First, Body

by Melanie Rae Thon

  He doesn’t think about God or ask himself what he believes — he knows: he believes in her, in Gloria Luby, in the three-hundred-and-twenty-six-pound fact of her body. He is the last person alive who will touch her with tenderness.

  The others will have rubber gloves, and masks, and knives.

  So he is going to lift her, gently, her whole body, not her shoulders, then her torso, then her terrible bruised thighs. She’s not in pieces, not yet — she’s a woman, and he is going to lift her as a woman. He is going to move her from the gurney to the table with the strength of his love.

  He knows how to use his whole body, to lift from the thighs, to use the power of the back without depending on it. He crouches. It’s a short lift, but he’s made it harder for himself, standing between the gurney and the table. If he pressed them together, they’d almost touch — a man alone could roll her.

  He squats. He works his arms under her, surprised by the coolness of her flesh, surprised, already, by her unbelievable weight.

  For half a second, his faith is unwavering, and he is turning with her in his arms; they’re almost there, and then something shifts — her immense left breast slaps against his chest, and something else follows; her right arm slips from his grasp — and he knows, close as they are, they’ll never make it: an inch, a centimeter, a whole lifetime, lost. He feels the right knee give and twist, his own knee; he feels something deep inside tear, muscle wrenching, his knee springing out from under him, from under them. And still he holds her, trying to take the weight on the left leg, but there’s no way. They hit the gurney going down, send it spinning across the room. The pain in his knee is an explosion, a booby trap, a wire across a path and hot metal ripping cartilage from bone, blasting his kneecap out his pants leg.

  When they hit the floor, his leg twists behind him, and he’s howling. All three hundred and twenty-six pounds of Gloria Luby pin him to the cold concrete.

  She amazes him. She’s rolled in his arms so his face is pressed into her soft belly. The knee is wrecked. He knows that already, doesn’t need to wait for a doctor to tell him. Destroyed. He keeps wailing, though there’s no point, no one in that room but the woman on top of him, insisting she will not hear, not ever. There’s no one in the hallway, no one in the basement. There are three closed doors between Sidney Elliott and all the living.

  He has to crawl out from under her, has to prod and shove at her thick flesh, has to claw at her belly to get a breath. Inch by inch he moves, dragging himself, his shattered leg, across the smooth floor. He leaves her there, just as she is, face down, the lumpy mound of her rump rising in the air.

  Dr. Enos is trying not to smile while Sid explains, again, how it happened. Everyone smiles, thinking of it, Sid Elliott on the floor underneath Gloria Luby. They’re sorry about his leg, truly. It’s not going to be okay. There’ll be a wheelchair, and then a walker. In the end, he’ll get by with a cane. If he’s lucky. It’s a shame, Dr. Roseland tells him, to lose a leg that way, and Sid wonders if she thinks there are good ways to lose a leg. He remembers the boy on the table. He remembers all the boys. Are those my legs?

  He’s drifting in and out. He hears Roxanne laughing in the hallway. Then he sees her at the window, her mouth tight and grim as she sucks smoke.

  She wants to know if it’s worth it, the risk, the exchange: Gloria Luby’s dignity for his leg. The idea of her dignity. She laughs, but it’s bitter. She tells him he’s a failure; she tells him how they found Gloria Luby. It took six orderlies to get her on the slab. They grunted, mocking her, cursing him.

  He sleeps and wakes. Roxanne’s gone. Even her smoke is gone. He asks the nurse, a thin, dark-skinned man, Where is she? And the nurse says, Where’s who, baby? Nobody been here but you and me.

