by Aimee Bender
So, he said. What did happen to your father anyway? he asked. The man has faded. And you, he said. You faded, too.
He carried the new 15 over to the fireplace and carefully set it aside. Then he leaned down and picked up another stencil, the infamous and powerful 42. I was distracted by that for a second when I realized what he’d just asked. My heart rose up.
What? I said, holding up my arm, peach, to the partial light filtering in through the curtains. Look, I said. I’m not faded.
You faded too, he repeated. Faded, faded, faded. I saw those track meets, he said. You were so good, that stride of yours.
What? I said again.
I cheered and cheered even though you’d turned into a little brat by then, he said.
I quit the team, I said.
I know, he said emphatically. He picked up the ladle again. You were taking the makeup test in math class and told me, he said. You were doing that odd thing with the pencil.
Wait, I said, you don’t even remember who I am.
He sniffed at that. Dipping back into the cauldron, he poured another thin layer of hot wax into the shape of the 42. It crawled through the mold, taking on the angles of the 4, spinning down the hunchback of the 2.
Anyway, he continued, I enjoyed myself so much at the track meet that I went back, but you were gone by then. I found another star but she wasn’t quite as good. Then I got pneumonia, that was a bad month. 6’s and 7’s.
That’s right, I said. We had awful substitutes the whole time.
I leaned harder on that wallpaper. Mr. Jones turned his face to mine, eyes bright. He lifted the old 15 off his neck, broke the string off with his hands, and tossed it straight into the cauldron. It drifted on the waxy hot sea for a second, shoddy old 15, a faithful true life it had led, until it sank slow as a doomed ship into the beige depths. Jones watched it, we both did, then he turned around and walked to the number wall, took down 19, and slipped it over his head.
I like visitors, he said. This is good for me.
I shifted my weight on the wall.
So how come you never said anything, I asked. If you noticed all this stuff.
What do you mean? he asked.
I mean, there you were, saying how important it was to notice things. You noticed the pencil, I was grateful for that, I said. But how come you never said anything about this fading stuff?
But I did, he said, blowing on the 42.
I shook my head. What are you talking about? I asked. I even egged your garage one year because you said nothing to me about anything.
That was you? His eyebrows raised. I blanched slightly. My goodness, he said. That was really awful of you.
I know, I mumbled. Sorry about that.
He fiddled with the 19, supporting the bottom with his thumb, and redipped the ladle to give 42 its second coat.
Well, he continued, you must’ve egged me for saying something then. Because this is exactly what happened. I went to you some afternoon, you were playing on the lawn, and I said: Mona, you seem upset. And you said to me, and I’m certain of this, you said: Shut up Mr. Jones.
I did not say that, I said.
Well, he said, I am quite sure you did. I asked you if your father was okay and you said he was just fine and why was I even asking. You were a very snotty little kid.
I was a great math student, I said. I really said that?
Sure, he said. You were an excellent math student. The ladle brimmed with wax, and he stood there, poised. But you were a very snotty little kid, he repeated.
Hang on, I said, how come you remember all of this all at once? Five minutes ago you thought I was here to sell you cookies.
He scrunched up his lips, close to his nose, then lowered them. Didn’t you buy the ax for your twentieth birthday? he said.
I had a sudden urge to melt down all his numbers all at once in that cauldron, dump every wall-hanging mood inside, then take off my clothes and step into it, a smooth wax glove, coating myself with every age, every mood, everything as available as skin.
You really asked that? I said.
He nodded. Sure did, he said. Then I stopped asking. His eyes were away, reviewing it all in his head. He poured the ladle down on the 42, second layer.
I don’t remember any of that, I said.
So is he all right? Mr. Jones asked, his eyes returning to me.
The 50 was still tight in my hands, paper untouched by the new warmth in my palms.
He thinks he’s about to die, I said quietly.
Mr. Jones nodded. I see, he said. He blew again on the 42, a gentle careful wind. The number settled and hardened. And you? he asked.
Sometimes I think I’m about to die, yeah, I said.
No no, Mr. Jones said. I meant do you think he’s about to die?
