An Invisible Sign of My Own

by Aimee Bender

  I’m glad you’re feeling better, I said. Nine times better.

  He stopped opening his car. I rode closer. His face looked soft and worn as cloth.

  Why thank you, he said. That’s truly nice of you to notice, he said. That’s a nice thing to do, for a kid to notice that.

  Well, I said. 18 is nine times higher than 2. That’s a ton higher.

  He winked at me. Still, he said. You’d be surprised at how many people never say a word.

  He wished me a good day and then got in his car and drove off. All afternoon I felt great, having noticed. I was a good noticer. So I noticed everything that day—I overnoticed. I told another neighbor walking around that I liked her new haircut and she hugged me. I told the little boy who played up the street that he had a bleeding arm and he said, What? and ran off, scared. It stopped when I told my dad he looked tired and my mom said that was rude and to go clean my room.

  The following year was when my father dropped out of the active world, and it was that same year that my feelings changed for Mr. Jones. At age thirteen, I often found myself spitting on that hedge that separated our house from his, and one Halloween, I egged his garage, by myself, with two dozen eggs, a few of which were rotten.

  He never found out it was me. He wore a 10 all that week, picking the shells painstakingly from his driveway with a handheld broom and trash receptacle.

  A few months later, he dropped down to 3. I didn’t say a word about it. I was waiting by the car one morning for my mother to drive me to school when Mr. Jones came through his front door to take out his trash. It was not yet eight A.M., and the air was cold and pale.

  Oh hi Mr. Jones, I said.

  I thought I caught him looking at me mournfully, and I figured he was thinking I was a self-absorbed teenager now and had lost my youthful candor and observation skills. But I was standing there, completely aware of the loud and sad 3 around his neck, just refusing to comment.

  Hi Mona, he said, voice hopeful.

  So, I said, playing it up. So Mr. Jones, why do you wear those numbers around your neck like that?

  His eyebrows bunched in, like a dog’s.

  I thought you knew, he said.

  I stared straight at him, eyes cold with hate; I was thinking about how for three years straight now, Mr. Jones had seen my father get into his car in his suit of triple shades of gray and his face with its weird fogged absent skin and how he’d never said a single thing. No one else did either, but I thought Mr. Jones, the man who praised noticers, might. I was wearing an invisible sign of my own now. It said: Up Yours Hypocrite.

  Never once did he look at me and say: Mona, I know something is going on, and I notice you look sadder than you used to.

  It would’ve meant a million dollars to me if he’d said something like that. I would’ve been his slave forever. Instead, he kept changing his numbers and going about his day and lifting and lowering like a teeter-totter.

  Don’t you remember? he asked that morning, approaching the hedge.

  I blinked slowly. Remember? I said, hard. Remember what?

  He stared at me, disbelieving, and then went back inside for a minute, and came out again wearing a 1. The number hung heavy around his neck as he finished taking out the trash. He didn’t look at me again. I’d never seen the 1 before; it was very new-looking. I had a horrible day at school and when the substitute math teacher asked me to do the equation, I nailed it, found the value of y, and then said I had to go to the nurse, couldn’t she see I was in the midst of choking?

  8

  Mr. Jones was still lost in the height of his newspaper as I turned the corner and drifted down Aisle Two. Here were screwdrivers, dead bolts, rows of hammers. I squeaked the shiny purple plastic of a shower curtain, and stroked the maple handle of a saw. The truth is, I love hardware stores. I longed to fill my arms with all of it, run back to the diner, and thrust a metal bouquet at my chilled father, consisting of wrench, pliers, and drill.

  Yell: Go! Fix yourself!

  I pictured them walking back to the car by now, slow, the sunburn a ruddy murky swamp drowning away my father’s face.

  On the front wall of the hardware store, all seven different clocks clicked to five-to-eleven. I wandered down Aisle Three. This row smelled sharp with cedar, and contained nuts and bolts, can openers, wooden spoons. Mallets and glue guns. Knives with sharp blades, my profile elongated, eyes slivered and blue in the silver.