  His father stands in the corner, shaking his head. He can’t believe Sid’s come back from the jungle, nothing worse than shrapnel in his ass, only to get it from a three-hundred-pound dead woman in a hospital in Seattle. Three hundred and twenty-six, Sid says. What? Three hundred and twenty-six pounds. His father looks as if he wants to weep, and Sid’s sorry — not for himself, he’d do it again. He’s sorry for his father, who’s disappointed, and not just in him. He’s been standing in the closet in Sid’s old room all these years, sobbing in the musty dark, pressing his face into the soft rabbit fur. He’s been in the other room, in the summer heat, listening to Sid plead with Roxanne, Just let me lick you. He’s been in the kitchen, watching Sid’s mother fry pork chops, chop onions, mash potatoes. He’s tried to tell her something and failed. He’s stood there, silent in the doorway, while she and Sid sat at the table chewing and chewing. Now, at last, when he speaks to his son, he has nothing to tell him, no wisdom to impart, only a phrase to mutter to himself, What a waste, what a waste, and Sid knows that when he says it he’s not thinking of the leg. He wants to forgive his father for something, but the old man’s turned down his hearing aid. He looks befuddled. He says, What is it, Sid?

  The nurse shows him the button to press when the pain comes back. Straight into the vein, babe. No need to suffer. Just give yourself a little pop. Some people think they got to be strong, lie there sweating till I remind them. Not me, honey — you give me one of those, I’d be fine all the time. He grins. He has a wide mouth, bright teeth; he says, You need me tonight, honey, you just buzz.

  Gloria Luby lies down beside him. She tells him, I was exactly what they expected me to be. My brain was light, my liver heavy; the walls of my heart were thick. But there were other things they never found. She rolls toward him, presses herself against him. Her soft body has warmth but no weight. She envelopes him. She says, I’ll tell you now, if you want to know.

  The blond girl with the spikes on her jacket leans in the doorway. Outside, the rain. Behind her, the yellow light of the hall. She’s wearing her black combat boots, those ripped fishnets, a sheer black dress, a black slip. She says, Roxanne’s dead. So don’t give me any of that shit about risk. He turns to the wall. He doesn’t have to listen to this. All right then, she says, maybe she’s not dead. But I saw her — she don’t look too good.

  She comes into the room, slumps in the chair by the bed. She says, I heard all about you and that fat lady.

  She’s waiting. She thinks he’ll have something to say. She lights a cigarette, says, Wanna drag? And he does, so they smoke, passing the cigarette back and forth. She says, Roxanne thinks you’re an idiot, but who knows. She grinds the cigarette out on the floor, then stuffs the filter back in the pack, between the plastic and the paper. She says, Don’t tell anybody I was here.

  The nurse brings Sid a wet cloth, washes his face, says, You been talking yourself silly, babe.

  You know what I did?

  The nurse touches Sid’s arm, strokes him from elbow to wrist. You’re famous here, Mr. Elliott — everybody knows what you did.

  Roxanne sits on the windowsill. She says, Looks like you found yourself another sweetheart.

  Sid’s forehead beads with sweat. The pain centers in his teeth, not his knee; it throbs through his head. He’s forgotten the button on his IV, forgotten the buzzer that calls the nurse. Roxanne drifts toward the bed like smoke. She says, Does it hurt, Sid? He doesn’t know if she’s trying to be mean or trying to be kind. She says, This is only the beginning. But she presses the button, releases the Demerol into the tube. She stoops as if to kiss him but doesn’t kiss. She whispers, I’m gone now.

  Sidney Elliott stands in a white room at the end of a long hallway. He’s alone with a woman. He looks at her. He thinks, Nobody loved you enough or in the right way.

  In some part of his mind, he knows exactly what will happen if he lifts her, if he takes her home, but it’s years too late to stop.

  He tries to be tender.

  He prays to be strong.

  FATHER, LOVER, DEADMAN, DREAMER

  I WAS a natural liar, like my mother. One night she told my daddy she was going to the movies with her girlfriend Marlene. Drive-in, double feature, up in Kalispell. D
addy said, How late will you be? And my mother said she didn’t know.

  Hours later, we tried to find her. I remember my father hobbling from car to car while I sat in the truck. The faces on the screen were as big as God’s. Their voices crackled in every box. I was certain my mother was here, stunned and obedient. Huge bodies floated over the hill. They shimmered, lit from inside. This was how the dead returned, I thought, full of grace and hope.

  It was midnight. I was nine years old. By morning I understood my mother was five hundred miles gone.

