Going Through the Change

by Samantha Bryant

  Still, as she looked at it longer, Linda wondered if anyone actually cooked in there. The countertops were clear of the devices, spice racks, and jars of kitchen implements that lined her own kitchen counters. Again, she had the strangest feeling that no one really lived here. The only place that looked used was the area by the dishwasher where a tiny teapot sat surrounded by used teacups left unwashed. She picked up the box of tea and was startled to see her neighbor, Cindy Liu, looking at her from the side of the box. Linda had not known Ms. Liu made tea as well as soaps and lotions. “Mood Lightener,” read the logo. It was written in the same calligraphy as her “Nu Yu” soap.

  David came behind her and put a hand on her elbow. He looked up at her. “I know. A waste of a good kitchen, huh? Most of these rich ladies don’t cook, but they still want all the best in their kitchens.” He gestured at the stainless steel refrigerator and pot rack stocked with pots that looked brand new.

  Linda nodded. “I could make quite a feast in a kitchen like this one.”

  David patted her back. “You have always fed us well, corazón.” Linda felt like she could fly. It was the first time he had called her by an endearment since the change. Even if it was just habit, even if he was disgusted by her new body, it meant he knew she was still herself inside this hulk. She was still his Linda. She took his hand in hers and squeezed. He smiled up at her.

  They were standing there a few moments later when they heard heavy footsteps approaching. David pulled his hand back, an apologetic look on his face. Linda understood, though. There was no way to know how this gringa would take the sight of two men holding hands in her kitchen.

  Mrs. Roark came around the corner, holding a basket of kitchen towels. Linda couldn’t help noticing the towels all looked practically new, no signs of wear or even ordinary use. No sauce stains.

  “Oh, hello,” the woman said. “Did you find the electrical box?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” David answered, smiling. “So, now I’m going to remove the remnants of the old fixture and see what we need to get your new one in place.”

  Linda turned to follow, paused, and, turning to Mrs. Roark, said, “You’ve got a lovely kitchen.”

  Mrs. Roark smiled brightly. “Thank you. It’s more kitchen than I need, but I hope to learn to use it all someday.”

  “It certainly is a good space. You could prepare quite a feast in there.”

  The woman looked a little surprised. “Do you cook?”

  “Oh, yes. I’ve always been the cook in our family. It’s just one of the ways I take care of the people I love.” A strange look crossed the woman’s face. Linda couldn’t read it, but she could see the woman was very worried about something. “Hey, can I help you with that?” She took the basket from the woman’s hands. “Maybe you should sit down?” She steered the woman toward the breakfast bar by the window. The woman moved strangely, shuffling her feet rather than raising them. When Linda touched a hand to the woman’s back to direct her, she felt some kind of brace or belt under her thin T-shirt.

  “Leonel!” David was calling her from the front hall.

  Linda shrugged at the woman apologetically. “I can come check on you in a little while. But, for now, duty calls!” She turned and walked quickly to the foyer.

  “Sorry, David. I was talking to the lady about her kitchen.” She added in Spanish, “There’s something strange about her.”

  David nodded in agreement, shrugged, and started to climb the ladder. “I’ll need you to keep my ladder steady and maybe to pass a few things up to me once I get up there.”

  Linda manned her station, keeping her eye on her husband as he climbed the ladder once more. She watched as he removed the part of the old lightning fixture that was still affixed to the ceiling and took it when he passed it down to her. Her eyes were fixed on him as he examined the wires, so she didn’t see what startled him. She saw it when he began to fall, though.

  “Madre de Diós!” He stepped too far back and pinwheeled his arms for a long second before he lost his balance completely.

  Linda moved under him, making a basket of her arms, and caught him as easily as she might have caught a child. She looked down into his face as he lay in her arms and thanked God she was there. Her curse was a blessing. She had saved him.

  fter the two workmen left the kitchen, Jessica leaned against the tall stool near the side counter. Her knees and legs hurt so much from trying to move about the house with the scuba weights on that she couldn’t even lift them to sit in the chair. Looking around the kitchen, she saw several furniture items she could grab onto if she had gravity problems, so she decided to take the weights off.