  Across the street, someone let out a loud hoot about one of the runners. I touched each knife and turned the corner.

  Aisle Four had the gardening supplies. Hoses and shovels and hand-drawn signs that marked the placement of fruits and vegetables. I saw a few of Elmer Gravlaki’s father’s addresses hanging on the wall for sale, ornate wooden 2s and 17s, sanded to the smoothness of pebbles, and thought of Elmer, walking around with everyone’s house number rolling around in his head, the same way another kid learns to make his fist harder.

  Closing in three minutes! called out Mr. Jones from his stool.

  Closing? I said. It’s barely eleven in the morning.

  He didn’t answer.

  I found plant food in a green package nestled next to a pointy spade. I’d never seen my father garden but it seemed like a fine activity for a faded person, and this plant food looked as good as the one in the blue package and the one in the red package and who really needed to ask Mr. Jones anything. Half my job was done. In Aisle Five, I picked up a handful of nails, cold little metal fence posts, and stirred them in my palm. I was trying to think of how to explain to my mother that I’d broken my promise, shown up empty-handed, started a new tradition of no presents at all, when right then, two minutes before closing, I turned my head one inch to the left, and saw what I wanted for my twentieth birthday.

  My heart picked up a beat. I knew it instantly, dripped the nails back into their bin, and walked over.

  There was only one left.

  Hanging from a hook high on the wall, in Aisle Five, was a medium-sized solid steel ax. Sharp and mean and perfect. I didn’t know if I had ever actually seen an ax before, but this particular model was the basic type you read about woodcutters using, with a flared silver blade attached to a light grainy wooden handle the color of unsunned blond hair.

  Everyone makes fun of shopping but it’s all about this. It’s all about suddenly attaching to an object so deeply you can’t leave it in the store. I wanted that ax. I was meant for that ax. I loved the graceful skirt of the blade and how it looked like it came all the way from a forest. I loved how the edge was so sharp it glittered, and the powerful way the metal poised like a panther on the wood. It was such a hopeful ax, up there, wanting to be bought and used, in this warm-weather town where the houses were built without chimneys. I reached up and lifted it off the wall and brought it straightaway to Mr. Jones. The sudden flush of birthday prickled over the back of my neck.

  Just in time, I said.

  He looked up from his newspaper and checked the price tag.

  Twenty-four dollars, he said.

  It’s my birthday, I told him.

  He folded the paper into fourths and put it to the side. Unusual choice, he said. How old?

  Twenty, I said.

  He nodded. Lucky for both of us I’m still open, he said.

  I’d like to buy this ax, I said. And some licorice.

  He carefully removed the price tag from the stem of the ax and then pulled a rope of red licorice out of the bin near his knees.

  Here, he said. That’ll be nineteen dollars. I’ll give you a twenty percent discount being that it’s your birthday. Plus one dollar for the licorice. Twenty even. A dollar per year, he said, nodding at the sense of it.

  I could smell the Sunday air drifting into his store, dry and vast, the moving sky.

  Thanks, I said. I pulled the crumpled fifty from my pocket and handed it to Mr. Jones. Fifty: half a life, maybe. Half a countdown. L. I thought of telling my mother, voice somersaulting with glee, how for once I’d f
ound something I really wanted. Her forehead would clear, face smooth; she’d say, How wonderful Mona! What did you get?

  It’s useful, I’d tell her. I’ll use it.

  Mr. Jones counted the change backward into my palm. I folded the bills and placed them in my back pocket together: one bill the new age I was right now; the other the age I was when my father turned from a robust man who raced me on the track to one who froze inside restaurants.

  That’s forty and fifty, Mr. Jones said, and—

  I don’t need a bag, I told him. I’ll carry it. Oh, and the plant food too.

  I’d almost forgotten the little sinking bag on the counter.

  He rang that up.

  What’s a girl like you doing with an ax? he said. You going to chop firewood? He laughed at his own joke.

  Don’t you remember me? I asked him.

  He scrunched up his nose. Remember you, he said. Remember what? That’s four dollars.

