Hydroplane: Fictions (14 page)

Then my mother gets sicker.

A good thing the nurse coming in to care for my mother.

A fluke the nurse becoming my father's girlfriend.

I once said to my shrink, I never went to see my mother before she died.

I said, How do you feel about that.

When my brother went, he stood by her bed.

He called me and said, It's not even her.

So why should I visit, I thought.

My brother said she ate crumbled toast. Her mouth was always open wide. She lay, curled, unmoving, on the hospital bed they had rented and set up in the living room.

Like a fucking table, my brother said.

We just sit around it, he said.

From the floor I told my shrink about my swimsuit. It didn't fit, and I feared the men would laugh.

She said, There's no time now.

She said, Can this wait until Wednesday.

It was Friday. I would see her Wednesday after work. But there were days to get through before then. And I wanted something on the phone.

I said, But my father and brother always laughed.

I now owned a beachrobe.

She said, Can it wait.

In the beginning, I went to the convention, truth be told, to look at men. To pick up men.

I cared less about the convention itself, its topic I mean, and more about picking up men in suits. I wanted something lifelong.

I drank with men in cocktail lounges at the ends of days.

But they were the dullest men, convention die-hards, and I spent most nights in my room alone, watching TV

Once I called my brother from Kansas City. I said, Guess where I am.

He said, You're desperate for friends.

He said, You're becoming you-know-who.

In the rooms our suitcases spilled out onto the floor. My brother's model plane parts were spread about. The glue he used made my head come unhinged. It felt like being underwater.

So I suppose I should have liked this.

Underwater was no sound, no light.

Above water was a mess.

My father used to say about my mother, She can't let things go.

She couldn't let things go.

What things.

This and that.

He traveled a lot. He smelled of smoke.

But she let the big thing go, you know.

My father said this. She let the big thing go, Ha ha.

No one thought this was funny. Not even he did after he said it.

When my mother got sicker, my father called the nurse he liked the most. She kept my mother drugged as my father said to do. The drugs dripped into my mother's arm. My mother said some of the strangest things. My father called to tell me what.

He laughed and I could hear the nurse laughing in the background.

I said, What the hell's so funny.

He said, You have no sense of humor.

Perhaps this was true.

A man who had bent my ear in the ballroom with jokes approached me poolside. I was removing my terrycloth beachrobe. He said, I've got a good one.

After each joke he said, Do you get it, and poked me in the ribs.

But I didn't get it.

And each time he poked me in the ribs, I felt my ribs and what my ribs were supposed to be protecting, and the terror of this.

That ribs protect organs. Skin protects ribs. Hair protects skin. And then what.

There was a day, sitting on the edge of a bed, my father and mother and brother on the beach, the TV on, the model glue in its tiny tube just across the room.

I uncapped the glue tube and breathed in the fumes, and deeply I should say, and my head went murky, swimming in black.

I tried calling girls from back home, but I couldn't get my head to clear, so I threw several of my brother's model planes, still wet with glue and paint, through the hotel room window.

I didn't think they would fly, but I wondered how they would crash.

But to my surprise they flew.

Often the phone rang when I was in my shrink's office, and I always knew when the phone was ringing though she kept the ringer off.

I knew the phone was ringing because a red light on the phone would blink, and it made me just wild to see the light.

Often I said, Your phone is ringing.

My shrink said, Can you try to ignore it.

But I stared at the light until it stopped blinking.

I know I should at least have tried to ignore it.

But it could have been a friend or her mother or some die-hard patient desperate for who knows what.

My shrink said, What does this mean to you.

It meant something dull, like who was I and what was life.

I said, It means your phone is ringing.

I watched as my brother dumped butterflies, dead, from a plastic bag.

He pushed straight pins straight through their center parts and stuck them to a piece of board.

I suppose he should have preserved them in some way. Their wings, eventually, dropped off in powdery bits.

When my father called and said, I'm sorry, I said, What did you do.

He said, Your mother died.

He said, Where have you been.

I said, At the convention.

He said, That's my girl.

My brother and the nurse had carried my mother's body out to the lawn on the bed.

My brother called and told my machine, We put her on the
fucking lawn.

I heard him say this in real time. I was reading a magazine.

He didn't want me to know he was crying.

I read an article on weight loss. It suggested exercise and low fat foods.

My brother never liked me to know he was crying. When a wave knocked him down, he pretended the water stung his eyes.

I would laugh and run to the room. From the room I called the girls. First one then another then another.

I said, I'm calling from the beach, when there was a beach.

And they always found ways to disconnect.

And my brother would find me. And I'd call him baby. And he'd pin me to the floor.

My brother had said, It's not even her.

I said, Sometimes I'm not even me.

He said, What does that mean.

I said, I'm thinking of seeing a shrink.

He said, You're thinking of buying a friend.

But I was feeling something. Or I was feeling nothing.

This is how it starts.

One year at the convention, I met a man who seemed less dull than the others.

His suit looked less pathetic, his shoes better groomed, and we had a nice talk as we walked through the ballroom collecting things from tables into our tote bags.

We had a private dinner in the hotel, and he told me I had
quite a body, and I said nothing, looked at the table, and he laughed at something, perhaps at how I had become a girl.

Truth be told, I felt like a girl, covering my face with my hand and laughing.

His body was average, his face as well, and at some point—I'll just say it—I learned about his wife and kids.

I learned the hard way, or was it the easy way, when, in his bed, his wife called and he picked up and said, Hi honey, and, Yes baby, and pinched different sections of my skin.

Still, I stayed the night. And in the morning when I waked he was dressed and sitting on a chair reading the newspaper and I said, Hey, and he said nothing and I said, What are you doing today, and he lowered the newspaper and said, What, and I said, Today, and he said, I don't understand.

