by Aimee Bender
“I don’t know how to describe it, but I just remember those things you say differently than other things,” she said, waving her fork. “Like, it makes me feel like I have to wash my hands. But not in a bad way.”
“Of course not,” I said, “in that great sticky hands kind of way.”
Aunt Minn laughed softly, pressing her fork tines sideways into her zucchini slice until the cooked flesh split through the metal.
“You two,” she said.
We talked for a while about soap dishes, and how maybe I should have a designated part of my shop only for unique soap dishes, and both of them were so enthusiastic about the topic that it was obviously only there to block further discussion of Sammy’s pool party the next weekend. Sammy’s parents were never around and Sammy had once come to school drunk and Aunt Minn wanted assurance, possibly in writing, that Vicky would not drink or do drugs while she was there, which Vicky found too formal and not necessary and said she really was only interested in swimming, anyway, and maybe hanging out with a guy from her history class. This I had been hearing about from both sides all week long. Aunt Minn wanted to be sure Vicky knew very clearly about the family’s history of psychotic breaks, and her own risk factors, and Vicky said the main risk factor in her life was the act of being bathed in constant anxiety, and they had said this to each other in new and varied ways all the time, like an overplayed duet on the radio. At the end of the meal, Aunt Minn went to the kitchen to bring in the bowl of fruit, and Vicky, eager to change the subject, grabbed her phone to see if there was any existing soap dish store, expertly searching and tapping and enlarging, finally showing us photos of a few boat-shaped versions, and another inexplicably shaped like a rat.
When the meal was over, and only leftover grains of rice and single stray blueberries remained on the table, Aunt Minn returned to the kitchen and brought the landline phone to the table. The three of us formed a triangle around it, leaning in, and the nurse connected us to my mother’s room. This was the first time I’d spoken to my mother since the week before, when she’d been so hard to understand, her words upside down, inside out. “Hello?” she said, once it connected, and Aunt Minn and Vicky piped in right away with their greetings, “Hello, Aunt E!” “Hi, Elaine,” “What’s going on in Portland?” “What’s the weather like there?” “Hi, Mom,” I said, after a pause, and she let out a wave of glad sounds. “Francie,” she said, “Minnie. Vicky. I’m so happy to hear you all.”
It was immediately clear that she was better. Her voice had firmed back up. Her fluctuations of tones matched ours. Her sentences followed through. She asked how we were all doing, and Vicky jumped in, telling her about the upcoming fall play, and the blue tones she was hoping to use in the lighting scheme to fill the stage with a sense of mystery, and loss, which my mother listened to with interest, and Aunt Minn said something about how glad she was that Elaine was doing better, and that her shoulder was bothering her but on the whole she was doing fine, and I said how I’d made a big sale when I’d found a charming miniature grandfather clock in Atwater that had been broken but easy to fix. It was an exchange of health we were having, updates of functionality, and my mother responded to everyone with beautifully fitting noises of all kinds. When it was her turn, she told us about how her medication was much better, and she was feeling much more like herself again, and there was a job opening at the bakery down the street that she was considering applying for, and about how she was becoming closer with that friend Edward, the piano player of so many years with the strong lungs and the warm manner. Her voice sounded tinny and pleased through the phone lines. She asked what we’d had for dinner, which she always asked, and my aunt went through the menu, after which my mother told us that she and Edward had just read reviews online of a new restaurant in walking distance with an unusually special and reasonably priced eggplant dish that maybe sometime we could all try together. The three of us nodded; Aunt Minn clapped her hands. “Next visit!” my aunt said, “please.” At some point, Vicky got up to wipe down the table, and I watched all the last pieces of rice and blueberries connect to her sponge and gather together to fall into her hand. When we said goodbye, my mother sent kisses through the phone, and Aunt Minn walked the handset back to the kitchen.
