Going Through the Change

by Samantha Bryant

  elen Braeburn sank into the overstuffed recliner chair with a sigh of relief. It was wonderful to get off her feet. She’d shown that prissy little rich girl seven different houses today, just so she could go with the first one; the one Helen had told her was perfect for her needs. Why couldn’t young people just listen? They could’ve saved several hours of time and Helen’s aching feet.

  She bent forward over her paunchy stomach with a grunt and unlaced the bright pink sneakers she had recently started wearing everywhere, much to her daughter’s embarrassment. Helen had to laugh at the idea that her twenty-three year old daughter, with white girl dreads and a tattoo snaking from the shoulder to the wrist around her right arm, found her, with her pink sneakers and otherwise perfectly ordinary appearance, embarrassing.

  She let the sneakers fall to the side of the chair and tossed the socks down the hall, vaguely in the direction of the laundry alcove. Then she pulled the handle, leaned back, and clicked the button to start the kneading massage feature. It felt good to get her feet up. In spite of the sneakers, her feet still ached, and she thought they looked a little swollen. Her days of wearing pretty little flats were definitely over. She felt like they looked silly on her, anyway. Like putting a sweater on an ugly dog. Besides, knee troubles had come on with the new tire around her middle. Kitten heels weren’t going to help that, either.

  Now that George was gone, the bastard, she was kind of glad he had insisted on buying this monstrosity of a chair. At the time, she had thought it ridiculous. “Who are you, Ward Cleaver?” she’d said. She had tried getting rid of it along with all his other belongings after he’d decided not to come back from his midlife-crisis cross-country motorcycle ride. The chair was so damned heavy that no one seemed to want to do the work it would take to move it from the third story condo, at least not for free. And Helen was done spending money on George.

  So, the chair remained. It had become her favorite place in the condo. She moved a short bookshelf, a small table, and good reading lamp around it, running a multi-plug extension cord under the rug so she could charge her iPad, Kindle, phone, and laptop all without getting up. The table held a stack of books to read, the remote controls for the television and stereo systems, a little bowl of butterscotch candies, and her unsorted mail. There was a blanket over the back of the chair in case she got chilly.

  Chilly was definitely not the problem today, though. Helen pulled her hair up, like it would help. Her hair felt stiff, and she wondered if she had just smeared makeup into it. Her stylist would just love that. Strawberry blonde highlights combined with age-defying pasty-white foundation. Lovely.

  Helen tugged at the front of her blouse and pulled it in and out like she could fan herself cool. But she knew better. This wasn’t an external heat, this was her burning up from within, and all she could do was wait it out. She hated waiting.

  Oh wait, there were those new supplements Mary had picked up for me at her little food co-op thingy.

  She picked up the box, wondering when that girl was going to get a real job. The supplements were conveniently chair-side with the unsorted mail. The box was bright orange with an ornate yellow font. “Surge Protector.” Helen snorted. Well, at least this Dr. Liu who made this stuff had a sense of humor. She read through the label quickly. Lots of hippie-sounding stuff like black cohosh and kava and primrose oil and more sciencey-sounding things like isoflavones. She didn’t really know what any of it was, so she read the bio of Dr. Liu on the side panel instead.

  “Dr. Cindy Liu has been on the cutting edge of natural remedies for menopausal symptoms for twenty years. Her newest product will bring instant relief to many women suffering from hot flashes.” Helen studied the small black and white picture of Dr. Liu. She looked normal enough, small-boned, delicate face half hidden behind large glasses. She seemed to be wearing a lab coat over a nondescript crew-necked shirt. In the tiny picture, there was no way to tell if she was thirty or sixty years old, though Helen assumed she must be nearer sixty if she could really claim twenty years of experience. Dr. Liu’s hair was dark and trimmed in the smooth around the face hairdo favored by so many Asian women. She looked directly at the camera, smiling.

