Ball

by Tara Ison

  I see his sensitive, devoted hand ceaselessly on her leached-out skin, her toneless body.

  Caressing her glorious, extravagant, interminable hair. Stroking her, undyingly.

  It really should have been me.

  “ . . . yeah, maybe this really did the trick,” I hear her say.

  There’s a chuckle. She’s fussing with her wig, she’s been talking this whole time.

  “All the others were a lie. Trying to be someone else. This is really what I wanted.”

  “This one is perfect,” I tell her. “It’s you. The perfect you.”

  “I want to be wearing it, you know. In the box. Promise me?”

  “I promise you.”

  “And you have to check my eyebrows are all right.”

  “I promise. The eyebrows, and I’ll be sure you have it on.”

  She examines a lock. “I got yogurt in it. I want it to be all pretty and clean. You’ll make sure, okay? Even when it gets crazy?”

  “Give it to me now. I’ll wash it now. We have that special shampoo.” The clock is ticking, I think.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Please,” I say. “It’s what friends are for.”

  “Would you close the door? The boys . . .” She fusses with her Comfy Grips and gently slips the wig off with practiced care. “Going out in style,” she says.

  She hands it over to me, carefully, and I picture the remote, yielding nuns surrendering their precious and painstaking sacrifice. She’s all stripped down to scalp and skull now, illusionless, fetal and wizened. She’s no empress, no Cadillac, no queen, just a drained sack of festering skin and I’m the only one able to see it, spot the patches of sweat on the burgundy satin dress, really know the ugly, bald truth about her. She’s hideous, but everyone else will eternally see only the beautiful fake. I imagine her lying serene in her casket, flushed clean and perfectly groomed, an abiding Nefertiti or Cleopatra.

  “Be careful,” she says.

  Do it, be unabashed, be bold.

  “I promise,” I repeat.

  I take the wig into the bathroom with me, close the door. I run the water in the sink. I open the medicine cabinet, still and forever announcing I love you, find the tweezers. I close the toilet lid and sit, cross one leg over the other, take her hair in my hand, her perfect and healthy and human black hair and I begin to tweeze. I pluck each thick, glossy fake strand out by its fake root and let them drift hair by hair by hair down to the cold white tile floor.

  THE KNITTING STORY

  She knits as a clumsy, pudge-fingered child, because her mother loves to tell her the once-upon-a-time story of knitting socks for her college boyfriend, painstaking argyle-diamond wool socks for the princely young man who carelessly thrust his foot through the sock toe after all that labor the mother did to show and prove her love, because that was how. She knits because her mother is at a luncheon or antiques show or mahjongg and Can’t the child occupy and entertain herself, and so after school the child trudges to the craft shop and spends her allowance coins on a Let’s Get Knitting! booklet, and fuzzy pink yarn like a long bubble gum worm, and a pair of pointy twig-thick needles she is a little frightened of, because if you walk around with them and trip you could poke out an eye, and on the floor of her canopy-bed bedroom she teaches herself how to cast on, how to loop little nooses of yarn through other loops, scoop the alive loop through and let the old loop fall away and die, loop loop loop, your rows like little crooked corn fields growing, and then you cast off and are done and look what you have made and can do, ta-da!

  She knits gifts for her mother—a potholder, a hot pad, a long tubular scarf, everything a wormy fuzz pink—because that is how, and her mother exclaims with joy at their sweet misshapenness and spills bloody meat juice on the hot pad and scorches the potholder and cannot wear the scarf because of its so beautiful but impractical color but is so very proud and What else can the child make, What else can she do?

  She knits because she grows absorbed by the taming of chaotic string into structure, the geometry of a messy line turned to a tidy grid, and her fingers slim to deft and she buys slenderer needles and more elegant yarn and her after-schools and weekends are now so very busy herself, in her room with all those squares. Square, square, square, a big gifty pile of them, this is what she can make and do.

  She knits because it is precious of her, because grown-ups find this little knitting girl adorable.

