by Sarah Bruni
The house had taken on the particular state of disrepair endemic to grown men who live alone with their mothers. It was not just that there were perpetually socks in the dryer and dishes in the sink; their entire existence resembled the domestic unrest of an elderly couple at the brink of not being able to care for themselves. Except—of course—she was his mother, and he was not even thirty years old. His mother was sixty-two and retired; Peter drove his taxi at night. For most of the day they shared the house.
Despite the long shifts she’d worked when he was a child, Peter’s mother had put in every effort to raise him with a modicum of normalcy. When she returned from her shifts at the hospital, she cooked dinners that represented each of the four major food groups. There was a deficit of cereals with high sugar content in the pantry. Red M&M’s, containing Red Dye 40, a substance suspected to cause cancer in laboratory animals, were separated from the other colors in the pack and expelled upon opening. His mother had given him piano lessons. From the age of eight, he had sat with his mother—who had pulled a kitchen chair beside the piano bench, instructing his small hand in the preemptive posture of stretching for an octave. She taught him the way his thumb must tuck neatly beneath his middle finger to run through a handful of the major scales without impediment. It was a kind of therapy for them both. Peter knew the lessons put his mother in mind of her own childhood, in Davenport, when her marriage and children were just some looming murky things in a future she still wanted to meet. For Peter, the exercise taught him a peculiar sort of patience, to read this foreign language and begin, slowly, to comprehend its cues—it took his mind off other things. But he was never any good at it. He was sixteen when he told his mother he was through with the lessons. Though he could tell that it disappointed her, this was a routine she let go without protest.
These days, the older woman his mother had become was a departure from the mother he’d grown up with. She seemed somehow to need a mother herself. Peter would come home from driving a night shift and round the corner of the kitchen to find it empty.
“Out here,” she called into the house. “I’m having breakfast on the patio.”
Peter followed the sound of her voice, and found his mother propped up in a lawn chair—the first streaks of sunlight passing over the yard—staring into space with a piece of string cheese clenched in her fist.
“Hi, honey,” she said.
“Where’s your breakfast?” Peter said. He looked around, hoping to see a bowl of cereal stashed behind the mums, a bagel beside the birdfeeder.
His mother waived the string cheese above her head like a limp flag.
“Strings of cheese?” Peter said.
“And some almonds,” his mother said.
She freed another thread from the cheese and placed it in her mouth.
“Don’t you want eggs or something, Mom?” he said.
“No,” she said.
Peter was still working out whether he was going to let the conversation go at that when his mother had theatrically lifted the rest of the log of string cheese and took a big bite out of it and finished it off that way.
Then there was how he’d found the gun. His mother was getting ready for her water aerobics class at the Y, and Peter was going to give her a ride. His mother was perfectly fit to drive; it was her car, but if he wasn’t working himself, he drove her, and waited in a bar near the Y for her class to end. He knocked on the door of his mother’s bedroom when it was time to leave.
“Come in,” she said.
She was sitting on an armchair in the corner of her room, leaning over each foot to tie her shoes. It wasn’t until he was halfway into the room that he noticed something off in the opposite corner. Her top drawer was open, and its contents spilled from the drawer onto the dresser—leggings, underwear, swimsuits, and some sharp, dark object that immediately contrasted itself from the soft-hued stockings and undergarments.
“Mom?” he said. The question that was supposed to come next was so evident it wasn’t readily available on his tongue. The gun looked so absurd in its disorderly pile, Peter paused for a moment, as if there were a clear reason for its presence that he only needed to summon.
“Just about ready,” his mother said.
Peter felt himself begin to back up, slowly. “I’ll pull around the car,” he said.
The bar where he drank while he waited for his mother was a local staple, the size of a trailer, with animal heads and glossy eight-by-tens signed by minor celebrities tacked to the walls at odd angles. Peter sat at the bar and began counting out singles to pay for his drink. Everyone sitting at the bar had the old haggard look of extended family, the uncles and cousins whose faces you recognize and nod amicably toward but feel no need to converse with.
Peter ordered a beer, took the first sip. He had swiveled around on his stool to lean his elbows on the bar when he saw the girl from the gas station. She sat with a small group, and it was clear she’d noticed him but she was trying not to look his way. It took him maybe thirty seconds to get her to look up. He fixed his eyes on her as he drank his beer. The girl’s eyes were darting around like crazy, trying to find somewhere else to rest. Her dark blond hair was pulled back in a lopsided ponytail, slightly off center, and she was pretending to laugh at something someone said that he couldn’t hear. He thought then that she was more interesting-looking than he’d realized at the gas station. He thought if she would look up, he would walk over to where she was sitting and buy her a drink.
But a moment later, when her eyes met his for an instant, Peter felt himself look away, down at some stray cat from the neighborhood that had wandered into the bar and was sitting on its tail by the pool table. “Evening, Edgar,” the bartender addressed the cat, but the cat paid attention to no one. When Peter looked up again, the girl was no longer sitting in the booth with her friends. He took this as a cue to finish his pint in a single gulp and drive to the Y to wait for his mother.
