by Aimee Bender
“It’s going to be hot in there,” she said, wiping her forehead. “You might need some kind of hand fan.”
That night, in bed, staring at the ceiling, in my room, door locked, tent on the balcony adding its weight to the apartment, a subtle weight I thought I could feel, I made myself a plan. While I was using this tent, it seemed valuable to continue to keep my regimen as simple as possible. I had abandoned the framing job, so as long as I could maintain paying my bills, the way I organized my time would stay my own. I would try to wake up and go to the tent in the earliest hours of morning, even before sunrise if possible, in the very coolest part of the day, and once inside I would sit and surely daydream and think about other things and make lists for the mailings but still try, as much as I could, to let the memories take shape, to attempt, bit by bit, to make what had been a blur more defined, described and shaped by care and attention. I wanted to focus mostly on the period of time that had started with the hammer smashing and ended with my arrival in Burbank, California, including the visit from my uncle, the stay with the babysitter, and the train ride with the steward, and also of course the parallel entrances of the butterfly in the water glass, the beetle on the paper, and many years later, those roses under the curtain. This would be my project, though I did realize other memories might arise, and that memories were not soldiers, lined up in tidy rows. That would be okay. I would see how it went. I would not wear a timer or wear a watch once inside so that the chamber itself would be separate from time, like a casino but with nothing in it. Like a tiny triangular empty moneyless canvas silent casino. As the car lights from down the street swirled against the wall of my bedroom, making patterns and lighting up blinds, I thought how it would be a kind of second job—not a paying job, but not unlike standing in the playground and taking stock of my internal state, though an internal state of the past, a reinsertion of myself into past events, especially because at the time of the events, I had barely been aware of what was going on. I wanted to track it. That’s all I wanted to do. The bedroom was quiet, and comforting. If I strained my ears, I thought I could hear the soft tones of my next-door neighbor Jose and his wife talking next door. One of their rooms shared a wall with mine. I could never make out the words, but I could hear their presences, her higher tones and giddy laugh, his low and formal murmurings. He would come unlock my bedroom door in the morning before he went to work at the racetrack, where he was head horse wrangler, usually around four in the morning. It was almost the first of the month, which meant I owed him cash, so I made a note to stop at the bank the next day to take out the money needed. Fifty dollars a month. On the list of my expenses, a line item in my budget. To break the twenty, I would buy myself some of that quality beef jerky at the convenience store near the ATM, and something about imagining putting the two twenties and the ten into an envelope, and folding the envelope to feed it into the slot that was Jose’s mailbox downstairs, and placing the beef jerky on my kitchen counter, and in this way renewing the month, was adequately soothing to send me to sleep.
18
“Who’s that?” Vicky asks once, when I wave to Jose one Saturday afternoon after he calls out a hi, mounting the outside staircase of the building with bags of groceries in his arms. She and I are heading out to get ice cream at the Rite Aid/former Thrifty’s down the street, the last place for miles to find real rainbow sherbet.
“Just a neighbor friend,” I tell her. She gives me one of her hopeful looks. “As in, friend. He’s married. Happily married. He helps me out with stuff. That’s all.” “He seems nice.” “He’s very nice. Very helpful.”
19
On the Monday after the tent’s construction, I woke up earlier than usual, five a.m. probably, with a kind of giddy anticipation, like one might feel on the morning of a new school year, or a new and exciting job. Jose had already unlocked my bedroom door and driven off in his truck to Santa Anita. I stood formally and opened the door into the rest of the apartment. The living room was dark, the boxes and piles of supplies darker forms on the floor, and I picked my way through them to the glass door of the balcony. Outside, the streets below were empty. Streetlamps still lit. Storefronts closed. I flipped up the balcony door’s lock and quietly slid the glass open.
Against the back wall of the balcony, in the darkness, the tent rested in its spot like a child’s fort. Lumpy, and awkward, and odd. There was no real reason to do this, I thought, standing, staring at it. It was a silly construction. This was not something people did with their time. I stepped onto the balcony, and glancing around, as if someone might be watching, squatted and unzipped its entry panel, crawled in, and zipped it back up. My heart, to my surprise, was beating hard. I imagined someone catching me, saying I was violating building codes, or that it wasn’t allowed, this kind of action; it wasn’t right; it was, in some basic way, unseemly. Inside, it smelled strongly of new canvas, and the freshly cut sawed ends of the wood, and what I imagined was the faintest hint of aged paranormal rose, and I rotated around so that I was facing the balcony railing, even though all I could see were the darkened panels of what was the orange canvas, my poorly attached zipper, and the edges of Vicky’s well-nailed beams. Downstairs, someone turned on their car and began backing out of a parking space. Something about it all was terribly, almost embarrassingly, private. I wasn’t sure what to do. I could hear my own breathing, in and out, the body and its tasks, and I sat there quietly for a few minutes, and then closed my eyes. I may have dozed off a little. Around me, in the state between sleeping and waking, the intensity of light started to change, and as the sun began to rise and extend rays over the valley, the orange of the tent picked up a faint glow that steadily grew brighter, and warmer. The walls flushed around me, fleshy and active, and more cars began their routes through the streets, the sounds of traffic blending into an ambient soundtrack of the city waking up, more neighbors backing out of their designated slots in the parking lot, honking, accelerating. It was Monday morning. The memories were so close. They were ready to go. Sitting on the steps, staying with the babysitter, packing up my things, getting to the train. A faint wave of panic passed through me, like I might burst and explode shreds through the canvas, but my body didn’t move, and I didn’t leave, and more than anything, as I sat there, it seemed like I had gone to all these lengths to do what was really the most obvious thing in the world for me to do, because for all my talk of forgetting with Vicky, of tacitly agreeing falsely that I was adding details to embellish the story for her enjoyment, of not answering her when she said it was all impossible, my memory of this time is keen. It is keen. That is not bragging; that is merely descriptive. Once I pay attention, it is all right there to consider, and I have made up nothing. That’s the whole point.
