by Aimee Bender
The son now had some space to do things. His father was gone. Which was sad, but his father had never trusted him, and that had always been a problem. He went to the Grind It Up coffee shop down the street from his apartment in Oakland and ordered himself a raisin scone and a black tea. Then he sat down at the table of a large man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. This man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.
“Yes?” the man said, moving his newspaper aside.
The young man didn’t move. He sipped his tea.
“I’m sitting here?” said the man. He was a big man too. He took up most of the table. There were plenty of other free tables in the café. The young man trembled inside, but he kept his hand steady. He steadied his symmetrical face.
“You a homo or something?” asked the man.
The son didn’t respond. But he could see the man digesting the face, the perfect face, and the man lifted the table gently, and the scone slid down into the boy’s lap, and the tea wobbled, and the boy just put the scone back on the now slanted table and kept his eyes on the scrawny facial hair of the man.
The man, Marty, was tired. He did not want to fight. He had done that so many times before. He was tired of it, and he was taking classes now, and they told him to acknowledge how he was really hurt inside, not angry at all. He read his paper high over his head and stopped looking at the young man. So it was a homo. So he was picked up today at the café by a homo. This was new for him. He decided to do what that lady said, and try to find the humor in it, and when he did he really did find it funny, and behind his paper, he started to laugh.
Well, the young man was stuck. He’d wanted a hit, a real hit, a hit that would complicate his face. Finally he put a hand on the man’s newspaper, folding it down. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I just want to get hit.” Marty laughed and laughed some more. His arm tattoo read Skull Keeper, and had an illustration of bones wrapped in ribbons. “You want to get hit?” he said. “Too bad. I’m done with that shit.”
“Please?” said the young man, and Marty said no, but the tight businessman eavesdropping at the next table with an iced mocha blend said he’d do it, sure, a hit?
“Right on the cheek,” said the young man, and he asked Marty to oversee, because now he trusted Marty far more than the tight businessman, whose smile was far too pleased at the idea. “Let’s all go out back? Please?” he asked Marty, who folded up his paper and agreed, because it was the modern world, and he was old but open-minded, and being the protector was a better role for him anyway, maybe a role to consider, in fact, for the future. And the tight businessman looked so tightly delighted, and the boy said, “Cheek, please,” but he did not know the tight businessman had poor centering perception, and had never, in fact, hit another man, although he’d wanted to, his whole life, ever since he had been teased every day on the walk to school by that bastard boy Adam Vermouth, who had told him in a squawking voice that he was useless, useless, useless. The tight businessman played with his hands as fists all the time at the office, but when put in the actual situation, aiming for the cheek, what he got instead was the nose, and he slammed the boy straight on and broke the bone, blood pouring out of his nostrils. “Okay?” said Marty, holding his arms out flat like a referee. “Are we done?” “That’s good,” gasped the boy, reeling with pain, and the tight businessman was just warming up, was dancing on his toes, ready to pummel this handsome young man into the brick of the café’s back wall, but Marty clamped one soft big paw on the businessman’s shoulder and said, “You’re done now, son.” The tight businessman relaxed under Marty’s hand, and the young man, too, relaxed under Marty’s voice, and later, Marty did decide that it had been a far better day for him, being the fight mediator, the protective bulldog, and when he told the lady he had figured something out, tears broke into his eyes, like eggs cracking, bright and fresh. She was proud of him. He was such a good man inside, underneath all the butt kicking and bravado.
The young man, bleeding all over the wall, waved off offers to go to the hospital or the doctor. “No, thank you, thank you,” he said, stumbling inside, using up a pile of brown recycled napkins, then holding the café’s one pint of coffee ice cream to his nose, and the businessman kept saying, “It will heal poorly,” and the young man said that was the point. And he shook the hand of the tight businessman, who was feeling cheated, as if he’d had a taste of nectar he could hardly even feel in his mouth. The young man waved at Marty, who was at the pay phone telling about his revelation, and he headed home. There, he tended to his nose for days, hoping and hoping, and he went over to his mother’s on the day he was ready to really look at it straight on, ready to remove the Band-Aids making a little pattern all over his face. She was in the kitchen, eating jelly beans off the counter—eating them even when they turned into tiny tractors and then back again—and she helped him peel each Band-Aid off, one at a time, and then they both went to the bathroom mirror. She put a hand on his shoulder. They stared at his face for a long, long time.
What had happened of course is that it had healed symmetrically. The nose was severely broken and bumpy, but the bump was a band over the middle of his nose. It had complicated the vertical planes of his face, but horizontally he still matched himself exactly. The young man’s eyes filled, and he felt the despair rushing into his throat, but his mother, wiping his cheeks clear of the leftover crusted blood, breath smelling of jelly beans, listened to the story and laughed, and said, “Son, my sweet, sweet son, it’s just that you are a butterfly. That’s just what you are. I don’t think you can do anything about it.”
