by Tara Ison
Also By Tara Ison
A Child Out of Alcatraz
The List
Rockaway
Reeling Through Life
Copyright © 2015 Tara Ison
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ison, Tara.
[Short stories. Selections]
Ball: stories / Tara Ison.
pages;cm
ISBN 978-1-59376-622-1
I. Title.
PS3559.566A6 2015
813›.54—dc23
2015011962
Cover design by Kelly Winton
Interior design by Domini Dragoone
Author photo © Michael Powers
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.softskull.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10987654321
e-bookISBN978-1-61902-682-7
for Theda
CONTENTS
Cactus
Ball
Bakery Girl
Wig
The Knitting Story
Staples
Needles
Apology
Fish
Musical Chairs
Multiple Choice
CACTUS
I haven’t left the apartment in nine months. My current boyfriend, Paul, has tried. He’s tried to lure me outside with tickets to the Hollywood Bowl or the Greek, lobster dinners on the Santa Monica Pier, a drive to the outlet mall in Camarillo for shoes. He combs LA Weekly in search of compelling events. He seeks to entice me with unmuggy, azure-skied days, with dove-gray rain days, with his twilight-walk-on-the-beach idea of romance. He brought me a kite, a neon-lime rhombus with an optimistic mile of spooled nylon string, and proposed Laguna Beach. He bought me a pair of rollerblades, then he bought me a Jet Ski. Actually, his parents bought it, for both of us. But his parents have always liked me. Paul thinks going outside will be good for me, scrub off dull cells of skin, freshen my blood, inspire bloom. You need some sun, he says hopefully, light and fresh air. A change of atmosphere. You’re pale. You need to go outside. He talks about the necessary vitamin D absorption from ultraviolet rays. He cajoles, pleads, pouts, but in the end I give him shopping lists, and he comes back with everything I’ve asked for.
I don’t need to go outside. My computer is right there on my desk, and my work, mail, contact, come to me. Light and sky, a vertical swatch of the Hollywood Hills, all find me through the faux-bay window in the living room. I can plant myself safely in the window seat I rigged up and look out, see pavement, Laurel Avenue, cars, the street cleaner on Tuesday mornings, a sleeping ceramic child and the ugly, treacherous, stolen cactus in our small plot of front yard. Paul has refused to water the cactus, thinking that will get me to rise, but I remind him: It’s a cactus. Go on, withhold water. It’ll just mock us. It’ll outlive us both. Just try to master it, and, more likely, you’ll be the one to get hurt.
This cactus stabbed me once, so I know what I’m talking about.
JOSH, MY FORMER boyfriend, dug the cactus out of the ground in front of me on our only trip to the Mojave Desert. He had a job leading overnight hiking excursions for junior high and high school kids. He had a stock of whistles and white cotton French Foreign Legion–style caps. He’d drive a herd of bored, sweating students out to places like Death Valley, Anza-Borrego, Indian Canyon, in a renovated bus donated by the L.A. City School District, and explain how crashing tectonic plates thrust up the mountains and granite shafts, how melting glaciers once filled the basins with lakes, about global warming patterns and elevation and evolving ecosystems, how the water burrowed itself deeper underground as if looking to hide while harsh, parching winds swept soil into dunes. He showed them bedrock worn down and exposed like picked-clean bones. He taught them about the Pleistocene Pinto people, and the Serrano Indians who lived on pinyon nuts, cactus fruit, and mesquite beans, wove sandals and baskets from the shredded, curly fibers of Mojave yucca, and left behind their pottery and rock paintings. He explained how explorers a hundred years ago dammed up the last trickles of water, plundered the desert for gold, and left a honeycomb of mines. He pointed out arroyos, playas, and alluvial fans baked down to dust, the stump of a basalt volcano, aplite and gneiss glinting in the sun. At dusk he showed them emerging kangaroo rats and desert iguanas and burrowing owls, explained how roadrunners get all the moisture they need from the bodily fluids of reptiles, insects, and rodents they eat, taught them how every desert animal has adapted in body shape or metabolism or special skill to hang on to its place as predator or prey. At night he and his students would all lie in their mummy bags under the black celestial dome, undimmed by any fake municipal glow, and watch the elliptic path of the planets, the zodiacal chase of stars. It’s the vastness of it all, he would always tell them, me, sounding drug-fried or stupid, neither of which he is. His favorite word, vast—vast desert, landscape, atmosphere, universe, space. Earth: a core of rock, a crumbled mantle, a thin forsaken crust, and a mere us between it and the vast and boundless sky. He said it was the vastness that got to them every time, what they succumbed to, the letting go of small things, but I know what got to them was him. I pictured the cynical, trooping teenagers rolling their eyes, elbowing each other, then finally cracking smiles. I pictured them losing their cool urban sheaths and succumbing to his desert varnish, his energized mirage, his pulse. Succumbing to this oasis of a person. He said it was the vastness that got to them, but I know that’s what got to him, rooted him, somehow made him feel peace. I didn’t get it. All that quiet just sounded lonely to me. The idea of succumbing to all that space made me feel aimless and lost. I could never understand why he’d want to feel so insignificant.