As we headed to the kitchen to wash dishes, I could feel inside me the snag of an unfinished thought, although I couldn’t quite locate what it was. Vicky scraped the plates, and I rinsed, and Aunt Minn reordered the dishwasher to make space. It didn’t seem to come from the phone call—that had gone smoothly, and had eased something in me, like always, hearing my mother’s voice back to stable, and how the medications had kicked in. Although the illness could still swerve and jag inside her, the bounce-back was now notably faster and better. Vicky cleaned the serving plate with the small purple flowers that couldn’t fit in the dishwasher, and I rubbed it dry with a dishtowel, and as we moved through the routine we’d been through after so many meals before, folding in Uncle Stan’s parts, sweeping, neatening, all three of us talked about the latest news, including the disturbing sight of an influx of polar bears at certain villages in Russia, and a congressperson’s new bill about health care, and then we went over the phone conversation with my mother together, safe territory, revisiting the high points like we’d all just seen the same movie: Edward, bakery, eggplant dish.
Once the floor was clean, and the dishwasher began its series of hummings, I hugged Aunt Minn and Vicky, leaving them to each other, while I carried the unfinished thought within me, and its tiny, almost negligible, itch. My bus ride home was a beautiful lit hallway, traveling the streets. Other buses crossed in the opposite direction, wheeled containers full of gleaming white light. Inside mine, the only other passengers were an older man, nodding off to sleep, and a younger woman in a jogging suit, tapping away at her phone. The traffic lights were mostly green. We passed a mirrored office building, in which I could see our bus, moving through the squares, and the three of us plus driver inside it, and the woman’s focus on her phone reminded me of Vicky and her own looking up of the soap dishes, and right then the word sticky came back, and my thought returned to its track, a train lining up synaptically that I could now get on and ride. Sticky, I thought. It was the thing about the sticky memories. As we turned up Victory, I found, watching the man’s nodding head as a rhythmic companion to my thinking, that I had wanted to reconsider what Vicky had said at the table with her fork waving in the air—something about the idea of formed memories, of treating the memories like something to capture. It seemed useful to me. I could make some use of that idea. Perhaps, I thought, as I got off the bus and walked to my apartment, the nighttime wide and starless above, the quiet and tucked-away quality of Sunday evening, up the stairs and past some of my neighbors’ apartments, with the clinking of dishes in sinks, and the fading smell of fried meat, that was what I had been looking for.
12
The beetle had come, in its way, before the butterfly. I met it first on its piece of paper, on the lawn of the elementary school, as my uncle and I waited for the babysitter to finish up her end-of-the-week classroom preparations. Once she was done and came out to meet us, she would drive me to her apartment, and he could jump back into his red rental car and race to the airport to fly home and greet his infant daughter, who was, at that moment, getting ready to burrow through the birth canal. My aunt, hundreds of miles away, explaining to the obstetric nurse between contractions just why he couldn’t be there yet. My mother massively sedated at a different hospital, in a different city, in a different wing. I remember it was a Friday, because everyone we spoke to said have a good weekend at the end of the exchange, like a kind of punctuation, and to keep us out of the way while we waited for the babysitter, my uncle had guided me to the concrete steps at the front of the school, offering me his tin of mints, drawing maps of the West in the dirt, both of us hunching in our sweaters and jackets while we waited for the older grades to get out. Or, while I
waited for the older grades to get out, and he pulled out his phone again, making the series of calls to set up my care.
