The Bed Moved

by Rebecca Schiff

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2016 by Rebecca Schiff

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The following stories first appeared in these publications:

  The American Reader: “http://www.msjiz/​boxx374/​mpeg” published as “Boxing Experiment A38” (October 2014)

  Electric Literature: “It Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Deal” (December 4, 2013)

  Fence: “Another Cake” (Spring/Summer 2010)

  Guernica: “F = ma” (July 1, 2007)

  n+1: “The Bed Moved” (Spring 2006), “Men Against Violence” (December 14, 2012), “My Allergies Will Charm You” published as “Pick a Fish” (Spring 2006), and “Welcome Lilah” (Spring 2006)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schiff, Rebecca.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  The bed moved : stories / Rebecca Schiff.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-87541-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-101-87542-1 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3619.C363A6 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015029299

  eBook ISBN 9781101875421

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v4.1_r1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Bed Moved

  Longviewers

  http://www.msjiz/boxx374/mpeg

  Men Against Violence

  Welcome Lilah

  My Allergies Will Charm You

  Keep an Eye on It

  The Lucky Lady

  Third Person

  Not That Kind of Sad

  It Doesn’t Have to Be a Big Deal

  Phyllis

  F = ma

  Rate Me

  World Trade Date

  Another Cake

  Sports Night

  Communication Arts

  Little Girl

  Schwartz, Spiegel, Zaveri, Cho

  What We Bought

  Tips

  Write What You Know

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For my mother

  The Bed Moved

  THERE WERE film majors in my bed—they talked about film. There were poets, coxswains, guys trying to grow beards.

  “Kids get really scared when their dad grows a beard,” I said.

  Finally, I had an audience. I helped a pitcher understand the implications of his team’s hazing ritual. I encouraged indecisive dancer-anthropologists to double major. When a guy apologized for being sweaty, I got him a small towel. I made people feel good.

  Then I took a break. Then I forgot that I was taking a break. Spring was here. Jake was here. Also Josh. One dancer-anthropologist dropped anthropology, just did dance. He danced with honors.

  “Mazel tov,” I said.

  The bed moved. Movers moved it. Movers asked what my dad did, why he wasn’t moving the bed.

  New guys came to the bed. New guys had been in the Gulf War, had been bisexual, had taken out teeth, had taken out ads. Musical types left CDs with their names markered on—I kept a pile. I was careful not to smudge them, scratch them. (Scratch that, I wasn’t careful.)

  “So many musicians in this city,” I observed, topless.

  Boxer shorts were like laundry even on their bodies. Guys burrowed down for not long enough, popped up, smiled.

  Did I have something? Did I have anything?

  I did.

  Something, anything, went in the trash, except one, which didn’t. One hadn’t gone on in the first place.

  After, cell phones jingled: Be Bop, Mariachi Medley, Chicken Dance, Die Alone.

  Nervous, I felt nervous. There was mariachi in the trains, or else it was just one guy playing “La Bamba.” I slow-danced into clinic waiting rooms. Receptionists told me to relax and try to enjoy the weekend, since we wouldn’t know anything till Monday. Sunday I lost it, banged my face against the bed. Be easy, girl, I thought. Be bop. Something was definitely wrong with me—I never called myself “girl.” I played CDs, but CDs by artists who had already succeeded. They had succeeded for a reason. They weren’t wasting time in my bed. One did pass through the bed, to brag. He had been divorced, had met Madonna.

  He asked, “Is this what women are like now?”

  Longviewers

  MOMMY AND DADDY hate the other street. The other street used to be just another street, but now it wants to give us its traffic, to cause us pain. Now Mommy and Daddy host meetings in our house like it is union times. If it were union times, we wouldn’t have a house, or artichoke appetizers for the other angry people, but the spirit would be the same. I’ve never seen Mommy and Daddy so worked up. Usually, they’re at work. They just go to work and they hardly have friends. Not like me, who’s always on the phone, dampening the little holes. They got me Line 2, and when it’s for me, they yell, “Line 2!” like it’s my name. I never even noticed the traffic on our street. I don’t even drive.

  “You still call them that?” says Kira, a friend who also has her own line. “I stopped calling my parents Mommy and Daddy when I learned to tie my shoes.”

  “You’re so mature,” I say. “Can you give me maturity lessons?”

  Daddy tells me to get off the phone, it’s time for Save-Our-Street strategy.

  Daddy, he’s incensed about the other street, his neck bullfrogging out over his tie. He’s not even loosening the tie anymore, just gets home from work and starts dialing his new friends, Bruce and Bruce, the other save-the-street fanatics. Daddy’s got a widower friend now, too, and the never-married Vietnamese woman with a Long Island accent who gardens. She plants bulbs, waves him over for the update.

  “They’ve got a lawyer now,” she hisses, smushing dirt.

  “That’s okay,” he says. “We’ve got the mafia.”

  Daddy jokes, but only with our street. With the other street, he makes a point of racing down it, pounding the horn. He goes to town meetings and curses the mayor, whose name is May Hamburger. May Hamburger is in somebody’s pocket on the other street. They claim their street, Longview, is too narrow to have two-way traffic. Last spring, they say, a child almost died. Our street, Hillview, is wider; a thoroughfare, a boulevard. Hillview can accommodate.