  Helen considered the orange box again. Sure, why not? It probably wouldn’t make it worse. And everything at that co-op place was so healthy. That was probably why it tasted so awful.

  Helen looked around and realized she had neglected to bring out a glass of water this time. Damn. She really didn’t want to clamber back out of the chair to take these things. Could she dry swallow them? Jesus. No. They were huge. Horse pills. Those chalky kind, too. Bright orange with yellow spots. Weird looking things, for sure. Ah, here we go.

  Helen found a half-full bottle of water squeezed between stacks of books. It probably wasn’t too old. She gulped down the pill.

  “Bleah! Horrible!” Helen downed the rest of the water, trying to get the taste out of her mouth. When that didn’t work, she grabbed one of her butterscotch candies to suck on. It was a weird combination at first, but then the taste of the pill began to fade.

  “Ooh.” Helen had the oddest sensation. It was like a cooling ray had run down her body, starting with a sort of tingly sensation in her scalp and then spilling down her neck and shoulders and out her feet. It was like the heat was being pulled out of her body. She imagined just wadding up the heat ball and chucking it over her head and behind her into the kitchen.

  Wow! These things are pretty good, Helen thought. She’d have to let Mary know how quickly and well they worked. Maybe now she could enjoy some TV. She found the other clicker, turned on the system, and began clicking through the channels. She stopped when she found a good one about baseball players getting their chests waxed. Lots of bare muscle to admire.

  She was startled out of her enjoyment of grown men turned to jelly by a little wax when the smoke detector started beeping. Damn! She’d have to get up to deal with it or her neighbors would call the super on her. Probably the batteries needed to be changed again. It always went off to announce that it needed batteries.

  As she hauled herself out of her comfortable seat, she thought she smelled smoke. Impossible, since she hadn’t cooked anything in days. But when she turned around, she saw that there were actual flames in the kitchen. Shit! Her laptop was in there. She ran into the kitchen and snagged it off the counter. It’s okay! She hugged it to her chest. It was warm but not yet hot. It would probably be okay. Thank God! She was terrible about remembering to back it up, and her whole life was in there.

  But when she turned around, she saw the flames had now spread across the doorway. Helen looked around the room for the fire extinguisher and saw its empty holder on the wall. She hadn’t replaced it after that little grease fire a month or so ago. This wasn’t good. The air had visible smoke. Not just that wispy stuff, but black puffs. Helen was sure it was the curtains. That filmy, sparkly stuff had to be full of things that turned toxic when they burned. She crouched low in the room. That’s what you were supposed to do, she was pretty sure. Something about the air being better down low?

  Helen thought she must be in some kind of shock because she seemed to feel just fine. In spite of the smoke, she wasn’t having any trouble breathing. Her eyes weren’t even watering. Weird. She’d still better get out of there. She braced herself and scuttled for the lowest point of fire. She figured she’d have some burns, but it would be better than dying.

  When she made it to the living room, she grabbed her striped tote bag and dropped the laptop in it. With one quick arm sweep, she knocked the contents of her side table into the bag. She grabbed her shoes and had just reached for the doorknob when a fireman burst through the door, his face blackened around his protective mask. He grabbed her by the arm, tugged her through the doorway, and then tossed a blanket over her shoulders. Before she knew what was going on, she was outside, standing with all her neighbors in a sort of circle near an ambulance.

  “Ma’am. Are you okay, ma’am?” a young man in a whit
e coat was yelling into her face.

  Helen nodded, confused.

  The young man pulled over a little bag full of medical instruments and leaned toward Helen. “Let’s check you out. Are you having trouble breathing?”

  Helen shook her head. “I’m fine.”

  The young man sat her down on a sort of metal stool and took the blanket off her shoulders. He pulled out various gadgets and examined her. As he worked, Helen watched her neighbors. They were a mess! The old fart across the hall was attached to some kind of respirator. The nice young lady with the best view in the complex was sobbing into the shoulder of a tall man in a long black jacket, the latest in a long string of handsome guests Helen had admired in passing. People she didn’t even know lived there were all gathered around, whispering, crying, and moaning.

