend at the apple orchard in mid-March. Usually it was still cold at this time of year, officially winter, prone to fog and night chills that sent the spiders indoors to torment them, but nothing was for sure in northern California, and the late afternoon air was unseasonably warm and bright, birds wrestling in the budded trees, the weeds and grass of the field she stood in glowing greenly, smelling deeply of themselves.
They were there too early. They had never come to the farm in March before, but when her father suggested it, she had grown so excited that she puzzled even herself. She had friends in Berkeley, a birthday party to go to (Kim would be there), but there was something so secret and true about the farm, something so old in her that she could hardly resist it: the half-a-year of waiting, then that sudden reward that she was never able to predict (though it came every year, without fail) that first weekend when her parents, filled with relief, would pack food and coffee and drive off with Lydia and her older sister. There was the mysteriously long route across a bridge, the familiar water tower in white, then the old unchanged and cob-webbed homestead where her mother had always crept off happily with a book and her father paced restlessly through the fields in an old fishing hat,
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