by Aimee Bender
“It’s not like I really understand it either,” I say, holding the fabric in place for her. “Does it at least get you off the hook a little bit?”
Nail in mouth: “You mean with her worrying?”
“Yeah.”
“A little. Should I worry?”
She pauses, hammer up.
“No,” I say.
Vicky drives the nail into the right spot, adds another for reinforcement. Earlier in the week, when the canvas panel peeled open, I found it almost impossible to concentrate with that open section letting in a triangular spot of brightness. Like a constant interrupting voice of light. I have grown accustomed to the soft filtered sun as experienced through the canvas, and also to the effect of the cave. The entire tent enterprise might even fail with a hole, because although on some level I do understand that memories are not tangible, it also seems in a very small way possible that without containment, everything I am thinking about might just stream out of me and into the city itself, never to be found again.
“Can you check one paragraph really fast before I go?” Vicky says, tucking her tools away, latching the kit. “I changed some of the wording. I cut out nice. I changed lucky to fortunate.”
“Good,” I say, going to grab a pen. “That sounds good. And really, I’m okay. You can tell Aunt Minn I’m not going to jump off any balcony. That is not my worry at all.”
“You promise?”
“Promise.”
26
I walk her to her car, Aunt Minn’s car, and the backseat is piled high with costumes that she said she is washing early so they can alter them for the show. One of them seems too princely for Our Town, with a slip of velvet on the collar, but she says there’s a way to cover it with cotton and make it look more like a janitor for the Stage Manager’s role. I thank her again, and hug her, and as she’s settling into the driver’s seat, the building manager with the gray ponytail walks through the parking lot, heading toward the mailboxes, and when she sees me, she stops. “Hey, what’s that thing on your balcony?” she calls over, her hands full of letters, all stamped and ready to travel the country. “That orange thing you put up? Is that safe?” “Oh, it’s just this tent thing,” I call back. “Nothing to worry about.” “You’re not sleeping out there, are you?” She peers through the windshield at Vicky, who waves. “No, no, not at all,” I say. “Because,” the building manager adds, flapping the letters, “it’s not up to code for sleeping. The balcony is not zoned for sleeping.” She squints her eyes at us for a moment, and then heads over to the mailbox, and when I lean back down, Vicky is raising her eyebrows, turning on the car. “Everybody worrying about you, Francie,” she says, shaking her head, and I watch as she navigates into the flow of traffic, how she changes lanes so smoothly, the signaling, the brake lights. The building manager and I walk back up the stairs together; we’re on the same level, a few doors apart, and she is sorting through a pile of rent envelopes now, retrieved from the mailbox. I can see mine in the stack. It’s dark, and the moths are fluttering to the lights on the outside hallways, plastering their bodies to the plastic shields. “I just like to know what’s going on,” the building manager says, glancing up, hand on her doorknob. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff that goes on in these buildings. Good night,” she says, disappearing into her apartment. “Good night.”
27
The brunch place was crowded. I plowed through my stack of marionberry pancakes. The babysitter drank three cups of coffee. Afterward, we walked a few busy blocks down Burnside to a temporary craft museum for kids, where I sat at a table and strung faceted beads on a wire, and when I felt the tears rising to the surface as they seemed to do every few hours, like my body needed to wring them out the way one might do with a drenched washcloth, she found an outside bench in a patch of sunlight and smoothed my hair as I wept. A friend of hers joined us for a little while: Terry, with the dark curls and cream-colored scarf. They sat close together, whispering, and while they spoke, I drew light patterns inside, in what they called the luminosity room, a closet-like space where I could wield a fiber-optic hose that drew streaks of red on the wall like a murder made of light that washed away in seconds without a trace. I did it over and over again. The babysitter put in a call to my uncle, who said my mother was eating and drinking but still wasn’t ready to talk on the phone, but that the baby was doing well. They would be bringing her home the following day. Wait, my mother? No, no, sorry. The baby. She was eating also. She had pooped.