  She removed the weights and laid them out carefully on the counter next to her. She pulled herself into the backed stool and crossed one leg across the other knee, flexing and rubbing the ankle. There was a dark line encircling it and a reddened, sore-looking patch of skin just at the inside bone. She wished she had a better idea of how to deal with her problem, something that didn’t come with new problems of its own.

  She considered, again, Dr. Liu’s offer to help her. Her mother’s friend was an herbalist or something. Jessica had never been sure what exactly she did for a living, but knew that her mother swore by various products Cindy Liu had created over the years.

  It was Dr. Liu who had concocted the licorice scented tea that had soothed Jessica as she recovered and grieved following her surgery, the same tea they drank together when they spoke two days earlier. The tea had tasted a little different. Not bad, just different. Jessica hoped Dr. Liu wasn’t changing the blend. She loved it the way it was.

  It had been a surreal conversation. Jessica couldn’t explain why she decided to tell Dr. Liu about her condition when she hadn’t yet even told her own mother. Maybe she was just that desperate to tell someone, to get some reassurance she hadn’t just lost her mind. After all, it sounded crazy. A person couldn’t really just float away like a balloon.

  But tell she had, when Dr. Liu asked her to. In fact, she had talked quite a bit, more than was usual for her. Jessica had always been somewhat reserved about her personal life. She had certainly never been accused of over-sharing, especially not to people she doesn’t know well.

  But she found herself telling Dr. Liu all about her life—not just her condition, but also the way her feelings about her husband had changed and how she felt trapped in her life. Things she had certainly never told anyone before. It was like she couldn’t help it. She was simply compelled to talk. Jessica wondered what had come over her. She was disturbed now to realize how much she had revealed. She wished she could take the words back somehow, erase them from the woman’s memory. She’d had a headache the entire next day, which she thought came from the stress of knowing Dr. Liu knew so much about her situation.

  Dr. Liu had listened intently as Jessica described her gravity problem. She didn’t even really seem surprised, reacting as calmly as if this were a perfectly normal problem any person might have. She had asked a lot of questions about how it felt and about how Jessica had been able to move through the air and get back down. She’d asked if Jessica had any idea what had caused it, and Jessica had to admit that she did not. She hadn’t done anything differently that day that she could think of. She’d sipped tea and watched movies all morning. That was all.

  Dr. Liu had contemplated this information quietly for a while after that, picking up the box of tea and reading the list of ingredients as if she didn’t already know what was in it. Finally, she had put it down and gripped Jessica’s hand in both of hers, looking into Jessica’s eyes with an alarming intensity. “I’d like to run some tests, Jessica. Would you come to my lab tomorrow? With a few tests, I know we can figure out why this is happening to you.”

  She couldn’t have said why, but Jessica didn’t want to go to Dr. Liu’s basement laboratory. It was true she had been curious about it when she’d heard Dr. Liu describing it to her mother. It was also true she had not been to see it yet, though her mother had
visited and had gushed about the amazing setup and the incredible work her friend was doing there.

  Now, she was invited, and some part of her hesitated. She had told Dr. Liu she couldn’t come at that time and promised to call to set up another time, stalling. There was something she didn’t like in the focused attention of Dr. Liu. Something about her felt dangerous.

  Still, obviously, Jessica needed some kind of help. It’s not like she could take this one to Urgent Care and get some antibiotics. When she imagined trying to discuss it with a medical professional, she had images of straitjackets and long syringes dripping thick medicines. She should probably take Dr. Liu up on the invitation. It wasn’t like she had a lot of options. Maybe she really could help.