Finally, he was eating a hamburger one afternoon and, licking the ketchup off the knife, he cut open the side of his lip. It was a small mark, but it needed stitches, and when they took out the stitches he had a small raised area above the left side of his lip which provided the desperately needed window. He met a woman—Sherrie-Marla—in a week. True, about a month or two later, she, while kissing him passionately, bit the other side, creating an identical mark. She dabbed ice on his lip, apologizing, and he dreaded it, dreaded her change, his eyes filling with tears in advance of her leaving, but the fact was, Sherrie-Marla trusted him already. When he took the ice off, and showed to her his new symmetry, she didn’t flinch. His face was him to her now; it was not a map or an indicator of some abstract idea. Turned out it was only the first impression he’d needed to alter.
His mother came over for brunch with her Sunday suitor, and when she saw Sherrie-Marla take her son’s hand and kiss it on the thumb, a circle completed inside her.
In bed, after the brunch, Sherrie-Marla turned to him with clear eyes, touching his lip wound with her fingertips, her head propped on her open hand.
“You have movie star lips now,” Sherrie-Marla told him, smiling, as he leaned in to kiss her, tenderly, her kisses very, very gentle on the sore area, just pillows in the air between them.
Her own face was wildly asymmetrical. One eye much higher than the other. A nostril tilted. The smile lopsided. The front right tooth chipped. The dented chin. The larger right breast. The slightly gnarled foot. It had caused her her own share of problems. We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all. It opens its arms, in its unevenness, and he, the butterfly, flew inside.
Americca
When we came home from the movie that night, my sister went into the bathroom and then called out to our mother, asking if she’d bought another toothpaste as a hint.
I know I have major cavities, she said. But do we really need two?
Two what? asked my mother.
Two toothpastes, said Hannah.
My mother took off her jacket for the first time in hours, and peered in the bathroom, where, next to the grungy blue cup that holds the toothbrushes, there were now two full toothpastes.
&
nbsp; I only bought one, she said. I think. Unless for some reason it was on sale.
We all shrugged in unison. I brushed my teeth with extra paste and went to bed. This incident would’ve been filed away in non-memory and we would just have had clean teeth for longer, except that in the morning there was a new knickknack on the living room side table, a slim abstract circle made of silver, and no one had any idea where it came from.
Is it a present? asked our mother with motherly hope, but we children, all too honest, shook our heads.
I don’t know what that is, I said, picking it up. It felt heavy, and expensive. Cool to the touch. Nice, Hannah said.
My mother put it away in the top of the coat closet. It was nice, but it felt, she said, like charity. And I don’t like too many knickknacks, she said, eyes elsewhere, wondering. She went to my grandmother and brought her a lukewarm cup of tea, which Grandma accepted and held, as if she no longer knew what to do with it.
Drink! my mother said, and Grandma took a sip and the peppermint pleased her and she smiled.
Happened again the next evening when, while setting up for a rare family dinner, my mother stood, arms crossed, in front of the pantry.
Lisa, she said, you didn’t go to the market, did you?
Me?
Hannah?
No.
John?
No.
Grandma never shopped. She would get lost in the aisles. She would hide beneath the apple table like a little girl. Our mother, mouth twisted to the side in puzzlement, found soup flavors in the pantry she swore she never would’ve considered buying. She held up a can of lobster bisque. This is far too bourgeois for me, she said. Wild rice and kidney bean? she said. Lemongrass corn chowder?
Yum, yelled Dad from the other room, where he was watching tennis.
Hannah paused, placing spoons on napkins. I don’t really like soup, she said. I shook my head. Not me, I said. I definitely hate soup.
Our mother tapped her fingers against the counter. What is going on? she asked.
Hannah lined up the spoon with the knife. We’ve been backwards robbed, she said solemnly.
I laughed, but her eyes were serious.
All’s I know is, she said, I did not buy that soup.
Neither did I, said Mom.
Neither did I, called Dad from the other room.
I could tell I was still the main suspect, just because I seemed the most interested in all of it, but as I explained repeatedly, why would a person lie about bringing food and new knickknacks into the house? That is nice. That is something to get credit for.
Dad cooked up the corn chowder after he found an enormous piece of gristle in his mustard chicken. We all watched him closely for choking or poisoning, but he smiled after each spoonful and said it was darned good and very unusual. Like Southwestern Thai, he said, wiping his mouth. Like … the empress meets Kimosabe, he said. Like … silver meets turquoise, he said, laughing. Like … We all told him that was enough. Hannah checked the inside of the can for clues. After dinner, Dad collected water glasses from the rooms, singing.