I didn’t know my uncle all that well at that point, and this was my introduction to what I now would call his outrageous efficiency; within ten minutes, he had contacted the train reservation line and bought two tickets, and then through several other brisk and impenetrable conversations secured me a trusted steward, a second cousin on his side who lived in Seattle who could come down and ride with me from Portland’s Union Station to the end stop in downtown Los Angeles, which was a good place to get off, easy and final, and where my uncle explained he himself would be picking me up in the main parking lot by the taxis on what would be Monday evening. “I will be the one in the Orioles cap,” he said, tapping the brim of his Orioles cap. Trees rustled. The flag made whipping cloth sounds high on its pole. My uncle jotted down some notes on several slips of paper, with the babysitter’s name on one of them, underlined, and explained to me that the babysitter would be introducing me to this steward/cousin at the train station on Sunday, and the steward would apparently be wearing a red zipper sweater with a train on it. “I haven’t seen him in a few years, but he’s extremely nice,” said my uncle, folding the papers and tucking the slips into his jacket pocket, “very dependable, easy to be with.” “Will he talk to me?” I asked. “If you don’t want him to, then no.” “I don’t want him to.” “I will pass that along.” The lawn shone green, and the air chilled, and with each small action he took, I could feel the adults shuttling into a line, myself the red baton passed from runner to runner like I’d seen the previous year during the Olympics, which I had watched for hours with my mother because she could not stop staring at the primacy of a running body: “That’s health right there,” she’d said, fake-smoking a broken chopstick. My uncle had also called her hospital for an update, and found out she was a little better, but not in any way ready to talk on the phone.
The beetle, my future beetle, was not present in any of this. At that point, the beetle was just a drawing on a paper in someone else’s backpack. It was being shoved in the backpack probably right around then. Getting zipped up, but with zipper not fully closed. The teacher was saying the last messages before the weekend at the front of a classroom to a room full of restlessness. The kid upon whose test lived the beetle was likely staring at the clock. Ready to go home. To have a weekend. To play some ball.
My uncle, done with his tasks, smiled at me, and then, with the slightest of movements, pivoted his body away and called up my aunt again in her hospital room. As soon as she picked up, his phone manner slowed and quieted, and he gathered the same crooked maple stick off the steps that he’d used earlier to draw my route, poking at more gum blobs on the concrete. He spoke very close into the phone, as if he was trying to mesh himself through it. “She seems okay,” he said softly, glancing at me. “She didn’t eat much.”
This time my aunt’s voice was quiet, too, and I could hear only the one side of the conversation.
“True,” he murmured, nodding. “True.”
I huddled on the steps, half listening. Below us, the cars were starting to line up at the curb. Small cars, station wagons, SUVs, minivans, a motorcycle, several sedans.
“If I catch the four-fifteen,” said my uncle, “I can be at the hospital by eight. Tell her to wait till eight!”
He laughed. He wiped his eyes.
Above us, the clouds stretched and shifted, gathering in bunches. I trained my eyes on the extending row of cars at the curbside. More were lining up every minute, passing through the street break into the tree-lined residential neighborhood nearby. I didn’t usually sit on this side of the school, the Ash Street side, instead getting picked up by Alberta’s mother or my mother on the other end with the smaller brick building, where the younger grades got out, and I had never watched the formation of the pickup line for the bigger kids before. I had never let the pickup line command all my focus, with nothing else to distract me, and no car of my own to drive off in.
As a game, a game I had played with myself many times before, I let the thing in front of me lose a little touch with itself. I liked to play it if my mother was late, or if I was at a birthday party where I didn’t know the kid very well: to loosen my understanding of the relationships between things and try to see what was happening in front of me as if I did not know what it was. What was this colorful circle held by a parent and topped with lit candles? What were these shiny wrapped boxes all in a pile? How easily I slipped into it, the sensation that I had materialized from elsewhere, without handbook or experienced context.
“Listen to the nurse,” my uncle whispered into the phone, his face now fully turned to the side.
From what I could understand, every car—and I did let myself recognize them as cars—had at least one adult in it, but was also incomplete. They were clearly waiting for something. They waited patiently in their long row, without jostling; it did not seem to matter who or what was at the front of the line. A few turned off their motors, but no one got out. Their business was with the car, required staying with the car, and it seemed as though they would be driving again soon.
