Temporary

by Hilary Leichter

  “You hired me next to a dumpster,” I say.

  “You’ve got to start somewhere.”

  The boy’s plan sounds bright and metallic, so sleek that it hurts to look in the direction of his dreams.

  “In that case, can I have a job at your company?” I ask.

  “Of course,” he says, “pending approval of your application.”

  We go to the store and pick out the right kind of pens for his company, the kind a real businessman might use. We click them open and test them on papers filled with scratch. He carries them home, bag swinging around his wrist. Then he lines them up on the desk next to his bed. We do homework and dot the i’s and cross the t’s like honest professionals.

  I notice that when I say certain unfamiliar words, he repeats them later in conversation, mispronouncing them, which makes my heart feel larger than ever before. He grows and grows and grows.

  When he finds out about the Chairman, he thinks I have a superpower. “Can I see him? Can you tell him to appear?” he marvels.

  “Oh, he comes and goes as he pleases.”

  “But who tells him to go away?”

  “No one. He never goes away.”

  He pretends to talk with the Chairman in his room, down the hall, and into the kitchen. I can hear him exclaiming and reasoning, discussing everything from math homework to pets.

  “Whoa,” he says, collapsing on the ground. “Whoa, the Chairman is so cool!”

  “Whoa!” I say.

  “Did you see him? He was hanging out with me!”

  “I totally saw.”

  “Whoa.”

  When I’m up late, walking about in his mother’s slippers, my necklace starts to burn, and the Chairman keeps me company watching late night television talk shows.

  “Did I miss him again?” the boy asks in the morning.

  “Your sweater is too small,” I say, and we go shopping for a new one, with a zipper and patches and pockets to hold the treasures that come with being a kid. Then he’s too big for the new sweater, and we shop for a newer one. His parade of sweaters could stretch around the apartment and over the cat and under the rug.

  I sign permission slips, practicing the forgery for field trips and class projects. Yes, my boy can travel to the clock tower. Yes, my boy can dissect a frog. And also, yes, he may. After school, he runs down to the stream with other boys his age. One of them wears a helmet, because he has a new bike. They share the bike and throw away the helmet. They take turns. They all pile on at once, like bees on a hive, and the bike falls flat on its side.

  I save my money and I buy him a bike of his own.

  “You really need to stop doing this,” he says, shaking his head, disappointed that I still don’t seem to understand.

  I shrug. “I can’t help it.”

  “Try,” he says, grabbing the bicycle handles, the bright red bell above the brake. His face changes for a minute, softens. “I’ll keep it,” he says, “but only to make you happy.”

  “Fine,” I say, and I smile to myself for weeks.

  “Don’t mention it,” he says, and he rides his bike into the sunset like the cowboy I’ve raised him to be.

  The other mothers gather at a picnic table for coffee, and I join them.

  “Whose mom are you again?” one of them asks. She has a short blond bob that leaves her neck long and free.

  I point to the boy who is mine.

  “Did you get your nose done?” they ask. “Did you gain some weight?” “Did you dye your hair?” Not remembering but somewhere deep down suspecting, suggesting, I’m not the person I pretend to be.

  “Yes,” I say, to all their questions. “All those things, yes.”

  “That explains it!” says the blond bob. She offers me a cracker and some cheese. She offers me a glass of wine, later, on her couch.

  “The kids!” they exclaim, and they talk about their kids.

  “The pets!” they exclaim, and they talk about their pets.

  “The husbands!” they exclaim, and they talk about their husbands.

  The plurality of their lives, I think, trying to cast a line to a person, place, or thing I can claim for myself.

  “What about you?” asks a mother with adult braces.

  “What about me?” I ask, genuinely wanting an answer. No one answers. We read magazines and the glass of wine in my hand refills itself thanks to the magical properties of women gathered in a room.

  We volunteer to chaperone a school dance. The boys stand around a box of donuts, watching its contents with the intensity of attempted levitation. We stand near the door, guarding the comings and goings of our children, our cheeks flushed with the cold.

  “Why not a slow dance?” says the blond bob, and she changes the music. Now the boy and his friends are holding the donut box, all hands on deck, as if to say, We’re clearly busy with something else right now.

  The girls coagulate in the darkest corner of the room.

  “I love this song,” says the blonde bob. She dances with another mom.

  I look down and my boy is standing by my side. He touches my wrist.

  “These pants are all wrong,” he says.

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Everything,” he says, almost crying.

  I walk back to our apartment and retrieve a pair of khakis. I walk back in the dark, khakis slung over my shoulder like a pelt for his survival.

  “Thanks,” he says, running off to change in the bathroom. He tucks his wrong jeans in my bag and returns to his friends, to their deliberations over donuts.

  “Wasn’t that fun?” I ask him on our way home at the end of the night.

  “It was a kind of fun,” he says.

  We walk the rest of the way in silence. When we get home, he suggests I get mad, then get sad, then stare out the window.

  “That’s how it should be,” he explains, walking off to bed.

  The moms sit at the picnic table with their coffees. We talk about the boys. We talk about the bombs. We talk about the petition for the thing no one remembers. We bake cookies and bring them to bake sales and sell the cookies for more than they’re worth.

