Alex Myers
Alex Myers lives and teaches in Rhode Island. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of publications including flashquake, Apple Valley Review, and ghoti mag.
The first Melissa heard about the whales was when she took her mother out to dinner in late September. The restaurant wasn’t crowded because her mom had wanted to eat early, unreasonably early. There were only a smattering of patrons, and the hostess had seated them thinly along the restaurant’s street-side windows, creating a false veneer of occupancy.
Still, Melissa’s mother spoke loudly. “You’ll never guess who called about the whales. June Cornwall.”
Melissa was mystified both by the whales and the mention of June Cornwall – she still thought of her as Mrs. Cornwall – who had been her father’s assistant for years before he died. She tried to puzzle out what her mom might be talking about, but gave up and asked, “Which whales?”
“At the museum, dear. June wants me to help out there and give information about the whales. You know, a tour of the whale room there.”
The museum. There was only one museum in their world: the museum where her father had been director, which perched atop a modest hill, near the observatory on the college campus that constituted the heart of Greendale, Massachusetts, only a half mile from the restaurant where they now sat. The museum that Melissa hadn’t been to, had tried not to think about, since her father’s death two years ago.
The waiter came by, deposited a basket of rolls and a dish of butter on the table. Her mother’s hand hovered momentarily over the basket, indecisive, before plunging in to grasp a roll. Melissa watched her motions, familiar and discomforting at the same time, like so many things from her childhood, even this town, her birthplace. When she’d moved back two years ago, taking an adjunct position, she’d told herself that she was just here to help her mother move on, get back on her feet after her father’ death. She didn’t imagine that she’d stay for long, and the longer she did stay, the more she felt trapped, pulled back into the orbit of her childhood: the same streets, the same buildings, even some of the same people. Worse than that, though, were the things that had changed. She could accept the necessity of her return, the need to help her mother move on, the sense of adult responsibility that settled around her as she shouldered this task, but now she felt herself reduced to being a child again, reluctant, petulant, unable to escape.
Her mother attended to her roll, shaving yellow curls off the frozen bud of butter. Melissa watched the butter accumulate on the roll, watched her mother perch the glistening knife on her plate. She knew there was something she should say, some word of encouragement or at least response, but Melissa felt empty. She did not want to talk about or think about the museum.
“Surely you remember the whale room,” her mother said.
“Of course I do. But I thought the museum was closed for renovation.”
“Well, the renovation is all done. It’s just opened up again, and June thought I would like to volunteer. And I have to say, it is fun. I’ve just started my training on whales.”
Melissa looked at her mother with disbelief. “I don’t see how you could go back there. That’s Dad’s place.” She regretted the words as soon as she said them. “I just meant that maybe going back will be upsetting for you.” Melissa stumbled a bit, trying to find the right phrase; she didn’t like discussing her father, or really anything from the past, with her mother. She wanted her to move on, to be her own person, unencumbered by what had been. She imagined her mother’s life if she stayed here in the same saltbox house on the edge of campus, growing older while the undergraduates remained eternally young, becoming increasingly irrelevant to what was around her.
“It’s not upsetting at all. Really, it’s rather comforting to be back there and besides, it’s all new. Or mostly new, anyway, since the renovation. Your father would be happy to see it, with everything updated.”
Not only was this beside the point, Melissa thought, it wasn’t true. Her father loved the museum the way it had been. She’d felt resentment at the museum for starting renovations almost as soon as her father died, as if they were glad he was gone so they could change everything. Besides, the point of museums was that they shouldn’t change; they preserved the past. The waiter came by their table and placed their entrees in front of them. Melissa’s mother began to slowly cut her steak. “You should come by and see the new exhibits sometime. I can show you the whale hall, give you the tour.”
“What’s new with the whales?”