What were they waiting for? Across the street stood houses and those restaurants, but no one was getting out to go home, or pick up food. It had to be related to the larger building where we were sitting, the one attached to the lawn with the sign on the front that read Lewis and Clark Elementary. Behind its front offices, one could glimpse a yellow slide on a yard and a handball court, so it seemed a reasonable guess to think that the building housed children. That this was a building full of children. At some point, via some cue, the children would have to emerge, and then something new would happen, something having to do with the cars. This was my hypothesis, and as a loud clanging reverberated in the air, the building doors flung open, and the stillness of the walls and the grass broke and filled fast with people, specifically children, everywhere, active, busy, kids running through the silver gates, tearing down the lawn, shouting, laughing. Every kid ran down the lawn and within a short number of minutes found a particular car, opened the car door, and threw its body inside. It happened over and over—kids pouring down the hills, knowing just where to go even if stalling and playing, no kid going for long into the wrong car, no car expunging its chosen child. Kids entering and shutting doors, kids receiving cups or snacks or nothing from the adult hand in the front seat, kids pulling straps over their bodies, and then each car driving away from the curb once it received its cargo. The car fulfilled completion once the correct child entered it, and then the car could go. In the new spaces provided, more drove up, and the line shifted and shortened, restructured its first, lengthened again, accepted children, shortened again; a fresh wave surged through doorways to dash down the lawn from other released classrooms, and the cycle went around a few times over a series of many energetic minutes, cars driving in, cars driving out, the choreography entirely predictable, almost synchronized, until at last only one remained, a silver sedan, engine humming. The woman in the driver’s seat fiddled with the radio. I could see this by the movement of her arm. Finally, the last kid, running, whom I couldn’t help but recognize because his younger sibling was also in my class and had already settled in the back, burst forth from the gates of the field with a gaping backpack, down the hill, across the sidewalk, to be swallowed by the sedan, and after straps were attached and both children were pressed into their spots, the woman stopped messing with the radio and pulled away. Then there was no trace of any of them: neither children nor cars, and only the expanse of green lawn, and trees, and some birds on the upper walkway pecking at crumbs left behind from lunches, crumbs that could never reattach to any bread or sandwich.
The totality of it all was horrible. I was not at that time and age truly cognizant of what was in play for me on that day, but the terror I suddenly felt at the empty lawn was real, and as I looked at it the whole thing, the who
le lawn, seemed to tilt, like all the trees and grasses were leaning and listing even though nothing in my neck or head had moved. “Remember to breathe out,” my uncle was whispering to my aunt, “exhale,” and the words came at me sideways and I thought I might fall right off the ground, then, the untilted straight flat ground. It was like witnessing an eradication of children, the empty schoolfront, the plain green grass, the car line empty, the stretch of gray curb, like they had never been there and would never return, and the mobility of humanness struck me right then as something gross and foul, even despicable, so endlessly rolling and loose we were, so portable and untethered to anything. I tried to return myself to this world I lived in, to reinstate framework, my school, my pickup line, my mother’s car, parked in our parking space in our apartment building only a few blocks away, but nothing held form and the ground kept its tilt and I couldn’t seem to settle myself back into myself. I might’ve started tearing at things right then, pulling at my hair or clothes, touching my nose to the railing over and over like a goose or a broken toy, to feel I was there, to confirm thereness, if I had not glimpsed, right at that moment, in the middle of the lawn, a white rectangular piece of something that had drifted out of one of those backpacks during the absorption of the children into the cars.
I locked my eyes right on it. From a distance, it was just that small shape of white, but I used every bit of it I could to fill my gaze, to edge out everything else. I stood, and left my uncle talking to my aunt. Into the slight breeze, the ruffling leaves. The empty curb running alongside. The lawn, the lawn, the lawn, the lawn, the lawn, the lawn, then the paper. It was far at the other end, by a cluster of hedges, and as I got closer it became increasingly itself, bigger, brighter and more papery, man-made, perfectly shaped with its four right-angled corners, damp from an afternoon mist that had come and gone, eight and a half by eleven, and looking so incredibly and beautifully like every other piece of paper I had ever before encountered. How worshipful I felt of it right then, this relic, this reminder of the existence of people, this connection between the school and the gone cars, as too I felt such a rush of love for the empty red metallic cinnamon candy wrapper I saw scuttling by over the blades of grass buoyed by the afternoon breeze.