  “I feel so undervalued,” says the blond bob. We go for walks sometimes in the afternoon. She starts to sob. “Do you value me?” she asks.

  “Of course,” I say, patting her round, bright skull. Like polishing a prize.

  We walk to the stream and take our shoes off and put our feet in the water. It feels cool and fresh between our toes, and then it feels like nothing. We wade until we’re numb, continents of snow drifting over the tops of our feet.

  “And at what cost,” she asks, a question in a conversation we’ve never had.

  My boy leaves his keys in the door and gives me a fright. Is he old enough to drive? I can’t remember.

  He and his friends go on a field trip and learn how to craft artisan paninis. They come over and demonstrate their new skill. They make one just for me, with thick bread and the nicest cheese you can buy at the store, with aioli and fresh tomatoes and ribbons of basil, and it’s simply the very best thing I’ve ever tasted.

  “It’s the very best thing I’ve ever tasted,” I tell them.

  “Hooray!”

  “In my whole life.”

  I scoop shiny spheres of ice cream for them, and they play board games on the floor, falling asleep with a milky lacquer over their lips. The old cat traipses through the casualties, knocking over piles of cards, swatting at the plastic pieces.

  I stand to watch the scene, the boy and his friends scattered on the rug, heads almost touching, limbs landing this way and that. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll rent movies. They can watch movies all day long. They can just sit here and watch as many movies as they want. How many days are like that? It’s a good kind of day to have. I make a shopping list for all the different kinds of days I want to provide for my son, and I cross this day off the list.

  The moon lights up the living room like a screen. I go to my room to get some
sleep.

  In the morning, I wake up already standing. I’m standing over the kitchen counter. The boy is standing across from me. When did he get so tall? Do I see the beginnings of a beard?

  “You were sleepwalking,” he says. His friends stand behind him, providing some unclarified moral support.

  “Where did I go this time?” I laugh.

  “You went to collect your things,” he says, opening one hand and revealing my eye patch. “Pirates,” he murmurs to his friends, barely holding his voice in place.

  “It’s not what you think. It’s a costume,” I explain, “for Halloween,” my heart already breaking. I try to lie every day, practicing mostly on myself.

  “Is this a costume too?” he asks. In his other hand, he reveals the brooch in the shape of a nautilus shell. The same shape found in the nerves collecting behind his eye at this very moment. In his eye he collects a tear, then another. “This was my mother’s,” he says. “Why do you have it?”

  “I don’t remember,” I say. I muster all my human resources to not collapse, to not die right here on the spot.

  “Get out.”

  “No,” I say.

  His friends look at me, unfriendly friends. The old cat hisses.

  “Out,” he says, pointing to the door.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t just leave you here alone.” I place my hands flat on the kitchen counter, which I have come to think of as my kitchen counter. My kitchen. My cat. My home. My child. “You’re just a child,” I say.

  The light sort of shifts. Does he have a tattoo? A mustache?

  “I’ll call the police,” he says, and I know he means it. I know I won’t be as lucky a second time around, running from the law. “This transaction,” he says, “is not open to your interpretation.”

  As I exit the apartment, I’m scolding him, punishing him, yelling for no reason, getting sad, and walking out the door. I thought my steadiness had nearly arrived, but here I am, alone again.

  “Don’t come back, ever,” say his friends.

  There are lots of different kinds of mothers. He never specified which kind he wanted.

  This is me, the type of mother who leaves.

  “Where you heading?” the blond bob yells in my direction. She’s standing at the corner.

  I don’t respond.

  “Hey! Where you going?”

  I keep walking.

  The artisan panini shop has been replaced by a bank. All the same bank. New stores. All the same stores. I don’t recognize a single thing, and I recognize everything. It’s exhausting. Once my heels were solid, but now they’re rotted through, the infrastructure of the stolen boots laid bare. I once walked along and sometimes skipped. Now I skip minutes, seconds, hours.

  I find a job flipping burgers, and that’s all there is to that. I keep expecting the job to reveal itself in full, but not all jobs are icebergs, with hidden miles of work. Some jobs are just jobs. I tuck my hair into a net and conduct daily dealings with grease and fire. I catch my reflection in the sneeze guard, and she’s a stranger.

  At the new bank, they’re hiring human metal detectors. I drink a thick milkshake filled with special particles, and now, when someone walks past me, I can detect their metal. I can also detect their mettle, an unintended side effect.

  You explain to your supervisor that you can detect their despair, and your supervisor declares that this makes sense. “Despair clings to the metal you’re already detecting.”

  We detectors have the simplest of intentions: to keep people out, to keep people in. To sense something extra, a sheath or a shroud, a holiday bonus, an elbowed bracket that extends past the boundaries of the body. The boundaries of the bank are high and tinseled with security cameras, electrified with wire, gilded with lights that lead me back to my place at the front entrance.

  I detect some metal in the shape of a toy.

  I detect some metal in the shape of a nautilus shell.

  I detect some metal in the shape of a knife and look up. Laurette’s face looks back. The sorrow I detect is so deep and unbearable, I throw up. Seasickness, sorrowsickness.