I USED TO watch him pack for his trips. He’d squeeze one spare everything into a small duffel bag and reel off the desert’s vast beauties he couldn’t wait to get back to, while in my head I listed ways he might get hurt. A blistering third-degree burn, despite the sunblock. Heatstroke, despite the cap. The skull-splitting fall from a rock. A flash flood while he slept. In my mind he’d go to retrieve a student who’d wandered into a forbidden, abandoned mine, only to have it collapse on top of him in a thundering billow of rock. He always packed a topographic map and compass, but I suspected he’d get lost one day in the pirouetting cactus–boulder–cow skull, cactus–boulder–cow-skull backdrop of the cartoon Southwest. I’d watch him load the bus with plastic five-gallon barrels of water—I want you guys guzzling two gallons per person per day, I’d hear him warn students on the phone in his teacher’s voice, you gotta replace that sweat!—and think: evaporation, dehydration. I pictured him desperately sucking a chunk of cactus. I pictured him writhing with heat cramp. He always packed a shovel, in case the bus got mired in sand, and I’d picture a fresh-dug desert grave, his body wrapped in the shiny green Hefty bags he took along for trash and already melting into his skin in the sun. He had a cooler the size of a steamer trunk packed with food and bricks of ice, and I’d think: starvation, botulism. The first aid kit didn’t reassure me; it confirmed my fears. There were desert tarantulas and desert snakes, and I’d watch him sharpen his jackknife and scissors and imagine him coming back in a limp, drained stagger, his
body marked with a cross where some student had X’d over a fanged puncture to suck out and spit the poison from his blood. Every time he came home, a mere him, hair burned a lighter blond, his fruit-leather skin covered in a gritty sweat and his nape bright as tomato from having loaned his neck-flap cap to a student too arrogant to bring his own, I’d busy myself with a special dinner, something cool with mint and cucumber, draw him a tepid bath, bustle and fuss all to avoid a hysteric relief at having him return okay. Each time he came back unhurt I stockpiled the fear, carried it over to the next time, weighed the increase of odds that meant nothing bad had happened yet and so next time, of course, it would.
