The Bed Moved

by Rebecca Schiff

  “I’m not. Why can’t you? Is your mom scared?”

  “No. Your dad’s—”

  The dancers’ clogs make a sudden racket on the shellacked floor.

  “What? My dad’s what?”

  “Your dad’s awesome. But I don’t live in that neighborhood.”

  —

  MONDAY MORNING, we stand on a lawn on Longview instead. Even the widower’s given up, gone back to his usual routine, transferring photographs of his late wife out of albums that have lost their stick. Our signs have wrinkled, curled. They’re already mementos of this time.

  “Longview is kind of scary without sidewalks, Daddy.”

  “They could build sidewalks,” snaps Daddy. “There’s certainly enough room on their lawns. Then they’d have sidewalks.”

  “Where’s the lady who gardens?” I say.

  “Who?” he says.

  “Bruce never comes.”

  “He’s redoing his dining room.”

  “What’s wrong with his dining room?”

  “Gene Flusser!”

  The driver of a passing car is a famous Longviewer, the one in bed with May Hamburger. Daddy drops his sign and gives Flusser’s bumper the finger.

  “Is the finger in the tradition of Martin Luther King?” I ask.

  “This one is,” he says. He leaves the finger up, for everybody. I put mine up, aiming it at the other street and also a little at him.

  I guess we’re showing Longview what we’re made of.

  We’re made of cells. We’re made of fatty tissues, which we either fear or desire, depending on where they deposit. We get labeled in textbooks—organ, organelle. We give traffic the finger.

  Except traffic must have seen the finger, because Gene Flusser’s walking back, from kind of far. He can’t drive back because the street’s one way.

  “Daddy, stop,” I say.

  “Stop what?” he says, tucking his middle finger back into his fist.

  “He’s coming.”

  “I see him—Gene!”

  “Alan! Aren’t you cold standing here?” asks Flusser.

  “We’re staying warm,” says Daddy.

  “Who’s this young lady?”

  “She’s a fighter.”

  It’s all very friendly, Longview, Hillview. What the view is of, nobody can say.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” says Flusser, extending a handshake to me.

  “I have a note.” One of my hands rests on my jacket where the new breast should be. The other shoots out to shake. “But I’m learning a lot out here. You guys could use some sidewalks. Why’d you get out of the car, Mr. Flusser?”

  “I forgot my lunch, so I’m going back to get it.”

  He doesn’t even look at our signs.

  —

  I’M ON YEARBOOK NOW. I write poems about assemblies, come up with captions for boys who ignore me.

  Kira and I didn’t stop being friends because of the street. We’re still friends. Now we’re crying about the Joads. Now we’re sanding boats. They will float on half an inch of water in a stoppered sink. They will never know the sea.

  Mommy has a new enemy: the phone company.

  “Thieves,” she says, highlighting my calls on the bill. But her heart’s not in the hate. The folding chairs stay folded in the basement. My easel stays folded.

  Daddy’s not doing mornings on Longview anymore. He decided it was best to conserve our energy for our own street, because people in gridlock are more likely to be sympathetic. He’s not doing evenings on our street anymore either, though, except that he sits in gridlock with the others on his way home from work.

  But walking home, sometimes I think I see him, one block away, planted on our sidewalk, a man with salt and pepper ringing his bald spot, a man with a Windbreaker, Longview’s worst nightmare, the only man with enough love to turn the tide the other way.

  http://www.msjiz/​boxx374/​mpeg

  SHE WAS A GRIEVING CHAMP—black bra, black jeans, two competing bereavement groups. She kept my father’s computing magazines by his side of the bed, in case he came back to life and needed to order some outdated PCs. She kept his diabetic candies on top of the computing magazines, in case he came back still diabetic. When I came to visit, we looked at pictures in her bed and sucked his candies. I lay in his spot. She slept in his shirts. He had T-shirts championing places he’d vacationed, runs to cure diseases that hadn’t killed him.