I don't know why they put my mother on the lawn.

But at least it was summer.

There was a day I ran into the field of brown grass and wildflowers, my brother's butterflies still alive in a plastic bag.

I wish I could say I let them go and that they flew far from the field so my brother could never recatch them.

Yes, I thought they would fly.

But I turned the bag over to let them go and they fell to the ground in circles, sunk in the tall brown grass and flowers.

I went home once after my mother died. I thought to visit the girls. But I didn't know where any of them lived. So many years had passed. And I never liked them, besides. And they never liked me.

When we got back from my father's convention one year, the girls had, together, ganged up on me for reasons having to do with my calling too much.

When I told my father, he said, Those bitches, and I laughed so hard I thought I would crumble to the ground.

I collected my mother's things into tote bags. There wasn't much I wanted.

My father's girlfriend lay on the couch, watching TV and smoking. She wore my mother's robe.

It wasn't a beachrobe but some other old thing my mother wore around the house.

My brother was putting things he wanted of my mother's into boxes.

It wasn't worth fighting over the things.

When my father's girlfriend stood, I noticed she was very tall and the robe stopped just above her knees.

I let her hug me.

Then I went into the field behind the house, more overgrown than ever, brown grass taller than I was.

It looked like rain, so I stayed just for a moment.

In the fitting room the salesgirl said, Let's see you.

I admit I was afraid, at first, to part the curtain. I didn't want the salesgirl looking at my body, for—and I admit this, too, hard as it is—I didn't exactly feel like the body's owner. As an owner with any sort of choice in the matter—and this isn't a joke—I believe I
would have chosen another model.

But I parted the curtain.

I waited as the salesgirl looked.

My father took us to a diner in a part of town I had never seen. My brother and I rode in the back seat. The windshield wipers made a sound like something—I'll just say it—a sound like crying. At the diner I ordered toast.

The girlfriend said, Your mom was nice.

They all ordered quite a lot to eat and ate like horses.

My father told a story about something the girlfriend did. Something stupid. She stuck a fork in a plugged-in toaster. Or she dropped the phone into the tub. Or she left the iron face-down, hot, on the ironing board. He pretended to be angry when she didn't laugh. The girlfriend smacked him on the arm and called him awful.

He told her she needed new dresses.

He said, She'll send me to the poorhouse yet.

I can't explain why this bothers me still. I mean, the girlfriend's gone. The day he threw her out of the house, my father called and told my machine, I threw the bitch out.

The man at the pool held my arm. He said, I've got a good one.

He said, This girl, see, is walking through a field…

Okay.

And she's lost and scared, so she keeps on walking and, lucky for her, she sees a house with lights on, so she knocks on the door
of the house and a man answers, and she says, I'm hoping you can help…

Okay.

So the man says to the girl, I'd love to help you out, and invites her inside and says she can spend the night at his house and promises he'll take her home in the morning if she…

Stop, I said.

He said, What.

I covered my ears.

Just stop, I said.

I sat in the waiting room with a magazine. A girl waited, too, on a chair near mine. She looked at me. I must have been looking at her.

I read an article on how to be more assertive. It suggested a firm handshake, eye to eye.

I heard my shrink open her door down the hall. I felt ready to talk.

First of my father throwing his girlfriend out. We would laugh our heads off over that.

And there was still the matter of my swimsuit.

And the matter, too, of the beachrobe.

My shrink came into the waiting room. I stood and said hello. This always made me feel like a kid. Like a shy kid hiding behind my mother's legs in a crowd.

The girl stood, too, and said hello.

My shrink said my name.

She said, Come with me.

We walked partway down the hall to her office.

She said, It's Tuesday.

She said, You're Wednesday.

She said, I'll see you tomorrow.

She walked me back to the waiting room.

She said to the girl waiting, I'm sorry.

The girl looked at me and went with my shrink down the hall.

She was taller than I was. Better looking.

I didn't return to see my shrink. I was tired of talking. And she would send me to the poorhouse, besides.

My father and brother once managed to pinch.

My mother laughed as I stood on the sand.

The ocean meant me and the fishes.

The hotel room meant me on the phone.

And I just stood there, frozen.

My mother said, Just tell her you're sorry.

My brother ran into the ocean.

My father said, What's got two hands and flies.

It hurt where he pinched. So I ran to the room. No, I kept on running. There was a mall nearby, and I ran into the mall in my swimsuit. I was barefoot. It was freezing in there.

I could have sunk into the field behind the house, the field just wild with tall brown grass.

The air smelled like rain. I looked at the house's black windows.

I imagined the poorhouse as looking like our house.

I once said to my shrink, How do you feel about that.

My shrink said, I feel with my hands, Ha ha.

There was a night I watched my mother fall asleep sitting up on the hotel bed, her mouth wide open, the TV flashing on her gray face. And I poked her in the arm to wake her, and she didn't move, and I poked her in the ribs, and I jumped on the bed screaming, Wake up, and my brother, building a plane on the floor, looked up, said, Quit it, and I said, Baby, and he said, I'll kill you, and went back to his plane. And I jumped on the bed wildly, screaming, Wake up, Wake up, until my father walked in, smelling of smoke and drinks and perfume and who knows what else and said, Don't jump on the bed, and my mother waked and said, Where have you been, and reached for the pen on the table beside the bed and threw the pen at my father.

I started to say to the operator, I'm disconnecting, but instead I said, I've got a good one.

This girl's walking along the beach and she's thinking…

My shrink's machine picked up.

The operator said, I'm sorry.

How she works in an office doing who knows what…