Terry kissed the babysitter on the cheek and waved goodbye.
We walked together along the riverbank. We lay on the grass and looked at the clouds.
Throughout the day, if pressed, I might say I felt, even then, something waiting for me back in the babysitter’s apartment. I felt it tugging at me, and I feared it a little but also welcomed it, because although it did not seem entirely safe, it was also, without question, mine. In this way my attention on that day was split into three equal parts: one part riding steady with my mother in the hospital, connected to her even though I could not picture her so joined to a void in which she levitated in white space like a floating corpse magician. Then, a focus upon the activity at hand, which was for a while drawing untraceable murders with a red-light hose, while wondering vaguely if Terry might be the babysitter’s girlfriend. Finally, the tug to the thing in her apartment, which had not yet formed. I remember this all clearly. When the babysitter and I went to a diner and had cheeseburgers and fries and milkshakes, and laughed a little about the red straws in the shakes and how tall they were, like superstraws, the three separate pulls maintained like split roads inside me driving to different directions at the same time: mother awareness, dinner restaurant straw activity, babysitter’s apartment tug. After dinner we went briefly to my own apartment to get a few of my things, including the tape recorders and the brown bunny and the word searches. That part we rushed through; I did not want to stay long. It had been only a day and a half but with the dishes crusting in the sink and the trace scent of my mother’s gardenia mist and the bedroom doors left open like the people had atomized, it all felt like the wreckage of another life, which it was.
On the kitchen counter rested a hammer, and the cordless phone lolling on its back.
Finally, a walk back to the babysitter’s loft where after washing up she tucked me again under the chenille as I fell asleep fast for night number two, living and dreaming of the tug, at the site of the tug, inside it. I didn’t hear her mount the ladder, or settle into her blankets, didn’t see her turn off her light that time, but still, inside the restlessness of sleep, the tug stayed with me, dragging things to the surface, rumbling in the corners, filling my dreams with motion.
28
Shortly after my aunt and uncle had welcomed me into their house, Aunt Minn pulled a stool over to her desk in her bedroom and asked me to come shop with her at the computer. Vicky, who could now hold her head up, was in a cotton backpack strapped to her chest, facing out, babbling, but Aunt Minn was able to position her hands in such a way that she could type.
It was early June, late in the morning, and you could already feel the intensity of the Santa Ana heat wave pressing against the windows. From what my aunt and uncle had told me at meals, all of us sitting together around the circular table in the windowed nook of their cheerful butter-colored kitchen, this was just the beginning of what was likely to be an exceedingly hot summer. Burbank was known to break the hundred-degree mark on many days from July to October. “No marine layer here,” Uncle Stan said, smiling, drinking his passionfruit iced tea with unmistakable pride.
I hovered in their bedroom doorframe. I still found it difficult to cross doorways into rooms in their house without explicit invitation.
“Come in, Francie, come!” Aunt Minn patted the stool. “Please.”
Her desk was positioned by a large window that overlooked their backyard, a lawn o
f radiant green with an apricot tree and a robust plum and a series of terra-cotta pots growing thick-petaled black rose succulents and some kind of orange land coral. My aunt and uncle were not, as far as I could tell, richy-rich, but due to the sprawl of Southern California, land in the valley was far less expensive than in the city proper, or in Portland, and my mother’s and my apartment could’ve dropped from the sky and fit into their yard alone. Inside their bedroom, curtains flowed gauzily from silver rods, lifting with the rare breeze to flutter toward the sky-colored bedspread, the crystal knobs, the puffed and quilted chair.
I settled onto the stool, and Aunt Minn clicked on an everything store full of pictures and prices where we bought me new shorts, a T-shirt with a hen on it, and a red baseball cap for those upcoming scorching summer days. “What are summers like in Portland?” she asked, and I told her I wore shorts there, too. That I wore sunscreen, even hats. She picked out a pillow she liked with stitched stars for my bed, and then typed in lamp and brought us to the lighting section. I had been living there for only a few months by that point, and the butterfly’s emergence was still shockingly fresh in my memory, was something I thought about all the time, and seeing rows of any kind of decorated lampshade startled me.
