by Aimee Bender
I wasn’t on my bike this time. If I tried to sit on that bike, my feet would drag on the cement. I walked over to the paper and picked it up. It was made of that unrippable kind of fabric—not paper, not cloth; it was made of some toxic material created in a factory in a different country, sent over in boxes on a big metal boat.
My mother was older than my father. In July, she had turned 53. His birthday was in a month.
I ran my fingers over the numbers; they were thick, and dark, and certain. 50.
I used to think death might be hidden somewhere on our bodies. Tucked behind the pupil like a coin, slid beneath the thumbnail, ribbon-wrapped around a wrist bone. A sharp, dark sliver; a loose, pale pellet. Each person different. Each lifespan set. On the day of your death, it melts out through your entire body, a warm, broken bath bead. Until then, it waits—sealed and silent. If you knew where to look, you could find it, resting in the curve of your ear, waiting patiently for its right day. Those people who survive brutal car accidents: not their day yet. Those people who die from one bad hamburger: their bead was up. I’ve always steered clear of fortune-tellers, because what if she was real and she found it? Slid it out from beneath your thumbnail, held it to the light, and told you.
On this day. On this hour. You have this much left.
I avoid fortune-tellers for two reasons. For one: what if she glanced at me and said: Mona, and her voice sank. Oh poor Mona. She can’t disguise her pity. She says: You will die young, you will die a girl who has never found her place in the world. Your heart will quit you before its time.
I exit the tent, shoulders low, body crippling.
But below that lives the other fear, the less known fear, the rumbling flood: what if she said this. What if she said: Oh Mona, and her voice soared. Oh Mona, she said, you will live so long. You are going to have a life and it’s going to be something beautiful.
This 50 was not for me; I lived elsewhere. It was not for my mother, she was already past.
I stood on the lawn and the leaves on the tree covering the kitchen window were blinking in the breeze and I could guess where he was inside. In front of the television, half-watching, taking note of everything living inside his skin. Gallbladder? Check.
Liver? Check. Heartbeat? Check. Brain? ABCDEFG … Check. He is aware of her, puttering around the house, throwing away junk mail without regret. (I’ll never use this coupon, she announces. Carpet cleaning? Forget it. Trash. She is so good at throwing things out.)
I stood on the lawn with the paper fluttering at my feet and the tree fluttering over the kitchen window and the two people I loved most in the world separated from me by walls and years.
I didn’t go in yet. I imagined the Stuarts in Florida. Kids almost grown by now. Tanned. Sidestroke champions. I think of the now-youngest Stuart, Joanna; she was ten when the baby died. She’s with her first boyfriend, in his living room, and he has a new baby brother sleeping in a crib nearby. The boyfriend asks her: Do you like babies? And she says: Babies? Babies? I’m not sure. He doesn’t ask anymore; he has fulfilled his questioning duties and now removes her shirt. While she feels her breast kissed for the first time in her life, something sweeter than an ache, a sharpened ache, a purified ache, she is thinking about that creamy movement inside the crib. It had been a girl. That had been her only sister. The youngest. She was supposed to outlive them all.
My eyes are closed but I see him inside: my father, 50, watches TV alone. If I listen very hard, I can hear those electric voices from the television wandering out the open window to reach me.
I don’t move yet.
Somewhere across town, feet firm on the gravel, the fastest and steadiest person in town breaks the tape, and wins the marathon.
part two 50
10
My father was a track star in college. He showed me photos from his scrapbook once, of himself in a line with ten or so other men, each with knobby knees and thighs too exposed, the styles of uniform different then. The terrible vulnerability of his bare skin. The whole thing made me embarrassed to look at, but then he turned the pages and to my surprise there were all the prizes he’d won—blue ribbons, smushed behind plastic, forcing the pages of the scrapbook to lift too high. First place in sprint—fifty-yard dash. First place in relay—he was the anchor. First place in long jump. That one amazed me. Really? I asked, rereading the flakes of golden writing on the blue satin. He nodded. His hands, with their carefully shaped pale fingernails atop the page, looked to me now as though they had never moved fast through anything.
