Notable American Women

by Ben Marcus

  I stood still as the retinue continued to survey the objects of our home. Two girls slid toward me and pinned a small tag to my pajama top. Their fingers were buttery on my neck and their hair scratched at me like wire. The tag was fastened just under my chin, and I had to scrunch up to see the long code embedded on it, a set of numbers and letters spelling nothing I had read before. I touched the symbols, and they made more sense under my fingers, but before I could figure out a message, my hand was slapped away. Dark lowered her arms as she passed me, and for a second I could smell the cloth go by my face.

  The reception carried on in this manner for far too long. When Dark arrived at a window, she took slow postures there in the light—reducing herself so much in space that another woman could have been tarped around her—and we were all supposed to wait there as though we were looking at a painting that might suddenly prove interesting. My mother crouched nearby and squinted at Dark. She tried the postures that Dark had struck, but my mother was too tall and she kept losing her balance, giggling loudly as she toppled, exaggerating her embarrassment, upon which Dark was polite enough not to remark. Some of the assistants stood by my mother and braced her from falling over. I had not seen her allow herself to be handled so freely before. People were actually touching my mother. Other girls made writing gestures in their notebooks, their hands dipping and looping into the paper as if they were sewing up someone’s body. I did not need to stand like a fragile old lady while people massaged my arms and held me upright, but standing upright at all seemed difficult in that company, as the women around me did everything but that: crouching, lunging, going airless in their bodies as they draped themselves like pelts over our furniture. Standing made me feel too tall, in charge of something. I thought I should issue a command or make a ruling, but I could only look at one thing, at the man they had brought with them, who hadn’t hit the floor yet, who was too perfect for me to see, who would not look at me at all.

  Pal was carried from room to room that day because Ms. Dark would not let him walk the floors on his own. “A bomb with a heart,” she called him. When his heart stopped, he would go off and there would be a sad time of thunder, with thunder so slow that people would collapse and houses would take great fractures in their sides, with people pouring from the seams, running for their lives. Every time she said “thunder,” she squinted at me, filtering the word toward me with her eyes until I forgot what it meant. She said “thunder” as if it were my name. She said it so much in the way I would imagine my mother saying it, if my mother talked and this were the only word she was allowed to say, a word that would have to stand for everything she felt, that I wanted to run out of the house and dive deep into the learning pond, until I had reached the cold, dark bottom. The girls around her nodded in agreement. I didn’t like how words sounded on her face: frozen bits of her body she was retching up. We had to be very careful, Dark said; we had to keep Pal alive no matter what. His dying would pull the plug on something terrible. She held Pal in front of her, her white shirt blocked by a great spot of black water in the shape of something living. He had legs that were hard and long and made me hungry. I wanted to be held against somebody so that I looked like that: like nothing, like a hole into nowhere, like a piece of sleep. Jane Dark was someone to disappear against. The whole time she carried him, Pal kept his eyes closed, as though a switch had to be flipped for him to wake up and look around. I moved to the stairs and watched, concentrating my whole head at him to see if he would open his eyes, but Pal slept hard against Jane Dark, with a wet mouth. Nothing I could do in that house full of quiet people would wake him up.

  I wandered upstairs. All of these old people in my house made it hard for me to breathe. They were too soft. Somebody might break. No one was singing and there were no sandwiches.

  In my room, I looked out the window to see where my father might be hiding. A visit from so many people was bound to frighten him off. He would have run to the shed. He would be peeking from behind a tree. Soon we would hear his scared little song.

  The day was pale enough to reveal a finality of mountains in the distance, and everything looked as it ever did: shrubs buried softly in a soil as loose as black rice, the learning pond set too low to the ground, birds flying poorly and without purpose, the sun blocked by a cloud the shape of our house. Above the furnace, a sharp string of behavior smoke was breaking up as it floated over the learning pond. A convoy of small blue trucks glowed on our street as if they were see-through— Dark’s vehicles parked in neat formation. A flock of birds must have pierced through a small opening in one of them, because a storm of sharp black bits whirled within, the birds as fast and small as bees in a jar.

  Below me on the grass in front of the house, a small man was pinned on his back by a circle of girls. My father did not look as disheveled as he should have, considering what it must have taken for the girls to wrestle him down. It would have been just like him to surrender to their grasp too easily, to play along until he was their prisoner, happy to have so many young women minding after him. All he ever wanted was to be an accomplice in his own capture. He must have sat down with pleasure when they set upon him. He must have exaggerated his alarm when they finally pinned him down.