  Absentmindedly, I ran my index finger down the silver blade of the ax, and even though it had been hanging up high, unsharpened and ignored, the edge cut right through the skin. Blood blossomed forth, a rose.

  Oh no, he said. Look at that. Let me get you a tissue.

  It’s okay, I said. I gave him a ten, backing away. I used to live next door to you, I said. Mona Gray. Left side. You remember that, right? I was your math student, I said. Your star pupil.

  He handed over the change and looked at me, reaching for a tissue, half off his stool.

  What are you planning to do with that ax? he said.

  What’s your number today, Mr. Jones? I asked.

  He blinked, surprised. I took another step back and he reached beneath his shirt, obedient, and through the collar pulled out a small precise 12, made of wax, about the size of a tennis ball, hanging on a string and gleaming dully in the lamplight.

  12, I said.

  12, he said. Thanks for asking.

  Not so great, I said.

  No, he said, not especially.

  His face had opened up now, since I’d asked to see it, clean, wide, as if I’d turned a key and walked directly into his body.

  But I did the opposite instead—backed away from him more, that eagerness in his face, edging toward the door. I could feel the sunlight behind me, waiting, the step into dryness. I bit off the end of the licorice rope.

  He was off his stool now, staring at my finger, bleeding all over the blade. The 12 bounced around his neck but I was out of the store, entrance bell singing my exit; outside, the light was white and the park sprinklers had been turned off, leaving fleeting tiaras of dew on the air.

  Coiling the licorice around my wrist, I held the plant food in one hand and the ax high and blinding in the other. The stem waggled in my grip.

  Will you look at this! I said out loud to the world. Just what I’ve always wanted! I said.

  9

  In the street, two orange cones had tipped over, vivid and isosceles. The coffee shop was still crowded with people. My parents’ car was gone.

  I used the ax first to circle the air around my head, then to brush against the bark of trees, then to lean on like a walking stick. I loved my new present, but I didn’t like being around marathons, and I didn’t like that Mr. Jones hadn’t remembered me, and I wasn’t sure how to manage going to school in the morning with kids who would cough at will and like it. I did the walk to my parents’ house slowly, eating licorice, sucking on my bloody finger, passing abandoned folding chairs set up by the side of the road. Families stood outside on their lawns, talking, drinking iced tea. It was just past eleven o’clock. The streets were calm with Sunday.

  I walked by the flowery house where John Beeze lived with his mother, the butcher, and the green public house that no one could stay in because the pipes were damaged by a root. Kids liked to play there when it was raining. More than one town member had been conceived in its back rooms.

  Bikes lay flat on lawns, wheels spinning.

  The plant food sifted and shifted in my hand, and I leaned on the ax, blade lilting out like a song, and debated where to put it once I got home. Bedroom? Windowpane? Closet? Someone let out another sports yell, several blocks away.

  I rounded the corner. I was now about seven houses from where my parents lived.

  All these homes I knew very well. I had known all my neighbors growing up. Mr. Jones still lived on my parents’ right side, but on the left had lived an old woman named Mrs. Finch. For years she baked terrible cakes and brought them to her neighbors on birthdays, never missing a year, waiting at the door while we took a bite and nodded and smiled over the awful sour salt glob in our mouths.

  I approached her house, balancing that ax head on my shoe.

  Mrs. Finch was important to me. Not because I knew her that well, or because of the cakes, which were awful. She’d stopped baking in her later years, and become a sickly lady with a cane, a walker, and a wheelchair, all three, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone when she died. I was twelve then, and two of my grandparents had died by that point so I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with death, particularly the deaths of old people.

  The remarkable thing had happened the day before she died. I had been riding past her house on my bike, back and forth on the sidewalk, too scared to dip into the street and head downtown. I stayed on the sidewalk even though people on foot gave me dirty looks. Whenever I rode my bike, I felt one second away from flying over the handlebars: dizzy, then dizzier, then dead.

