An Invisible Sign of My Own

by Aimee Bender

  But he’d changed the air, just like that. Now it was different, concentrated—palpable, like smoke.

  He returned his face to the movie. It was getting more intense: The serial killer was in the darkness of an alley behind a bank, hiding; there was the woman tied up, her mouth stuffed with money; there were two policemen skirting the scene; the two good bank robbers were running to stop the policemen from doing the wrong thing; I couldn’t stand it; I decided not to watch, and I closed my eyes and then, like a pop-up book next to me opening, all I could really feel was him right there, breathing, that man. A man. I repeated what he’d said to me in my head. I repeated it again. I repeated it again. On the screen the music was lurching higher, the cellos were speeding up, the strings were vibrating, and I was rising inside; I wanted him to know I’d heard him but I couldn’t say anything. My hands were silent in my lap and I began to cloak the air around myself, heavying it, thickening it with aggression and glamour, red velvet breathing, and I made the air seethe off me, onto him, to make him look over again; I wanted to force him to look over just by the power of my will. He kept his eyes on the movie. I thought of him with the bubbles: Did you break it on purpose? Telling Ellen her symptoms. Inflate my heart. I kept my eyes closed and imagined leaning over pushing down the popcorn tub taking his face into mine and then stealing it with a kiss, just like that, we are sealed and joined. Living inside his mouth. Wrapping him up in my cloak. On the screen I can hear a gigantic shootout taking place; the bullets are whizzing through the air and burying into flesh and I can even hear the blood, splashing, cinematic, how red and wet blood sounds, and there are the moans—the spare characters are sighing, loud: He got me! And I think of the dyslexic kid in the third grade who is the best drawer in school and how a few weeks before he made me a picture of a horse and wrote on top of it—to Moan—and how I’d oohed over the picture, the mane of the horse, the great proportions, but it made me want to hide, my name up there like that, transformed, just like that, into someone new. On the screen there are shouts and the music is shifting and it’s hinting at the sound of resolution, everything is okay now, almost, is it?, yes, it is, you can open your eyes now, but I don’t; I can hear they got the bad guy, the woman is freed, the chaos is melting back into order and the woman is leaning on something, comforted by the good cop, or the good robber, just someone good, and the movie music has switched to slow calm strings, it’s time for the viola to have its solo, this is the part the viola player tells his mother to listen to, but I keep my eyes closed because I want to kiss him and when you kiss someone your eyes are closed. I won’t do it but I want to and he is chewing next to me, the last of the popcorn, cold by now; if he has felt anything from me, he is careful not to show it, and I am wrapped up in myself here, I have cloaked myself, I have sent surges of me over to him, but he knows nothing. He is caught in his own wonderings. He is still watching, he is inside the movie and he is not mine.

  17

  My mother once told my father that she was taking me on vacation. I can’t go, I said, I have homework. I was in junior high at the time. My father brought out his camera, but she waved him off. I wondered what was going on, if we were heading to the city or going fishing or what, but then she told him we’d be back by seven. We didn’t even get in the car. Just walked for an hour, past the stores, past the hospital, through empty lots, straight to the edge of town. It was sunset and the air was a bright gold, stretching out, dust particles lit like tiny lanterns. We were silent for a while, and then she said: Mona, out there somewhere is Africa.

  We looked at the dry ground ahead of us, the stretch of horizon. It seemed impossible. Even water seemed like a crazy idea. She let out a deep breath.

  I want, she said, to take a train through Russia and end up in China and walk through Nepal and pet a goat in Italy and climb a pyramid in Egypt. I want to see the next town, she said.

  I just want, she said, to eat a hamburger from a different family of cows.

  I kept staring out at the highway in the distance.

  I like our town, is what I said to her. I like the movie theater here, how they give you popcorn in a glass bowl.

  She put her hand on my hair then, circled it in a ponytail with her fingers, let it free. That’s not what I meant, she said to me. I like our town too.

  We stood together and she played with my hair until it was dark and the dust turned invisible and we could just see the lights of incoming cars, moving up the highway, passing by. On the walk home we held hands for a bit, which made me feel like her prince, and then stopped at the one Chinese food restaurant and ordered twice as many dishes as we could eat. The bottoms of the huge white bags were warm as we walked the three blocks home, and I held my arms around them, smell rising into my nose: of crisp egg rolls, of brown sauce, of garlic and ginger. At home we spread the dishes over the table in rows.

  My father walked over, rubbing his hands together, and I said, We just brought these over from China.

  He smiled and rubbed my hair.

  I built a tunnel underneath the house, I said. It only takes twenty minutes because it’s downhill both ways.

  My mom winked at me, sticking a fork into each dish. There were so many choices: beef with ginger, oyster-sauce chicken, garlic broccoli, orange-peel pork. We piled our plates as high as we could manage, to create the whole land in our stomachs, to take the inside linings of our bodies on a visit to countries the outsides would never see.