I looked straight at him. He was looking straight at me. My palms were all over the 50, lifeline direct on those black fast numbers. Mr. Jones was waiting. The 42 was gelling. I opened my mouth, and the response that came out of it shocked me entirely.
No, I said. I don’t.
26
The next day I walked over to Lisa’s house, because I knew the address, because Elmer said it all the time now: 265 Ogden Place. No one was home, so I left a note in the mailbox saying I’d be coming by the school next week to pick up my things and some afternoon I’d like to take her to the park, or the movies, or the hospital, and that just because I was fired didn’t mean she would never see me. I know where you live, I wrote. Inside the envelope I also put a leaf that I’d ripped into the shape of a 3, and wrote: 3 X 3 = ? Love, Ms. Gray.
On Saturday, I spend the whole day cleaning the apartment. I make the kitchen floor so white it’s a dentist’s dream; I vacuum; I scrub the shower grout. I shine the kitchen faucet until I can see my eye on the nozzle. I fill the trash can with a bouquet of dirty paper towels from dusting. I throw out magazines. He shows up at eight. The apartment smells of detergent which reminds me of axes and he sits on the couch where I lied and fiddles with the pillow corners and says he saw Ann a few days ago. A mess of stitches up her leg, he says. She was bossing all the nurses around, he says, laughing. She’s okay? I ask about five times. She’s limping a bit for now, but she seems to be all right, he says. I keep nodding. I’m not sure where to put my relief plus I’m so nervous I can hardly look at him. He’s wearing a T-shirt that says SCIENCE on it in block orange letters. His hair is messy. I think of Ann in her bed at home now, trays piled by her bedside, every different kind of pudding, spoons drying inside plastic cups. I get Benjamin a glass of water that he hasn’t asked for, and he stands up to take it and I know I have to make the first move so I do it fast—he’s swirling the water, clear liquid inside hard glass, it reminds me of the hospital, and I step in closer, halve the space, and I just spend some time with the inside of his elbows, the burn marks from the science class. He watches me closely. I don’t kiss his mouth right away, I kiss instead his neck and the side of his cheek and the inside of his elbow.
We walk over to the couch and then we decide to walk over to the bedroom and our shoes are coming off and the magnets are charging up and I can feel the soap waiting for me in the bathroom, sitting there in its porcelain soap dish calling my name, Come on in Mona Gray, yoohoo Mona, get this over with. Come on in and visit. Come ruin everything. I’m holding his fingers, lightly, and I don’t know if I can do this on my own. Our faces are close and I’m learning about his mouth again and his lips are warm and Ann is okay and the kiss keeps changing shape and size and speed and I’m going to try to foil this, I can just feel it, and the lights are off in the whole apartment and the bedroom is just shadows, curtains hanging, unmoving, and the bluish form of the bed. We stand over the bed and he sits down on the edge and I am straddling him, and our hips are starting to glue together, and I am in love with the way his elbow meets his forearm, the muscle on his shoulder, the hardness of his collarbone, the way he’s made, so complete and simple, so mysterious and complicated, and I’m getting s
cared. I open my mouth to speak, tentatively, terrified, and I say it. I need to go to the bathroom, I say. Next door, the soap rears up in the soap dish, lathered, foaming, eager, ready. His hand is on my stomach. Come in here; come ruin it. He stops kissing me and looks straight at me and his teeth are white in the darkness. There is a long pause and I am waiting, and my hope is eighty airplanes, poised on the runway, ready for takeoff: please, please, please, please. And then he smiles. No, he says.
As soon as he says it my eyes fill up, just like that, the gratitude is that fast and that immediate, but I don’t trust anything so we’re kissing more and his lips are sweet as orange slices on a plate on a porch in the summer with weeping willow trees and larks, and then I ask him again, sure he’ll get reasonable here; I say, in a more urgent voice: Hang on, I have to go to the bathroom. He is still looking at me, watching me, and says, no, voice stronger now, and I say, But I have to go, really, I mean it, and he shakes his head and says: No. Today I have decided to be your bathroom monitor and today I say no. The soap lather crawls over the edge of the porcelain and spills into the sink, somersaults of white. I was just kidding, I tell him, that thing I said the other day, I was just kidding, but he looks at me and shakes his head again. No. I grip his shoulders and his lips are drinking mine and then hands on my shirt and he’s unbuttoning me and air moves into my blouse and I feel the skin on his back, how it falls into the spine, like waterfalls into a riverbed, my fingers boats traveling up the stream of his vertebrae and for a second I feel like I’m safe from myself. Panic lifts into kites. I ask him again. I need to go, I mumble, but now he just says, Come here Mona Gray, and leans back on the bed, takes me down with him.
