Karen Bender - Refund - Stories

They rushed back and forth from the yard to the house, collecting items. The yard was green and shadowed and lush. I could almost taste all of this; I wanted to taste the pale, thin light filtering through the leaves and the blue sky above me and the children’s golden arms. In the house, far away, the phone rang. The children grabbed flowers from bushes and arranged them artfully around the cat’s grave. They began to pick up handfuls of dirt and throw them into the hole. Their palms were gray and chalky. The children didn’t understand any of it and they did, completely. The phone rang again.

The children finished their memorial. They turned to me, hands empty and open. Now they didn’t know what to do. They ran to me, their faces aglow with sorrow and triumph at what they had made.

— Mom, they said.

— Yes?

— Now what?

Now what. The phone stopped ringing. It was quiet for a few minutes. I sat on the grass. They did, too. I sat with them, listening to the soft sweetness of our breath. We gazed at the pure, dark trees, and we had but this, this one moment, and the next.

— Listen, I said.

— To what?

— The air.

We listened to the air, to the gorgeous, peculiar sound of nothing. We could hear anything in it; that was our revenge. We could sit there, each moment, and listen.

Inside, the phone began to ring again.

— Mom. Did you hear that? my son asked.

He looked at me, waiting. I did. I was held by the moment; I knew it would lift me to the next one and the next. I let it lift me to my feet. Then I went inside to pick up the phone.

I loved helping my sister Betsy hide her bad hand. In the morning, she’d be standing on the side of the bathtub, looking at her body in the bathroom mirror. “Make it fashionable,” she’d say. I’d flip through my tube tops, finding one the same color as her swimsuit. Betsy examined her tan lines or put on Sea Coral lipstick because she thought that was right for the beach. She ignored me when I pulled her bad hand — the one with no fingers — toward me and put a tube top over it. She liked tube tops because they hid her hand completely and made her look like she was carrying something bright. “Maybe tape it shut,” I said. “Or paper clip it. And bunch it at your wrist. There.” Betsy would hold the tube top up and examine it. “Cool,” she said. I smiled, the expert.

My parents were the ones who started helping Betsy hide her bad hand. After my mother hemmed the bottom of Betsy’s coats, she would sew the extra material to one sleeve. Betsy always had sleeves that were too long for her. I thought all her coats looked like they were coming alive and taking over her body. My mother took forever with those sleeves. I hated watching her with Betsy. Because of her hand, Betsy possessed my parents in a way that I did not. Sometimes when I played with Betsy, I pulled my coat sleeves down over my hands; but the sight of me with gigantic hands always seemed to annoy my mother. “You don’t want to look like a waif,” she said, and she rolled my coat sleeves all the way to the elbow.

Helping Betsy with her bad hand was the only thing I could do right that summer. Betsy was only eleven, a year younger than me, but she had become pretty. The sun went into her skin, and she held it easily, her hair, knees, glowing. Everyone knew her walk at our junior high school, a slow, watery step, her hair lifting and slapping her shoulders. Betsy understood something that I didn’t, and as her older sister, it was my job to stop this.

That was the summer when my father moved from his bed to the couch every morning and when my mother tried to figure out what was wrong with him. It was 1973. Sometimes he was the one who waited in the gas lines, sometimes it was my mother. In the car he read books about success. They had words like Win and Conquer and Pinnacle in the titles. He and my mother ran a tutoring business for high school students, and students had maybe gotten smarter, somehow, and now nobody seemed to need much help.

The books made my father tired. After he read them, my father came home and lay down on the couch. He watched the news reports. Before he felt tired, I used to sit with him on that couch and watch Sherylline Rivers talk disasters: My father would say two things to me, either “Listen, Sally,” or “This is sick.” “Listen, Sally,” included anything in the Middle East and teenagers who were more successful than I was. “This is sick” included everything else. I wanted to sit on that couch until my father organized the world for me.

Now he didn’t want us in the den, so we sat where the carpet turned from rust to brown and watched him. It was Betsy’s idea to toss balls of paper with messages at our sleeping father. She wanted to see how far she could throw a ball of paper if it was placed on her bad hand. She said that if the messages hit him, maybe he would feel better. We scribbled notes we thought might work: The Greatest Father in the Universe! Smile! Hugs and Kisses! We Luv You! I crumpled up Smile! and put it carefully on her bad hand.

She reached her arm back and served Smile! , full force, into the den. The ball bonked our father on the forehead.

He opened his eyes. We waited for him to thank us.

I knew our father was different when he woke up after our message hit him. He didn’t instruct us about the world, something he would usually do. He threw back the blanket and sat up.

“Enough, girls,” he said. “Out.”

Hearing our father talk that way sent Betsy all the way across the yard. She put her towel as far from the den as she could. She said she was going to make a project of thoroughly reading all of her Seventeen s.

I couldn’t decide where to sit. I didn’t know what we had done wrong. Sometimes I sat with her across the yard. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the den, like an anchor.

Our mother began to walk through the house. She walked hard through each room, as though into a wind. She was different, too. When she looked at us, she wasn’t in her face; she was somewhere with our father.

When my mother yelled at my father to get up or see a doctor, I ran to Betsy, who was involved in her Seventeen s.

“What do we do!” I yelled at her.

She turned the page on a quiz on kissable lip gloss. “How should I know?” she asked.

I started to walk away until we heard our mother’s voice rise again, louder than I had ever heard it.

Betsy jumped up. She began to run, arms flapping. I ran, too. She turned on the sprinklers. “Doe,” she sang. “A deer. A female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun. .”

“Me, a name I call myself. .” We ran. We ran over the water; we ran as though we had practiced. I followed her around the yard, over the magazines, cover girls all wavy under the water.

We ran as far from the house as we could. We sang so loud our voices blurred. The house shimmered through the water. It almost looked beautiful.

BEFORE MY FATHER GOT TIRED, HE TOOK US DRIVING. HE WANTED to take us somewhere we had never seen. Sometimes he reached over the seat to us, his arm waved in front of our faces, and Betsy and I would decide what to put in his hand. “Guess what this is,” we’d say, giving him anything — a shoe, a comic book.

I hated the game the moment Betsy put her bad hand into his. My father would rub her bad hand gently, as though he were trying to erase something, and then his fingers would close completely over her. “It’s. . a banana,” my father would say. “A croissant.” Betsy would fall into the seat, giggling. “Wrong,” she’d say. “It’s a boomerang tip.” Sometimes I would also put my hand into his. He would lightly lace his fingers into mine. “This is — um,” he would say, thinking. I waited for him to tell me something special I could be.