Ball

by Tara Ison

  Winter.

  She sees a man down the path, wearing a Botanical Garden uniform and carrying a rake, speaking at her. An open trash bag of dead leaves at his feet.

  Excuse me? she says.

  Winter’s coming.

  Yes, she says. You need to refill the food machine.

  Not my job, he says. He drags a rake along the bed of sand she’d disturbed.

  She resumes her watch of the water. They have to be there, she thinks. There has to be a way to get their attention, to lure.

  No, winter they take the fish away, he tells her. No point waiting.

  Oh.

  River here’s too shallow to keep them warm.

  Where do they take them?

  He shrugs. Safe place. Bring them back come spring.

  His bed is smoothed into rows once again, every pebble in place. He moves on with his bag of leaves.

  Somewhere protected, then, a safe, warm place. That’s good. She wonders how they gathered up all those writhing fish. Someone with a net came, yes, balloon-scooped them along a slow sweep of water, lulling them, then carefully up to a safe and warm elsewhere. No hooks, of course. Not if the goal is bring them back whole come spring. Keep them alive, unhurt. She’d cried when her little fish was hooked, when she’d realized what she’d done. She’d made such a fuss. Other fishing men on the boat, laughing, paying no attention, ripping metal hooks from jaws or cutting through scaled white bellies with gleaming knives, dropping bright wet guts in bloody buckets, on deck. Other fish lying on planks, gaping mouths working against air, gills clenching then loose. And the little twisting rainbow fish in her cold hand, screaming. Her uncle suddenly there, I’m here, don’t be scared, he’d said.

  But it’s screaming, she’d said, shaking. It’s screaming, help it, can’t you hear?

  Let go, let go, taking the fish and showing her he could unhook the fish free, It’s okay, see?, gently with his big fingers, snipping the line and working the cruel barb out with care, rinsing away thin blood to show her it was whole and good again. See? he’d said, holding her close and warming her as she gulped for air, Everything’s okay now. He leaned over the edge of the boat, dropped the little fish home.

  We don’t have to fish anymore. We’ll do something else. Whatever you want.

  He’d wiped her teary cheeks, let her hiccup in his face, squeezed her hand in his massive fishy one. And they’d watched the fish swim away. She’d clutched on to his thumb.

  Yes, something fun, he’d said, patting her. Just the two of us.

  I’M SO SORRY, the nurse’s aide tells her. We tried to get hold of you.

  He places his plump hand on her arm without asking.

  Excuse me? she says. She drops her sweater on the hallway floor, to have an excuse to pull away.

  He passed on. About an hour ago. Very sudden. I am so sorry.

  She hears the Go! click in her head. She can count final seconds now. The aide takes her to see him, again without asking. He is alone in a different room, small, chilled, in the basement. He is still in a regular hospital bed, not on a slab, lying under a neatly draped sheet that bulges across his belly. The tubes and monitors have been unhooked, are gone. There is the promised air of a dignified end.

  Would you like to see his face?

  She shakes her head. She is cold in this room, feels only numb.

  I understand, the aide says. That’s fine. Everyone deals in their own way.

  Yes, she says. What happens now?

  We’ll need you to sign some forms. I’ll go get them. Leave you two alone a moment.

  Thank you, she says. Yes.

  The aide pats her shoulder and she wills herself not to flinch. He walks off, his feet squeaking across the tiled floor.

  Were you with him? she asks after him.

  Oh, yes. Don’t you worry, he wasn’t alone.

  That’s good. I didn’t want that. I never wanted that.

  Of course not, the aide says.

  I thought I should be here for him, you know? It was the least I could do.

  Don’t feel guilty, hon, you did everything you could. Don’t you let that eat you up.

  She nods, then asks:

  Did he say anything?

  The aide shakes his head. It was a very peaceful end, he says.

  Good, she says.

  Now she can feel it, the peace. She can call the Neptune Society, fill out the final date, use her rubber stamp, send all those forms off and away and be done with it. A peaceful end, yes. Nothing said. Nothing more to feel guilty about. She should remember to send the aide something, she thinks. A big box of chocolates or those hard candies, all for him, a special treat.