  But Mommy says they’re just worried about property values. The Longviewers, she says, only care about money.

  “That kid did need stitches,” I say.

  “Longviewers are selfish. They could care less if we live or if we die.” She’s folding chairs.

  “How much did our house cost?” I ask.

  “A lot,” says Daddy.

  “It’s about safety,” she says, plunking a chair against a chair. “It’s about not getting stepped on. You know, the Longviewers hired a lawyer.”

  “This is like the Balkans,” I say. “This is how ethnic conflict gets started.”

  We did ethnic conflict last year in Integrated Studies, which is English and Social Studies combined in a classroom with an accordion divider. This year, we’re reading our thirty-seventh Steinbeck and getting quizzed on kamikaze pilots. Did they:

  A) Drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

  B) Fly on wind power alone?

  C) Undertake suicide missions on behalf of the Japanese government during World War II?

  D) Strafe Longview?


  At least we’re not learning about Helen Keller anymore. Sometimes I write invisible letters on Kira’s hand in Integrated Studies. T-H-I-S (flat palm) S-U-C-K-S. We’re not making fun of Helen Keller, just using her techniques to get by. We have our own handicaps. Boys who crack Helen Keller jokes ignore our collective lack of breast. They’re probably from Longview.

  No, Kira doesn’t live on the other street. She’s just a friend from the town. Kira thinks my parents are “awesome.” Once, I think, she saw them kissing.

  —

  AWESOME DADDY is now shouting “Furthermore” into a tape recorder.

  “He’s losing it,” says Mommy, not at all scared.

  Did he ever have it? I really don’t know. In the photo albums, he looks peaceful, with a fatter tie. The albums are pre-me. Mommy and Daddy slide around under loose plastic flaps, in front of trolley cars, the Dead Sea. Maybe trolley cars are the answer to the problems of street. Maybe monorail. In Technology, we cut out articles about electric cars, then paste the articles onto paper a little bigger than the articles. Electric-car articles hang around the room, next to articles about Maglev trains.

  Kira and I sand a lot in Technology. Our bridges are almost soft. But hers, with tighter scaffolding and a two-pyramid base, holds more pebbles. My bridge is not strong. I keep working on it. It keeps breaking. I keep fixing it. The bridge project is a way to pass the quarter until it is time for the end of wood. Then we have Math. Math seems to be about fractions canceling each other out, about objects in space, and the cute fish of infinity.

  “Furthermore,” Daddy repeats, almost kissing the tape recorder. “Furthermore, if the town chooses to make Longview Road a one-way street without a fair hearing, then we, the residents of Hillview Road, will be forced to take matters into our own hands and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, take unlawful actions against an unjust government.” He clicks off.

  “Are you crazy?” asks Mommy, now afraid. In between “He’s losing it” and “Are you crazy?” lies a whole sea of meaning.

  “I’m mailing it to Hamburger tomorrow,” he says. “If she doesn’t respond before Wednesday, we’re taking the street.”

  “Our own street?”

  Daddy looks around for a padded envelope, and sees instead a potential ally, the girl who just aced her test on India.

  “Hey, punko,” he says. “Want to show Longview what we’re made of?”

  I think of the post-me albums, the diapers, the boys who make diaper jokes about Gandhi.

  “Do you want me to get hit by a car on purpose?”

  “No, just clean up your room before the meeting tomorrow.”

  “They’re not going to go in my room.”

  —

  MY BED’S BEEN MADE. I trot downstairs, sling around the banister at the base. I pile some hot artichoke on a saltine. The chairs are out, evenly staggered, Mommy style. She’s very exacting about the chairs.

  “Good job, Mom.”

  Mom? It just comes out, her new name. Is this how it happens? One day you’re “Mommy, change me, feed me, sprinkle talc all over my naked body,” the next day you’re complimenting her on folding-chair spacing. Mommy doesn’t notice.

  “I need to review the talking points,” she says. “Don’t eat all the dip before people get here.”

  People get here. The gardener lady’s wearing lipstick, maybe hoping to meet another enraged single. She’s dreaming, though, because except for me and the widower, it’s all furious couples in sweaters.

  Daddy has maps, crudités, an easel.

  “That was my easel,” I say, to nobody. Nobody asked to borrow it, either.

  “The morning commute won’t be affected by the one-way chokehold Longview is imposing, since cars can still use both Longview and Hillview to go west,” he says, drawing parallel sedans going west. “But we want to get some folks out to protest Longview in the mornings, too. Bruce? Lillian?

  “The evenings are when we have our real battle. As the streets parallel, we will get all of Longview’s eastbound commuter traffic.” He draws a fat line of trucks trying to go east.

  “Not on our watch!” screams a Bruce.

  “Not our kids,” says a wife, pointing at me. There’s applause. I represent something, a kid who might run into the street, basted by a car that should have been on Longview.