When we were first together, he’d always asked me to go along. When we were first together I wasn’t scared at all, and I always shrugged and said No, I don’t feel like it, I’m not much of an outdoors person, You go, we’re not joined at the hip, You go, we’re going to grow old together, right?, plenty of time, You go, we don’t have to do everything together, we don’t have to share all the same interests, right? Plus the lack of privacy, the adolescent throng, the harsh and lunar-sounding landscape, the herding and the rules—bag up and ziplock your toilet paper, you guys, leave no trace!—always made it sound more like work than play. And I didn’t want to be part of his work, just one more thing he had to pack and take along. I wanted to carry more weight than that. But then after a while I thought maybe if it was just us two. I wasn’t seeing him that much. He was being successful and busy at his job, scheduling extra excursions. That’s what’s so great about you, Holly, he’d say to me, leaving, You’re so independent. He was away a lot of weekends, then a lot of weekdays, too, and getting an edgy, cramped look sometimes when he was home. So I finally suggested it, my going with him and just us two, and he wanted to know why I’d changed my mind. He wanted to know what I possibly thought I’d get out of it. You’re not very adaptable, Holly, he mumbled into my neck one night over the whir of the window fan. And I said See? That’s the point, I don’t understand the appeal. This will expand my horizon. But when I said that I realized it was his horizon that worried me; his was getting too big and far away for me to be more than a speck in it. A mere me. I was a dot on his landscape, and I wanted to be a vast and boundless thing for him. I wanted him to succumb to me. I went to the outlet mall and bought hiking boots, a special sunscreen with alpha hydroxy. But by that time I wasn’t just worried, I was also getting scared, for him, and he had stopped asking me to go.
Then one bland, humid Friday morning last April, the phone rang with someone telling me that weekend’s excursion to Joshua Tree was called off due to an outbreak of flu at some East L.A. junior high. Josh was outside loading the bus and, when I told him, got his edgy, penned-up animal look, the one that says let me out.
Shit, he said. He sighed, regarded the bus a moment. Then he turned back to me. Okay, let’s go. We’ll go, just us two.
Now? I said.
I’m packed up. I have the permit. It’s April. I can’t stay here all weekend, he said, gesturing at the street and pavement. He had refused to plant grass on our little front plot, saying lawn in Los Angeles was an environmental insult. I’d thought maybe just a rose bush would be nice, but instead we had a found-rock garden. We’d spot lost-looking rocks in alleys or streets, bring them home. At first I’d thought it was fun, kitschy, but today the rocks just looked forced. Horns honked down on Sunset Boulevard; there was a siren’s rise and ebb, a jet, a helicopter’s anxious drone, the hot gasp of wetted city cement, the smell of exhaust.
What’s the problem, Holly? he said. You said you wanted to go.
I saw us going back inside the apartment where it was safe and where he didn’t want to be, saw spending a weekend together, just us two, with four walls and a roof and a window unit that cooled and filtered air. Then I saw him saying I’ll go, I’ll just go myself, and then going by himself. Leaving me in favor of all those dangers. Wandering off and never coming back. I saw the snake venom coursing through and no one ready with a knife; I saw him dead from exposure and no one there to dig his grave. I saw turkey vultures swooping in to pick his bones clean. This wasn’t him wanting to leave me, I realized with relief; this was him needing me. This was him not wanting to get hurt, not wanting to be alone, not wanting to let go. Wanting to let me in to fill up all his precious space.
I went inside and put on my boots and sunblock. We transferred mummy bags and shovel and cooler and first aid kit and wheelbarrow and gallons of water from the school bus to his truck, left Hollywood, and drove a few hours east from Los Angeles along the 10, where the world went dull and beige, full of highway and dirt without nap, tired motels and shopping malls and hamburger drive-thrus collapsed at the foot of mountains as if dumped off cliffs. Then, somewhere beyond the turnoff for Palm Springs, higher and higher up and farther on Route 62, the dunnish air cleared and the Mojave Desert slowly unrolled into lucid bloom. Magentas, lemons, purples, oranges, whites, from the horizon to us, a sudden extravagance, and the wind-snap of sage, nectar, honest rock, succulent air.
See? he said. April.
I pictured it all dead, I said.
It’s never dead. It looks dead in fall and winter, sometimes, when a lot of it’s dormant. But then it all explodes.
I took off my boots and hung my feet out the window, so my toes could breathe. I leaned back against him, and he put his arm around me, poked his nose in my ear. He kissed my throat and said, See?
Yes, I said.
No, look, a Joshua tree, he said, pointing.
We were passing a lanky, trunked thing, its branches outstretched in stiff torsion, each one ending in a tuft of spines. We passed another one, then three.
