Willful Creatures

by Aimee Bender

  She liked to kiss in public, so that if someone had a movie camera she could show people. See.

  The other girl, now called Cathy, was on the street alone, looking for her friend who was out back with ash on her lips pushing lips against ash, using her tongue in all the different interesting ways she could think of, her breasts rising.

  Cathy, teenager, out on the street alone.

  This is so rare. This moment is rare. This teenage girl out on the shopping street alone: rare. She walked by herself, eyes swooping side to side, looking for the bobbing blur of her friend, Tina’s, ponytail, but Tina was not to be seen, not even in the dressing room of the cute clothes store next door where they’d recently tried on skirts made of almost plastic that were so short they reminded you of wristbands.

  Tina now had his hands on her waist, thinking of that exact skirt right as Cathy walked by it, thinking how it had held in her butt and if she was wearing that plastic skirt now, and he held her butt, it would remind him of a bubble, not a heart.

  I do not want guys to feel my butt and think of hearts, she said to herself, that is too weird.

  Cathy walked to the corner. She thought, Did Tina leave? She thought she’d head back to the poster store but she sat down on a bench instead and when the bus came she got on. She looked at the people on the bus and no one was looking at her except some creepy old man at the front with those weird deep cuffs on his pants and the seat was cold and Tina was somewhere left out in the stores and would they miss each other? Did she miss Tina? Oh, she thought, probably not. And this was her stop and she got off and walked home, and it was hours too early, they were supposed to be at a movie, and when she went inside her mother was sitting there on the couch looking at the backyard. It was like the whole afternoon had got a haircut that was too short. She sat with her mom, making sure the backyard stayed put, which it did, and when her mom fell asleep it all seemed disgusting and this was what happened in the afternoon and she went and looked at herself in the mirror for an hour and felt terrible even though she liked the pose of her left profile best.

  And Tina, done with kissing, done with skull rings-the boy settled back behind the counter after waiting two minutes, counting, to tame his erection-Tina was walking the streets and asking people if they’d seen a girl with a great yellow shirt on. No one had, they thought she meant some older woman but Tina said, No no, and she started to cry on the street because she thought the worst thing, but when she called on the phone just to see, just in case, the most familiar numbers in the world, Cathy answered. Hello? Tina forgot how to talk for a second, she was so surprised, and then she just said, Oh. Oh? Hi. Cathy? Tina? Hi? The two girls bumped around the conversation for a few minutes, but for the first time in life, they didn’t know what to say to each other. After a while they just said goodbye and hung up. From then on at school they tended to be friendly but distant and found other people to sit with at lunch. By graduation day, three years later, they had forgotten each other’s phone numbers completely, even though they hugged in their caps and gowns and tassels for old times’ sake and said, Good luck, Keep in touch, Have a hot summer, Later.

  Here is my opinion of the emergency room: it’s bad.

  Here’s the deal: everyone is sick and coughing or has some finger falling off or is bleeding all over several Kleenexes or crying because the one they love is taken away to be fixed or not fixed or else running to the bathroom with a bladder infection. I do not think it is a good TV show. I think it is a bad place to be and I go there all too much because I am in love with someone who is in love with hurting herself so the emergency room is our second home.

  The nurse knows my name. Sometimes I use a fake name just for fun but she raises her eyebrows and corrects me.

  Okay, this seems unrelated but it’s not: at Thanksgiving I broke a plate and my mom did not get angry. It was an especially big plate, and after I broke mine there was only one left. “These,” she said to me, “have never fit inside the dishwasher anyway and they always break and sprinkle plate dust everywhere.” She looked at me. “So,” she said, “let’s break this last one too.”

  We went outside and she held it up and then just let it drop. I kind of wanted her to throw it but she had her own style and that’s okay. It still broke off into little plate pieces that I offered to clean up and while she went back to the turkey I swept up the pieces and thought about my mother who was not afraid.