  Sitting in her kitchen and thinking, Jessica continued to rub and rotate her feet. It felt so good to take the weights off her ankles that Jessica became that much more aware of the belt around her waist. Taking a deep breath, and hoping this wasn’t a mistake, she loosened the belt. Heaven! She stretched her body, arching her back and closing her eyes. Maybe it was because she had closed her eyes, but Jessica didn’t see or feel this one coming. The next thing she knew, her cheek was pressed against the ceiling.

  Jessica didn’t know what to do. The upward force was so intense it took all her upper body strength to force a couple of inches between her body and the ceiling, so she could try and move herself to a position where she could grab something and get herself back on the floor. Maybe it was a reaction to the weights. A build-up of some kind. Maybe the condition was getting worse.

  This time, Jessica wasn’t afraid so much as angry. What the hell was happening to her? Hadn’t she had enough trouble in her life? Her gymnastics career ruined at age eleven by a stupid knee injury during a three-legged race at field day. Her failure to find a career. Her father’s sudden death. Her ovaries gone to cancer at thirty-two. Her husband and his impatience. Early onset menopause. Depression. She reached the doorway between the kitchen and living room just as she reached the end of her litany of woes.

  Grabbing onto a section of the moulding around the wide doorframe, Jessica whipped herself around the corner. She hadn’t counted on the force of her own movement, however, and lost her grip, flying into the middle of the room. Déjà vu, she thought, grimacing. There she was again, hovering in the middle of the living room, too far from the floor to reach it and too far from the ceiling to push off from it. Stranded again.

  So, she did the only thing she knew to do. She tried to swim through the air over to the wall. At least she had the sense to get rid of the glass coffee table. She’d told Nathan that a crack had developed in the glass and it would cost too much to repair. He’d just nodded and turned back to his laptop. He never used the table, anyway. So long as she kept the house showroom neat and furnished in the sleek, modern style he preferred, he didn’t take much interest in such things.

  Jessica’s awkward attempts to pull her way through the air were having some effect. She built up a small amount of momentum and felt herself buffeting forward. She panicked when she realized her trajectory was taking her toward the doorway to the front hall, where the workmen were. There was nothing she could do to arrest her movement, nothing she could reach. She stopped only when she reached the open doorway and was able to grab the moulding. A chunk came off in her hand with a gentle cracking sound.

  Jessica saw it, the moment when the nice man from the contractor’s office looked up and saw her floating along the ceiling. She heard him call out something in Spanish and then watched helplessly as he stepped backward and started to pinwheel his arms. She willed herself forward, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. She continued to bob along the ceiling like some kind of abandoned balloon. Useless. Even her voice failed her. The poor man!

  When the man on the ladder fell, Jessica cringed, waiting for the sound of impact. It was so far to fall! But the sound never came. Jessica pushed off from the ceiling and spun herself toward the doorway so she could see what had happened. The other man, the big handsome quiet one―Lionel?―had caught him. He stood there, cradling the smaller man in his arms, just breathing. After a beat or two, the bigger man put the smaller one down on the ground with incredible gentleness. “Are you all right, David?” he asked.

  David nodded, sitting on the floor. “That was a close one. Thank God you were here. I saw…”

  Jessica was sure he didn’t want to say what he thought he had seen. She could also see that this David wasn’t really okay. He was visibly shaking, and his voice was not steady. Jessica felt guilty for having frightened him.

  The larger man bent over David then, putting his large hands on David’s shoulders. He ran his hands over David’s body, as if he had to check and make sure he was still all there. Finding no injury, he laid a hand on David’s cheek and then leaned in to kiss him, pulling him to his chest in a possessive, protective gesture that spoke of long years together. Jessica suddenly felt like an interloper in her own home, witnessing their private moment. She also felt strangely jealous.