  She framed photos of him we’d ignored for years—him by the waterfall with the fanny pack, him driving cross-country shirtless before any of us knew him, before men in this country wore fanny packs. My mother made copies for me to take back to Brooklyn. I put the copies in a box under my desk, a box that held knitting needles, a pane of lighthouse stamps from the week I thought I would collect stamps, free NYC condoms. The condom wrappers had the subway map on them, in case you needed to know how to get somewhere while erect.

  I left the city every few weeks to be unemployed at my mother’s house and pretend I was there to fix her computer. First we made dinner. I strained broccoli while she tried to convince me that I would like working with people. She folded napkins and I told her to join a book club. Dessert was always called “a treat.”

  Then we did albums. The baby ones were best, before the house, the sprinkler, the unlisted number. But pictures at the house were still better than pictures somewhere else, any vacation museum-weary in retrospect. Why had we chosen Quebec that year? Why had we been to tombs, to caves, rushed into darkness by locals to learn millennia along the wall? Stalactites and stalagmites, limestone blown out by flash, cousins waving glow sticks at roller rinks, my father not even in them because he was taking them, leading our family out onto jetties, teaching me that buoy wasn’t the same as boy. I thought their white Styrofoam heads bobbing were a new kind of boy.

  “I need an empty dishwasher before bed,” said my mother. “But I hate to bend.”

  “I’ll bend.”

  I put the forks where I remembered. I stacked damp Tupperware where it didn’t belong. I glided from room to room in my mother’s house, into the laundry room to see what was new there, down to the garage with dinner’s garbage. I peed an unnecessary number of times. There’s nothing to do here but pee, I thought. I needed the internet. This was before you brought your own computer to your mother’s house, before the internet was in every room, so I went to the room designated for hers. Lots of warnings popped up during the dial-up song—my mother needed a new computer—but I had no idea how to fix that. I went to a website for idealists looking for jobs. None of them were ideal. I started opening old WordPerfect files, mostly letters my father had written—angry letters asking the cave tour company for a refund, boring letters to me at camp.

  “It’s too bad you don’t love your swim instructor. Diving can be tough. I am enclosing your June report card. What happened in Home and Careers? Regardless, the rest of it is a knockout. Way to go!”

  I was still no good at home or careers. Grades predicted something, maybe that you’d only be good at getting good grades. I missed quarterly reminders of what adults expected of me. I missed the old Courier font, 1994 in the corner. His letters were written years before he had gotten sick and had no trace of sick in them—no battle metaphors or gastrointestinal reports.

  “The fight goes on. Today was a good day. I even managed to get some ice cream down.”

  He wrote daily when he was too sick to work anymore, bleak cheerful missives, cc’d to too many people. I wanted to check to see if he’d written a final letter to me only, something he hadn’t had time to print out. I wanted last words, a story I’d never heard about summers at Lake Luzerne, a drugged-out road trip with an old girlfriend, paternal wisdom that might move me to tears. The meaning of life is love. It’s never too late to learn how to dive. I scrolled down the Recent Documents section—different versions of my résumé, a bill from the urn people, and a link, http://www.msjiz/​boxx374/​mpeg. The link took me to a thirty-second
video of two topless women boxing, punching each other and grunting. The women’s breasts swung dangerously. They sneered at each other, but it was a joke, it wasn’t real. The blonde pushed the brunette against the ropes, and the brunette snapped back. She raised her fists and the video froze.

  I closed the window, then shut down the whole machine. Of course, all men looked at porn. He must have found the boxing late one night when he couldn’t sleep, searching, not exactly knowing what he was looking for. I breathed out through my nose. My own darkness reached toward my father’s darkness, both of us nosy in our sleeplessness, both of us with oily noses.

  Still, the sick are supposed to be holy, empty of desire. Their flesh is pallid and their eyes are bright. They tend to be hairless. Maybe he wanted to have desire again, maybe he got bored waiting to die. Well, what was he supposed to be looking at? Girls of the Herman D. Weiss Center for Radiology and Oncology? Bald Sluts? Barely Breathing?