That morning, I spent a little time in the tent, just beginning to think about when my uncle came to visit, and sitting on the steps with him at the elementary school, noticing how the memories rose up, and then submerged, and then rose up, and then submerged, and when I started to feel tired, I exited. Zipped it back up. There seemed to be something important about zipping it back up. I returned to the inside of my apartment and closed the glass balcony door, and before I began the rest of my day, to throw myself into the extremely above-the-surface actions of packaging objects and taking them to the post office, I looked out at it. Orange, and lumpy, and still. Absurd as it was, I already felt it looked a little different. Then I went to the living room and attended to boxes for several hours before heading to the post office to mail everything away.
PART TWO
Locks
20
My mother was the best and the worst at Go Fish. She was the best because she made the room into an ocean, our cushions a fishing boat—cutting lines of string to hang from the sides as we held our cards high to catch the dim glow of the corner lamp. While we were playing, she would sneakily attach something to one of my strings. “Do you have any fours?” I’d ask. “Sorry, darling. Go fish,”
she’d say, and after picking my card, I’d pull at the string to discover some kind of a small toy, a treasure from the depths of the beige carpet-sea, a tiny plastic frog, a crayon. The delight! I won every game we played of Go Fish, and not because she was letting me win, and not because she was a clueless player, but because she simply did not want to take my cards. She liked to give me all her cards. She hoarded her nines and she surely knew I had a nine but she never asked for my nine until I demanded hers and she gave me all three, and then the look on her face, the plainness of the pleasure. Aunt Minn would tell me about this sometimes, about how everyone worried about her sister but that when she could, in the phases of health, my mother tucked Minn into her bed, and sang her made-up melodies, and gathered little treasures she’d found, flowers, pretty rocks, discarded toys at the playground, loose and sparkling beads. This same Go Fish game with treats tied to strings had originated with Minn, in their home in Corvallis, on their living room carpet, which had been, more suitably, blue. She’d been a lousy player then, too. “I always won,” said Minn, tapping at the edge of her glass of wine. There we were again, in the living room, Vicky asleep upstairs, Uncle Stan working at the computer upstairs, my aunt and I at sea on the sofas. Was it coincidence that she too liked to sit at night in a dark living room near the glow of a distant lamp? It was like a small homage we made together, and I sometimes felt a flash of clarity then of how Minn and I shared something highly specific, how perhaps I had been a renewal of her to my mother, or how she had been a practice round for the arrival of me. “You can go to bed if you want to, Francie,” my aunt said, gazing out the living room window, which had turned flat with interior light and impenetrable. “Can I stay?” “Of course. It’s not boring to you, just sitting here?” “No. No.”
21
After my TV show ended, the babysitter gave me a quick tour of her loft. At the high end of a wooden ladder, she showed me her mattress, messy with colorful blankets and pillows, shrouding an alarm clock and a few books tucked tight into a corner. The loft hung partway over the living room, which she’d furnished with a sofa, a TV draped in a scarf, a standing plant, and a spring green table that made the transition into kitchenette. “Here is the fridge,” she said, back on the floor, pretending to be a person on a game show, flourishing, “please help yourself. You can eat anything in here.” On her refrigerator were photographs of a few smiling people, whom I couldn’t have cared less about, but they were held in place by magnets of cat faces: gray, black, tabby, rough to the touch. On the table next to the sofa she’d turned on that golden softly lit lamp with the butterflies, which I already felt belonged to me in some way, was mine on a much deeper level than just who happened to pay money at some store, and the lamp shared space with a clear jar filled with multicolored glass candies that later, when she wasn’t looking, I carried around in my mouth. “Would you like any lemonade?” the babysitter asked, but I told her no.
* * *
—
There was no time for sipping. I was far too busy carefully touching my finger to the bowl of small woolen bananas she had set next to the matching bowl of big real bananas in the center of the spring green table. “That’s for the tiny people,” she whispered to me, winking. But what wasn’t? A whiskered ceramic panda sat on the bathroom sink sprouting, from inside its head, several toothbrushes, including a wrapped one from her dentist that she said I was welcome to use. On a ledge, she had picked a few lush hydrangeas from the front walkway and gathered them bluely together in a vase made from an old juice jar cleared of its label.