  “Unbelievable!” The paramedic pulled his stethoscope down and looked Helen in the face. “Ma’am, I don’t know how you did it, but you are absolutely healthy. Jack said your shirt was actually on fire when he dropped this blanket on your shoulders, but I can’t find a mark on you. It’s some kind of miracle.”

  essica peered down at her husband, trying not to think about how far below her he really was. She felt sick with fear. He was looking around all over. Everywhere but where she was, hanging on to the chandelier above his balding head.

  “Jessica?” he called. His voice seemed to bounce off the empty walls.

  Her hand slipped, and she had to grab the light again to avoid floating all the way up to the skylight. There was nothing the least bit fun about this dream anymore. It was becoming all too real.

  “Up here,” Jessica hissed through clenched teeth.

  Nathan peered around the back of the staircase. “Higher!” she said. If he didn’t see her soon, the boys were going to hear. She shook the chandelier, making the dangling crystals shake. They were seriously dusty, and the released cloud of dust made her sneeze.

  That’s when he looked up. His eyes went wide. “What the—”

  “Shh! Help me down! I don’t want the kids to see this.”

  That was when three-year-old Max peeked his head around the corner. “Frankie,” he yelled to his brother, “Mama can fly!” His grin was so broad it seemed his face might split in half.

  Jessica tried to smile back, but the best she could manage was a weak twitch.

  Coming at his brother’s call, Frankie barreled around the corner, nearly sliding into the china closet when he tried to stop. “Whoa! Mama, how’d you get up there?

  “Right now, I’m just trying to get down, honey,” Jessica said, keeping her voice and face as calm as she could. She burped. She was so scared she was sure she was going to throw up. Her husband had moved to the doorway between the two boys. He put one hand on each of their shoulders. The three of them stood there with identical mouths hanging open.

  “Any ideas?” Jessica asked, trying not to sound as frightened as she was.

  “Can’t you come back down the same way you got up there?” asked Frankie. He was so rational for a five year old. Mama’s future scientist, Jessica always said.

  “I don’t think so, honey. I don’t really know how I got up here.” Jessica gulped back a salty ball of tears that seemed to fill her throat. She tried to signal to Nathan with her eyes to get the boys out of there, but he was just standing there like a slack-jawed idiot. She willed him to snap out of it and get the kids out of the room, so they could work this out together. They used to be so good at solving problems together.

  “I just tripped and sort of didn’t fall,” she told Frankie, who was still studying her with a curious gaze.

  Jessica thought about her flight across the living room, how she’d thought it was a dream. That light tickling was still there in her belly. Like she had swallowed something effervescent and it still bubbled in her gut. It wasn’t painful. Just sort of strange. She burped again.

  As she tried to analyze the feeling, her legs suddenly dropped liked gravity had remembered they were there. She was no longer holding on to the chandelier in order not to float away. Now, she was hanging from it, and she was starting to fall. “Nathan!” she squealed. One hand was already starting to slip. Her hands always got damp when she was scared. It had been a real problem when she’d been doing competitive gymnastics.

  Nathan moved. He was standing below her now, waltzing in a sort of circle, trying to make sure he stayed under her. “Boys,” he yelled, “get back in the doorway. Stay out of the way!” His eyes were still on the boys when Jessica lost her grip and plummeted from the ceiling. The collision knocked him to the floor.

  She lay there, breathing hard for a moment. When she opened her eyes, she saw the chandelier’s wild swinging. “Nathan! Get up! The chandelier is going to fall!”

  He didn’t respond. Christ. He must’ve knocked his head when she landed on him. She scrambled to her hands and knees, grabbed him under the armpits, and hauled with all her might, trying to keep one eye on the boys and another eye on the chandelier. She was sure she saw dust and plaster breaking away around the joint that connected the fixture to the ceiling. “Frankie, take your brother to the couch, now!”