“You shouldn’t have to read with a flashlight for the rest of your life,” Aunt Minn laughed. She kissed the top of Vicky’s fuzzed head. “I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Kids use flashlights to cheat on the lamp,” she said. “You can’t sneak if it’s your only option!”
“I don’t need to sneak.”
“Here, look,” she said. “What do you think?” The screen had broken into many squares, and inside each square was a different lampshade.
“Do you like horses?” She navigated the page swiftly, clicking on the horse example, where chestnut thoroughbreds ran around the perimeter.
“No, thank you.”
On her desk, the glass cube of caught flowers weighed down stacks of bills, a lumpy clay blob held an assortment of pens, and I read, for what would be the first time, the sign above her computer on its hammered piece of white tin that stated, in soft cursive, Slow Down.
“Why slow down?”
She followed my gaze. “Oh, I just go too fast,” she said. “Too much to do every minute. Angels?”
“No angels, please,” I said.
“Ladybugs?”
I pointed to a lampshade in the bottom corner.
“Clouds and rainbows?”
“Clouds and rainbows are good,” I said.
“Or, pears?”
“Better clouds and rainbows,” I said.
“Then that’s what it will be!”
She clicked a few more times, and ran her lips over the baby again.
“What is that?” I asked, pointing now to the baby’s head.
The skin was pulsing right at the top of it. I had seen it since arriving, many times, all the time, but had never found the right moment to ask.
“Ah,” said Aunt Minn, resting her cheek near it. “That’s called the fontanelle. Where her skull hasn’t fully grown together yet. That’s her heartbeat you’re seeing. Intense, isn’t it?”
I nodded, vaguely. The skin looked dented, broken.
“What’s under the skull?”
“Her brain.”
“Oh.”
Aunt Minn did some more clicking on the computer, inputting her credit card number and address. While she did, as a private internal activity, I pictured myself walking over and carefully selecting one of the ballpoint pens from the lumpy clay holder on the other end of the desk, and then returning to her chair to plunge it directly into Vicky.
I did not deliberately imagine this kind of thing happening. It rose up on its own, like a little secret movie intrusion, and it had been happening—this imagining—for weeks. Knives and fire into the babysitter, sharp pointed items into Vicky. I’d arrived at the house with the thoughts already inside me, but the presence of a baby and her absurd helplessness had made it all so very much worse. Every room I walked through in Burbank contained possible, tempting weaponry: earring back, fork, pencil, paper clip. The pearl letter opener Uncle Stan displayed on his desk, the plentiful wooden block of knives on the kitchen counter. I did not understand why I kept thoughts like these so close to the surface—I knew I loved the babysitter, and as far as I could tell, I didn’t particularly want to hurt the baby; I liked the baby well enough, enjoyed making her smile at me, enjoyed the way her toes wiggled and her legs kicked, but I still couldn’t help picturing it, mating the sharp object to the soft area.
As long as Aunt Minn or Uncle Stan or some other adult was close by, the likelihood of me doing anything seemed small, but I did not trust myself at night, when the adults were asleep, and shortly after moving in, due to nightmares and an almost constant preoccupation with the state of my hands, had asked my aunt to install that lock on my bedroom door, the lock that had inspired Vicky’s personal essay though she had never understood its original purpose. At first, Aunt Minn misunderstood and bought me a brass model that locked from the inside, like it had been in Portland, wanting very much to respect my privacy, and to replicate what I’d had at my previous home, so I had to explain through a fountain of tears that I wanted a lock on the outside this time, so that while it was nighttime I could not get out. That I wanted to be bolted in. It had taken many go-arounds before she, extremely reluctantly, agreed. “Just in case I sleepwalk outside and hurt myself, like Grandpa did,” I had begged her, though I had never sleepwalked in my life.