  She knits because her best friend in high school has prettier ringlet hair and wears girlier, more impractical shoes, and so she teaches her best friend how to cast on and loop loop and cast off, and they both make the now-perfect potholders, the precise hot pads, the scarves that lie flat, and then the best friend goes away to an expensive college in an icy state and returns at her first Christmas holiday with magical sweaters, glorious garments with plackets and cables and set-in-sleeves and stitches like vines and popcorns and the holey appearance of lace that everyone goes ooh and aah for, and the best friend explains it is not enough to just Let’s Get Knitting!, the same childish stitches over and over again for row after row gets you nothing but a pile of meaningless squares that no one wants or loves, you must follow a pattern in order to create an actual ooh and aah thing, and she is angry and ashamed the prettier, better-shoed, and effortless-at-everything best friend had understood this and she had not.

  She knits to perform the trickery with cable needles and yarn overs and ribbing and moss stitch and basket weave. She knits to tame sloppy loose skeins into tidy submissive balls in her hands, at her feet. She knits to exhibit mastery. She knits in public, at coffeehouses and airports and parties, her crafty hands blurred with speed, and people look in approving wonder at her industriousness, her occupying and entertaining herself, her un-idle hands, no lazy devil’s handmaiden, she.

  She knits because she can rip out what is imperfect and do frogging, the unraveling of the completed or semi-completed thing to an again loose scribble, because you rip it rip it rip it out, like the ribbiting frog, who is only an ugly sticky frog and not the perfect prince and then you can start all over.

  She knits because her kneaded dough will not rise into a proper loaf.

  She knits because it frightens her to read.

  She knits because she doesn’t understand calculus.

  She knits for the first grown-up man she falls in love with, a damaged man whose flattering cruelty sends her to study a library of patterns, swatch multiple yarns, debate even in her sleep the best fiber content and thickness, because the right sweater will heal him, the correct cotton merino or cotton cashmere or cashmere merino blend will basket-weave and moss-stitch and cable this man to her, the ribbing will cleave him unto her and keep her at his side, because look at this, her handmade healing labor of love, so she obsesses over this yarn’s slight scratch and will it irritate him or keep him sensitized to her, or that yarn’s lack of elasticity and will it make of her precious gift a saggy and shapeless thing? She knits because his flattering cruel attentions are trickling hourglass sand, his growing coolness stiffens her fingers, and so she knits faster and even faster like the princess in the fairy story who races to knit sweaters out of stinging nettles for her twelve beloved brothers turned into swans from a witch’s curse and thus turn them back again before they are stuck that unmanly swan way forever, knitting with bleeding fingers to save them into complete-again princes by this show of her love. She knits feverishly, her fingertips pricked into splits, but the sand-gritty time’s-up man carelessly thrusts her away before she can finish the last magic stitch, like the fairy-tale princess ran out of time and had one sweater with only one sleeve for the swan brother who would now be stuck with one wing instead of an arm forever, and she is consumed with guilt and fury at her failure to craft the perfect healing thing in time, and so she frogs the finished sweater, erasingly, wishing a witch’s curse on him, an eternal hair shirt of stinging nettles, a next-in-line indifferent and cruel woman who will brutally cripple and leave him an open
, forever-after wound.

  She knits wedding-present blankets for fiancé’d friends, the Victoriana-flowered or fisherman-Aran afghans to adorn the feet of marital beds or drape across the Mission sofas in the den or warm their couples’ embrace. She knits to soak the DNA from her sweaty fingers into their lives, as they TV cuddle or fuck or share nighttime tales of their tedious stitched-up lives.

  She knits because she doesn’t like the smell of children.

  She knits because she is afraid of her career.

  She knits because she is not allergic to cats.

  She knits for another man, who is gentle and loving and neither frog nor prince, and she grows impatient knitting for the pattern of his gentle lovingness, she knows nothing she knits will shape him well or into the right thing, so she stealthily unravels her work by night like Penelope’s secret unweaving to forestall the choice of a suitor, but by day she keeps on knitting for the gentle loving man, because that is what you do, that is how. She knits like the spider at the center of the web disdains the ensnared fly even as it feeds, she knits in her mind while the gentle loving man makes love to her and she comes only when she imagines herself stabbing her shiny needles into his soft flesh, into the wet, submissive ball of his heart, and so she hurries to cast him off and away before she destroys him with her hateful, unmagical knitting for real.