  Anyone else you’d like me to call? the aide asks.

  No. There’s no other family. Just the two of us.

  He nods, smiles understandingly, leaves.

  She takes a handful of sheet, careful not to touch his bulk, and folds it down to reveal his dead rubber mask of a face. He is very still. His eyes and mouth are closed. She looks for a flicker, an eyelid’s twitch. There’s nothing. Let go, let go, she thinks. But she has to be sure. She moves aside the sheet, places two careful fingertips on the inside of his cooling wrist. Nothing. She watches the sheet resting over his chest, slowly counts Mississippi seconds to one hundred, waiting for a rise and fall that doesn’t come before she is convinced.

  No, it’s only almost over, she realizes. She isn’t quite done yet.

  THE LITTLE RIVER is scaled with crisp brown leaves. The Garden feels wintry, fully abandoned. She takes her place on the bridge and opens the plastic box: gritty bits and flakes, grays and blacks. She leans across the rail; there is no breeze and the ashes slide straight down into water, onto floating leaves, no comical blowing of puffs into face or hair as she’s seen in movies. She takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with relief. She can go, let go. She breathes, and then she sees a blink of red. An autumn leaf, it must be. A wet red flash again, a surfacing ripple, leaves floating clear. A black eye gazing at her through water. The red fish is gliding, calm, watching. It swims a slow, helix’d path, there but demanding nothing. Obscured by floating leaves, then appearing again. They must have forgotten about this fish, left it behind and no one noticed. Maybe they just couldn’t catch it, because it was so slippery, so strong. She should tell someone, she thinks.

  She looks around; there is no one to tell. The fish is gone now, hidden again. Maybe they wouldn’t even believe her. Or care. She’d tried to tell them about the fish before. How the fish was screaming, frightened, trapped. And how no one saw or helped. But her uncle was there, she told them, he heard her, saw her, so gentle to the little fish, so careful to take away the sharp hook and not cause any more pain. She’d tried to tell about his warm hands, holding her close. But her father needed to get to the drugstore for her brother’s inhaler. Her mother on the phone, pleading, her sister threatening to leave rehab. They couldn’t listen about the little fish. So she’d told another story. About her uncle driving her home, after their fishing trip. Just the two of them. He’d been paying such extra attention to her lately. Taking her for special adventures, special treats. Telling her she was such a good girl, she deserved it. Telling her she was very special to him. Her parents heard that part. So she kept telling. She told them about stopping for ice cream on the way home. About her uncle pulling off the road in the dark. About the fun game he wanted them to play together. She told them about frightened, about trapped, about pain. About his fat hands, and what they did to her. Her parents listened hard to that story. Paid attention. Such turmoil then. Her parents yelling into the phone, the threat of violence, of legal dispute. She heard her uncle’s voice over the phone, the last time, pleading with her parents. Such a fuss she caused. And all hers, this time. Because she was so special. For a while. Her uncle exiled in the end, a small sacrifice. Banished alone to that tiny room. Like cutting loose and throwing back a wounded, bloodied little fish. But then it simply swims away, disappears below the smoothin
g surface. In the end, it’s like nothing ever happened at all.

  At least she never had to see him again, really, after their final special day. She never had to hear his voice ask her Why? Why would you do that to me? Why would you lie?

  The fish emerges again, eyeing her. Its tail fin bumps a drifting, laden leaf; ashes float down and the fish catches them in its mouth as it glides past. She wonders how long it will glide there, along a shallow river current. Perhaps it will live to be a hundred. Always lurking, just waiting to bubble up, to emerge thrashing again and again.

  No, she tells herself, eventually it will stop. Unfed, and all alone in the cold like that. She takes a deep breath, exhales. It has to die. It has to.

  MUSICAL CHAIRS

  “They call her the Senator’s Wife,” he tells me.

  “Oh. So, you still want to be a senator?” I ask.