“How is everything going so far?” Aunt Minn said, at the computer, finalizing her purchases and swiveling to face me. “I mean—” She blushed. “I know it can’t be easy—”
“It’s nice here,” I said.
“You’re so quiet and easy. You can ask for things.”
“I don’t need anything.”
“A bike? We’ll get you a bike.”
“Sure. Thank you.”
“I used to love clouds and rainbows too.”
“They’re very pretty.”
“We could have a painter come and paint some clouds and rainbows on your walls—would you like that? I have a friend who loves to do things like that; she’s good, too. Let’s do it! Okay?”
“Okay.”
She looked at me closely, smiling, hopeful, with her protruding collarbone and concerned eyebrows. She exercised too often, it seemed, and wore her wool cardigans even on warm days, and I often saw the point of her jaw tensing as she grinded her teeth, but her eyes, small, alert, always felt caring to me.
“Would you like to hold her, honey?”
“No, thank you.”
29
These were not isolated imaginings, either; also, around that time, I had been courting and circling yet another sharp object, this one based at the home with my mother.
After she had removed the kabob skewer from her hair, leaving it on the counter while we slept, I had woken extra early the next morning, unlocked my door, tiptoed into the kitchen, and taken it to hide as planned on a high shelf in the closet. My mother was still sleeping, and did not wake up, or check to see what I was doing, and in the subsequent days, we had our meals, and played our card games, and she never asked if I’d seen where her clever hairpin had gone off to. But a few days later, while staring out a school window as an older grade kicked a soccer ball around the emerald green field, the one who seemed preoccupied with the kabob skewer turned out to be me, as I found myself firmly fixed to the thought that the skewer might be of some use to me, might serve some of my own project purposes, and that maybe I could just borrow it for a brief moment that afternoon. This ended up being just a day or so before my mother shattered her hand with a hammer.
We were home together that day after school, my mother and I, an overcast and rheumy
afternoon with fat drips falling off the eaves from a noontime rain. The air smelled of loamy soil, and worms flipped and rolled on the sidewalk. Each day since the kabob skewer, my mother had seemed a little more revved up, a little harder to understand, and that afternoon she had picked me up at school on foot, waiting with her body in the pickup line as if she were a car, making beeping sounds from the curb which made me laugh with delight and continued unease because something about it wasn’t just theatrical. She was starting to shed excess energy. I could almost see it shooting rays off her body. After our postschool puddle walk, she’d settled in to make an early dinner in the kitchen, spreading mayonnaise on bread and rolling slices of turkey. I’d done my job of ripping up some lettuce for the salad, and in as stealthy a way as I knew how, I picked up a stool and lugged it to the front hall. The closet was in the living room/entryway of the apartment, and my mother’s back was to me as she rolled and rerolled the turkey slices with the kind of brittle insistence I had forgotten but was instantly recognizing upon its return. The days had been growing steadily worse. For this one, she wanted to make sure each sandwich had five slices of rolled turkey. She had told me about it on the walk home several times. Her hands couldn’t stay still. They could not hold the roll, the turkey kept unfurling, and I could feel the frantic build in her, even with her back to me, even as I climbed the stool and reached my own hand up.
The closet smelled of damp wool and wet slickers from our rain walk, when she had bubbled over with laughter over our reflections in the puddles, and our neighbor walking by with his two white dogs had stared at her, smiling, and said, “You’d think it never rains here!” as she raised her face and palms to the sky like a lady in a movie. The edge, by the hour, was expanding into the whole. I reached into the darkness of the closet and groped around until I felt the skewer with my hand, my seeing, hunting hand, knowing its smooth wooden handle and pointed tip, and I brought it down and held it close by my leg, passing her muttering at the turkey rolls, me replacing the stool quietly at the kitchen counter.