  She knits for pregnant friends’ future joys, knits whimsical pea pod snugglies and pumpkin hats and the treacle-pink or frozen-waste blue or gender-neutral blankies to be soon covered in apple juice vomit and leaked urine. She knits for the ooh and aah baby shower moment of applause, and then it is time for the next, less-wondrous gift to be opened, and she knits to pity them all.

  She knits while watching a television program about people who choose to be cast away on a desert island and contest with each other in mock tribes to remain there, cast away and useful to their tribe in some mysterious strategy for survival, and she knows she would knit hammocks from palm frond strings so everyone might sleep hammock’d up and away from the sand fleas and snakes and rats, she would knit to keep everyone else clothed, she would knit nets to catch fish, and then when all her tribal friends were well slept and fed and clothed and warm, they would cast her away, cast her off, throw her in a volcano and be rid of her forever.

  She knits vests for the shivering, soapy penguins newly cleansed of oil spill oil, because she is nurturing.

  She knits sweaters for the naked baby pandas in a Chinese zoo nursery because she is internationally engaged.

  She knits a cardigan for her elderly father, who is already shrinking and shivering inside his closet of clothes meant for a full- and warm-muscled man, but she knits slowly, for she knows once the sweater is finished he will be, too, so she knits stitch by stitch as if patiently teaching a clumsy, pudge-fingered child she doesn’t have, until there are no more stitches to stitch and she wraps her father’s loose bones in the sweater and buries him in it, because that is how.

  She knits security blankets of bargain-bin yarn for homeless abandoned infants, because she is maternal.

  She knits chemo caps soft as kitten bellies for brave, hair-shedding friends with translucent skin, because she is supportive and merciful.

  She knits because studies show knitting reduces the risk of dementia, and she will not become a fogged, unraveling person who must rely on mocking, merciless tribal friends for survival.

  She knits until her hands are swollen and carpal tunneled into witchy old-lady knuckle knobs, into burning nerves. She knits into numbness, into scrim.

  She knits and knits like Madame Defarge in her chair, content in the breeze of the guillotine blade, knits until she feels the blood has risen warm to her ankles and it is suddenly, surprisingly, her turn now, sees she has blindly knitted herself into the wooly smothering thing that will bag her own cold, twiggy bones, and that is all she has ever made, or done.

  STAPLES

  My boyfriend’s other girlfriend is at his home in his bed right now, with staples in her scalp. This time was a brow lift. The doctor slit her scalp from ear to ear at the hairline, hitched up an inch or so of face and forehead, and stapled the skin seam shut. My boyfriend demonstrated this to me in the Japanese restaurant, sliding his hands across my own scalp, under my hair to the roots, my ears mashed flat against his palms. He made kachunk noises as he pantomimed the stapling. Then he blew a strand of my hair from the manila folder next to his plate of sashimi. He’d called that afternoon to tell me to meet him, that he could get out for a few evening hours, that I should wear a shortish skirt, and that I should download the treatment for his new screenplay he’d attach in an e-mail, take it to the copy place, and bring him ten copies of it at dinner. The manila folder holds the original. He gives the copies to friends, for feedback. Right now, his girlfriend thinks he’s copying. She’s lying in his bed, swollen, bruised, in pain, icepacks chilling the tiny stainless-steel clips, thinking he’s off at the copy place to make ten copies of his treatment, but instead he’s eating pricey sashimi with me, stretching the smooth skin of my face up by my ears and hair to illustrate her, and making loud kachunk noises as he knuckles a stapled line across my scalp.

  On the floor next to me is the stack of treatments. Also, a plastic grocery bag. He’d called me back to tell me to pick up a few things. After the copy place, he’d told her, he would stop at the market. I was to pick up milk, bread, orange juice, broccoli, cooked chicken breasts from the deli counter. Everything organic. Toilet paper. Whole-grain bread.