  That night, in bed, shadows moving over the ceiling in dark lakes, I heard my father shifting and coughing. A familiar sound, the settling and resettling of his throat. But that night it sounded like a slow train to nowhere, wind steady and moving through his lungs, always chugging, circling the house, chugga chugga, over and over and over again.

  When Benjamin Smith and I left the movie theater, it was just getting dark and the sky was royal blue, the brightness that is post-sunset and pre-night, the air like a dress.

  I invited him over to my apartment for some reason. I played with the nails in my pocket—flat head, sharp tip.

  We stood in my living room, awkward as poles.

  Hey, he said, pointing to the pictures on the walls; I recognize these artists, he said. He especially liked Lisa’s row of eyelashed 9’s in the grass. According to Lisa, 9’s are girls, because according to elementary school art, boys have no eyelashes. In an effort to decorate, I’d plastered my living room with the spiky suns and sky bands of blue of my students—Danny’s war where the people shot 7’s, Mimi’s 3 dog.

  I was laughing to him about Mimi, saying something about the way she wrote her name, how she dotted her i’s in a new way each week, how this week she was dotting them with hexagons because we were learning shapes, when he leaned in and kissed me, just like that, he traversed the space and halved it, then quartered it, then eighthed it, then shut it down completely until there was no space between us at all and his lips were warm and tasted like butter from the popcorn.

  His hand slid under the back of my shirt, palm on spine, strong.

  I wasn’t sure what was happening. It seemed that we were kissing. The science teacher, with burns up and down his arms. His lips, my hand on his face, on the back of his neck.

  Minutes and minutes of this, of his face with mine.

  Then I dipped out. Said excuse me; turned to go to the bathroom.

  He turned too.

  I’m just going to the bathroom, I said.

  Let me walk you there, he said.

  I laughed at him, his eyes now drooping and earnest, but he stuck by my side.

  I’ll be right back, I said, in the hallway, by the bathroom door, bleary, closing in again on his face and we kissed, soft, and I kissed his teeth and he smelled like pine and coffee and sweat.

  Excuse me, I said again. I’ll just be a minute.

  I put my hand on the doorknob and I meant to go in, but it was like we’d been drinking magnets. I pulled into him instead, like we’d been sitting at a bar together, finishing
off a pitcher of melted-down horseshoe. The longest minute. Is the minute up yet? No, I say, even though the sun is rising now. The minute isn’t up yet. I’ll just be a minute but I still have a minute left. He put his hand on my cheek and held me there, and we kept kissing, over and over, lips sticking together, my body sealed to his, and I was blooming out of control, and the melting inside was unbearable, and I took myself away.

  Be right back, I whispered.

  I think you’re beautiful, he said.

  No you don’t, I said.

  Panic rose. I knocked on the bathroom door.

  No one’s in there, he said.

  I know, I said. It’s not that. He was kissing my neck into cellos. Wait, I said. Stop.

  He looked up. I slipped into the bathroom and shut the door and locked it and confronted my face—pink, eyes bluer than normal. Turned on the water. Took the bar of soap right into my hands. Held it like a slippery bird for a minute and then ran it under the tap. My friend, soap, that small ball of ruin. I washed my hands vigorously, gulping in the smell, and the nausea kicked in right away. I watched my face, watched as the smell heightened the thickness of the longing, then took it away; merged with it, then got big enough to surround and defeat it. I brought the whole bar up to my lips and rolled it halfway inside my mouth, sucking on the white curves, lolling the smoothness over my tongue, drinking the water off the white; I ran it over my mouth, lathered my lips, and I licked the froth off again and again, licked the smooth curve of the bar, reglaze, relick, swallowing it down, forcing the upset, feeling my stomach unravel, rocking back and forth like the autistic kid who came to the school one day and never returned, and Mr. Smith was standing outside the door, I could hear him humming an old-fashioned big-band tune, and when I came out, completely sick to my stomach, he took me back into his arms.

  Mona Green Blue Gray, he said. Now your hands are clean.

  We walked back to the couch and my body went limp and dead and he was kissing me but it might as well have been nothing then; I was gone. After a few minutes, he looked up.

  What’s wrong? he asked.

  And I said nothing nothing I’m just tired out that’s all, and he sat next to me, touching the side of my leg, waiting for me to shift back; he sat with me until the sky dimmed down and the living room was a dark sea with furniture poking up in darker islands. He kissed my fingers. I wanted to shoot him. Blam.

  I’m sorry, I said. I’m not into it. I’m just going to lie here until it’s bedtime. Please go home.

  He took my fingers in his and stroked them down. What happened? he asked.

  The air was still and dark, and I could feel myself beginning to blend in with the couch.

  I’m just tired, I said finally. I’ve been tired this whole time.

  My heart was thumping, very low and slow. I wished he would get out. I scraped at the oil of soap on my tongue. The science teacher’s eye whites were bright in the darkness, disappearing and reappearing when he blinked, and his hand was on my thigh; he wouldn’t stop touching me, and it was burning there and I wanted to get it off and I shifted my body so I was all me, alone with the air, none of him on me. Off. Away.

  But you were with me before, he said.

  I was not, I said.