  If I held my breath, I could zoom my sight in right up close to his simple face, to a proximity no son should be allowed, and I quickly saw much too much of my father, an amount of his person I didn’t think possible, which made me scared and disappointed by him at the same time. He should not be viewable so close-up, I thought. He should not be that dismissible. The more I held my breath, the more I felt I could leave my room through the window and swoop down through the circle of girls right up against my father’s red, struggling face, not stopping there, but entering my father at his hard red mouth and plunging directly to the underside of his face, where I could look back out from his head at a ring of girls’ faces encircling a cakelike round of sky, and, far beyond that, see the tiny face of a boy framed in glass, watching me as if it were my turn to be alive. I did not much want to be inside my father’s face this way, restrained by children, while my son watched me from his window. No matter how hard I tried, I only noticed what was wrong: the clear flag we had raised alongside the spire on the roof, the unfinished shed where my learning was supposed to happen when Mother wasn’t home, and then the learning pond itself, which from my father’s point of view looked like an unpromising little puddle and nothing more. The water was muddy and slow and dead. A person might float on that water and never change. He might drink it and still remain himself for the rest of his life.

  I breathed. I blinked. I turned my head and exhaled in hard, short bursts until I had shaken my father’s perspective. My sight was thin and clean and my own again. When I returned to the window, the picture was foggy and my father was just another man brought to ground by an efficient team of girls, so many of them that he didn’t have a chance. He wrestled vaguely against them on the grass, but they kept their feet on him and made clapping gestures in front of their chests. Something about the way the girls clapped seemed to gather too many birds into their midst, a cluster of black objects that fell heavily to the grass. The claps were short and hard, not at all like music; more like a code of command. The birds gathered nearby, and some of them fell to their backs and seemed to rest there, their brittle legs twitching each time the girls changed the cadence of their clapping. None of it seemed to have anything to do with my father.

  I cranked the window closed and took off my clothes. It was time to hold my breath and practice fainting. There were too many wrong, new things in the day, and I had to drop away into the sweet brown light of a good four-minute faint, enough to make the day’s events seem like someone else’s life, happening in a smaller and softer house a good distance down the road from here.

  Before I could clear a blackout area for myself—roll out the emotion rug, remove all sharp objects within the safety diameter—I heard footsteps coming slow and heavy down the hallway, someone’s bo
dy drumming at me. I was not used to visitors. This was the sound of someone making an exciting mistake. The steps were exaggerated, heavy and sarcastic, by someone who must have thought that walking itself was a joke, to be parodied if done at all. Thundering toward me now, the little man. I knew that I would not be fainting for some time. This would be a good deal better than that. My door trembled with his approach. I turned and waited, trying my best to relax my face.

  There’s probably no other way to describe what Pal did than to say that he found me out with his mouth, that he needed to know something, and the answer was somewhere on my person.

  He ran upstairs that first day, free of Dark’s arms, and he was yelling in some other language as he jumped up on my bed, a planet of fur and squished eyes, speaking his funny one-syllables, barking the names of people I didn’t know, as if he were only a dog.

  I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but I wanted to do something just as impossible, to show him I wasn’t content with anything I could actually be capable of doing—walk the ceiling and speak a new language to my friend, or set fire to my own hands and run circles in the room, but my mouth was built only to apologize and complain. I swayed on my feet as he darted around me. I was afraid I would fall over and go to sleep and then wake up to find him gone, which would mean I’d have to run hard into a wall until I forgot about him. My head would need considerable battering to leak out the sense of this new, amazing man. The helmet would be required, and great gulps of the forgetting water, and a mouth packed with seeds while I slept. His energy was big and I had no part of it. I felt threatened by his happiness. I was too tired, and he was too fast to look at. Being with him was like being alone underwater—everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced. No matter what was happening as his body blurred around me, I worried I might forget it all and have to be myself again, without ever having seen him. There was nothing for me to do but notice him as hard as I could, to notice him, to notice him, to notice him until I did not know what it was to even try to look at somebody without collapsing with exhaustion.

  My pajamas were on the hook because I had the window closed and the wind was turned on high out in the world, making my room feel under attack, a bunker keeping the hard sound out. I kept twisting and the wind only got louder, until it was like getting breathed on so hard, it would make me older, with fast air that would turn me into my father. When Pal climbed on and found me with his mouth, I just couldn’t stop laughing, but it was a laugh like an allergy, coming out too hard and strong and choking me, until I lost my breath and went down into the twisted sheets. Pal was part of my body now, but I felt even lighter. I had taken on a passenger, or he had taken on me. Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. I did not know where the rest of me had gone. We could creep from the room without sound. We could casually go to our graves. He would be my camouflage. I rolled over and silently laughed into the pillow, and Pal just sat on my bed on his hands and knees and he drove his mouth into me all day, telling a joke without words, one that tickled and hurt and never quite finished. He kept finding me out until he had solved me, and I was no more than a spill of water on my bed, a leak, soaking the sheets. I was only a bit of math for him to do, and then he had done me, and I was over, solved, finished. I had been answered.