That night, I kept a close eye on the back door, but it stayed locked; I even fixed a twig at its base to see if it got jigged during the night, but in the morning, all was just as before. I was walking to the bathroom to get ready for school when Mom cried out, and I ran over, and she was standing over the kitchen table, which held an extra folded newspaper. Hannah found a third pewter candlestick that matched the previous two, standing tall in the bookshelf. We ate our breakfasts in silence. Although getting robbed would be bad, there was nothing appealing about getting more items every day, and I felt a vague sense of claustrophobia pick up in my lungs, like I might get smothered under extra throw pillows in the middle of the night. And we couldn’t even sell the new stuff for extra cash, because everything we got was just messed up enough to make it unappealing—the pewter candlestick was flaking into little slivers, and the silver circle thing had a subtle, creepy smell.
For the first time in my life, I cleaned my room after school. I threw out tons of old magazines and trash and dumb papers for school with the teacher’s red pen stating: Lisa, we all know you can do better than this. While cleaning, I found a new mug on my side table, with a picture of dancing cows holding Happy Birthday balloons. It could only have been purchased by Hannah, but when I showed it to her she started to cry.
They’re trying to kill us! she said, sobbing, wiping her nose on her T-shirt.
Who? How? How are they trying to kill us?
The people bringing this stuff in.
But who’s bringing it in? I asked. We’ve been home the whole time.
Ghosts, she said, eyes huge. She stared at the mug. It’s not even your birthday, she said, not for months and months.
I stuck the mug in the outside trash can, along with the extra newspaper. I kept my eyes on all the doors. The twig stayed put.
We had a respite for a week, and everyone calmed down a bit and my mother went to the market and counted how many cans, so she’d know. We ate the food we bought. We stared at the knickknacks that represented our personalities. All was getting back to normal until the next Sunday, when Hannah opened the towel closet and screamed at the top of her lungs.
What? We ran to her.
The towel closet had towels in it. Usually it had small thin piles—we each had a towel and were expected to use it over four days for all towel purposes, and there’d be a big towel wash twice a week, one on Thursday, one on Sunday. We never stuck to the system, and so generally I just used my towel as long as I possibly could, until the murky smell of mildew and toothpaste started to pass from it onto me, undoing all the cleaning work of the previous shower.
Now the towel closet was full, not of anything fluffy, but of more thin and ugly towels. Tons of them. At least ten more towels, making the piles high.
Well, I said. I guess we can cut the Thursday-Sunday wash cycle.
My mother went off to breathe in a paper bag. Hannah straightened taller, and then put one towel around her hair and another around her body, a very foreign experience in our family.
I’m going to just appreciate the gifts, she said, even though her face looked scared. I’ve always wanted to use two at once, she said.
At school the next week, it was past Halloween and we had to bring in our extra candies for the poor children of Glendora. Bags and bags came pouring in, and aside from candy, I brought in an extra bag of stuff full of soup cans and knickknacks I’d salvaged from the trash. Everyone in the family felt funny about it; maybe it was like passing on something toxic. But at the same time, throwing out whole unopened cans of lobster soup struck my mother as obscene. How often does a homeless woman who lives nowhere near salt water get lobster? she asked, hands on hips, as I packed up the bag. We nodded. We liked how her guilt looked in this form of benevolence. I repeated it to my teacher. It’s not a Snickers, I said, but it’s got a lot more protein.
I believe I saw my teacher take that soup can for herself. I watched her closely that week, but she seemed fine, and my dad had never had a single negative symptom from his lemongrass corn chowder. I didn’t eat any Halloween candy. I didn’t want anything from anyone else.
I got a note from the shelter saying my bag was the best.
Hannah got a boyfriend. She didn’t tell anyone, but I could tell because she was using so many towels, making the bathroom a pile of towels, and for some reason I knew the towels were happening because of a boy. Why did she need to be so dry all the time? I asked her about it, when she came home for dinner and looked all pretty with her cheeks bright like that. I had to set the table because she was late, and she apologized and said she’d take dish duty for two days.
It’s okay, I said. Who is he?
She blushed, crazily. Who is who?
The reason you are late, I said.
I had to study.
Mom stood in the door frame, but she wasn’t listening.
How was your math test? Mom said,
brushing the side of her hair with a soupspoon.
Okay, said Hannah, glaring at me. I got an A.
What did you hear? she asked, dragging me aside and cutting into my arm with her budding nails.
Nothing, I said. Ow. I just guessed.
How? she said.
No reason, I said. Towels. Who is it?
She said no one, but then she barely ate at dinner, which is rare for her—usually I have to fight my way to the main dish to even get any, because she is so hungry—and that let me know she really liked him.
Dad lost his job. Then he got a new job. Then he got his old job back and went back to it. They were all in the same building.
We didn’t get any more items for a few weeks. I started to miss them. I mean, I felt like I would die of claustrophobia and I had become paranoid about all things new coming into the house, including the bathwater exiting the faucet tap, and I had made a checklist for market items, shopping items, and all school items, but when I opened the refrigerator and saw all the same old stuff, I wanted to cry sometimes.