Aimee Bender: An Invisible Sign of My Own

A few days after my aunt had driven away, when I was sure she’d be home, I ripped out three pages from the warped lingerie catalog and mailed them to her; I circled several of the bras that were clearly the wrong size and wrote, in black pen: I bet these would look great on you. She wrote back after a month and said everyone in the big city

was wearing the jacket I’d returned. I swiped my father’s tissue after he’d sneezed and mailed her that.

At home, brightness seemed to be draining from the house. The orange carpet paled to beige. The burgundy sofa looked more nut colored to me now. Brass quintets on the stereo sounded like drawers of silverware, clanking. No one read the glossy magazines on the coffee table anymore: What was the point of an alarm clock shaped like a turtle? I saved a page for posterity, but dumped the rest of the lingerie catalog.

The warmth of afternoon, squares of sunlight, glowing reds all of this darkened; it was as if someone had installed a dim switch on the side of our house and spun it down to Low.

I didn’t know what to do about it, so I just got used to it. When I saw myself in a mirror at school, my eyes were blue and my tongue was red. I looked garish and over-made-up to myself, with blue eyes. Blue eyes! I knocked on trees as I walked home, thinking of the gall of my body, having eyes the color of the stupid sky. At home, the mirror in the bathroom reflected back a more acceptable shade of industrial lead. When I saw pairs of ducks in the pond at the park, each time I convinced myself that the female, brown and beige, was more beautiful than the male.

She was direct, and simple. I ignored that male duck, whose iridescent green feathers I now found ostentatious.

I did not remind myself that only two years before I had written a ballad about mallards on my walk to school, about how those 3 feathers held the empress’s hidden emeralds, so she could always get money if she needed it.

My father managed to go to work every day, to the blue glass 6 hospital where he cured people of skin disease. To his office he wore dark blazers over dull shirts over tweed pants.

His watchband was silver; his wedding ring, white gold. His thick black hair now had stripes of age in it, and his eye whites were thin as skim milk. I had to go see him at work once because I needed an itch cream for my knuckles, which were so over knocked they’d broken out, and when I entered his office, he was standing by his secretary. She was a woman who believed strongly in the powers of herbal tea and singing. She wore a dress the color of cranberry juice and sported huge earrings shaped like bird cages that held inside them miniature plastic parrots. I was struck, held still at the door, by the contrast.

I waved to the secretary, who handed me a lollipop even though I was too old then; it was grape, a purple circle. I unwrapped it and popped it into my mouth. The secretary offered the bowl of lollipops to my father, as a joke. To both of our surprise, he reached in and fished around.

Aha! he said, when he pulled out his choice.

It would’ve made sense to laugh but it just wasn’t funny. He’d selected the only black licorice lollipop left over from the last batch that’d had patients complaining. He ripped off the plastic and held it up in his hand. I could feel the secretary trying to get eye contact with me, bird cages swinging, but I wouldn’t look over. I didn’t want to know the expression on her face.

That hospital where my father worked was the one true attraction in town. Everything else was very regular-we had a town hall, a library, one high school, a park. A butcher, a baker, an auto shop, an ice-cream store. All the buildings were one story high, and one story out loud. At the tourist agency, smack in the center of the park, in the center of town, my mother kept her people informed by busily making brochures called History of the Bug Shop or Evolution of Our Gas Station. There was also a record of everyone who had ever left town and where they were now.

Supposedly Molly Glee, who I’d gone to high school with, was currently in Sweden, making boats. I thought this was a big load of bull. My personal feeling was that there was a whole lot of lying that went on about where people were once they left. No one wanted to admit their kid had ridden off into that glorious western sunset only to sell insurance in another small town in the middle of another nowhere.

But even if it was true. Everything was eclipsed anyway, by the clear blue shadows of that hospital.

Its architecture would’ve been ornate anywhere, but especially ” ‘iSib I e s igz of in such a small town. Some very wealthy, slowly dying architect from the South had come many years before and built it entirely of blue glass, hoping to heal himself with the dry climate, and also to make life for the local sick people more beautiful. The hospital was twelve stories high, the biggest building in town by far. The clear cut blue — glass elevator was so thick it made the world look like liquid, and since there was no body of water around for miles, this was the closest you could get to swimming.

A month or so after he finished his masterpiece, the architect died, in a transparent blue room he designed himself, top floor, doing his best to replicate heaven.

My mother remembered the whole thing. She’d been just a teenager when the architect had come to town. She often told me about watching truck after truck drive in from the highway and head straight to the empty dirt lot, truck beds loaded with walls of blue glass-thick, clear panes of hardened sky. The hospital took seven years to build. My mother said the process was wonderful, from frame to completion, and as the walls and windows shot higher and higher, blue shadows large as swimming pools on the pavement, the whole town watched in awe from below.

On the day of the grand opening, in fact, Mr. George O’Mazzi, a war veteran, future father of biceped Danny, slammed his arm deliberately in a car door because he wanted the distinction of being the first to sleep overnight in the new blue palace. The brand-new ambulance spun down the street, jaunty and clean, red light awhirl. Mr. O’Mazzi’s plan failed miserably, however, because although the exterior was in great shape, there was very little equipment and even fewer doctors inside the hospital at the time, so he spent hours in terrible pain

before those trucks pulled in from the highway again, this time piled high with drugs.

When asked the following week by my blue-eyed mother just exactly what it was like to sleep in there, for the brochure on History of the Hospital, he stared at her. Like spending the night inside your eyeball, he said. Except imagine a needle poking right through the pupil.

She blinked.

Unfortunately, his injured arm, already weak and damaged from shrapnel, got infected from the car-door slam, and had to be removed. After his recovery, Mr. O’Mazzi brought the separated arm to the town glassmaker, who sealed it inside a rectangle of the same blue glass, for proud display on their mantel, engraved with the words FIRST

SURGERY.

Word of the hospital’s beauty spread, and attracted doctors from all over the country. Some came to town, balked at the size of the population, and left; but others, like my father, were soothed by the climate and sense of space, and stayed. He was glad to get away from his side of the country, a place so cold in wintertime that bullies went after scarves instead of lunch money.

My mother and father met right away because he was new and wanted to get connected and she was the best-informed resident. He explained to her how he fixed hives and halted acne; she told him how the town had saved the old oak tree on Maiden Lane from blight. Their first kiss was by the duck pond when the very first 4 ducklings had been dropped off, by some traveler from a city of excess birds.