“Well, they’ve kept the skeleton of course. That thing’s a fixture! Leviathan, the staff calls it. All those years of it hanging up there and I never knew it had a nickname. But there’s all sorts of new information. Did you know that whales were originally land creatures and then later moved into the water?”
“No. I had no idea.” Truthfully, Melissa hadn’t given a thought to whales for years, didn’t know much about them beyond what she remembered from her last biology class in high school, but she found her mother’s claim to be absurd, like the whales had just packed up, ordered a U-Haul when things got too crowded. She didn’t remember learning anything like that.
Across the table, her mother continued, “Well, it’s true. They are just amazing creatures. Some whales live over a hundred years and did you know that a few countries still allow whales to be hunted?”
They ate for a while in silence, her mother looking out the restaurant window while Melissa tried to sort out her thoughts and redirect the conversation. When she’d moved back to her hometown after her father’s death, she’d told herself it would be for a year, just to help her mother get back on her feet. It had felt like the right thing, the adult, responsible thing, to do. But it had been two years, and instead of helping her mother move on, Melissa felt more and more like she was sinking back into her childhood, that she’d never be able to lift herself, or her mother, out of this town.
Eventually, the waiter broke the silence and took their plates away. They waited for the check and chatted lightly about weather, books, anything inconsequential, a conversation that could have occurred between near-strangers. As they exited the restaurant, they made vague plans for their next get-together. Melissa’s mom gave her a loose hug and said, as she had said since Melissa moved back, “It’s so nice to have you here.” Melissa wondered why that was, whether her mother really meant it.
As Melissa walked home, the autumn twilight settling suddenly around her, she thought about the museum, imagining its rooms, its glass cases. The whale hall. She could picture the big, bleached skeleton suspended overhead. She remembered a scale-model of a whaling ship and a life-size harpoon. She remembered her father, crouched over next to her so that he was at her eye level, explaining how they spotted the whale and sent out boats to chase it, how valuable the oil was. But most of the details were lost. When she thought of the museum, she thought of rainy afternoons after school was let out, or snow days, when she’d spend hours there. Her dad would be in his office and she would just wander through the museums’ rooms. Her favorite spot was the dioramas of the town, a series of models that showed its development in fifty-year increments. First the forest with just a few cabins, then a town common and church, the first college buildings. Eventually a mill appeared and railroad tracks, then highways, and at last the town that Melissa knew was recognizable. She loved the orderliness of it, the way that a few things stayed constant: the river, the central street, the rounded hill. The way it seemed that things were meant to be built, that a place was saved for them. The promise of permanence amid change.
Even now, even though it had been years since she had been inside the museum, she thought that certain rooms: these dioramas, her father’s old office, she could recreate in the most minute detail. Her own private museum, right down to where Mrs. Cornwall set the telephone and jar of pens on her desk. But in none of these scenes could she place her mother. The museum had always been between Melissa and her father, a place where they understood one another, a shared language. She thought of the large windows in the galleries, the sunlight coming through, catching motes of dust, and she could not picture, would not picture, her mother there.
The sidewalk sloped down towards the river, and the last few college buildings slipped past her. She crossed the bridge above the old dam, the water gushing over, just noise; it was too dark to see. When she’d returned to this town, Melissa had opted for a condo in a renovated mill building, down in what used to be a neglected district on the river. As a child, the area where she now lived had been off-limits; the old mill and warehouses had been home to junkies and squatters. She found some small satisfaction from living in a formerly forbidden place. It sweetened the guilt, the timidity she felt about still living in the town where she grew up, an act she thought suggested a weakness, a failing, an inability to transcend. Tonight, the old mill buildings loomed large and shadowy, hunkered down along the banks, vague and threatening like the unease that filled her.