  I remember the clumsy child I was. Bruises on my arms, scabbed knees. Boys chased me down the gully after school. I remember falling in the mud. They stole things I couldn’t get back, small things whose absences I couldn’t explain to my father now that we lived alone: a plastic barrette shaped like a butterfly, one shoelace, a pair of white underpants embroidered with the word Wednesday. I was Wednesday’s child. I wore my Tuesday pants twice each week, the second day turned inside out.

  Careless girl, the nuns said, immature, a dreamer. They told my father they had to smack my hands with a ruler just to wake me up.

  I was afraid of the lake, the dark water, the way rocks blurred and wavered, the way they grew long necks and fins and swam below me.

  I was afraid of the woods where a hunter had killed his only son. An accident, he said: the boy moved so softly in his deer-colored coat. When the man saw what he’d shot, he propped the gun between his feet and fired once more. He bled and bled. Poured into the dry ground. Unlucky man, he lived to tell.

  I was afraid of my father’s body, the way he was both fat and thin at the same time, like the old cows that came down to the water at dusk. Bony haunches, sagging bellies — they were pitiful things. Daddy yelled at them, waving his stick, snapping the air behind their scrawny butts. They looked at him with their terrible cow eyes. Night after night they drank all they wanted, shat where they stood. Night after night the stick became a cane, and my father climbed the path, breathing hard. He’d been a crippled child, a boy with a metal brace whose mother had had to teach him to walk a second time when he was six, a boy whose big sister lived to be ten. She drowned in air, chest paralyzed, no iron lung to save her. I thought it was this nightly failure, the cows’ blank eyes, that made my mother go.

  My daddy worked for a man twelve years younger than he was, a doctor with an orchard on the lake. We lived in the caretaker’s cottage, a four-room cabin behind the big house. Lying in my little bed, the one Daddy’d built just for me, I heard leaves fluttering, hundreds of cherry trees; I heard water lapping stones on the shore. Kneeling at my window, I saw the moon’s reflection, a silvery path rippling across the water. I smelled the pine of the boards beneath me, and the pines swaying along the road. Then, that foot-dragging sound in the hall.

  I remember the creak of the hinge, my father’s shape and the light behind him as he stood at my door. This was another night, years before the movie, another time my mother lied and was gone. He said, Get dressed, Ada, we have to go. He meant we had to look for her. He meant he couldn’t leave me here alone. I wore my mother’s sweater over my nightgown, the long sleeves rolled up.

  This time we drove south, down through the reservation, stopping at every bar. We drove past the Church of the Good Shepherd, which stayed lit all night, past huddled trailers and tarpaper shacks, past the squat house where two dogs stood at the edge of the flat tin roof and howled, past the herd of white plaster deer that seemed to flee toward the woods.

  We found my mother just across the border, beyond the reservation, in a town called Paradise, the Little Big Man Bar. Out back, the owner had seven junked cars. He called it his Indian hotel. For a buck, you could spend the night, sleep it off.

  My mother was inside that bar, dancing with a dark-skinned man. Pretty Noelle, so pale she seemed to glow. She spun, head thrown back, eyes closed. She was dizzy, I was sure. The man pulled her close, whispered to make her laugh. I swear I heard that sound float, my mother’s laughter weaving through the throb of guitar and drum, whirling around my head like smoke. I swear I felt that man, his hand on my own back, the shape of each finger, the sweat underneath my nightgown, underneath his palm.

  Then it was my father’s hand, clamping down.

  I am a woman now. I have lovers. I am my mother’s daughter. I dance all night. Strangers with black hair hold me close.

  I remember driving home, the three of us squeezed together in the truck. I was the silence between them. I felt my father’s pain in my own body, as if my left leg were withered, my bones old. Maybe I was dreaming. I saw my mother in a yellow dress. She looked very small. A door opened, far away, and she stumbled through it to a field of junked cars.

  The windows in the truck were down. I was half in the dream, half out. I couldn’t open my eyes, but I knew where we were by smell and sound: wood fires burning, the barking of those dogs.

  I remember my prayers the morning after, boys lighting candles at the altar, my mother’s white gloves.

  Green curtain, priest, black box — days later I was afraid of the voice behind the screen, soft at first and then impatient, what the voice seemed to know already, what it urged me to tell. I was afraid of stained glass windows, saints and martyrs, the way sunlight fractured them, the rocks they made me want to throw.

