Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  “Sever her! Sever the Pearl imposter!” someone shouts.

  “And we all know,” says my best friend Pearl, “who does the severing.”

  Every man and woman stands back, until I’m left at the center of a circle. Pearl hands me a knife larger than any I’ve ever seen, even the gourmet knives in my culinary boyfriend’s precious butchering set.

  “Oh, that’s definitely Darla’s job,” the captain says, his arms crossed over his chest. “Without a doubt.”

  “Any limb will do,” Pearl says, and the crew leaves me to my work.

  An hour or so after dawn, my best friend Pearl notices that the alleged-original Pearl is no longer in the dungeon. She’s no longer anywhere to be found.

  “Well?” she asks me, a glint of something in her eye that makes my torso lean away. She is surrounded by a throng of pirates, hands on their daggers and swords. They have come to find me at my desk.

  “It’s done,” I say, keeping my face cool and even.

  “And?” Pearl continues. “Where is she?”

  “She’s no longer with us,” I explain. “She’s no longer your concern.”

  “Did you sever a limb?” Pearl is getting frustrated. The captain peeks around the corner, then leans on the doorjamb to listen.

  “No, not a limb,” I say. “I severed her head.”

  The first mate of human resources delivers an audible gasp. Someone else passes out. The pirate captain’s wife covers her mouth. The parrot man narrows his eyes.

  Pearl smiles. “I don’t believe you,” she says. I have anticipated her disbelief.

  “In The Pirate Book of Burdens,” I offer, launching my voice loud and clear, “what is the most important burden of all?”

  “The burden of proof!” the executive assistant yelps, unable to contain himself.

  “It’s true,” the captain says. “We pirates, as a people, are wholly concerned with proof.”

  “Yes,” I say. “And here is my proof.”

  I present to Pearl the sword covered in blood. Now her jaw drops. Now she’s impressed.

  “I severed her head and heard her spine crunch and turned her into fish food. No one lies about my friend Pearl, at least not to my face.”

  My mates applaud.

  “Now her face is gone for good,” I add, with a grotesque flourish. “She’ll work remotely the rest of her days.”

  Pearl holds the bloody sword for a moment, for a knife that commits a deed such as mine is no longer a knife but only a sword. She looks at me long and hard and surprised, and I feel as if it’s been a long time since Pearl was surprised by anyone, any thought, anything. And then she embraces me. A resuscitation. Everyone cheers. They lift me and carry me out across the deck, whooping and hollering. For she’s a jolly good fellow. Which nobody can deny.

  “There’s the trail of blood, leading to the plank!” someone shouts.

  “You can see where she dragged the Pearl who isn’t Pearl to her watery grave!”

  “So much proof, like, everywhere!”

  “No offense to Darla,” I hear the executive assistant say, “but I think this lady’s even better!”

  We dance and kick and shuffle. I lean against my dancing partners to hold myself up. The pirate captain grabs me by the waist and pulls me close during a ballad.

  “We should talk about your future,” he whispers in my ear. “So much potential.”

  “So much potential indeed!” the pirate captain’s wife agrees, coming around and swaying me into a pirate sandwich. Then she pats me on the head, and her husband pushes me over to a group that dances me into their arms. I wince as they throw me in the air, catch me, throw me, catch me with their open, welcoming hands.

  “You’re our favorite!” they say, except for the first mate of human resources, who knows he can never say anything to me ever again.

  My head spins with joy. I return to my cabin late that night, after drinking and twirling and drinking and leaping. I’m full to the brim. I unwrap the wound on my thigh that bloodied the sword. All the dancing has reopened the cut where I sliced my skin, and blood oozes down into my stolen boots. Maybe now I’ll be permanent. Maybe this is the start of the steadiness. In some careers, you draw blood to make an eternal bond. In others, you draw blood to fake an eternal bond. I hide the drenched gauze behind my pillow and wonder if the escape went as planned, if the prisoner Pearl has made it safely ashore. More than being good at my jobs, I’m good at procrastinating. I’ll find any way to put off a task. Indefinitely.