  Frankie knew the tone that meant Mama was not to be disobeyed. He grabbed his little brother by the arm and yanked him around the corner to the living room. Jessica kept tugging on her husband, moving him a few inches with each tug. She’d just gotten his head and shoulders through the doorway when the chandelier fell and cracked the tiles in the foyer. The crystals spun off the fixture and scattered across the room, but none shattered.

  “Plastic,” Jessica muttered. “I knew it!” Then she called back over her shoulder, “Frankie, bring Mama her phone, Little Man.”

  inda held the teacup gently in her hands. It was the last one from her favorite set—the ones with little pink roses and gold edging on the delicate handles. She’d broken all the rest getting used to her larger, stronger hands as she hid in her house like some kind of hunchback these last few days. She and David had told their children she was very ill. Lupita, the oldest, still called every day, but, especially with the way Linda’s voice was changing, it wasn’t hard to convince her not to come over. Linda sounded terrible.

  She couldn’t actually get her finger inside the tiny handle of the teacup, so she held the entire thing in the palm of her hand, like the little bowls the soup comes in at Japanese restaurants. Not pretty, but it worked. She should probably just invest in some bigger mugs, but she hated to give up the reminder of who she used to be.

  Linda stood suddenly, the motion seeming to make the entire dining room shake. She felt ponderous and huge in this new body, but now, five days after the initial transformation, she was finding there were things she liked about it. Crossing to the kitchen, she opened the top cabinet and easily reached the extra box of hibiscus tea she’d stowed there. When she put it up there a month or so ago, she’d had to haul out the folding step stool from the garage to reach the shelf.

  Even better, when she had dropped a sock behind the washing machine while trying to get the thrift shop smell out of the new clothes David had picked up for her, it had been a simple thing to tug it out away from the wall and reach behind with her new long arms to pull it out. There had been a pleasure in exerting her muscles that way; a pleasure she had never taken in lifting the ten and twenty-pound weights she used at the gym to fight upper arm wobble. She wondered how strong she was now. A washing machine was a heavy thing, and she had tugged it forward with one hand, like it was nothing.

  Linda went back to the dining room and looked at the piano. It had been in the same corner for fifteen years, ever since she and David bought it for their youngest daughter who said she wanted to learn to play. Viviana had never learned to play. She’d lost interest within weeks, and the piano had sat there collecting dust and knickknacks ever since. David always put her off about getting rid of it. “It’s too heavy to move,” he’d complained.

  Was it? Linda wondered. Was it really too heavy? Quickly, she moved
all the little objects from the top and laid them gently on the dining room table, working as rapidly as she could without breaking all the little pieces of ceramic her children and grandchildren had made. She made short work of the surface and then stood looking at the piano another minute or so, hands on her hips.

  It was what they called a studio piano. Plain brown wood without much decorative detail, but quite solid. Her brothers still grumbled about all the aches and pains it gave them to move it into the dining room from the little moving truck she’d hired to haul it across town. Jorge swore it was the start of all of his back problems. But men were such babies. They acted like every little ache and pain was the end of the world. Linda knew it couldn’t be that bad.

  She blew on her hands and bent at the knees like she’d seen the men do whenever there was heavy lifting to be done. She put her hands under the keyboard and lifted. There was the smallest feeling of resistance and a cracking sound. She let go. That wasn’t going to work. She’d just end up yanking the keyboard off.

  What if she lifted from the top? She put a hand between the piano and the wall and pushed it out into the room. The little metal wheels screeched, but the piano moved. Linda wondered vaguely if the wheels were rusted immobile.

  She stretched her arms out and grabbed the two ends of the piano at the top. The piano lifted off the ground easily, but then the top flopped open and she dropped it, cringing at the sounds of all the insides crashing. That couldn’t be good for the soundboard.