Melanie Thon: First, Body: Stories

The nurse shows him the button to press when the pain comes back. Straight into the vein, babe. No need to suffer. Just give yourself a little pop. Some people think they got to be strong, lie there sweating till I remind them. Not me, honey — you give me one of those, I’d be fine all the time . He grins. He has a wide mouth, bright teeth; he says, You need me tonight, honey, you just buzz .

Gloria Luby lies down beside him. She tells him, I was exactly what they expected me to be. My brain was light, my liver heavy; the walls of my heart were thick. But there were other things they never found . She rolls toward him, presses herself against him. Her soft body has warmth but no weight. She envelopes him. She says, I’ll tell you now, if you want to know .

The blond girl with the spikes on her jacket leans in the doorway. Outside, the rain. Behind her, the yellow light of the hall. She’s wearing her black combat boots, those ripped fishnets, a sheer black dress, a black slip. She says, Roxanne’s dead. So don’t give me any of that shit about risk . He turns to the wall. He doesn’t have to listen to this. All right then , she says, maybe she’s not dead. But I saw her — she don’t look too good .

She comes into the room, slumps in the chair by the bed. She says, I heard all about you and that fat lady .

She’s waiting. She thinks he’ll have something to say. She lights a cigarette, says, Wanna drag ? And he does, so they smoke, passing the cigarette back and forth. She says, Roxanne thinks you’re an idiot, but who knows . She grinds the cigarette out on the floor, then stuffs the filter back in the pack, between the plastic and the paper. She says, Don’t tell anybody I was here .

The nurse brings Sid a wet cloth, washes his face, says, You been talking yourself silly, babe .

You know what I did?

The nurse touches Sid’s arm, strokes him from elbow to wrist. You’re famous here, Mr. Elliott — everybody knows what you did .

Roxanne sits on the windowsill. She says, Looks like you found yourself another sweetheart .

Sid’s forehead beads with sweat. The pain centers in his teeth, not his knee; it throbs through his head. He’s forgotten the button on his IV, forgotten the buzzer that calls the nurse. Roxanne drifts toward the bed like smoke. She says, Does it hurt, Sid ? He doesn’t know if she’s trying to be mean or trying to be kind. She says, This is only the beginning . But she presses the button, releases the Demerol into the tube. She stoops as if to kiss him but doesn’t kiss. She whispers, I’m gone now .

Sidney Elliott stands in a white room at the end of a long hallway. He’s alone with a woman. He looks at her. He thinks, Nobody loved you enough or in the right way.

In some part of his mind, he knows exactly what will happen if he lifts her, if he takes her home, but it’s years too late to stop.

He tries to be tender.

He prays to be strong.

I WAS a natural liar, like my mother. One night she told my daddy she was going to the movies with her girlfriend Marlene. Drive-in, double feature, up in Kalispell. Daddy said, How late will you be ? And my mother said she didn’t know.

Hours later, we tried to find her. I remember my father hobbling from car to car while I sat in the truck. The faces on the screen were as big as God’s. Their voices crackled in every box. I was certain my mother was here, stunned and obedient. Huge bodies floated over the hill. They shimmered, lit from inside. This was how the dead returned, I thought, full of grace and hope.

It was midnight. I was nine years old. By morning I understood my mother was five hundred miles gone.

I remember the clumsy child I was. Bruises on my arms, scabbed knees. Boys chased me down the gully after school. I remember falling in the mud. They stole things I couldn’t get back, small things whose absences I couldn’t explain to my father now that we lived alone: a plastic barrette shaped like a butterfly, one shoelace, a pair of white underpants embroidered with the word Wednesday . I was Wednesday’s child. I wore my Tuesday pants twice each week, the second day turned inside out.

Careless girl, the nuns said, immature, a dreamer. They told my father they had to smack my hands with a ruler just to wake me up.

I was afraid of the lake, the dark water, the way rocks blurred and wavered, the way they grew long necks and fins and swam below me.

I was afraid of the woods where a hunter had killed his only son. An accident, he said: the boy moved so softly in his deer-colored coat. When the man saw what he’d shot, he propped the gun between his feet and fired once more. He bled and bled. Poured into the dry ground. Unlucky man, he lived to tell.

I was afraid of my father’s body, the way he was both fat and thin at the same time, like the old cows that came down to the water at dusk. Bony haunches, sagging bellies — they were pitiful things. Daddy yelled at them, waving his stick, snapping the air behind their scrawny butts. They looked at him with their terrible cow eyes. Night after night they drank all they wanted, shat where they stood. Night after night the stick became a cane, and my father climbed the path, breathing hard. He’d been a crippled child, a boy with a metal brace whose mother had had to teach him to walk a second time when he was six, a boy whose big sister lived to be ten. She drowned in air, chest paralyzed, no iron lung to save her. I thought it was this nightly failure, the cows’ blank eyes, that made my mother go.

My daddy worked for a man twelve years younger than he was, a doctor with an orchard on the lake. We lived in the caretaker’s cottage, a four-room cabin behind the big house. Lying in my little bed, the one Daddy’d built just for me, I heard leaves fluttering, hundreds of cherry trees; I heard water lapping stones on the shore. Kneeling at my window, I saw the moon’s reflection, a silvery path rippling across the water. I smelled the pine of the boards beneath me, and the pines swaying along the road. Then, that foot-dragging sound in the hall.

I remember the creak of the hinge, my father’s shape and the light behind him as he stood at my door. This was another night, years before the movie, another time my mother lied and was gone. He said, Get dressed, Ada, we have to go . He meant we had to look for her. He meant he couldn’t leave me here alone. I wore my mother’s sweater over my nightgown, the long sleeves rolled up.

This time we drove south, down through the reservation, stopping at every bar. We drove past the Church of the Good Shepherd, which stayed lit all night, past huddled trailers and tarpaper shacks, past the squat house where two dogs stood at the edge of the flat tin roof and howled, past the herd of white plaster deer that seemed to flee toward the woods.

We found my mother just across the border, beyond the reservation, in a town called Paradise, the Little Big Man Bar. Out back, the owner had seven junked cars. He called it his Indian hotel. For a buck, you could spend the night, sleep it off.

My mother was inside that bar, dancing with a dark-skinned man. Pretty Noelle, so pale she seemed to glow. She spun, head thrown back, eyes closed. She was dizzy, I was sure. The man pulled her close, whispered to make her laugh. I swear I heard that sound float, my mother’s laughter weaving through the throb of guitar and drum, whirling around my head like smoke. I swear I felt that man, his hand on my own back, the shape of each finger, the sweat underneath my nightgown, underneath his palm.