  And is this what it means to belong? Still drunk on the feelings from above deck, I tuck myself under the covers. It’s a question I’ve asked myself before, half-awake, on occasion, with my hands propped behind my head: Once after meeting a new friend. Again in the sweaty nook of my favorite boyfriend’s elbow, the discomfort of his sleeping position somehow only further proof of acceptance and inclusion. Is this what it feels like? I ask no one in particular. Even the seclusion of my bunk seems somehow possessive and true, not lonely, not isolated, just privacy as proof of permanence.

  At some point in the middle of the night, I hear an incredible crash, then screams, then cries of despair. I climb upstairs after redressing my self-inflicted injury. At first I think, Another capture? But the tears turn to laughter, and the higher I climb, the better I can hear sweet chimes between the sobs. The tears are tears of joy. A woman stands on the prow of the ship in silhouette with the confidence of someone who holds a perennial soul, who can leave as often as she wants, who can always come back. It’s fitting. Just when I’m feeling the thrill of the open waters, just when I’m finding my place in the crew, just when I’m learning to tie all the types of rope knots on my grub breaks, just when the captain asks me to consider my future, Pearl climbs the prow to tackle this silhouetted woman in a series of hugs. Darla has returned.

  I’m done filling in for Darla, who was visiting her grandparents in Florida.

  “I’ll never retire,” she says. She rips the cap off a bottle of cider with her teeth. “Too much free time.”

  She’s brought souvenirs for her coworkers, which is a pretty classy thing to do. A snow globe for the captain. A severed finger for Pearl. A box of saltwater taffy for the people she doesn’t know as well. I help myself to a piece, impressed again with the company ethos and very sorry to leave.

  My assignment ends the next day, and I prepare my possessions. I receive a final payment: a single, heavy coin. I’m thrown overboard sometime midafternoon, my belongings taped to my chest. Darla thanks me for covering for her as I’m walking the plank.

  “From what I hear, you’re a real gem,” she says, and she throws a life preserver down to express her gratitude. It floats far off and away on a wave. “It’s not personal,” she says. “It’s just a job.”

  “There is nothing more personal than doing your job,” I say.

  They’re throwing the man with long hair overboard too. Maurice—the actual parrot—has returned in his full-feathered glory, chirping and singing and circling the sails.

  “I told you so” is something the man doesn’t say, but he looks at me in a way that basically says everything else.

  I look back at the captain, at Pearl, at my new friends. Pearl turns away, and the captain gives me a big thumbs-up. This isn’t the goodbye I anticipated, but then again, I didn’t anticipate good-bye at all. I’m ashamed to admit it.

  “Good-bye, Pearl!” I shout, but she’s busy talking to her one true best friend. I see now how little like Darla I am, how little like me she is, how we are not at all like each other. She gallops around the deck with the confidence of a horse, her hair pulled into a bun, tiny curls slipping from underneath. The tiny curls look just like mine. I can always find a curl like this, and despite the situation, despite the fate before me, I smile. When I’m gone, a tendril will remain.

  We stand on the plank, the former Maurice and I. I’m scared to jump, but there are swords at our backs, so I simply loosen my limbs and fall. He grabs me by
the hips as we crash into the ocean, and he holds me against his belly for the descent. Salt water comes up, around, and into my ears, and I can’t help but respect the man for his clairvoyance. I never seem to see things coming before they’ve arrived. You’ll walk the plank, he said all those weeks ago. Now the plank is nothing but a shadow in a mirror world we’re leaving. It looks like an extended limb, and then—vanished.