He encouraged me to do track, and before he got sick, we raced until the dust flew, and my lungs grew sharp with air and want. I ran again on the high school track team, but when I started doing really well, of course, I quit. I told my dad it just wasn’t my thing—too competitive, is what I said. He’d nodded, but the track coach had been crushed. She tried to talk to me, but I just recited some well-used slogans: My schoolwork, I explained. She brandished my report card, miraculously, from her pocket. But you’re getting A’s! she said. I would rather focus on the other parts of my life, I said. She hung her head and spoke to the ground. There is practically nothing in the world as beautiful and simple as running, she said.
I couldn’t stand to hear that, and left. I went to two track meets during the year, but all I saw were the mistakes everyone made and was filled with the intense desire to show off, so I stopped going. On high school graduation day, the coach came over to wish me well. She was wearing a dress and looked ridiculous.
Good luck to you Mona, she said, and hugged me.
I felt a vague sense of floating. Her hug was loose and light. Good luck to you too, I said.
She smiled, then leaned forward.
So why did you quit, really, she asked.
Behind us, hundreds of my peers in their green robes and green hats were hugging parents. I’d already hugged mine; my mother had held my face, proud, and my father had praised and beamed and then sat, exhausted.
I looked back to the coach. The yellow tassel of my hat bobbed near the corner of my eye like a building in the distance.
I quit because winning is lonely, I said.
Her face moved back slightly. Clearly, she’d expected some story about a boyfriend.
But if you ran for the joy of running—
I interrupted. Whatever, I said. My voice was flat now. I patted her shoulder.
Thanks for everything, I said, and I walked away.
The morning after I found the marathon 50, I woke up in my clothes, 4:30 bright on the clock, each number a house of slim red parallelograms. I felt inside my pocket and of course there it was, and I took it out and unfolded it and the numbers were clear, and panic bloomed in my stomach again, an ecstatic flower.
I got a warning. No one gets a warning.
I wanted to marry wood. I wanted to chew down some two-by-fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz with luck.
I was awake and alert right away. Got up. Went to the kitchen. My shoes were on already. I’d slept all night wearing shoes. I opened the cabinet underneath the sink and took out the ax which I’d stored there as soon as I’d come home because at the time it seemed like as good a place as any to store an ax. The blade smelled like lemon-fresh detergent.
The handle slipped from the sweat in my palm but the ax winked in the darkness like a glint from a reptile’s cornea and I sat on the living room couch with myself, in the dimness that comes before early morning, and wondered what was about to happen.
51: Humming, just around the corner.
On the lawn the day before, when I couldn’t stand to stare at the 50 anymore, I’d folded it into my pocket, hid the ax in the bushes, and gone inside my parents’ house. After choking down birthday cake with my mother, I watched TV with my father for hours. He said cake made him queasy, and sipped mineral water through a straw. He looked the same as always. My mother had wanted to know if I’d bought anything for m
yself at the hardware store and I said, No? with a question mark and she looked at me funny. I’ll get something soon, I said. I need a shower curtain.
Before I walked home, she’d come out with me to the front lawn.
It was night by then, and the sky was crowded with stars, a geometric dream of pinpoints.
She said she remembered my birth. I said she should forget it by now. You, she said, touching my arm, you have so much ahead of you, I can just see it.
This felt vaguely like a threat. Bye, I said.
She stood under the front-lawn tree, and one white bloom drifted down the side of her face, a huge soft earring.
Mona, she said. She fixed her gaze right on me then, straight through the evening blueness, in such a direct way that I felt myself freeze, recede, loosen. I shook my head against it, reaching out a hand to touch the tree trunk. Between the bark and my mother’s straight-on gaze, I felt some kind of shimmer in the air. I couldn’t bear it.
Talk to you tomorrow, I said.