Joshua trees, he said. This is the only place in the world they live. And they live hundreds of years. The Mormons called them that. They drove out in their wagons to California and suddenly saw all of these and said they looked like Joshua, his arms up, welcoming them to the Promised Land.
He slowed the truck. The tree didn’t look like a welcoming prophet to me. Its trunk was covered in spikes scaled like a chain mail of daggers. The raised branch-arms looked deformed. It looked like an armored soldier with boiling oil poured down his back, caught in the first moment of panicked, agonized cringe.
We passed more, and then many, and then they were everywhere. It was a whole field of trapped and seared Joshuas trying desperately to grip the sky, shaking twisted, crippled fists at God.
WE STOPPED AT the Oasis Visitor Center in Twentynine Palms. Josh registered the truck at the backcountry board while I examined glass jars of jewel-colored cactus marmalades, cactus pickles, cactus candy. The labels showed a thorny cactus fruit split in half, revealing tender, pulpy insides. I bought granola bars and another half-liter bottle of water and leafed through a book called Common Cacti of the Southwest.
Look, I said to him, showing. I’m learning all about cacti. We should get this.
Holly, he said. He took the book from me and put it back. You’re here. You don’t need a book to show you here.
All right, you teach me.
Just be patient. He smiled at me as I tore the wrapper off a chocolate chip granola bar and ate it. You have to be patient in the desert, Holly. Give it up.
Before leaving, we walked up close to a smallish Joshua tree. A woodpecker rapped at a branch. Josh showed me wrens nesting in the tree’s topmost spines and thumbnail moths collecting pollen from the blossom clusters, laying eggs. He nudged a toppled, decaying limb with his foot; a kangaroo rat scuttled away, and termites surged.
It’s the perfect ecosystem, he said in his teacher’s voice. All in itself. The living tree is food and home for birds and insects and rodents. And then even when it’s dead, it’s food and home. The energy just keeps cycling, being transformed. There’s life everywhere, if you just look for it.
Oh, God, I said, ducking. In front of me was a fat lizard impaled on a spike through its belly. Hanging on a low Joshua tree branch I almost walked into. Its sleepy l
izard eyes were just starting to crust; flies buzzed.
Who would do that? I asked.
A shrike, probably, he said. Or a hawk. Saving it for dinner.
I thought the desert was so peaceful, I said.
No, the desert is so honest, he said.
He saw a bit of trash nearby, a dirty paper flap. He picked it up and tossed it along with my granola bar wrapper into the forest-green Hefty bag in the bed of the truck. He’d brought along a whole collection of plastic bags, from tiny ziplock to body-bag size. Leave no trace.
I screamed at the stab to my leg. Josh always camped with his students at official sites with tables and fire grates, but he’d wanted the two of us out in the middle of nowhere. And there we were, only us and the desert and a sere, planeless sky. We’d parked the truck and put on our French Foreign Legion caps and hiked hot silent miles into the wild brush from the road, as requested by park rules for “wilderness camps.” The Joshua trees had thinned out as we went farther east. We’d passed rock formations that looked like animals and gourds and human skulls, hiked across bajadas and around granite outcrops. Josh pointed out iguana, skulking coyote, rabbits, squirrels. Desert dandelions and mallow, flame-tipped ocotillo, beavertail, prickly pear. He was walking ahead of me, pushing water and supplies in the small wheelbarrow; he’d told me to walk behind, to obliterate the wheel’s track.
Tire marks can live out here for years, he’d said. And they don’t belong here. Scars in the desert heal slowly.
Thank you, teacher, I said. But my footsteps don’t belong here, either. Don’t footsteps count as scars?
We wove our way through creosote bushes and gray-green cactus scrub, breathing hostile air that heated, dusted, and dried my lungs, when I felt my leg seized by sudden hot pierces in the flesh of my right calf, just above my boot. I shrieked. A cylindrical piece of gray-green cactus half a foot long clung to my leg as if Velcro’d, its spines lodged in my skin.