  But my girlfriend is. Afraid. Of. Name it. I am going to refuse to go to the emergency room after a while but I know I’m lying when I say that. Some things you know you will never stop, your whole life. Some things just stay and stay.

  So let me tell you more facts then.

  In the emergency room the carpet is yellow and filled with little drops of red (now brown) that you know have been there for years and the carpet cleaning bill should be huge but they just let it go. There will always be more blood, they figure, so why clean up the old stuff? Smarter emergency rooms use linoleum. But my girlfriend isn’t a bleeder; she takes pills. I rush her in with her slurry speech and shaking limbs and sometimes I want to take her out of the car and just leave her at the emergency room gutter. I figure they’ll find her, but what if they didn’t? I saw a dog washed up on the beach the other day and no one saved it. Cute as it was, it was not cute enough. I thought about lifting up the collar and memorizing the number and calling the owner but I couldn’t touch its wrinkly neck. I’m not as brave as my mother. She’s the one who broke the plate.

  My friends tell me I’m an idiot; well, I say, no. They say she’ll never die and I’ll do this forever and I think they’re right but I still can’t stop driving that familiar ride to the hospital with the weird three-way stop that takes too long. I tell my friends that I like that emergency room nurse. That it’s all a big scam to fuck the emergency room nurse. With her white shoes and bouncy tits and thin knee-highs and my tongue up her dress.

  You know the truth: the nurse is in fact old and tired and gives me looks like I’m causing the overdoses, right. Me, the nicest person on the face of the earth. Like I’m the problem as I sit there and read the same magazines over and over. When I look for the crossword puzzles, they’re filled in, and worse: they’re filled in by me. And I can’t even correct myself because I still don’t know the same answers I didn’t know last time I was here.

  My girlfriend comes out from the back this time with that tag on her wrist and she crawls in my lap and kisses my neck and I grumble to the air.

  She’s telling me a secret.

  We all know what it is.

  “Never again,” she whispers to me. She thinks I’m so dumb. Like it would even matter. “This is the last and final time.”

  On the way out the door she wants a candy bar but has no money so we go into the lobby shop and I get her a Snickers and I get myself a coffee and we walk arm in arm to the car. At the car door I find I don’t have my keys.

  “Wait.” I keep checking my pockets, one two in the back, one two in the front, top of shirt. No jingling.

  “I’ll go get them,” she says, “they must’ve fallen out while you were sitting.”

  She’s so helpful now. Her skin is very pale; she looks diluted. I sip my coffee.

  “I’ll look,” I say, “you stay here.”

  I race back and the nurse’s eyes widen or at least I think they do and my keys are sandwiched in the pages of a magazine causing a pregnant lump and I’m back at the car and Janie is gone. Am I really surprised? She does this all the time. And like usual, there’s a little note in my windshield: Took A Walk. See You At Home. Plus a little heart shape. J.

  I’m supposed to be mad again. Instead I am interested in the traffic laws. Car on the right: go. Yellow means slow down. Use your blinker.

  I use my blinker. I find myself using it to go into the left left lane and getting on the freeway. This is not where I live. But I love those green signs. I love that they picked green instead of black.

  I drive to my frie
nd Alan’s house. He answers the door in a towel. I think he’s been having sex with his new girlfriend, Frieda from Germany, who he says is the hottest ever. She is walking around the living room naked and her breasts are different, un-American. Oblong. She waves at me. I wonder, Why did he answer the door?

  “Just stopped by to say hi,” I say. “I was going to bring you that book but I forgot.”

  “Lunch?” he says.

  “Sure.” I go into the kitchen and Frieda spoons cereal into a bowl without milk and then leaves again. I can hear her crunching in the living room. Alan gives me a cold barbecued rib and some pear slices and a piece of paper towel and a glass of milk.

  “Wow,” I say. “It’s the perfect lunch.”

  He leans closer to me. The only reason he let me in is because he wants to talk about her.

  “It’s so good,” he says, rolling his eyes, gripping the table, “I mean: fuck. I mean: go to fucking Germany now and get yourself a girlfriend.”