  We sink deeper, and the world opens wide beneath us. The world is deep and fills itself. I start to fill with water. Seasickness. There’s no purr in pirate. I open my eyes and think I see his lips moving, bubbles darting around his nose. “Swim,” he mouths. “Swim, swim like it’s your job!” His long hair flowers and branches out around his face, and I’m filled with the awe of lying under a large tree on a summer day, the leaves rustling with birds and bugs, a plane flying even farther above the tree, a skinny canoe at the edge of a lake where the water mingles with mud and turns to grass, and that is when my eyes close.

  FIRST WORK

  My mother arranged for me my very first job, just as her mother did for her.

  “We work,” she said, “but then we leave.”

  She unfolded the family tree of the temporary lives recorded before ours. My aunt with her stack of resumes. My grandmother with her dainty paper coffee cup. My great-grandmother behind a desk, and on the desk, a nameplate with someone else’s name. “Filling in!” she had written on the back of the photograph, in legible, steady script.

  “I’m just filling in. You’re just filling in,” my mother explained. “See?”

  She didn’t have to explain. I already knew it in my bones, in my knees, in the way you understand things about yourself even before you hear them spoken aloud. I knew I, too, would always find myself somewhere new, someone new, for the rest of my life, like my ancestors, like theirs, like theirs, like theirs. The top of my head measured just above the side of my mother’s full blue skirt, where the fabric emptied into a hidden pocket, where unbeknownst to anyone but me, my mother stored a bright set of inky pens.

  She drove us for three hours, deep into the suburbs. We stopped along the way for sandwiches, and she said, “Why don’t you order for the both of us? I trust you.”

  I ordered burgers instead, and she applauded my initiative.

  “Nice improvisation,” she smiled, squeezing ketchup from a packet. We ate at a picnic table under a stately oak until the juice from the burgers soaked the buns, until the birds came to claim our soggy fries. The lake nearby was full of children in canoes, running their fingers through the water, wanting and not wanting to capsize, in equal measure. When I finished my food, I stretched out on the grass and looked up at the light that filtered through the branches of the tree until my mother’s face encroached on the view, her head hovering above me like some newly built nest.

  “Time to go.” She smiled, and we piled back into the car.

  We sang along with the radio. Something about the seasons, something about eternal love, and then several songs with lengthy metaphors. She opened her window, then closed it, her short dark hair nicely whipped with wind. I pulled a single leaf from a single strand.

  “Thanks, kid,” she said in a voice that felt too kind, too sweet, settling a score that hadn’t yet been unsettled.

  I dozed off with my head tilted all the way forward, as if sleep were a somersault I couldn’t complete. When I woke, my mother had pulled over to the side of the road to check her directions.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I think we’re lost,” she said, but I knew that she knew where she was going. She didn’t have the frantic flutter of confusion in her eyes. Her finger traced the map with an absent sort of attitude, and she looked straight through the paper to something just beyond the visible world. She was making a decision.

  For a long moment, like a dimple in the day, I thought she might turn around and take me back to our living room, our kitchen. The particles of dust hung in midair over the dashboard, and the rear-view mirror was filled with homeward potential. Then the moment broke, the engine kicked, and she merged into traffic. Our car continued along its intended route.

  When we arrived at my new job, she left me with a leather-bound planner. “To fill your days,” she said in the customary fashion, “until none are left.”

  My mother had no other children, and she adjusted her hosiery as she walked away.

  The job was in a lovely little house with a lovely little door. There were more doors inside the house, seven doors precisely, in total. My job was to open the doors, then close them, every forty minutes, every day, all day long, until otherwise notified. The instructions were laminated and taped to the inside of a kitchen cupboard, which, being a cupboard and not strictly a door, I never had to open or close again if I didn’t choose to do so.

  My favorite door was blue and small. For a child, perhaps, or a pet. The door was at the far end of the house, and it was difficult to see what was on the other side. It only ever opened halfway, but it was important to make sure it was open when specified, even if only a crack, and, later, closed. I had a glorious, shiny wristwatch to keep track of time. But time kept no track of me, and soon my arms and legs shot out and up, and I was grown.