Once the door clicked, and I knew she was inside, I ran to the bushes and retrieved the ax, blade now cold from the night air. The handle was a rush of relief in my hand. I didn’t need to touch any tree trunks with my palm pressed tight against that wood.
In my dark apartment, 4:40 in the morning, shaky from the absence of sleep, nothing made me calmer right then than holding that blond wooden handle and looking at that skirt of shining steel.
It felt right. It seemed possible, and useful: to join the troops.
I considered some options.
The easiest would be a finger or a toe. This was the most conservative choice. Fingers would be obvious but I could hide an absent toe, maybe my whole life. I never wear sandals.
But big deal. Too small an offer.
I could slice off a kneecap, that smooth moving skipping-stone of a bone, shine it up and use it as a paperweight, give it to my boss as a holiday gift for her already overcrowded boss desk.
I could cut off my heel. I could cut off my hand. I could cut off my arm. I could cut off more.
Ears. Eyes. Nose. Calves.
Shoulders. Legs. Breasts. Fists.
The ax was clean and bright and manly. There was a sick feeling in my stomach, this side of throwing up, but it had, within its center, the undeniable bubbling of excitement. I could change my life, right here. I could make myself different and I would be different that way for my whole life, forever, and this—right here—would be the moment where everything turned.
Blam. New me. In the newspapers. In the butcher shop. Read about by Mr. Jones on the stool in his hardware store. I bet you remember me now, that girl around town with no head on her shoulders.
I held the handle close. Silly Mona, I said, and I almost got up to put it away but I didn’t move because I didn’t want to. The ax felt so good in my hands, so strong and real, so regular and steady, and that 50 was loud and clear on my bed.
I gripped the sturdy wooden stem and got up off the couch, stretching flat on my back on the carpet. Staring at the ceiling, I brought the blade into the air. It was heavy, and as I looked at it winking, I thought of something to do. My heart clanged, and thrill and terror dribbled through me, giddy and light, and I pulled myself up and stood, almost burping up bubbles like bells.
Holding the ax high in my right hand, I imagined it first: my arm, swinging down, a loose curve, swing down, and crash, crack, I let the blade bury deep down wherever the swing ends. Sshh, quiet, woozy, dreamy, the girl falls, sshh, tipping over, falling, something has been hit, timber, she’s over, there’s a slice in her leg, I’m bleeding all over the carpet, but there’s the towel! And there’s my father! And when someone asks at the hospital of glass, when they’re trying to cure my incurable wound, when they question me in high tones what happened, I say in a clear voice: I chopped myself down.
And then I’m the talk of the hospital for a while. It’s my best stint with fame.
My arm was up, ax up, high up, imagining this girl as me, loving it, heady with the image: I’m limping to the hospital, leaving a trail of blood on the ground; I’m pausing at the entrance where the building flies up in front of me like long hard water; I’m in the elevator, I’m in a room, ready to sneak out, preparing my escape so I can limp to my parents’ house and tell them I did it! I saved the family; my hair is fetchingly mussed and the hospital gown is billowing up like a wedding dress, and I am as noble as the rest of them and I am a part of the team, I am a team player, and then, of all things, in the middle of this, of all people, Lisa Venus popped into my head.
She’s in the hospital too, lost, peering out a blue window at the dark blue night, looking for the other wing, both of us imprisoned by the masterful glass architecture. I have a chunk missing from my leg and maybe I don’t have a foot—who knows—and she is walking through the halls, little Lisa, holding a drawing, and she’s asking where the cancer ward is because that’s where her mother lives.
And she sees me. Ms. Gray! she says. What are you doing here?
But I’m weak in the hospital bed without enough blood and I can’t even sit up. You can tell she thinks I look bad without makeup. The hospital nurse comes to her side quickly because she doesn’t want this little girl with the nice drawing of the skull and crossbones, she doesn’t want this little girl to be talking to the nut who thinks she’s a tree to cut down.
Ms. Gray, says Lisa, and her face is screwing up and she looks like she’s about to erupt into tears.