  “She knows not to run into the street,” says Daddy. “But, as I said in the tape I sent City Hall, some kids don’t. And that’s why we’re not going to let these Longviewers commute in peace, day or night, until we get this one-way farce reversed and traffic is flowing freely on both streets in both directions again!” He draws cars going in both directions.

  “Sign up for a morning or evening shift depending on your work schedule. Stay-at-home moms, we need you right now.”

  Mommy calls them non-working mothers.

  —

  “I WISH my parents cared about something,” says Kira. She’s using ketchup packets to make a rag look bloody for a skit we have to do about The Pearl. She’s going to play the mother and me the father. A doll is playing our baby. A Tic Tac is playing the pearl.

  “You live on a cul-de-sac,” I say. “What’s the problem?”

  “My dad has no interest in community service.”

  I don’t mind playing the father. I’ve borrowed one of Daddy’s old jackets, and I’m roughing it up with a stapler. I’m going to need a mustache. Luckily, I have no breasts. Kira’s costume is from our linen closet. Her hair’s in braids.

  “The kids who got Of Mice and Men are really lucky,” she says, trying to make our doll look deader. “I’d kill for that one.”

  —

  BOTH PHONE LINES are busy over the weekend. One of the Bruces is getting divorced. He’ll be departing our street for a condo, a support group.

  “I’m losing a real soldier,” says Daddy.

  There was the time this Bruce stayed up half the night coming up with the perfect clip art for the “Hillview Is Not a Highway” flyer, the time he called Mayor May a cunt. After a while Daddy just says, “A soldier,” and Mommy and I fill in the rest of his sad.

  Over on Line 2, Kira sheds her uterine lining for the first time. My bridge almost collapses with the news. My uterine lining remains intact. Happily married Bruce calls on Line 1 to talk to Daddy, now his one remaining Bruce, suddenly the only Bruce he can count on.

  The town, for some reason, is not moved by the tape.

  “Do you know what this means?” Daddy laughs, maybe thrilled to be ignored. “Hamburger wants war. Are you ready to mobilize?”

  We’re sitting around the kitchen table Tuesday evening. Mommy’s drowning a tea biscuit in decaf. I’m coloring in my maison for French. I draw mon téléphone in ma chambre.

  “La Ligne Deux,” I write.

  “I’ll call Bruce,” he says.

  “I don’t know,” says Mommy.

  “I have a Pakistan ditto,” I say. “But then I can help.”

  Help means collating the new flyers, practicing our chants. The new flyers say “One Way? No Way!”

  “I have to be at work early tomorrow,” says Mommy later. She’s in her nightgown, under her lamp. He’s pacing the den, pretending to yell at cars. “So keep an eye on him on Longview,” she says. “Don’t let him do anything crazy.”

  “If he tries to do something crazy, how will I stop him?”

  “Just tell him to stop.”

  —

  WEDNESDAY, A.M., Daddy and I are standing in the shoulder of the other street, minivan gusts whipping our “One Way? No Way!” signs back into our chests. Daddy’s scanning for his friends. Never-married gardener is a no-show. Happily married Bruce not present.

  The cars just go west. There’s not much to see.

  The widower friend shows up wearing his flannel jacket, dusted with dog hair. He and Daddy sort of grip each other hello, and then he leaves. We wait. A couple of women in terrycloth walk by, but we’re not sure if they’re Longv
iewers or Hillviewers or just power walkers.

  “Maybe tomorrow I’ll bring Kira, so we have more people.”

  “The whole street’s in denial,” says Daddy. “People completely disregarded the sign-up sheet. The stay-at-home moms stayed at home. But wait until they see how much traffic our street eats tonight. We’ll stand in front of our house with signs. I’ll make extra copies at work, so everyone has one to hold.”

  —

  LE MATIN PROCHAIN, LE MÊME. Except Daddy makes me and Kira sing a song. It has to do with sticking to a union till the day we die. We sang it last night on the sidewalk in front of our house. Daddy passed out lyrics. Mommy and I didn’t need them. The union song is from a cassette Daddy keeps in the car for long car trips. We have other tapes, but Daddy never plays them. What he does play now are cassettes from Line 1’s answering machine—Sorry, Alan, work’s been crazy, tae kwon do, Karen caught the flu. Mommy urges Daddy to delete, but he’s starting a list by the phone.

  “Not flu season yet!” it says.

  —

  FRIDAY MORNING, I lie in bed for a few minutes after I wake up, sliding the lump under my left nipple. It seems wider than usual, wider than the right. I scramble to my desk, flip through the index of Exploring Life Science until I find Puberty, female.

  “Breast bud and papilla swell and a small mound is present; areola diameter is enlarged.”

  This is it, this is Puberty, female.

  —

  AT ASSEMBLY, Kira tells me she can’t come anymore. Assembly’s in the gym. It’s Croatia Day. Puffed-sleeved maidens wave handkerchiefs while the teachers shush us. Every last Friday of the month, we’re herded into the bleachers to disrespect dancers from politically unstable lands.

  “It’s only been two days,” I say. “We haven’t even done civil disobedience yet.”

  “Why do you keep touching your breast?”