  “Well, yeah. Eventually.”

  “And that’s what your friends call her? ‘The Senator’s Wife’?”

  “Mm.”

  “She’s supportive. Well groomed. Law-abiding.”

  “Yeah.” He shifts his weight, peeling himself away from me.

  “She’s beautiful.”

  “I think so,” he says.

  No. He doesn’t need to affirm this; it is an objective analysis. She looks down on us from a cheap frame propped on a bookshelf, a shelf that still holds his adolescent and teenage books, here in his parents’ house. I knew him in high school but never came to this house. There would have been no reason to, then. Now he is back from law school, pre–his own apartment, and we are having sex beneath a photo of his by-any-standards-beautiful fiancée, left waiting with pearls and chignon back in Georgetown.

  I hate that I have to ask. “So, what about me? Why are you here, with me? What am I?” I am the Senator’s Concubine, I’m dying to say, but that is too cute.

  “You . . .” he says, tenderly stroking my sweaty hair, “are ambitious. You are going to achieve. You are going to do fucking amazing things, all on your own.”

  This is cruel, his faith in me. And inappropriate. At sixteen he was gawky and spotty and too smart for his own good, hyper-political, a frenzied blur. Debating Club, Junior State, the ranting editorial section of the school paper. All the soft and non-threatening civics of high school were mowed flat by his senatorial drive. I smiled indulgently, everyone did, then, at Chas’s panting, socialist need to Do Something, at his angelic blond curls and beige corduroy slacks. I would have shunned a crush with cruel and condescending sweetness. I would have dismissed him, thoroughly. I have now made the mistake of layering that memory onto this present man, reencountered five weeks ago in a bar I thought him too unhip for, and have wound up here, naked in bed with someone who is no longer who he was. Who now calls himself Chuck. Who has, in sneaking a new self past me, into me, lied.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asks in a skilled whisper, like it is a meaningful thing. This man could, will, become a senator. He is well beyond me and in total control, cool and self-assured as a fascist.

  “Yes,” I whisper back, grateful and hating myself, hating him.

  It is October. His wedding is scheduled for June. In January, a sweater for him half-knit (yes, I knit, you asshole, I think), my hatred frayed as used yarn, I pick up some other guy I truly don’t know in the hip bar, have sex in his car, and later call Chas to tell him he’s fucked, that I never want to see him again, and to please return my copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude sometime when I’m not home. Because of this, I don’t hear, a month later, of his engagement to the Senator’s Wife abruptly ending when Chas decides he’s just not ready to get married. She had moved here from Georgetown, bought the Vera Wang dress, registered at Williams-Sonoma. The cream-and-roses invitations had already gone out. I also don’t hear of it because Chas doesn’t call me again for three years.

  SOMEHOW, THEN, WE become friends. Once every eighteen months or so we wind up in bed, resulting in six months of revived snarl and separation, but we always work our way back to close-knit. He always has an excuse, and it is always Timing. He might have fallen in love with me, yes, but the timing was always wrong: He was engaged, I was seeing someone else, he was seeing someone else, I was being a lesbian, he was living in San Francisco, one of us moved and couldn’t find the other’s new address or phone number. To him it would seem merely a matter of temporal misalignment. That we simply never fell into the solitude gaps in each other’s lives. I think this is bullshit, but I let it stand; the truth doesn’t flatter me. Years go by, and we go to the Frolic Room for drinks, to El Coyote for nachos, to the Nuart for Scorsese retrospectives. We applaud each other’s successes and lacerate each other’s antagonists. We riffle through other lovers. At some drunken point one evening he concedes that if we ever were together, really tried being together, yes, we’d wind up wanting to kill each other, but no, we wouldn’t ever be bored. This is a tiny victory, shallow and insignificant though it may be. I burrow into it like a hastily dug grave.