  What happened to you? he asked. Just what exactly did you do in that bathroom? Did you take a pill or something? Come back.

  I wouldn’t look at him. I couldn’t believe he’d said that.

  I don’t know what you’re talking about, I said. Eyes on the pillow. I’m sorry, I said. I just don’t want to.

  But before—the science teacher said.

  That was all acting class, I spit out. None of that was me.

  He leaned forward again, but I shrugged closer to the couch, pressing myself into the pillows. Finally, he leaned back.

  It was you, he said simply.

  The pillows smelled like dust and old sun. I was monitoring my breathing, lungs shallow and vague, heart sluggish, wondering if I’d suffocate, so tight I was against the fabric. I wanted him to get out so I could stare at the 50 and nauseate myself with helplessness. The couch lightened as his weight left it and I could sense the height of him, even with my face pressed against the pillow.

  Bye, I mumbled.

  Then in the room, his voice, low: Liar, he said, an echo of his earlier self. The delight in the word gone.

  The air stiffened. I pressed my face deeper into the pillow. The clock in the kitchen suddenly ticked loudly.

  Believe me, I muttered. My head got dizzy.

  No, he said. This part is acting class—I give you an A for acting class. But the rest was real. This stuff, he said, this stuff about you I don’t like at all.

  What am I lying about? I said. I’m not lying, I said.

  Stupid Mona, he said, and his voice was one notch louder now. I was here, remember?

  The clock was ten decibels louder now, each tick a bomb. I could almost feel the couch pattern peel off my skin. I pressed the pillow against my mouth, a gag, hard, shoving it in as hard as I could to contain what was breaking inside me.

  I heard him move away. Turn the doorknob and let himself out. Shut the door. Click. Gone. Quiet. Empty. I rolled away from the pillows, which stuck to my cheek and stomach from the pressure and sweat; it was silent in the living room and I was ready to turn into stone if my heart hadn’t been beating so fast; I was ready to turn into stone if I hadn’t felt, all of a sudden, like dancing.

  I clicked on the light and the room jarred into shades of yellow.

  Listen. There was this pretty music teacher who wore red boots and visited school for private piano lessons. On her breaks, she talked about her sex life a lot. Math and music tend to get along, supposedly music is just math in its best dress, so within ten minutes of meeting her, she’d told me how she’d gone out with some man for months and she’d really liked him but then one day announced to him that she only liked women. He was confused for a while and said, Was there space for both? And she said, Nope, it was only women. She meant it at the time, she told me in the kitchen, picking apart a biscuit with her fingers, tapping her red boot heel on the floor in a four count. But, she continued, he never really thought about it, never once said to her: Well what about all those times you were so happy? And what about all those times we rolled around in bed all morning and made pancakes at two in the afternoon? Instead he said: I guess that’s the way it goes and I understand, and they broke up. She said it was just weird how certain things were respected without question and if he’d only listened to himself, he might have fought her a little harder. Would you have gotten back together? I’d asked, opening up the refrigerator and closing it again and then opening it again. I don’t know, she said. Probably not. But regardless, she said, there is something so awful, something so gross about watching someone who loves you struggle to believe what you both know, deep down, is partially a lie.

  18

  I didn’t talk to the science teacher all week at school. I wanted to staple an apology to my forehead, hold his face and look into his eyes and thank him over and over, but I knew if he touched me again I’d do the exact same thing. I’d be back in the bathroom in seconds, making love to that soap, sticking the soap anywhere I could, just get the human material off.

  I managed to see him only twice—once on lunch duty, in a heated debate with Danny. He had more marks up and down his arms, burns riding the split of his sinews.

  The second time, I kept my head low. I walked past him in the hallway and mumbled hi and he said hey and that was it.

  For Friday, Danny was assigned Numbers and Materials. All week he’d chattered about what he was going to bring, in a vague, excited way, e.g.: I’m going to bring the greatest thing, just you wait! and twice he came over to me at recess to make sure I wouldn’t stop him in the middle like I’d done with Mimi. Well, I’d said, sitting on the purple plastic bench, what are you bringing?

  You just have to promise, he said, eyes flashing brown and clean.
/>   I can’t promise, I told him, if I don’t know what it is.

  But I can’t tell! he said, hitting the bench with his fist. The bench bounced back. I hadn’t seen Danny so excited since I’d told him that on Veteran’s Day we would be spending the whole class doing word problems about soldiers.

  Other than that, since Mimi’s 9, things had been uneventful with the second-graders. No one brought any Numbers and Materials during lunchtime, and I didn’t really do any fun activities. I was the regular leader of a tight ship. I put names on the board at the first sign of chaos.

  Friday morning, Danny stumbled into class with a pillowcase over some kind of large hard rectangle. He greeted the flag as usual, and we did our usual pages in workbooks and even had a quick Friday quiz. I called him up in the last twenty minutes of class. Lumbering over to the front, he placed his item horizontally on the side table. He stared at Lisa and Ann and me for a second, then whipped off the pillowcase, revealing a long case of pale blue glass, frozen inside of which was none other than a left arm.