  I hurried to my old room, lay down in my old bed, and then sat back up to admire the glow-in-the-dark stars I had pasted on the closet door, because my parents hadn’t let me put them on the ceiling.

  —

  MY MOTHER was having breakfast the next morning when she saw me come down the steps.

  “Six a.m.! How nice of you to join me.”

  I’d snuck up on her being happy. She was furious most of the time, but here she was, allowing herself a moment of peace in a blouse, spooning cereal while it was still dark outside.

  “Do you want some? I made tapioca.”

  “Mommy,” I said. “You seem good today.”

  “Yeah.” She twisted her mouth. “I’m wonderful.”

  She drove away to have a wonderful day at work. I did a search for “water filters” because I wanted to protect her from the carcinogens of northern New Jersey. When I typed the “w,” “women boxing” appeared as a previous search. He had sought them out. The boxers had enormous breasts. My mother’s breasts were tiny, a few inches of raised skin, nipples the size of pennies. Did he dream of swinging breasts, of humiliation, knockouts, defeat? I thought about my own breasts. They would leak milk one day, harden with lumps the next. Blood would be mopped off the floor. I sat there for so long that the computer switched over to its screen saver, spiraling into infinity.

  In my mother’s house, back when it was my parents’ house, back when it was just my house—when I was an adolescent who went to high school and had long hair and lived in a house—my father and I would sometimes bump into each other in the middle of the night. He would go down to the kitchen to sneak cookies, and I’d go to the bathroom to inspect my pimples. Some were red, puffed-up, painful, others purple and faded, and I diligently spread prescription acne cream onto each one. The cream did nothing, but the smell palliated me.

  “Dad, when did your acne go away?”

  “Mine was worse than yours. I was a pizza face.”

  “Are those cookies sugar-free? Sometimes I want to rip my face off.”

  “Please don’t.”

  “When I was little I wanted pimples and braces. I wanted them.”

  —

  WHEN I TYPED the letter “r” into the search engine in my mother’s computer, the first thing that came up was “radiation enteritis,” a condition in which the lining of the small intestine gets eroded by radiation therapy. The patient has diarrhea about once every half hour, and winds up having to be fed through hyper-alimentation—a bag pumps liquid nutrients into a vein. The patient takes to wearing a forest-green backpack with the bag in it. The patient and my mother begin to affectionately refer to the bag as “hyper-al,” like it’s a buddy, it’s Hyper Al! Me and Al, we’re going on a little day hike through the house here to, ya know, calm Al down. My mother says things like “Thank God for hyper-al.” But then my father needs a different bag, a bag to hold what comes out of him, a clear bag so you can see greenish orange liquid sloshing around in it, and this bag he doesn’t bother to hide, because, what the fuck, guess what? He’s dying. I load the dishwasher and won’t admit it. Then he makes a joke. Then he’s dead.

  What was his joke? No, it wasn’t dirty. It was about me.

  “Thanks for loading the dishwasher,” he said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

  —

  MY FATHER was dead and my mother was loading the dishwasher in his “Guatemala: Heart of the Mayan World” T-shirt. She stuffed some forks into a tough spot. She rinsed empty olive containers, readying them for their new life as leftover storage vessels. Widowhood seemed to be about managing containers, telling you there was no longer coleslaw in what had been labeled “Coleslaw.” Or maybe that was adulthood. I wasn’t sure which hood she represented anymore. I didn’t know what I was standing against.

  “You need a water filter,” I told my mother.

  “You need a job,” she said. She ran unfiltered tap water over her hands, then shook them into the sink.

  “I thought you wanted me to work with people,” I said.

  “I’m not people. Dry this.”

  “I’m going to show you the latest filtration technology,” I said. “Carbon. Charcoal.”

  We dried for a while. She thought I could look into a career in environmental regulation. I thought I didn’t care about the environment, just her house. She was doing her part, reusing containers, repurposing her husband’s shirts. Plastic bags metastasized under the sink, and there was still a lawn to poison and mow, but she could replace my father’s car with a hybrid, or not replace it at all. She had her own car. She could be a one-car family.

