Willful Creatures

by Aimee Bender

  • • •

  At school, the ironhead made no friends because he was expected to be a tough guy due to the sharpness of that metal point, but he was no tough guy and preferred the sandbox to the grass field. He filled buckets with sand and then submerged them in sand. One afternoon, tired of being teased by the seas of children with human heads and his sisters who escaped ridicule by being the best at every sport, he left the playground by himself and went for a walk. He walked past the residential area of town, with the friendly rickety houses and their green-yellow lawns and an occasional free-standing mailbox in the shape of a cow or a horse. He walked past the milkman, whose arms were full with glass bottles of frothy white, all set to be delivered, and who laughed at the iron-head, which just made steam rise from the boy’s neck. He walked until he reached a big field, one he’d never seen before. Beyond it was a building. Glancing around, the ironhead crossed the field, lifting his little legs high to clear the tall patches of weeds, and the air was shifting smell now, it smelled bigger than the town did, pollen riding on wide open space, immigrant seedlings.

  When he reached the building he saw that it was an appliance shop. COME ON IN! it said on a sign in the window, so he reached high and opened the glass door and entered. This wasn’t a large store, but it was the largest he had ever seen, bright white with fluorescent light like the inside of a tooth. He walked down the four aisles slowly, hands in his pockets, passing blenders and sewing machines and vacuums and toasters. Finally he came across the assortment of irons in the middle of aisle three, and here he stopped. There were four or five different styles, some in boxes with photos on them, some freestanding, chin up. He settled himself down across from the irons and looked up at them. He imagined it was a family reunion. Hello, everybody. Nice to see you. He greeted his aunt, his uncle, his cousins. Reaching out, he took the boxes from the shelves one by one and set them in a semicircle around him. They were silent and price tagged and cold company. The ironhead sat there all day long, from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon, breathing a slow hush of steam, and no one in the store even talked to him. Finally the cashier’s boss entered, and when he found out how long the ironhead had been there, he called the police. “This is not a public park,” he said. “We are trying, after all, to make some money here.” In ten minutes, the cop car pulled up, and the two policemen walked over to the ironhead sitting quietly in aisle three trying to take that ever-elusive nap. One cop laughed out loud and the other pretended to pull out his gun in fake terror. “You never know what you’re going to see in this podunk town,” the laughing one said. “Got any wrinkles on your shirt there, mac?” His partner smirked. The ironhead leaned down and put his head on the white tile so that the boxes of irons rose over him like buildings.

  The cashier, who was not unkind, put in a call to the iron-head’s worried parents; they drove right on over, hurried in, hugged their son close. One of the policemen cracked a Halloween joke which made the mother livid but she was more concerned when she saw the half-moon of irons around her son’s head; she asked him what it meant on the drive home but he just shook his head, snuggling against her warm hip. That night, he lay in bed awake again, for the thousandth night of insomnia, listening to the sounds of his sisters and parents sleeping in the next rooms, which was the most lonesome sound in the world, and by morning was so exhausted, down to the root of his bone, that he begged to stay home from school. Because she loved him dearly, almost more so because he had been a complete and utter surprise, his mother gave him a good lunch of hot dogs and potato chips and chili and milk, set him in front of the TV with a blanket, and left for work herself.

  When she came home at five, her ironhead was dead. He was in front of the TV with his ironhead turned toward the sofa, away from the screen, and when he didn’t respond to her inquiries, she went to check on him, listening for his breath in its small steamy gasps, and she heard nothing coming out of him at all. She was so used to the slow steady hushed sound of his breathing that it was only the abrupt silence of him that convinced her he wasn’t there anymore. She crumpled by his side and held him close and cried and cried and when the little girls came home from soccer practice they didn’t know what to do and couldn’t stand to watch their mother crying like that and so they got mad at each other and screamed and kicked on the front lawn. The mother held her little ironhead close and his body felt cool and distant. She stroked down the plastic handle and when her husband came home she nearly fell against him.

  The doctor who came by that night to state the cause of death said that the ironhead had died of utter exhaustion, that it had nothing to do with the chili or the journey across the field or the iron in boxes or the laughing policemen. He weighed the iron and said that the weight of it was completely out of proportion with the rest of the body, and that it was frankly incredible that the boy had lived at all, carrying a head like that around all day. “This is rock-solid iron, and you can imagine-” he declared. The mother stood still as a stone; the father nodded slowly. The doctor didn’t finish his sentence, and bowed his head in the face of their grief. The pumpkinhead family buried the ironhead in the cemetery which was only a few blocks away, and at the funeral, children from the school filled buckets with dirt and then submerged them in dirt. A few well-meaning but thoughtless types brought irons to put on his grave, but the mother, her body taut and loosening at the same time, flung them as far away as she could, flying irons, until they crashed among the trees, shading boat-shaped imprints into the earth. One thrifty mourner secretly collected them and took them with her and sold them for half price back to the appliance shop where they crowded the aisle, chins up. The pumpkinhead family sat together at the cemetery and the mother kept uncovering dishes of warm food so she could release steam on his grave, because she wanted to give him voice, to give him breath again.