When her class got out, his mother walked from the building alone, her gym bag firmly under her shoulder, and got in the car. His eyes were fixed on the road and his mother had just stopped fidgeting with the radio when he heard himself say, “So,” as if casually, “there’s a gun in your underwear drawer.”
“Yeah,” his mother said. “What about it?”
“Isn’t there?” Peter said.
His mother exhaled quickly through her nose, half of someone else’s laugh. “It’s been there for years,” his mother said. “It was your father’s.”
Peter felt all the muscles in his neck tense. “Have you ever used it?”
His mother laughed. “Lord no, what do you think?”
He wasn’t sure what he thought, but already, before he even drove the car home or pulled it into the driveway, before he closed his bedroom door and pulled back the covers of his bed, Peter had an uneasy feeling in the bottom of his chest that had something to do with the gun in his mother’s underwear drawer, and something to do with the girl. It was that evening that he first had the dream, and after that, the dream came nightly.
He tried once more, that week, to go back to the station. He wanted to see the girl, to see if she too could sense something strange between them, to see if she understood that she was showing up on the floor of his bedroom every evening, as if on schedule.
“I saw you in the bar the other night,” the girl said when he walked in.
“Yes,” said Peter. “I saw you too.” He wanted to explain how at the bar he felt he had to look away. He wanted to say, You keep coming in my room at night and kneeling on the floor. He wanted to ask her who she was, to warn her that she was showing up in his sleep every night, and what that might mean.
“Do you think I’m pretty?” the girl asked.
“How should I know?” he said. The conversation was already derailing itself into the most vapid sort of flirtation, and Peter tried his best to set a better course for the things he’d come to say. “I think you’re interesting,” he said.
“B
ut not in a sexual way, right?”
It was impossible. She wanted him to kiss her. He could feel it, and though a few weeks ago, it was exactly what he would have hoped for, he now felt annoyed.
“You’re a fake,” Peter heard himself say to the girl. He felt misdirected. Yes, the girl was sweet and pretty, but that was it; there was nothing more to search for there.
Everything up until this point the girl seemed to take in stride. But then she looked down at the counter, trained her eyes there. She was staring at the keys of the cash register when she spoke again. “You think you can say what you want to me,” the girl said.
Before she even lifted her hand, Peter had raised his own to catch her palm midair. The reflex at first obscured the reality that she had been about to hit him. Initially, Peter understood only that there was something too familiar about this action, something enacted, as if he already knew that the girl was going to try to strike him before she’d even finished speaking. He was rattled by it. He walked out of the gas station in a daze and began to drive, and it was only when he was at a stoplight two miles away that he understood the reason he knew what the girl was going to do after speaking that line was because he had read it somewhere already. He had read it in The Amazing Spider-Man # 37.
There are moments when such slippage occurs, between the regular, everyday world and the interior worlds created, and these are the moments that fortify and support the worst delusions. Peter knew this much. He knew there was absolutely no evidence to support the conclusion that the girl in the gas station was Gwen Stacy. He knew—furthermore, because after all, he wasn’t insane—that Gwen Stacy was a fictional character created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, who did not exist outside of a hundred and some odd number issues of comic books from the sixties and seventies. But how to reconcile the simultaneous truths that clamored for attention in his chest, one asserting that this girl, this gas station attendant, was the living incarnation of Spider-Man’s first love: she had spoken a line straight out of the comic book.
In ASM # 37, the attempted slap is a kind of physical awakening, of mutual attraction, of tension, of the hierarchy of human relationships in the world not necessarily being quite what they’ve always seemed. Peter offers to walk Gwen to class, but feeling snubbed by his aloofness the past few weeks, Gwen Stacy replies, “What are you doing, Mr. Parker—slumming? Usually you’re too stuck up to say hello to anyone.” Peter suggests that Gwen is a “temperamental female.” A few more words are exchanged before Gwen accuses Peter of arrogance, and throws out her hand to slap Peter on the cheek, half-playfully, but with anger behind it as well: “You think you can say what you want to me, and then—Oww!” Peter catches her hand in his palm before it reaches his cheek. After this moment, the world shifts slightly to accommodate the reality introduced by Gwen Stacy’s action. Parker seems to feel himself capable of flirting, of asking for what he wants, of calling out his adversaries at school. This quiet moment of Gwendolyn Stacy’s attempted violence seems to alert to him that he is someone worth the effort of slapping, that his actions matter—that independent of any heroic acts he may perform as his alter ego—he matters. Gwen Stacy makes Peter Parker count for something besides the freakishness that he uses to save the city from villains each night.
Peter continued driving down Highway 6 until the ominous expanse of the Coralville Mall spread before him in the distance. There was a carousel in the parking lot and on it children were rotating. There was a theater where the blockbuster movies played every summer. Also an ice-skating rink. There had been a pond that sometimes froze in the back of his house where he and his brother would slip around in their sneakers in the winter, but this was long before the Coralville Mall had been built, with its assemblage of various atrocities and attractions. He parked the taxi and gazed onto the rink, thinking of Jake, of those winters when there was nothing to do but slide across the expanse of the water and hope not to fall through the thin parts. Before he had considered exactly what he was doing there, Peter approached the ticket counter. He purchased an hour on the ice, rented a pair of skates, and laced them up. He emerged on the rink and clutched the side railing as he slowly made his way around it.