In my apartment, I have my arm to the sky and the ax is waggling in it and I’m a statue here; I’m waiting to see if I’ll do it. Will I do it. Will I mark myself.
In the hospital, I tell Lisa: Don’t worry, I’m just here for a visit. In fact I’m right about to leave.
I try to get out of bed, but my head rushes from the weakness and the nurse has clamped a hand down on Lisa’s shoulder and is guiding her away. I can hear her start to cry in the hallway. They’re taking her to the cancer ward now. Everyone there is bald. Which is hard to see, that is hard too, but if you’re bald, you don’t have hair NOT to brush and so you don’t look matted up, and crazy, and neglected, and old. You just look less.
I manage to get up out of the hospital bed, and holding on to the wall I trail Lisa in my hospital nightgown. The moon is shining through the glass, a dome of blue, making shadows the color of morning sky on the pale tiled floors. We go to see her mother. She is a sleeping skull against a thin white pillow.
Lisa is so bristlingly alive with everything, I feel like she has absorbed all the flourescence accidentally. She goes to the bed, and sits there on the edge of it. She puts her drawing on the side table, and starts to sing a song about kickball. Her mother still sleeps. I look down my side, through my hospital gown, and the gash is as thick and deep as it can be without severing something, and I try to move the skirt to hide it but hospital gowns tend to show a little leg. If she turned, she could see it. A piece of me: gone.
I wait for her to turn. I am waiting for her to turn. I am watching the back of her head, and waiting for her to find out.
You. Hey—. You’re not what I thought.
Against the wall, I am doubling over. This is a bad feeling. I want to scoop up Lisa and take her to get ice cream in the cafeteria but I’m a one-legged lady with a crack in her shin and it’s getting harder and harder to move.
Race me, she says, dashing off in a blur, and she laps the hall four times, cheeks red from exertion, alive! alive!, panting, done by the time it takes me to hobble to the doorway and watch her go. The look on her face when she sees how little I’ve come.
Inside my apartment, I put down the ax.
11
The morning was still dark when I left. Hauling the ax over my shoulder, I walked to the school, let myself in, and went straight into MATH. Flicked on the light. The room illuminated—dim, wrong. The cutout numbers were curling inside their frames. The chalkboard still had Friday’s date on it.
Classrooms only look right in da
ylight. The whole place made me feel tired.
I searched in the cabinets until I found what I needed, then pulled an orange plastic chair to the wall, hammered some nails, and hung the ax up high. I hung it backward, blade to the left. When I was done, the room began to warm with light, and through the windows from the hall I could see the sky widening and opening, the first cars tooling down the streets. I sat in a chair and put my head on the desk and finished sleeping.
When the sun was up, the main doors flung open and a wallop of kids charged in, so full of energy they made my teeth ache. I got up and made myself a cup of tea, then headed in to see the kindergartners.
I forced myself to focus. We went over addresses and phone numbers. The first graders added 4 and 5 and 1 together. No one said anything about the new decoration.
By third period, it was, naturally, Lisa Venus who noticed first. She saw it hanging on the wall within five seconds of entering the classroom.
I like the 7, she said, pointing up. I grinned, huge, at her.
What’s that for? asked Mimi Lunelle, walking in wearing a pink dress with ribbons tied in bows all over it.
People sometimes use it to chop wood, I said, but we’re going to use it as a 7.
Ann walked in the door and sat in her seat. She glowered, listening for a minute, then said, in her usual flat tone: That is a hatchet. That looks nothing like a 7.
I felt a little better just having it nearby, a testimonial to my twentieth birthday, to the morning in my apartment. In the back of my head, I could feel the 50, like a just-emptied rocking chair, always moving, always one part of my peripheral brain occupied. His birthday was in a month.
Lisa was sitting at the table, sorting through buttons.
The rest of the kids were in their chairs too, eyes awake, the spastic sleepy push of Monday in their blood. They seemed more or less healthy after their Friday bout with disease. I could hear the science teacher next door, voice bright and awake, unfired.