“It’s not much,” she said, bowing a little, “but I hope it’ll be a good place for you in transit.”
Her voice was lit up by its usual warmth and energy, and she either did not remember or chose not to be worried about the violent daydreams I’d mentioned aloud, which neither of us brought up again.
I stood in the middle of the apartment, holding the glass of lemonade she had poured for me anyway. Her drinking glass was clear but had some kind of false bottom so it looked like the lemonade had been poured onto a bed of blue glass stones. “Is that your ice?” I’d asked, incredulous, and she’d laughed, gently. “This must all seem so strange to you,” she said, “your babysitter’s apartment,” but I stood as still as I could with my glass in both hands and my bag by the sofa, and for a moment, imagined at the end of the weekend all the trains chugging past us until the station was empty and we walked back to her loft together where I would stay for a time while my mother got better, becoming, to the babysitter, not her child, no, but some sort of young roommate she would entirely take care of.
It occurs to me now that they surely paid her, but that was not something that entered my mind at the time.
I sat at the green table and did my homework while she made us dinner, grilled cheese and tomato soup. After we cleaned up and took a tour of her shoes—strappy purple sandals, worn-heeled black cowboy boots—I brushed my teeth, and she rummaged in a drawer to find an old T-shirt with a silkscreen of a mountain and sun on it that I could use to sleep in. We would, she assured me, handing over the shirt, visit my apartment the next day after breakfast to pack for the train trip, and then I could finally get some of my things. We were in the bathroom then, and she was perched on the edge of the tub, looking at me intently when she said it, her eyes filled with sympathy, but I was washing my hands with her fresh-scented lemon verbena soap, resting it carefully back in the soap dish shaped like a dinghy, and her words didn’t fill me with any particular relief or solace; what was so very important to me in the apartment anyway? My ties to the things over there felt as delicate as spiderweb filament now. All I wanted was my babysitter’s butterfly lamp, and her lemon verbena soap, and even her spare toothbrush, which was several times softer and cleaner than my own.
We returned to the living room area, and she tugged pillowcases over couch pillows and piled me high with a slippery green chenille blanket.
“Comfortable?”
“Very.”
“Should I leave the butterfly lamp on?”
“Please.”
Beneath its spill of golden light, she sat on the edge of the sofa and read me a story about a ragtag spaceship that she said she was considering for her class. “Do you think they’ll like it?” “I do.” “Good,” she said, nodding, “good.” She brought me a glass of water. She didn’t seem to know what to do with me at that point, so she patted my arm, wished me sweet dreams, and then disappeared into the bathroom. It was still light outside, so the room glowed a faint blue with evening, a light rain tapping on the rooftop, and from time to time the building’s pipes released and sighed. I did not move. I felt myself a broken jewel inside a jewel box. Somewhere across town, through the network of streets, my mother was in some kind of institutional building, a hospital, surrounded by doctors and the staccato voices of medical care that I’d heard through the speaker when my aunt had talked to her during earlier incidents on the phone. I lay on the couch and thought of her and did not think of her; she was central to my every thought, running underneath everything in a hum, and also erased, excised from the moment like she had never been my mother in the first place.
After a while, the babysitter exited the bathroom in some kind of pajama outfit and climbed the ladder to her own bed, where she turned pages for a long time under the brassy light of a clip-on reading lamp.
Through the windows, the blueness deepened and darkened. Silkscreens of red-gold butterflies appeared to fly around the perimeter of the lamp.
“Good night, sweet Francie,” the babysitter whispered, later, clicking off her light.
She turned on her side. I could hear as her breathing slowed, and the room emptied of its other awake mind. Just me and the golden lamp. Black night outside. Something suspending. I remember this so well. How time seemed to stretch like taffy, dark nighttime taffy, made and pulled from the fabric of the sleeping and the sleepless. How tensions ga
thered in corners in murky clusters, and I could see them clearly from where I lay tucked into and half-held by the slippery chenille, darkness laid upon the dark, braids of muscular shadow folding slowly together. Like I was, for a second, witnessing something private and impassive about the inner workings of the world.
About a week earlier, at the parallel bedtime, my mother had done a load of laundry, and like the babysitter, had pulled fresh pillowcases over the pillows. Like the babysitter, she brought a glass of water to my bedside, and read me a story, The Velveteen Rabbit, one of her favorites. The sky dimmed outside. I had brushed my teeth; I had washed my face.
At the end of the story, the rabbit hopped off to eat the grass, real grass, and my mother sighed with pleasure, kissing my forehead as she stood.
“I could never leave my stuffed animals facedown,” she told me. She glanced at the ground and picked up one of my teddy bears that had fallen to the floor, placing it faceup on my pillow. “How I feared they would suffocate!”