When his shirt is off there’s no part of him I find better than the burns up and down his arms and I am kissing them over and over. This is where he melts, this is his bathroom trip, and he says to me: You don’t have to do that, it is ugly there, and I say: I think it’s beautiful, and he doesn’t believe me still and so I whisper how Danny brought in the severed arm to class as a 1 and the parents rioted but I thought it was wonderful, sealed in blue glass like that, the palm opened like a bud, and he starts laughing and laughing until his voice gets ragged and I can feel the room shift, the whole room is keeping us, and I ask him again because I can, because I am starting to have the smallest, most precious glimmer of trust; I say: I still have to go to the bathroom. His laughter is quieter now because I have been kissing each finger, each burn, each whorl, each cut, and he says: Too bad Mona Blue Green Gray because I am the bathroom monitor and you are not allowed to leave this bed. Lather drains into the sink, thinning. I make a move to leave but his hand clamps over my wrist and I say: I want to go NOW, but his hand is a brace and I slam against it. His fingers chafe my wrist. Pull harder. Pull. His hand is strong. I pull as hard as I can, throw the weight of my whole body against his hand, more, and I never get to do this, I never pull as hard as I can, I always pull less hard than I can just in case, but here I am straining, feet braced against the bed for leverage, and his hand is strong and wiry and I say: Let Me Go! and he is laughing at me and he says: You keep trying if you want but I will not let you go. I will not let you go.
My father was a track star in college and I was a track star in high school but I never ran against him, I never ran until I won, and that is the child’s job, to have the one day where I run faster than my track-star father and the scepter gets passed and the trophy changes rooms. I wasn’t fast enough at age nine; I was much faster at age sixteen, but by then he was grayed and quiet and gone. I have never really raced him and I never will race him; he can’t race; he gets too tired and he once told me he doesn’t like it if his heart beats so fast—that thumping, the insistence—I hate it, he said. So I stopped when he stopped. You faded, said Mr. Jones, blowing on his 42. Faded, faded, faded. You dropped off the number chart, he said. Now, the science teacher is right beside me, right here, fingers clamped on my wrist, saying: This is it? This is how hard you can pull? This is it? You’re WEAK, he says to me and I start laughing, loud, and I am pulling against his hand as hard as I can and he’s pulling back and the lamplight from outside the window is flickering over his skin like fire. I’m still laughing, barking, and I choke it out again: Bathroom, I say, but it’s a joke now and he just says: Pee in the bed then bucko.
In the next room, the soap is a quiet dry stone. He uses both arms and brings me up on the bed, pulls me on top of him. Everything slows down. His skin is warm. The room is awake.
In high school, we lined up at the starting line together, eight of us side by side, coltish and muscled. Shoes like slippers. Stomachs full of wise breakfasts. Eyes clear, eye whites milky. When the gun went off, it always took me a millisecond to remember what was happening. Bam. Boom. Go. The others would get ahead, the numbers on their backs moving up and down, 5, 11, 98, 42. I’d watch them moving. 50, 20. 40, 10. My stride took three strides to catch, but then, like a machine engaging, it rolled forward: leg after leg after leg after leg. The numbers floated ahead of me and they were like a beacon, a beckon, flat and hard, black and clean, and I’d pass them and the track would curve and I’d lean and push forward, past the air, past the noise, past the movement. Past everybody.
The clothes come off. His wristbones are sharp.
My father sat in the bleachers, wearing a hat against the sun. He always brought me a water afterward and I pretended I was happy to see him. I said, Thanks for coming Dad and Thanks for the water Dad and I talked and chatted and talked and kept talking so I wouldn’t accidentally open my mouth and do the thing I felt which was to call him a quitter.