  I learned to do everything in forty minutes. Some tasks that were shorter I extended for the sake of clarity and precision. Brushing my teeth, for instance, or combing my hair. A forty-minute sneeze is something I know how to do, and it’s not even listed on my resume.

  The doors, I imagined, opened to a city somewhere beyond the house, to a knowledge somewhere in the deepest pit of myself. Each squeaky swing closed still felt like an opening, over and over again. Or perhaps the doors kept the house alive, like valves to the atria of the heart, pumping whatever substance the house needed in the right amounts, at the appropriate rate. First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the third. The bathroom door and the door to the basement and the front door of the lovely little house.

  Across the street sat another lovely little house, with a lovely little door surrounded by cream-colored hydrangea. One day, I opened my front door at the scheduled moment, and the front door opened across the street. There, behind the door, was another little girl like me, though neither of us was truly little any longer. She had a glorious, shiny watch like mine, with a tiny face and a skinny gold band.

  Her name was Anna, and we met in the center of the road on our quiet street where it seemed no cars ever passed, except for the truck that came to drop off bread and cheese and eggs once a week. We waited at the ends of our driveways, sometimes mine, sometimes hers, and waved at the driver as he drove away.

  “Friends?” I asked.

  “Neighbors,” she said. Then later: “Yes, friends.”

  We played the customary games. We found ropes and jumped them. We found coins and tossed them. We bet the coins on probable events.

  “I bet my house will blow down.”

  “I bet my house will fly away.”

  We were two little girls with property, with nothing to our names. We drew straws for keeping track of time. We drew the scotch for which to hop. We drew doodles in our leather-bound planners, but only on the first page and the last. The days have only so much room for frivolity.

  Anna’s house had a different regimen than mine. Instead of doors, she was instructed to open drawers every hour. Little drawers, big drawers, both deep and shallow.

  “Some of the drawers are empty,” she explained, “and some are not.” She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask for elaboration.

  One morning, we were waiting for the food delivery at the end of Anna’s driveway. She sat on the back of the truck, pulled me up beside her, and the truck drove away. We drove past one street and then drove past another.

  I realized we were leaving. My face started to burn.

  “I promise we’ll be back in forty minutes,” Anna said.

  We drove around the neighborhood and saw many houses like ours. We sa
w a shop that sold ice cream, and we hopped off the truck, and we dumped a pile of coins on the counter for two cones, walking back to our street with milky streams trickling down our arms. But the ice cream tasted wrong, and as we approached the end of the block, I dumped the cone on the curb and ran inside my house to close the doors on time.

  First the small blue door. Then the master bedroom, the second bedroom, and the third. The bathroom door and the door to the basement and the front door of the lovely little house.

  Anna’s hair was short, and it curled behind her ears in two tiny wings. In the summer, her bangs stuck to her forehead, like feathers glued to an art project. Her bangs were a source of pride and irritation, always needing the remedy of a clip or a pin. Anna owned a fashionable pin with a tiny rhinestone glued to the bend in the metal.

  “I put my pin away in a drawer,” Anna explained, her bangs mingling with her eyelashes. “Old habit. Didn’t think it was a problem.”

  “And?”

  “Closed the drawer.” She mimed the action. “Opened the drawer an hour later, my pin was gone.” Her hands went poof, to signal the words disappeared and into thin air.

  We walked down my driveway and up hers, then back again, pretending the street was a moat and the driveways were drawbridges and the houses were castles and we were queens. We bowed to each other, then curtsied and continued our promenade.

  “What do your laminated instructions say?” I asked.

  “Nothing about this.”

  “Maybe give it a day or so,” I suggested. “Maybe your pin will boomerang back.” I did an exaggerated move that involved boomeranging myself away from and back to Anna’s side.

  She laughed like royalty, or maybe she simpered. “OK,” she said. “OK, you’re right.”

  The next day, I saw Anna sitting on the tree stump in her front yard. Her face was a sickly shade of gray.

  “I did something bad,” she said.