  For many weeks, all they ate were the casseroles brought by the neighbors. When they ran out of those, the mother went into the kitchen, gathered ingredients, and made spaghetti. She was slow and heavied, but she did it, and the family ate together that night: four. While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.

  Thirty years later when the girls were having their own children, they had mostly pumpkinheads, but the recessive gene did rear its head once more and the second daughter’s third child emerged with the head of a teapot. This seemed less difficult to live with than a pointy heavy head of iron and the teapothead child did just fine, made many friends, and slept without trouble. She breathed steam just like her uncle had, and so they sometimes called her ironhead as a pet name even though it didn’t fit. She was very good at soccer. The mother and father pumpkinhead still visited the cemetery regularly and sat there with their backs against the dates of their child’s birth and death and the mother said, “I can feel my head softening,” and the father said, “My shoulders are shrinking and my knuckles are growing,” and they sat with their heads orange globes against the gray stone and green grass and after a few hours walked home together.

  God put a gun to the writer’s head.

  I’m making a rule, said God. You can’t write another word or I’ll shoot you. Agreed? God had an East Coast accent, tough like a mobster, but his lined face was frail and ethereal.

  The writer agreed. He had a wife and family. He was sad because he loved words as much as he loved people, because words were the way he said what he wanted about people, but this was God and God was the real deal, and he didn’t want to spend too much time dwelling on it. So he packed up his typewriter and paper and tucked them in the hall closet, and within two days, to comfort his loss, went to the art supply store and bought oil paints and a canvas and a palette and set up in the garage among the old clothes and broken appliances. He’d always liked painting. He thought he had a good sense of color. He painted every morning for hours, until he started to paint something real.<
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  He was working on his eighteenth canvas, blues and browns in sharp rows blurring in the middle, making a confrontation with black, when God entered his studio, this time holding a dagger.

  Cut the painting too, said God. No words, no images. Or–He made a slicing motion near his stringy throat.

  Why? cried the painter, already missing the sharp smell of the oils, how the colors mixed to become brand new again, an exotic blush of yellow, a bluish gray, a new way to show trees, with white! He missed the slow time he took washing his hands with turpentine, the way his wife praised the new rugged scent of him.

  God lifted the dagger to the lightbulb of the garage and it glinted, unpolished silver, speckled with brown. Do not question God, said God.

  So the painter packed away his paints, inside that hall closet, next to the typewriter and reams of white paper. He felt a deep pang, but within a week signed up for a drama class, held in a church where the ceilings were high, the air cool, and every scene took on particular gravity with those stained-glass windows acting as set. He played a few roles, and he wasn’t very good at first but was enjoying it anyway, shy man that he was, liking the way he would feel his feeling and then use it and look around at the other people in the class, faces split into red-and-yellow triangles from the windows, and see they were feeling the same feeling with him, how contagious it all was. He needed a lot of reassurance as an actor but he was starting to understand its ultimate camaraderie and loneliness, the connection which is tight as laces then broken quick as the curtain’s fall.

  So of course one afternoon, walking out of the church, spanking a new script against his knee, he found God in the backseat of his car, gripping a bayonnet.

  No more, God said. In my house no less, said God.

  The actor started to cry. I love acting, he said. I’m just getting it right, he said. My wife thinks I’m coming out of my shell.

  God shook his head.

  Mime? the man pleaded.

  God poked the actor’s side with the sweet triangular tip of the bayonnet.

  The actor sat in the car, gripping the steering wheel, already missing the applause, the sight of the woman in the front row with tears in her eyes that were from the same pool of tears he’d visited to do the scene, the entire town fetching water from the same well.

  The actor was depressed for a while which his wife didn’t like much, but finally he slogged himself out of it and took up cooking. He studied the basics in the cookbook and told himself that patience was a virtue and would be put to good use here. Sure enough, in three months, he’d made his first soup from scratch-potato leek nutmeg-and it was very good. His wife loved it. You’re amazing, she told him in bed, his hands smelling of chicken guts; I married the most amazingly artistic man, she said.

  He kissed her. He’d made a dessert too and brought it into bed-a chocolate torte with peanut butter frosting. He kissed her again. After two bites the torte fell, unnoticed, to the floor.

  God was apparently busy, he took longer this time, but showed up after a big dinner party where the chef served leg of lamb with rosemary on a bed of wild rice with lemongrass chutney. It was a huge hit, and everyone left, drunk, gorgeous with flush, blessed. The chef’s wife went to the bathroom and guess who sauntered through the screen door, swinging a noose.

  No! moaned the chef, washing a dish. No!

  This is it, said God. Stop making beautiful food. What is with you?

  The chef hung his head. Then hung up his spoons in the cupboard with the typewriter, paints, playbooks and wigs. With the pens, turpentine, and volumes of Shakespeare. The shelf was getting crowded so he had to shove some towels aside to make room. He spent the week eating food raw from the refrigerator, and somehow found the will to dial up a piano teacher. But right when he glimpsed the way a chord works, how it fits inside itself, the most intricate and simple puzzle, when he heard how a fourth made him weep and a fifth made him soar, the cheerleading of C major, the birch trees of D minor, God returned with a baseball bat tucked into his belt.