  Sometimes my father held me on his lap until I fell asleep. He stroked my hair and whispered, So soft. He touched my scraped shin. What happened, Ada, did you fall down? I nodded and closed my eyes. I thought about the boys, the gully, the things they stole. I learned that the first lie is silence. And I never told.

  Then I was a girl, twelve years old, too big for my father’s lap. I dove from the cliffs into the lake. I told myself the shapes waffling near the bottom were only stones.

  I played a game in the woods with my friend Jean. We shot each other with sticks and fell down in the snow. We lay side by side, not breathing. My chest felt brittle as glass. If I touched my ribs, I thought I’d splinter in the cold. The first one to move was the guilty father. The first one to speak had to beg forgiveness of the dead son.

  I worked for the doctor’s wife now. My mother’s words hissed against those walls. I knew the shame she felt, how she hated that house, seeing it so close, getting down on her knees to wax its floors, how she thought it was wrong for an old man like my father to shovel a young man’s snow.

  But Daddy was glad the snow belonged to someone else. That doctor had nothing my father wanted to own. He said, The cherry trees, they break your heart. He meant something always went wrong: thunderstorms in July; cold wind from Canada; drought. I remember hail falling like a rain of stones, ripe fruit torn from trees. I remember brilliant sunlight after the storm, glowing ice and purple cherries splattered on the ground. My father knelt in the orchard, trying to gather the fruit that was still whole.

  Then I was sixteen, almost a woman. I went to public school. I knew everything now. I refused to go to mass with my father. I said I believed in Jesus but not in God. I said if the father had seen what he’d done to his child, he would have turned the gun on himself. I thought of the nuns, my small hands, the sting of wood across my palms. I remembered their habits, rustling cloth, those sounds, murmurs above me, that false pity, poor child, how they judged me for what my mother had done.

  I knew now why my mother had to go. How she must have despised the clump and drag of my father’s steps in the hall, the weight of him at the table, the slope of his shoulders, the sorrow of his smell too close. He couldn’t dance. Never drank. Old man, she said, and he was. Smoking was his only vice, Lucky Strikes, two packs a day, minus the ones I stole.

  He tried not to look at me too hard. I was like her. He saw Noelle when I crossed my legs or lit my cigarette from a flame on the stove.

  He gave me what I wanted — the keys to his truck, money for gas and movies, money for mascara, a down vest, a cotton blouse so light it felt like gauze. He thought if I had these things I wouldn’t be tempted to steal. He th
ought I wouldn’t envy the doctor’s wife for her ruby earrings or her tiny cups rimmed with gold. Still, I took things from her, small things she didn’t need: a letter opener with a silver blade and a handle carved of bone; a silk camisole; oily beads of soap that dissolved in my bathwater and smelled of lilac. I lay in the tub, dizzy with myself. The dangerous knife lay hidden, wrapped in underwear at the bottom of my drawer. Next to my skin, the ivory silk of the camisole was soft and forbidden, everything in me my father couldn’t control.

  The same boys who’d chased me down the gully took me and Jean to the drive-in movies in their Mustangs and Darts. Those altar boys and thieves who’d stolen my butterfly barrette pleaded with me now: Just once, Ada — I promise I won’t tell.

  I heard Jean in the back seat, going too far.

  Afterward, I held her tight and rocked. Her skin smelled of sweet wine. I said, You’ll be okay. I promise, you will.

  I am a woman now, remembering. I live in a trailer, smaller than my father’s cottage. I am his daughter after all: there’s nothing I want to own. I drive an old Ford. I keep a pint of whiskey in the glovebox, two nips of tequila in my purse. I don’t think I know as much as I used to know. I sit in the car with my lights off and watch my father, the slow shape of him swimming through the murky light of his little house. He’s no longer fat and thin. It scares me, the way he is thin alone. He’s had two heart attacks. His gallbladder and one testicle are gone. In January, the doctors in Spokane opened his chest to take pieces of his lungs. Still he smokes. He’s seventy-six. He says, Why stop now?

  I smoke too, watching him. I drink. I tell myself I’m too drunk to knock at the door, too drunk to drive home.