  I finish the sweater I once started for him and wear it myself. I wear it for years in front of him, carry it around, leave it lying in the hatchback of my car or draped over a chair until, finally, one chilly night we are sitting outside on the new balcony of my new condominium, and he is cold, and I can offer it to him. A retroactive, conceptual offering. Hey, this is great, he says, fondling it, Did you make this? For you, I tell him. A long, long time ago. He looks surprised, then abruptly seems to remember a meaningful thing. He nods, puts the sweater on, admiring my skill. Zosia, my new little dog, nudges him. I named her after my grandmother; I’d finally decided I was saving the name for no reason. Chas picks her up and nuzzles her in his lap. His fingers massage little circles in her fur; she closes her eyes blissfully and I am uncomfortably reminded of his fingers once touching me like that, those same little massaging circles.

  MY NEW CONDO is beautiful, a result of my doing fucking amazing things, all on my own. High ceilings and hardwood floors. Stunning appointments, a desirable neighborhood south of the Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. I am the youngest person in the building, and the residents, many of them immigrants of forty and fifty years, still speaking with German and Polish and Yiddish accents, who came here with nothing and are now comfortable, treat me like a successful granddaughter and tell me they are happy the building has fresh blood. The next youngest are the two women who live next door, LouAnn and Bev, in their early forties, with Brooklyn accents and a lot of condo-oriented spirit; the three of us are elected president, vice-president, and secretary of the Homeowner’s Association Board, which entitles us to receive late-night, distraught, heavily accented calls about plumbing problems and being locked out. LouAnn and I post friendly if slightly directive notices on the lobby bulletin board, announcing Please Note: The Lobby Floor Will Be Waxed This Wednesday A.M., Watch Your Step!, or Please Note: Residents Must Park In Their Assigned Spaces—Visitor Parking Is For Visitors Only! A gentlemen couple in their fifties sneak treats to Zosia and insist I let them take her for walks; they tell me she is very ethereal for a poodle. One time I hear an old lady shrieking “Fire!” across the hallway, and I race to her aid with a fire extinguisher; her tea kettle, forgotten, had boiled out its water and the kettle’s burning bottom was filling the kitchen with acrid black smoke. This sweet old lady, Mrs. Steinman, has a leg brace and a crumpled left arm, neither of which prevents her from taking out her own trash and doing all her own grocery shopping. In thanks for my blasting her kitchen with fire extinguisher foam, she leaves at my door three six-packs of Diet 7-Up, which she has wheeled upstairs to our floor in her little wire cart. She is from a tiny village in Poland, the same, we discover over 7-Up, as my grandmother Zosia. But my grandmother, daughter of the village rabbi, had fled the Russian pogroms; Mrs. Goldberg escaped as a limping, polio-afflicted twelve-year-old from the Germans. The village no longer exists. Her family no longer exists. I feel for her, having to live all on her own. I make it a point to engage with her in long chats when we
meet.

  One morning LouAnn calls me early, distraught, to tell me a swastika has been carved into our most recent posted notice.

  “A swastika?” I repeat. I have never seen an actual one, in my own actual life. “Who here’s going to creep downstairs in the middle of the night and put up a swastika?”

  “I don’t know. Bev’s totally freaked. You know about her grandparents, right?”

  “Yeah. . . . I can’t believe this.”

  “And Mrs. Steinman saw it. She was hysterical. She started babbling in Polish.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I’m going to call the cops. I’ll call you back afterward.” She hangs up.

  CHAS IS IN therapy. He is turning over a new leaf. He told me about this several months ago, sitting on the balcony of my new condo, wearing the sweater I once knit for him. He’s ready to settle down, make a commitment. He has just been made the chief trial attorney for the public defenders’ office and spends a lot of time in court, yelling at judges, Doing Something. He is interviewed on radio and television, his liberal dervish energy much in demand, and is earning one-fourth of what he used to make as a corporate litigator. He tells me about the new girl he is seeing and uses the unfortunate metaphor of Musical Chairs to describe how he is now at a certain age, there is a certain point, there comes a time, something about the empty chair presented to you at the exact moment you feel compelled to sit down, how you take that chair. Like when the time comes, in life, I think, to just go ahead and buy yourself a condo. It is all about Timing.