  Oh, and fruit, he’d called back a third time to whisper. She wants some fruit. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you back.

  That’s okay, I whispered back, I have to go to the store anyway.

  I didn’t want my dad to overhear I was doing this, buying groceries for my boyfriend. He’s never liked my boyfriends, but I know it’s just paternal gut reaction, all the worry. It isn’t that he doesn’t trust me—I’ve had his Visa card since I was fifteen, he trusts me to be smart and use it wisely for whatever I need, that I won’t abuse the privilege.

  I shift away and twirl a finger at the waitress, indicating I’d like more sake. My boyfriend is twenty-six but always gets carded. I never do, for some reason, although I’m only almost twenty-one.

  I wonder if the girlfriend will like the organic Fuji apples I selected, the juice with calcium and D and extra pulp. The expensive, brand-name juice I always buy for her. My boyfriend never keeps these kinds of things in the house on his own, for himself or me, only for her, for when she comes to town to get work done, and then to him, to heal. She lives near San Jose with an eight-year-old daughter she’d had on the teetering edge of being too old, and after acting failed, whom she refuses to raise amid the glitz and decay of Los Angeles. The daughter, my boyfriend has told me, goes to stay with her father when the mother is here, the ex-husband. The mother has been here a total of twenty-three weeks in the past two years, I calculate, the same two years I’ve been with my boyfriend, to undergo then recuperate from the work on fatty eye deposits, liposuction on tummy and hips, collagen injections, breast augmentation, facial chemical peel, and the current brow lift, which means the little girl has spent those same twenty-three weeks with her father, the ex-husband. I feel sorry for the little girl, her mother leaving so much. But it’s probably a special treat to spend that time with her father. I imagine he takes her on Ferris wheels at carnivals, clumsily braids her hair and ties bows, makes sure she washes her neck, holds her hand when they cross the street or go for strolls to get ice cream, tells her how wonderful and pretty and smart she is. The special kind of father stuff.

  Meanwhile, my boyfriend icepacks his girlfriend’s body, changes gluey dressings, washes her rank hair in a basin, and gently feeds her the bread, orange juice, and fruit I buy. He watches over her full time, devoted, and slips out to spend little gaps with me. When she’s healed enough to go back to San Jose, her daughter, and her current business venture, the last of the fruit will rot and the bread will grow
mold and the juice will ferment to foam, and my boyfriend will return to me and his screenplays and his staples of beer and salsa and fried pork rinds for protein. He will spend a portion of the money she leaves him to stock up on margarita mixes, frozen pizzas, and canned cream soups and bank the rest. He keeps blue icepacks stuffed in with the frozen burritos and quiches and taquitos. It’s the kind of food we eat when I go over to his place, and I often wonder when that diet is going to kill him. But when she’s in town, and giving him extra money, he spends much of it taking me out to pricey dinners.

  A couple of years ago she bought a pair of thigh-high leather boots, a boned spandex bustier, and a studded crop and placed an ad in the local paper. Silicon Valley guys called, lined up, became regulars, and she rose a tax bracket. But she got tired and worried about keeping it all up. She started getting work done, the minor nips and tucks, the same kind of work she’d eschewed when it might have helped an acting career in L.A. but now, well, her options were narrowing and she needed to make the most of what she had.

  I don’t judge her, I had said to my boyfriend when he told me about her. She has a daughter to take care of. Food, clothing, rent. Life’s expensive. You do what you have to.

  Exactly, he’d said. I keep telling you that.

  The waitress brings another warm white bottle, and I pour.

  So, she’s taken it online, he tells me tonight. Given she wasn’t actually fucking anyone anyway, you know? Customers e-mail requests, she links up maybe a dozen or so who want the same thing, just acts it out live online. She doesn’t even have to see these guys. She’s making a shitload of money. For just mind-fucking. Boilerplate B and D. The Come-to-Mommy crowd. No real fluids, no real skin.

  So, why is she still getting all this work done? I ask.

  He shrugs. Hey, even online she needs to look good. Who wants to get tied up and spanked by some old pig?