  I’m gnawing on the rib and loving how it sticks in my teeth.

  “Maybe it’s not Germany,” I say. “Maybe it’s just her.”

  He nods and grips the table harder. “Then,” he says, grinning, “you are fucking out of luck.”

  The skin of the pear is abrasive and rubs the rib juice off my lips.

  “Janie?”

  “Still alive,” I say, “just got back.”

  “Pills?” He looks away.

  “Yup,” I say, “same darn pills.”

  “And you?” He leans back now. He is a decent guy.

  “No pills for me.”

  “No, I mean how are you holding up.” He takes a sip of my milk; it’s a big sip and it sort of makes me twitch because I was saving it for last. Even though it is rightfully his. Still. I like milk.

  “Like I said: no pills.” I drink the milk until only one very slow drop is climbing up the side of the glass. I consider how I will back out of his tricky driveway. Make a perfect S shape, with one arm across the back of the front seat, like the seat is my girlfriend. A careful release on the brake while he goes to Frieda and kneels between her legs and the crunching gets louder and louder.

  Back home, Janie is in front of the television. It’s not on, but she’s looking at her reflection in the greenish glass. She doesn’t ask me where I was. She’s not too good at noticing things like that, like the fact that it took me an hour and a half to get home.

  I go into the bathroom and get dental floss. There are rib twigs between all my teeth. How I love to pop them out. One goes flying into the carpet.

  “Do you hate me?” she asks. She has her legs tucked underneath her and her head against a pillow and I can see the line of her thigh all the way up. I still think she is beautiful. She won a beauty contest when she was six.

  “Nope.” I keep flossing.

  “Come here,” she says, and I go lie down next to her and keep flossing.

  “Stop,” she says, laying her head on my chest. “I can hear you doing that.”

  “No,” I tell her, not touching her yet; I won’t touch her yet.

  She presses her face down hard. I stroke her head with my available elbow and her hair is shining like gold in the sunlight through the unopened window. It all makes me very sleepy.

  “The thing is,” she says, voice muffled out through my T-shirt, “what I said before, you know, never again, I can’t really promise that.”

  “I know,” I say.

  “I don’t really know what will happen.”

  “I know.” I wrap the floss around my index finger like a ring and watch the blood shift. The tip of my finger turns waxy and purple.

  “What would I do without you?” she says, and I get the floss around my wrist this time.

  “Same thing,” I say as my hand darkens.

  When I go to bed I think of Frieda but after a while I get bored. I don’t know what Frieda’s like. Janie, who I do know, is asleep. All her pill bottles are locked up in the trunk, and I own the key. It’ll take her a while this time to find where I hid the key; I’m getting better and better at stumping her. Last month it was floating in the bag of walnuts, and it would’ve taken a long time for her to find it except I forgot that she loves walnuts. Now we both hate them; Janie because of the taste in her mouth, me because when I found her, they were scattered all over the floor surrounding her and for a second I actually thought they were tiny shriveled lungs with all the air sucked out of them.

  This time, the key is hidden under the bathroom counter. Where the lip of the counter rises above the floor? I have taped it. You only notice if you’re lying flat down on the bathroom rug, relaxing, or if you’re running your hand along the rim. So this round should take at least a few months. One of these days, I’ll just do my duty and make a scene and dump all the pills down the toilet like I’m supposed to and Janie will cry and cry and then find herself a new boyfriend.

  Until then, it’s our best time together. She plays with my hair. She sits on the sofa in the slanted light with her guitar and sings songs with my name in them that she makes up on the spot. When she was six, she won that beauty contest talent competition by singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking” with a pretend guitar slung around her shoulder and a dance routine. All the adults cheered as she stomped about in her country-western outfit. All the other kids started crying backstage when they heard the thunderous applause. We still have the trophy; it’s locked inside the trunk with the pills tucked inside the cup part like a sordid story in a celebrity magazine at the airport. The boots she wore are in there too; they’re really little, made of thin yellow leather with fringe on top and a silver badge on the side. I didn’t have anything special to add, but just to be fair, I put my report cards from junior high school in the trunk too. I got all As. I have always been a good student.