  “Ma, what do you think about recycling Daddy’s computing magazines?”

  “He loved the computer,” she said.

  “PC Today from March 1997? He wouldn’t buy a PC from March 1997 if he were here today.”

  She paused drying. She liked to think about what he would do if he were here. I had convinced her to do a number of things by invoking his hypothetical opinion.

  “He’d want you to get a haircut. He’d think the ends were getting scraggly.”

  “He’d definitely replace the microwave if it was melting.”

  “He wouldn’t want me to have a job answering phones.”

  That last one was a lie. If he were here, I’d be answering phones somewhere, a receptionist without grief, assistant to a man who didn’t remind me of my father, because men that age wouldn’t.

  —

  THE WATER FILTER SEARCH was on. I seated my mother in her computer chair. I wanted to foster technological confidence. Do an internet search for your mother, and she’ll get a list of results. Teach your mother to search, and she’ll search for a lifetime.

  My mother stared at her computer screen like it was the control panel in the White House Situation Room, while I explained how to move a mouse.

  “Down, Ma! Not up! Scroll down.

  “The blinking cursor,” I said. “That’s you.

  “Type ‘w,’ ” I said.

  Men Against Violence

  MY FRIEND is marrying a man against violence. He founded a club called “Men Against Violence” in college, when he was not yet sleeping with my friend.

  “It’s not that impressive to be against violence,” I said, “if you would never be violent anyway.”

  My friend was impressed. She promoted him to boyfriend and they moved to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the religion that celebrates the holidays of all other religions. I promised to take the train, the bus, but never settled on a mode of transportation. It’s hard to get to Washington when you don’t want to go there.

  Soon they were back—law school, divinity school, nothing violent. My friend carried the Bible with her everywhere. She used it to hold our table at lunch because nobody would steal the Bible. I got falafel on the Bible. She paid for lunch. My friend promised to keep me posted, to send more photographs of them getting engaged.

  —

  WHEN MY FRIEND’S FIANCÉ founded “Men Against Violence,” a lesbian at our college didn’t lik
e it. A room full of men talking. What were they talking about? There was no way for us to know. I said they talked about porn. I said they were scared about violence in porn. This was college, when we were all more scared about violence in porn. But porn won.

  The lesbian attended the men’s meeting and screamed at them. She was the kind of lesbian who could shame a room full of men into disbanding their club according to the same principles upon which it was founded. Then the lesbian dated another friend of mine, a bisexual, and was violent toward her. It shed new light on the lesbian’s fury. After college, my bisexual friend dated men again, only men, men who wouldn’t hurt anyone, men who would have been against violence if they had gone to our college. Nobody was good-looking. Maybe being bad-looking made them want to be violent, and that’s why they had formed a club not to be. This explanation still made sense when I attended the wedding of my friend and the man who had founded “Men Against Violence.”

  —

  AT THE WEDDING, I made a toast. It was a job assigned to me because I was “good with words.” I wondered if I would have to let my friend minister my wedding because she was good with God. My toast was not very good. I did not mention the club my friend’s new husband had formed and disbanded in college, though the club was all I wanted to say about him. I said my friend was marrying someone with a cool beard.

  I had seen cooler beards. I had seen cooler beards at this wedding, but most of the men with beards had girlfriends, assigned to sit next to them in case the water glasses got mixed up.

  When had my friend made so many new friends? Were they all ministers? I met Methodists, Episcopalians, Unitarians. The girls were pretty and seemed concerned about race relations. The men were quieter, chewing behind their beards, like they had always been heading in the direction of wearing a tie at this table. Couples danced whether or not they were going to make it through the year. They were going to make it through the night, was the message, so back off. They didn’t know that I had backed off years ago, when all this was still for the taking.

  “Dr. King espoused nonviolent resistance,” said a Presbyterian in a tube dress.