  Don’t even think about it, barked God.

  Dance? Rifle.

  Architecture? Grenade.

  The man took a year off of life. He learned accounting. He was certain this would be no problem, but after a few weeks the way the numbers made truths about people’s lives was interesting to him; he tried law but kept beginning a duet with the jury; chemistry was one wonder after another; even the stock market reminded him of a wriggling animal, and so of course, the usual: pins near the eyes, the closing of the job doors, the removal of the name plaque, the repeated signing of the quitting papers.

  So the man sat in a chair. God had ordered him to stop talking, so he went to a park and just looked at people. A young woman was writing in a blank book under a tree; she was writing and writing, and he caught her eye and sent her waves of company and she kept his gaze and wrote more, looked up again, wrote more, circled his bench and sat down and when she asked him questions he said nothing but just looked at her more, and she stood and went away, got a drink at the water fountain, circled back. After an hour of this, she nodded to him, said Thank You, and left. The pathway of her feet looped to the bench and back and away and back, in swirls and lines.

  Shut your eyes! yelled God.

  The man’s wife was unhappy. She was doing all the cooking now and her husband didn’t move or speak anymore. She missed their discussions, his paintings, his stories, his pliés. She missed talking to him about her job with the troubled people, and how at certain moments there was an understanding held between her and the person, sitting there, crying or not crying, mad or not mad, happy or unhappy, bland or lively, and it was like, at that moment, she said, they were stepping all over a canvas together. It’s like, she said, the room is full of invisible beetles. Or faucets. Or pillows. Or concrete. She told him all about it and his eyes were closed but she could feel, from his skin, that he was listening. She went to him and undressed him slowly and they made love there on the sofa, and he hardly moved but just pressed his warmth to her, his body into hers, and she held him close and the man gave her all he could without speaking, without barely shifting, lips and hips, and she started to cry.

  Afterward she pressed her head to his chest and told him all the things she had thought about, the particular flower he made her feel, the blade, the chocolate torte.

  They slept on the sofa together.

  God put the man in a box with no doors or windows. He tied his hands behind his back and knotted a blindfold over his eyes. He stuck duct tape over his lips. God said: Not a peep out of you. Don’t you interact with anybody. The man sat with his head full of dreams. He thought of flying fish and the smell of his wife’s skin: white powder and clear sweat. He thought of basil breaking open and the drawing of a tomato with red and black paint and the word tomato, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, and the perfect taste of tomato with basil, and the rounded curve of a man’s back, buttons of spine visible. He wondered where the girl with the half-blank book was right then. He thought of his wife making bridges of air over air. He listened to the sound of wind outside the box, loud and steady as his breath.

  The next thing in the morning was the cast-iron pot full of potatoes. She had not ordered them and did not remember buying potatoes at the grocery store. She was not one to bake a potato. Someone must have come in and delivered them by accident. Once she’d woken to meadows full of sunflower bouquets all over her house in glass vases and they turned out to be for the woman next door. Perhaps the woman next door had a new suitor now, one who found something romantic in root vegetables.

  Our woman checked through her small house but it was empty as ever. She asked her neighbor, the one whose windows were still crowded with flowers, but the neighbor wiped her hands on a red-checkered cloth and said no, they were not for her, and she had not ordered any potatoes from the store either, as she grew her own.

  Back at the house, the potatoes smelled normal and looked normal but our wom
an did not want them around so she threw them in the trash and went about the rest of her day. She swept and squared and pulled weeds from her garden. She walked to the grocery store and bought milk. She was a quiet person, and spoke very few words throughout the afternoon: Thank You, Goodbye, Excuse Me.

  The next morning, when she woke up, the potatoes were back. Nestled, a pile of seven, in the cast-iron pot on the stove. She checked her trash and it looked as it had before, with a folded milk carton and some envelopes. Just no potatoes. She picked up all seven again, and took them across the road and pushed them one at a time into the trash Dumpster, listening as they thumped at the bottom of the bin.

  During the afternoon she walked past rows of abandoned cabins to her lover’s house. He was in his bedroom, asleep. She crawled into the bed with him and pushed her body against his until he woke up, groggy, and made love to her. She stared at the wall as the craving built bricks inside her stomach, and then she burst onto him like a brief rain in drought season. Afterward, she walked home, and he got ready for his night job of loading supplies into trucks and out of trucks. She stopped by the cemetery on the way home to visit her mother, her father, her brother. Hello mother, hello father, hello brother. Goodbye now.

  The next morning, the potatoes had returned. This time she recognized them by the placement of knots and eyes, and she could see they were not seven new potatoes, but the same seven she had, just the day before, thumped into the Dumpster. The same seven she had, just the day before that, thrown into the small garbage of her home. They looked a little smug. She tied them tight in a plastic bag and dropped them next door on the sunflower woman’s front stoop. Then she repotted her plants. For the rest of the day, she forgot all about them, but the next morning, the first thing she checked was that cast-iron pot. And what do you know. And on this day they seemed to be growing slightly, curving inward like big gray beans.