Three weeks of whale facts followed, three weeks of phone calls in which Melissa’s mother urged her to come over and see the baleen she’d been allowed to take home for further study, three weeks of Melissa coming up with excuses, chores to do, lectures to attend, that kept her distant from these artifacts, from any confrontation with the museum. The phone calls stirred up unpleasant thoughts of her mother in the whale hall, the dusty light streaming in through the windows, the feeling of loneliness and morbidity she expected must haunt her mother as she stood amongst those bones, those glassed-in displays of taxidermied animals. The sense of defilement Melissa felt at imagining her mother there in rooms that had been her father’s, or her own as a child, rooms in which her mother had no place. Get out, she wanted to tell her. Get out. And she wasn’t sure if was for her mother’s sake or her own that she wished that.
Yet, when the phone rang, displaying her mother’s number, Melissa knew she had to answer it, go through the standard pleasantries, the brief and largely inaccurate summary of her week at work, take a breath, withhold her resentment, and ask, “So, how is the museum?”
Her voice brightened in response, as if she had been waiting for this question. “Oh good. Very good. Just this week I’ve been promoted to pterodactyls.”
“That’s a promotion?”
“Oh, yes. Pterodactyls are much more advanced. It’s not the same as when you were in school.”
Melissa found it hard to understand how dinosaurs could have changed. They were, in fact, one of those things that were not supposed to change.
Through the earpiece, her mother’s voice continued, “The room’s the same. Still the hall of dinosaurs, still in the same place, but they’ve improved it quite a bit. I mean, goodness, when you were a girl they had those skeletons all wrong. Some meat-eater’s head stuck on a plant-eater’s body. And those poses. Like they would walk around all day on their hind legs.”
Melissa was dumbfounded. “That’s not true?” Admittedly, she had not spent much time in the dinosaur room. She had preferred the dioramas or the displays on Native American life. But now that she urged her memory towards it, she remembered the dinosaur room, the rocks with the fossils pressed in, the massive skeleton that filled the middle of the room. This had always been a figure of mystery and horror to her, its bones dark brown, almost bronze, not bleached and clean like the whale’s. And its empty eye sockets and toothy skull added to the sense of threat. How could that skeleton not be right, not be true? As a girl, and even, she now realized, as an adult, she’d always pictured the archaeologists unearthing the skeleton intact: a whole dinosaur laid out in the soil, as if by a primordial mortician. But now she could see that image was hopelessly wrong. They would have found a mess of bones, all scattered, and had to put them together, decide what they meant – death was neither neat nor easy. She knew that now. And even the museum, though she was afraid to admit it, could get something wrong.
On the other end of the line, Melissa’s mom continued. “And pterodactyls. It’s not like they’re birds, like everyone thinks. They were gliders. Of course, dinosaurs did evolve into birds, eventually. But really. You should just come to the museum, and I’ll give you the tour. You’ll be surprised at what you could learn.”
“I don’t know, Mom. I’ve got a busy weekend lined up, raking leaves.”
“Oh, it’s not that big a museum. It won’t take long. And you don’t even have to tell anyone I’m your mother. Just come in and pretend you’re a tourist. You can’t miss me. I’ll be the one with the pterodactyl skull.”
Defeated by her mother’s enthusiasm, Melissa sighed, “Okay. I’ll come tomorrow morning.”
The morning brought a foggy drizzle, and Melissa’s windshield wipers smeared it across her vision as she drove to the museum. The campus was empty at this hour, and Melissa thought the museum would be too: just her and her mother. The thought made her sad; there must be many days when only a handful of visitors came to the museum and her mother had no one to tour around, just the empty exhibit halls where she would stand, looking like an artifact herself. Melissa climbed the steep stairs to the museum’s door and told herself that she was doing the charitable thing, the right thing for her mother. She tried not to consider what her father would think of this, this violation of his domain. She braced herself to be offended by the new displays, to mourn all the exhibits that he had worked so hard to maintain, now gone in the renovation. She didn’t know what she would find inside, but she knew it would not be what she wanted.