Benjamin’s fingers move over me. He tells me something about my shoulders. I tell him something about his back. I can’t leave the room. I’m not allowed to leave the room. We shift and roll over. I stop smiling.
Breathe in. The room gets darker. Hands.
In the locker room, I unlaced my shoes. I got a lot of congratulation hugs. The coach walked over, her lipstick stretched and wrinkled from beaming, and told me I beat my own record. She waited for me to react but I just pulled off my shoes one at a time and piled them into the steel-smelling locker. I don’t want to beat my own record, I told her.
His hands are on my face and we’re wrapped around each other then and it’s slow and silent and intent, nothing fancy, nothing new; if people were watching in the movie theater they’d file out to the box office, demanding their money back, bored. What’s going on with those two, they’d say, they are just taking their own sweet time, aren’t they.
His thighs. The stream up his spine. The thin paper of his eyelid. The hair smell of his hair. The absurd asinine inane idiotic perfect simplicity of the fit.
On the clock, the red digital lines, wickedly bright, shuffle and restructure: 11:59; click: 12:00. Only the movement of three numbers at once makes me blink and notice: midnight. Tomorrow. Sunday. Which means it is my father’s birthday. Which means he is 51 years old. And inside all the dizziness, Benjamin’s eyes closed, mine open to darkness, the air in my chest thickening to a wheeze, warriors with weapons overtaking my body, distant movement getting closer, I think for a second that I am Joanna Stuart, the caboose of the family, taking off my clothes, melding skin with a boy in a Florida bed, and she thinks, as she pushes her hips down into his, I’m still here, she thinks, I have been here the whole time, haven’t I, and the broom thought that finally sweeps me away is just that I am young. I am younger.
I am supposed to outlive them both.
27
The next afternoon, I spent an hour downtown at the bookstore picking out a book for my father. I considered something on skin disease and then another book on TV movies and something else on effective gardening but I kept returning to a big beautiful photo album of runners, black-and-white images, in the steel colors that make athletes gleam like statues. I carried it around the store for a while, bought it, and walked home with my arms around the wide cover. My body felt tired and calm. I’d sent the science teac
her home in the morning, before noon, after we spent over an hour in bed talking about every kid in the school and I laughed so hard at his imitation of Danny O’Mazzi I had to go to the bathroom to pee and he followed me in, saying: You’re still not allowed to go to the bathroom, and I twisted, laughing, said: This is for real, and he nodded and went to have some cereal. I peed, then washed my hands with shampoo. The soap was in the soap dish and looked, at that moment, the size of a piece of soap.
I wrapped my father’s gift in tinfoil, put on a dress, and walked over. Knocked on their door. He opened right away—alive, alert—and hugged me. He was now 51, the most unmagical number of all. Happy birthday, I said. So nice to see you, he said. Everything seemed exactly the same as always, which made my heart hurt. I handed over the big square, which he received, smiling, then went to the living room, sat on the couch, and unpeeled it meticulously. How wonderful! he said when the cover was revealed. I nodded. Quiet. Will you look at these pictures, he cooed. He pored carefully over each page. He liked the active pictures the best—the one of five people jumping hurdles at the same second. The one of the woman arching through the air to break the tape and win. When he was done, he leaned over and kissed my forehead. Smart daughter, he muttered, proud.
My mother, looking beautiful in a slow burgundy dress, walked in, put a hand on the back of my neck, and said: 51! She kept laughing about it. I can’t believe you’re 51, she said to my father. You look like you’re about 75.
She kissed his cheek, long. My mother melted on birthdays.
We were going to dinner soon, at the fancier restaurant in town, and my father opened his other gifts and tried on various sweaters, most of which he found itchy. While my mother finished getting ready, he took me outside to the backyard and showed me the new Shape of Health he’d made early that morning while my mother was still sleeping; this one, he explained, had a slightly larger radius. I think the first was too small, he said, so I thought I’d try a bigger range. What do you think? he asked, eyes open and eager. You’re the math teacher.