In his dreams, the girl sat beside him in the taxi. What a small detail this was, her presence beside him, but what a difference it made to have someone else there, to give witness to the things he saw. It was a shock to the system to consider that the things he saw were real enough that someone could bear witness to them. The children were going around the rink quickly in pairs, and they were singing along to whatever song was playing over the loudspeakers, a song that sounded vaguely familiar, like something outdated, something kids shouldn’t know.
“Mister, gotta get off the ice,” one kid was saying, and it took Peter a moment to realize that the kid was speaking to him.
Peter regarded the kid who had addressed him, a boy of twelve or thirteen who was holding the hand of a girl who looked a little older. “Couple skate,” the boy said. Peter nodded, not exactly sure what the boy was getting at, until he looked to the boy’s companion who seemed to take amusement at Peter’s unfamiliarity with the rules of the rink.
These kids had grown up with things he hadn’t—ice skates, technology, different kinds of wars. They understood things that he did not. Peter mumbled in appreciation for the tip, and he started to skate toward the swinging door. When he tried to exit, he noticed a girl of about nine standing in his way. She was wearing one of those costumes, with the leggings that are the color of skin and a skirt that swirls around as she spins. Her lips were heavy with gloss, like the mouth of a doll. She held out her hand.
Peter looked behind him but there was no one there.
“Do you need a partner?” the girl asked.
“No, thanks,” Peter said.
The girl rolled her eyes.
“I don’t know how to skate,” Peter said.
“Come on,” the girl said. “The song is half over.”
Precariously, Peter placed his hand in the hand of the nine-year-old girl, resisting, holding back at first, to let it be made clear to any father or legal guardian who might be watching that the girl was the one who was directing things here: Peter was simply following her lead. He was not a pedophile. He did not habitually come to the ice rink to find the hands of prepubescent girls to clutch during couple skate.
In his first solo laps, Peter had stayed very close to the outer wall, to have something to fall into should he lose his balance. But this girl was leading him out to the center of the ice where there was nothing to hold onto, nothing to guide him but her hand.
“You’ve never been on the ice before?” the girl asked him.
“Not like this, with skates, no,” said Peter.
“You don’t have to hold on so tight,” she said. “It’s easy.”
“How long have you been doing this?” Peter asked.
“My entire life,” the girl said, and she said it with such quiet dignity, it was easy to forget he was speaking to a child whose entire life was a fraction of a reasonable amount of time. It seemed incredible that she could take herself so seriously, could trust in her experience so effortlessly. Behind the child’s hand, Peter could still make out the slow tingle of the place in his palm where he had caught the girl’s slap in the gas station. It seemed to be couched there under the skin, auguring something. He began to skate, and as he did, he felt a slow certainty growing in his body. There were patterns carved into the ice from the laps of skaters who had passed before them, who were continuously passing, and he clutched the hand of the child, for balance, for assurance, but after a little while he felt steady; he felt that for the first time in his life, he was following signs that were meant for him to interpret. That he would find himself capable of things heretofore impossible. The song neared its climax, Love shack, baby love shack! Love shack bay-ay-bee-ee! A love shack seemed in those moments a sensible place, not only a place where people could get together, but a place where people coul
d get things done, before it mutated again into an absurd place, an idiotic made-up, vaguely seedy place conjured by people on drugs—a place that didn’t exist.
When he hit the ice, the girl went down with him. He tried to release his grasp from her hand, but the weight of his body was so much greater than hers, the momentum of the fall pulled her on top of him. So first there was the impact of his tailbone hitting the ground, and afterward the impact of her body hitting his. There was no blood, no breaks, no sprains, no reason for the pairs of skaters to do little more than shift their path slightly to accommodate the obstruction on the ice. But in the moment in which he began to fall, thinking back on it from his bedroom later that night, there was no fear. The drop weight of panic into the stomach, yes, but it was closer to pleasure. The throb in his tailbone was an old familiar pain, he was remembering now, there on the surface of the pond, Peter and his brother: they had tried to fall. The object of the game had been to wipe out in the most outrageous and unimaginable ways, how they had flung the weight of their sneakers into the thinnest parts of the ice, how they had hoped to fall through the ice and drag up a fish, its body squirming outside the breathable water. To be the most reckless, the most unhinged, the first to break into another dangerous world and bring back evidence of his daring achievement.
“Are you all right?” The child stood over him, or she had been standing over him for a while, a slight concern passing over her tiny brow, her toothpick legs beneath her again, the sequins on her costume glittering like some promise, close enough to touch.
Peter looked up at her. He smiled.
For the first night in seven, the dream did not come. Peter didn’t wish for it, or wonder where it had gone. Even without it, he had made up his mind on what he was going to do. He stayed up late in his bedroom, composing a note that would serve to communicate his absence to his mother, until he returned.
Mom:
I’m sorry for leaving unannounced, the same as everyone. I borrowed Dad’s gun, but don’t worry, it’s not what you think. I’m coming back—believe me.