  Jessica wedged her hand into the corner where the ceiling met the wall and pushed down, fighting the buoyancy that urged her upward. It was like trying to force a beach ball beneath the surface of the water. Her slender arms shook with the effort. She cleared her throat. “Could you help me?” Both men turned and looked at her, David grabbing the elbow of the larger man, who stood. He was startlingly tall, but his face as he moved toward her was gentle and kind. She didn’t hesitate to reach for his hand when he offered it.

  elen tossed off the covers. She couldn’t sleep. It had only been a few hours since Cindy had dropped her off, after yet another all night session testing the limits of her abilities, tipsy on wine and drunk on power. She had stumbled to the bedroom, thrown away her burnt-up clothes, and flopped into bed. She fell into sleep like a diver into a pool.

  She hadn’t expected to resurface again so soon. She checked the bedside clock. Four-thirty a.m. Too late to be called night and too early to be called morning. But her eyelids were up, and she shook with a restless energy. She knew this feeling. It was excitement.

  The round of experiments with Cindy last night had shown her what she could do. And she wanted to do more. It had been a long time since her limits had been stretched, since the world had seemed new and exciting. God, what a rush! It was like being in love.

  She sat on the edge of the bed for a moment and then padded to the closet and pulled on a long T-shirt. It had been her husband’s and proved more durable than he had. She wondered if it were possible to buy fireproof clothing.

  Moving quietly through the apartment, she made her way to the kitchen and to the patio doors at the back. She stepped through into the patch of grass that had sufficed as a yard for Mary’s barbecue party a week or so ago.

  Helen looked around. The windows of the two apartments above Mary’s overlooked the yard, but they were dark. The back of the yard was bordered by some kind of industrial strength hedges, probably to protect the homeowners behind from having to see the seedy, little apartment dwellers smoking their cigarettes and drinking their beer.

  Helen willed a ball of fire into her hand and made it roll. She tossed it from one hand to the other, rolling it across her arms and laughing. She balanced it on one finger like Wilt Chamberlain and made it spin, first one direction and then another. She made a second and a third ball and tried to juggle them. Whenever she dropped one in the grass, she stomped out the small fire with her bare foot and made a replacement.

  When she tired of fire juggling, she decided to try other shapes. She made a sort of spear, a long thin flame. She bent it around itself until it was a ring. She spun it in the air and then around one wrist, like it was a hula-hoop. She thought about spinning it around her waist, but knew the shirt would never survive it. She didn’t want to end up naked in her daughter’s backyard.

  God, this was fun. She hadn’t had this kind of fun in years. She lined up a couple of beer cans and soda bottles in various parts of the
yard and, making her finger into a gun, shot them with small blasts of fire, leaving smoking piles of melted tin can and broken glass.

  She was trying to decide what to do next, when she froze, stopped by a small squeak. The sliding door squeaked in its track. Helen turned, just in time to see her wide-eyed daughter poking her head out the small opening she had made. Her voice sounded almost childlike, like she was afraid. “Mom?”

  It was a truth of life that as a woman aged, Helen thought, people tended to treat her more and more like a child. Salesclerks called older women honey, just like they might a child. Senior food and movie tickets were sold at a reduced price, just like a child’s. Discounts and nicknames weren’t so bad in the scheme of things, but the assumption of incompetence was hard to take. Helen wasn’t sure when she had crossed that line—the magic age that made people treat her like she was old— but she had.

  It was especially hard to take from Mary. Even when her daughter’s advice was good, it still galled Helen to take it. After all, she was the one with the life experience here. Her daughter ought to be listening to her wisdom. But, as Helen had gotten older, she had often thought the roles were reversing between herself and her daughter. It was Mary who was always trying to tell her how to live her life instead of the other way around. It was Mary who wanted to know where she was and what she up to, like it was her job to keep tabs on her mother. It was Mary who Helen had to explain herself to. Sometimes, it was annoying.

  This morning, though, was different. Now, Mary, in the role of mother, was watching as she, in the role of child, said again and again, “Look what I can do!” And she could do amazing things. She demonstrated again all the forms she could make the fire take. She showed her the way she was impervious to harm from fire or smoke, clapping out flames in her hands and stomping them out with her bare feet. Mary’s face showed a complicated combination of emotions from fear to excitement and back around with a bit of worry and disbelief mixed in.