  As I rode by, I spied on Mrs. Finch’s lawn a piece of butcher paper wrapped around her front-lawn tree, and written on the butcher paper had been a number, in black block ink. The number was 84. I remember looking at it and wondering why her address was so much shorter than ours, and why she’d stuck it on her tree, or if Mr. Jones had put it there in a really good mood, and then I decided that it wasn’t her address or Mr. Jones at all, and spent a good minute or so thinking about that, why was it there? rambling along in my own head, pedaling down, knocking on tree trunks, thinking thoughts I never would have thought of again, thoughts meant to be unremembered, if it hadn’t been that she died the next week and in the obituary it said she was 84 years old.

  I looked at that typeface on the newspaper and the butcher-paper number lit up in my head.

  There was a beauty and an order that I liked. I found it peculiar, but I also found it perfect.

  I tore that obituary out of the newspaper, and saved it. I placed it in the drawer of my wood nightstand set aside for unusual items, where it shared space with a tiny plastic running man, a gum wrapper in Spanish, and the one warped page of my aunt’s lingerie catalog that I hadn’t been able to throw out.

  Birthdays passed and no one got a sour salt cake anymore. I forgot all about the 84 until the whole thing happened again, and this time it was much worse.

  Across from Mrs. Finch was a big friendly yellow house. Right now someone else lived there, some family with eleven cats, but when I was growing up, that was where the Stuarts lived. They were really nice, tall people, even though they didn’t like the horn on my bike and got irritable when once on an impulse I picked one of their prime golden roses for my hair. They’d had three kids around my age, and a new one, a brand-new baby, pink and fleshy on the blanket, with curling fingers.

  I was thirteen years old, biking up the sidewalk one afternoon, when I saw a flag flying on the Stuarts’ lawn. It was a flag with a circle on it, one big black 0. I remember supposing they were some weird religion that worshipped 0’s. I spent a good minute thinking about them, about what that meant, about tires, about rings, about lunar eclipse.

  I had a flash of worry before I went to sleep, but so swift I never would’ve remembered that either.

  A week later, their baby died. It was in its crib and Mrs. Stuart left the room and when she came back the baby wasn’t breathing anymore. Just like that. She brought it into the world; it took off. Didn’t like it. Left. Mrs. Stuart shook it many times, she apparently never really GOT it; she just
stared and questioned, asked questions to the baby: Are you okay? What is going on? Baby? She was nothing but question marks and she couldn’t grasp it, but I did; I got it. I remembered the 0.

  Could I have warned them? What to say? I quit riding my bike and retired it to the side wall of the garage. Cars lined up in front of the Stuarts’ house and people walked to their door, hugging casserole dishes close to the heart, food warm through the glass, dampening their shirts. The 0 flag flipped and waved in my head. I did not know how to make a casserole and I never spoke with the Stuarts again. I did, however, bring them a replacement rose, for the one I’d clipped months before; I bought a long-stemmed red at the store and stuck it, like a pole, next to their rosebush. A sentry rose. To watch out for pickers. After a few months, the Stuarts and their three alive children moved away, I think to Florida.

  Some worries sit in the stomach like old bad food. Most of the time, they are so quiet and dormant you can’t feel them at all. Oh good, you might think. They’re gone.

  The fall marathon was held only once a year on the Sunday of the last week of September. This Sunday—of my birthday, of plant food, of axes, of breakfast. The race went through all the neighborhoods, and the small group of local runners spent months training to loop the town. Brief synthetic shorts, heavily muscled thighs. Shoes soft as slippers.

  No one I knew ever ran in the marathon. I didn’t set up a folding chair to watch it because I couldn’t stand seeing those people running, the shapes of muscles moving inside their legs like activated geometry. I didn’t like to think about winning it which is always the only thing I thought about when I watched.

  I was twirling the ax handle, walking by Mrs. Finch’s house, walking by the Stuarts’ old house, passing folding chair after folding chair, when I reached my destination and saw, edges lifting in the wind, a marathon identification number resting lightly on my parents’ front lawn.

  And it said 50.

  I looked at the paper on the lawn.

  It said 50, there was no doubt, it was the number-fifty runner. Black number on white paper, bordered with orange.