The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer

course, picking up the sixties’ remaining scent of rebellion and breaking out of Mendocino anytime she could, but really she was as dreamy and distant as before. The last time Lydia saw her sister, just a few months before, the older girl had dispensed with her former sororal cruelties and lit up a joint for them to smoke together in their room after dinner. It had been a bizarre evening. Their parents had insisted on having Christmas together despite their obvious animosity, so the two girls had sneaked off to their room and, with the low rumble of voices below, leaned out of the open window, coughing, laughing (Lydia was not really stoned but thought she was), and then used a purple magic marker to draw smiley faces on their jeans.
    Lydia had a wooden stash box up here in the barn, but it was empty inside. She was still enough of a child to play at things, just as she’d baked plastic muffins in a cardboard box, now she was pretending to smoke her invisible joint out the cracked window of the loft, the bats adjusting their dark wings above her. She should have loved the freedom of suddenly being the only child, alone with her father, having escaped from the city this weekend to wander the farm without the threat of her sister making her eat green strawberries from the mud. But of course that’s not what she felt. She was eleven; she longed for change but was afraid when it arrived, and this year without her mother or her sister was stretching on and on like an endless rehearsal.
    The dusty air above her seemed like the smoke from her invisible joint, and she posed on her stomach in the hayloft, legs crossing, scissoring behind her, head leaning on a hand and inhaling her pretend adulthood. Lydia wasn’t a quiet or contemplative girl, but was the kind who had to be entertained constantly, either by an adult, another child, or by herself or nature. She wasn’t meditative and bookish and could barely make it through a teen magazine without tossing it out the window and bursting through the parlor, singing something, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” anything. To the frustration of her father.
    So she was active even while lying quietly in the loft. She could see her father through the window of the kitchen, and three longhaired graduate students in T-shirts (one of them seemed vaguely cool to her, in a peasant skirt and braids, but the others were worthless), all of them holding covered dishes or spelt bread or something. They were always polite and ill-gendered, the men too wispy and effete, the women loud and almost mustached. It made Lydia glad she wasn’t there among them—there would be the usual bizarrities of conversation that upset her, the insistent phrase “let me show you something" that always preceded a grainy photograph of Mars. She could see the whole of the house, its craggy shape partly restored, the field dark with old rain and hazy with light, the sky diamond-bright just now, and all the plain broad world below it.
    And here was some man, some stranger coming toward her, struggling through the weeds. He was tall, with curls of long coppery hair, and moved so oddly in the grass, working his hands and fingers to part the tall garlic flowers, the stalks of seeds, but keeping his body stiff and upright away as if he were made of glass, as if the slightest pressure from a blade of grass would shatter his chest. She watched how he went, avoiding nests of wild roses and gopher holes—he seemed to have an extraordinary eye—banking like a river, meandering so wide across the field until it seemed as though he planned to cover every inch of it before he reached her.
    He stopped, raised an arm of his plaid shirt to show it covered with burrs. She tried not to laugh. There was something about this man, though, that made even Lydia pause and think. Something un-laughable, really. He was so different from the other people at the party. Maybe it was because he didn’t look desperate or scared while