  I didn’t start mouthing back until I was older. Jane Dark had moved in and set up her program—a great gymnasium of ladies laboring to be silent—so Pal came to live with us full-time. Father turned scarce, restricted to a shouting position some distance into the field. He raised a fist and yelled, and sometimes he threw a small wooden lance at the house, to little effect. I could imagine small birds breaking against the shutters. Pal and I spent our days in great schemes and chases. Pal would sit back with his legs up and yell at me, but I never knew what he meant. We wrote no notes. To make him stop yelling, I’d put my head down and charge like a bull into the wall. Sometimes I charged so hard, I couldn’t stand back up. Pal yelled louder. We yelled at each other and I tried to learn his language. I would take off my pajamas and play bomber with him, and Pal would calm down for a while, his face bristled and distant, breathing hard, as if it were a language of its own that I should study. I listened to his breath and heard foreign words an old man might say. Then I could approach him and he would pretend not to notice. I could make his breath go steady and slow, until there were no words in it, as if I were washing the air that came out of his mouth, polishing it into my own private wind, until it was a word so pure, it sounded like nothing at all. We would run down near the fainting tanks and sometimes we would play dead for whole afternoons, sprawled next to each other in the grass as if we had been killed far above and had just landed dead like that. When Pal played dead, he invited blackflies around his person, and they would commence to circle and dive-bomb at him. I could hear the whining pitch of their flight. Then he was all of a sudden up fast and running, the flies disturbed from their meal, Pal perfectly happy to have fooled them. I did not much care to stand up after playing dead. My body refused to work. The grass down there was so clean and cold and sharp—I felt plugged in to all those thin green wires. It was the best way to die. When I finally pulled myself up to walk home, all those wires were severed and I operated without power, trying to smile at Pal with my broken, run-down face, which kept slipping down my chest, begging me lower. Trying not to sink back down into the soft shore of the pond, where my face could stay buried.

  When I went downstairs the day of Pal’s first visit, my mother said I should wash my face, but she didn’t wait for me to do it. She was quickly on me with a sponge, roughhousing my cheeks, using the sandy side all over my head, until it chafed and strawberried. She showed me notes she must have scribbled while I was upstairs with Pal, admonishments of one kind or another. I was in for corrections. There would be new learning water to drink, new behavior flash cards, and gymnastics against emotion. An itinerary was written out for me with early rising times, and cleaning duty at the fainting tank. The ladies in the room applauded my mother, quietly patting their knees as they crouched like skiers, and my mother just scrubbed me harder, as if she were acting in a play that required her to do this. I thought we were all watching ourselves being serious. I made a serious face and tried to look tired. I held my breath until my vision clouded and I felt older. She showed special vigor on that part of my head that would have had hair on it had I been more like other boys, buffing the very top of me. Some of the girls in the kitchen laughed, imitating me getting scrubbed up. They squinched their faces and dodged about the room, pretending to fend off the sponge. To everything I did, they invented a dance, so that even when I tried not to move, they exaggerated my stillness and strutted like stifflimbed robots. The smallest girls in the background simply hissed through tiny perforations they made between their fingers, filling the kitchen with a young, female wind that was sharp on my skin. I thought my bones might slowly break. It was like being held by a large hand, choked by air that had formed a corset around me.

  By the end of this public washing, I no longer had any of Pal on me, but I didn’t need to; my heart was flushed and fast and I could still feel him in the fat wall of my chest, where I had decided to save my day with him, where he pulsed in me. My mother released her sponge to a group of girls, who quickly bagged it and marked the bag with code. The sponge was brought over to Jane Dark, who slipped it into her cloak and coughed.

  They led me to the table. Dark wore a burlap hood and was muttering something. I felt happy; my face was clean; my vision had doubled, tripled, so I could see deep inside everyone, even all of the emotion removers, who were stone-faced and dead-looking, who had wept into cloth and laughed or raged into their hard swatches of linen that they wore in bracelets over their wrists. I could see inside Ms. Dark’s hood and through her face and I could watch the tiny women struggling to operate this great lady’s head, even though it was only blood
and flesh like the rest of us, even though I only wished her design were something anyone could determine.

  Dark took me on her lap, which was the first lap that I had been on. It felt designed for my own body, a seat only I could fit in. I rocked in it and it held me in a perfect mold, like a great warm palm. Mother looked on and turned her hand to some notes. She mimed a smile at me, but her face collapsed too quickly and I wasn’t fooled. I still could not keep myself from smiling back at her, even though I had been told not to, covering my teeth with my hands. She would not hold my stare.

  To everything I tried to say, Dark shushed me. I wanted to ask her about Pal, but she put a finger to her lips. When I mentioned that Father was outside, the whole room shushed me at once, the sound of a faucet turned on full. Dark held me closer and squeezed my torso, kneading my ribs and belly as if it were a dough, until I started to huff, just because it felt new so deep in my belly, especially when she held me like that. She placed her hand on me and I shushed the room in a loud expulsion. Little girls gathered near me and helped squeeze at my midsection until the shushing came from way down in my stomach, a silencing hiss I had not heard myself make before, loud enough to fill the room. The women all smiled and seemed shy. I shushed hard and long, with my eyes squinched tight, until my face felt swollen, as though a tourniquet were constricting my neck, and then the shushing seemed to release from my mouth and act on its own, and I could breathe quite separate from it and just listen to the hiss. It was so soothing that I was afraid for the kitchen to be quiet again. The quiet might hurt, without the shush filling the air like a great pillow. The quiet might tear something open.