  The pumpkinhead couple got married. They had been dating for many years and by now she was impatient. “I’m getting cooked,” she told him, and she took his hand up her neck to the inside of her head so he could feel the warmth of the flesh there, how it was growing soft and meaty with time; he reeled from both burden and arousal. Taking her hand, they walked over to the big soft bed and while he unbuttoned her dress, he thought about what she was asking for and thought it was something he could give her. He slipped his belt out of the loops and the waist of his pants sighed and fell open. When the pumpkinheads had sex, it was at a slight angle so that their heads would not bump.

  They had a big wedding with a live jazz band, and she gave birth to two children in the span of four years, each with its own small pumpkinhead, a luminous moon of pumpkin, one more yellowish, one a deep dark orange. The pumpkinhead mother became pregnant with her third child in the seventh year, and walked around the house rubbing her belly, particularly the part that bulged more than the rest. At the hospital, on birth day, the nurses swaddled the baby in a blanket and presented him to her proudly, but she drew in her breath so fast that the pumpkinhead father, in the waiting room watching basketball, heard through the door. “What is it?” he said, peeking in.

  She raised her elbow which cradled the blanket. The third child’s head was made of an iron.

  It was a silver model with a black plastic handle and when he cried, as he was crying right now, steam sifted up from his shoulders in measured puffs. His head was larger than the average iron and pointed at the tip.

  The father stood by his wife and the mother adjusted the point so that it did not poke her breast.

  “Hello there, little ironhead,” she said.

  The siblings came running in from the waiting room, following their father, and one burst out laughing and one had nightmares for the rest of her childhood.

  The ironhead turned out to be a very gentle boy. He played quietly on his own in the daytime with clay and dirt, and contrary to expectations, he preferred wearing ragged messy clothes with wrinkles. His mother tried once to smooth down his outfits with her own, separated iron, but when the child saw what was his head, standi
ng by itself, with steam exhaling from the flat silver base just like his breath, he shrieked a tinny scream and matching steam streamed from his chin as it did when he was particularly upset. The pumpkinhead mother quickly put the iron away; she understood; she imagined it was much the way she felt when one of her humanhead friends offered her a piece of seasonal pie on Thanksgiving.

  “Next year,” she told her husband that November, “I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I’m serving a big human butt.”

  Her husband was removing his socks one by one, sitting on the edge of the bed, rolling them into a ball.

  “And for dessert,” continued his wife, stretching out on the comforter, “we will have cheesecake from brains and of course ladyfingers and-” She started laughing then at herself, uproariously; she had a great loud laugh.

  Once undressed, her husband lay his head flat on her stomach and she held the wideness of his skull in her hands and smoothed the individual orange panels.

  “I think our son is lonely,” she said.

  They made love on the bed, in a quiet relaxed tangle, then threw on bathrobes and went to check on their children. The two girl pumpkinheads were asleep, one making gurgling dream noises, the other twitching. They shook the second gently until her nightmare switched tracks and she calmed. Shutting the door quietly behind them, the parents held hands in the peace of the hallway, but when they stepped into the ironhead’s room, they found him wide awake, smoothing his pillowcase with his jaw.

  “Can’t you sleep, honey?” asked his mother. He shook his head. He had no eyes to look into, but the loll of his neck and the throw of his small body let them know he was upset. They sat beside him and told a story about zebras and licorice. He tucked his head agreeably on the pillow and listened the whole time, but his parents tired before he did and tiptoed out of the room, figuring he was asleep. No. He never slept, not because he didn’t want to but simply because he couldn’t, he didn’t know how. He spent a few more hours staring at the wall, feeling the sharp metal of his nose, breathing out clouds into the cramped sky of his bedroom. Around three in the morning, he read a picture book. At five, he snuck to the kitchen and had a snack of milk and cookies. He felt very very tired for four years old.