  When I collect myself, Laurette has disappeared, and my supervisor stands over my head.

  “Pack your things, obviously.”

  Then it’s unemployment for months, for maybe one hundred years. Unemployment: Don’t say that word in front of the baby, my mother had scolded her mother. Such shame, the first time I have ever been without occupation. But time seeps in around shame’s edges. Unaccounted time, time without sheets or stamps or cards. Time introduces herself to me, to each of my empty hours. Time is a new acquaintance, and she does something funny to my limbs, my worries, my anger, my life. Garbage sidles up against the curb, like a lonely lover looking for affection. There is no one living in that building across the way. A tree lost half its branches yesterday, and everyone continues to walk through the ghost of its shade. Unaccounted time has its own inventory.

  On a cold morning, I feel a lump in my throat that lasts all day.

  On a humid afternoon, I find a stray pamphlet tucked inside my boot, stinging the bottom of my foot for who knows how long. I hold the pamphlet to my chest until it burns like a rash. I make a wish on the pamphlet to go home. For a place to belong. I even click my broken heels together.

  On a rainy evening, I wait at the dock, in the harbor, near the public beach.

  On a foggy night, in the distance, a billowing sail, the silhouette of a vessel on the move. I run with everything I own, which is nothing, just my necklace, hot as fire, just me and the Chairman of the Board, racing to meet the pirates at the shore.

  The gods created the First Temporary so they could take a break. “Let there be some spare time,” they said, “and cover for us, won’t you? Here are all our passwords and credentials.” She fell from the husk of a meteor and glowed with no particular ambition. They had to pin her down so she would not float away, so very much distracted was this new kind of soul, so subject to drift. The gods had not yet created gravity. This was back when toads without occupation soared straight up to the clouds, back when employment was the only kind of honest weight you could apply to a life.

  The First Temporary was encouraged to replicate the gods’ image, even though she was not specifically created to resemble any of them. This was a job description added ex post facto. And so she forever was to learn her permutations, her shorthand methods of duplication, contortions of empathy. Her handwriting was the perfect facsimile of the handwriting everyone expected. She lived in the space between who she was and whom she was meant to replace. More responsibilities for the First Temporary, and she completed the tasks with aplomb, filed the backup documents, checked each item off her list.

  “Burn this bush,” one god said, and so she did.

  “Now put the bush back the way it was,” another god said, and the First Temp learned the drudgery of tasks done and undone, the brutal makings and unmakings of the earth.

  “Can I stay? Permanently?” she asked, and the gods just laughed and went to lunch.

  The First Temporary studied the world. She noted the shortcomings of the gods, their tempers and their feuds. It was their bureaucracy that allowed for her existence. She noted the fallacy of permanence in a world where everything ends and desired that kind of permanence all the same.

  One afternoon, when her work was finished, she had an hour to spare for insubordination. With her eyes closed, she created a series of friends. No, employees. No, colleagues, she thought. The temporaries emerged from the soles of her sensible shoes, then scattered with the wind. She reached down from the sky to find them, dipped her hand into a stream and pulled them from the current like an oar from a canoe, digging deep into the water and lifting forth. She wiped them off and patted them dry and gave them leather planners, inky pens, laminated instructions for how to interact with the world.

  They were travelers, created as such with the breeze at their backs, meant to fill any gaps the gods had forgotten. There we
re stars in the sky but still no moon, and a temporary rounded her body into an iridescent orb. “Great idea,” one god said, feasting on honeydew, and the moon was made in her image. The intentions of the moose were always unclear to the elk, and a temporary vaulted her arms into antlers so the animals could lock themselves into thorny disagreements, then eventually, solutions. Shoelaces were always frayed at the ends. A temporary reduced herself to a fraction of her size, capped an aglet on the laces with her new, plastic countenance. The sky would not meet the sea, and so a temporary folded herself into a thin connecting strip of mist and air, henceforth called a horizon.

  The world accumulated more stuff but stayed the same size. Clutter gave the impression of completion, but the First Temp knew there was still work to be done. “Get clever,” she told her colleagues. They noticed the absence of microwave-safe pottery and hollowed their bodies into bowls, plates, mugs, forgotten, and left to sit in their own filth. They noticed the absence of storage and stretched themselves into closets. They noticed the continuous departures of kindness and sloughed their skins to wear their hearts on their sleeves as reminders. They always noticed, with relief, prodigal kindness making its inevitable return.

  The temporaries grew sturdier legs, more robust arms, less prone to willy-nilly transformation. They evolved and took their places in the crowd. They fit in and filled in. Thousands of years changed over like a crossing signal, and the temporaries crossed the street. Sometimes the crosswalk was not enough for traffic, and yet, a temporary hit by a bus was rarely mourned or replaced. After all, who would bother replacing a replacement? In this way, the temporaries had a sort of elastic permanence of their own.

  “But now will you hire me full-time?” asked the First Temp.

  “Come into our office,” the gods said, and she followed them to their desks.

  “I really love your creativity,” one god said with a hint of ellipsis, and the First Temp correctly predicted a forthcoming, ominous but.