The bored student at the front desk stamped Melissa’s hand and let her pass inside. The floorboards creaked beneath her feet in a reassuringly familiar way and soon she could see the milky white bones of the whale, Leviathan, still hanging above. She sighed a little, with relief that this, at least, was the same. But the rest of the whale hall was transformed: all the little models of the boats were gone, so too were the samples of the harpoons and blubber hooks, all the heavy tools of the whaling trade. Instead, the wall was lined with pictures and placards explaining the evolution and anatomy of whales, with display cases filled with samples of baleen and scrimshaw. Whaling was mentioned only briefly as part of an explanation of why the animals were critically endangered today. This wasn’t the way it was, thought Melissa, and she hurried through before she could remember what she missed the most. She stepped out into the hall that led to the rest of the exhibits and was tempted to go to the gallery that held the dioramas of Greendale. It was possible that someone had made another one, a new one, showing the town now. What would have changed? A few new buildings on campus, a set of stores downtown, but nothing else. All the major changes – highways, condos, strip malls, had happened beyond the diorama’s sphere, on the town’s outskirts, or else had been renovations like her rehabbed mill condo, or this museum, changing only on the inside, nothing a diorama could show. Besides, it was possible that they had removed the display altogether, decided that it was antiquated, unnecessary, like everything else. She didn’t want to know if that was true. It was better to imagine that it was still there.
She entered the dinosaur hall, still expecting to see the large skeleton, rearing onto its hind legs, jaws open, in the middle of the hall. It was the only thing she remembered clearly from the room. But it was gone. Without it, nothing in the room was the same; there was no gravity, no center to which everything was pulled. She saw her mother across the room, bent down next to a child – Melissa hadn’t realized there was a single other visitor in the museum, the place was preternaturally quiet. She couldn’t tell what her mother was showing the child, couldn’t hear her voice. For a moment, she watched her mother, feeling the ache – disappointment or loss – over the absence of the dark, looming skeleton. Then her mother stood up and turned to Melissa as the child walked away.
“How are you finding the renovation?”
“I don’t know. It’s all…different. I’m not sure I like it.”
“Melissa, honey, nothing stays the same. You know that. It’s different, but it’s also right. Let me show you.”
Her mother led her over to a model of a dinosaur that was a little bigger than a large dog, almost pony-size. The skin was a mottled green-brown, not the lurid chartreuse Melissa remembered from the plastic dinosaur figurines of her youth. This was more accurate, no doubt, but also unfamiliar and, true as it may be, it was hard to accept.
“This is a Grallator. It lived right here, hundreds of millions of years ago.” Melissa’s mother spoke in a voice she hadn’t heard since childhood, a teacher’s voice, a voice meant to impart wisdom, truth, to comfort as well as to inform. “It hunted in small packs and could jump quite far. That far, in fact.” She pointed ahead of her on the floor to a set of yellow footprints that had been painted on. The dinosaur wasn’t exactly cute, but it seemed real to Melissa, imaginable as something that once lived, unlike the bronzed bones that used to be here. The muscles of the model were poised, rippling as if the Grallator were about to leap forward.
Her mother had moved on and now stood next to a large nest filled with grayish eggs. “These are real fossilized dinosaur eggs, found about ten miles from this museum. Now we’re going to follow the story of what happened to the Grallator from the time it was an egg all the way to when it died out, or went extinct.”
Melissa found herself lulled by her mother’s voice, the cadence of the story she told like so many bed-time books she’d read aloud long ago. Once upon a time… this town had been a massive swamp, with ferns as big as trees, and dozens of kinds of dinosaurs. The world must have belonged to them, seemed, in their minds, to have been made for them. They bred, they hunted, they died, they were no more. She thought about what her father would say to all these new displays, to the fact that Mom was here now, usurping him. The rain tapped against the windowpanes, and Melissa found herself believing that he’d forgive them, the museum, her mother, herself for wanting to make something new, for wanting to stay here, for finding another truth.
© Copyright 2009 Alex Myers