Jac Jemc - A Different Bed Every Time

On Sundays my mother dragged my sister and me to church. I mostly ignored everything that went on and daydreamed about boys and dogs and what would happen when my parents finally found me out in public without that brace on.

My favorite part was when the congregation would recite the longer prayers together. There were slight variations depending on the versions they learned and when the congregation’s mouths touched different words at the same time, I could never decide if the result sounded like a beautiful chord or an argument. I stared up at the cross and thought about how Christ had known what was coming and how he must have mentally prepared himself for a long day.

My sister seemed suddenly enthralled by mass. We left and she tried to point out all of the loopholes to my mother, and my mother just kept repeating the sentence, “That’s faith.”

On the way home from church my mother stopped to give communion to an older parishioner. My sister and I sat in the swing on the shut-in’s front porch and played word association games.

“Heave.”

“Heavy.”

“Weeping.”

“George.”

“Oooo, who’s George?” my sister asked, and I had to explain how I’d connected “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” to George Harrison.

When we got home, I couldn’t take my church clothes off quickly enough. I stood in front of the mirror, unbuttoning, and wondered how I could be tired by noon on a Sunday. I stripped down to just my underwear and the brace, and poked at the spots where the hard plastic made my flesh bulge out. “You’re not fat,” I told myself. “Shut up.”

I went out to the yard with a book and a blanket, kneeled on a bright fig and watched the juices blossom through the throw.

I jotted down the dreams I could remember and when I reread them, they sounded like apologies to myself: consoling, reassuring, “won’t let it happen again.” I laid in the sun, still, and searched inside my body for the sensation of each organ pumping me alive.

The day was breezy and I climbed to a low tree branch, closed my eyes and held my arms straight out to the side, feeling the air and the leaves reach for the sensitive skin of my inner elbows and the spot my tank tops left bare between the brace and my armpits. My father strolled by with hedge clippers.

“You look like a bird.”

“Good,” I said, squinting one eye open to see if he lingered.

I could tell my father had the same thought every day of his life: how did I make these two weirdos?

My sister had been dabbling in performance art then, rehearsing her new piece: resting her chin on the dining room table, trying to prevent a rat from throwing itself over the edge with her cupped hands.

“Cecile,” I said, “I’m done with my homework, if you want me to pose.”

She scooped up the rat and put him in his tank. On the way to the garage, she ran her hands through her hair before washing them.

“Becky, you’re a real natural. I swear. No one with an effed up back has been so paint-worthy since Frida Kahlo.”

“Rebecca,” I said to her. “I want people to call me Rebecca now.”

“Yeah, right on. Reinvent yourself, kid. I’m into it. How’s the puppy fundraising?”

No one else knew about my silent theft and clandestine sales. She liked the idea. We thought I might just single-handedly wean our father off cigarettes. We knew that wasn’t possible, of course, but we had all sorts of justifying to do.

“It’s going well. I’m about a hundred dollars short,” I said, patting the back pocket of my jeans. I kept the money on me, sure my mother would find it if I left it in my room.

“Here’s something I bet you haven’t thought about: what happens if you want to go away to school? What do you do with the dog then?”

“I’d take it with me, obviously,” I said.

“Rebecca , you can’t have a dog in a dorm room,” she said.

“Dad told me I look like a bird.”

“That’s sweet?”

“I don’t think it was meant to be. But I liked it, yeah.”

She hummed and continued painting.

“Have you ever slow-danced, Cecile?” I asked my sister.

“Yes, of course,” she answered.

“Like with someone you really like?”

“Yeah, I guess. What’s going on? Do you have a dance coming up?”

“Probably at the end of the year.”

“It’s so not a big deal, Becs. Just a body against a body.”

“Rebecca,” I corrected her.

Several days later my sister asked me back to the garage. The warm spell had drooped. She wanted to try a slight variation on a piece she’d made a few weeks earlier. She needed my head at a different angle and hadn’t had luck painting it without me there.

Cecile got things ready while I wandered her studio, which sat full of our old bikes and the sled, the gardening tools, bags of soil.

“Cecile? Why is there a goldfish in the washbasin?”

“Oh, Bruno won it for me at the Mt. Carmel carnival. I don’t have a bowl yet.” She coughed.

“Bruno? Who’s Bruno?” I flicked at the water a little to make the fish swim. “You can’t leave a fish in a sink covered in your old paint. Carnival fish are doomed as it is. Give the little guy a chance.”

“Bruno is my new friend,”

“I see . What were you doing at Mt. Carmel anyway? You know all the money they earn from that carnival goes to the church, right? I thought you weren’t into that.”

“Mom asked if I wanted to go to the novena with her. I think she was joking, but I told her I’d come with and hang out at the carnival until the novena was over and then we could ride the Ferris wheel like old times.”

“Really going for Daughter of the Month, huh? Why didn’t you ask if I wanted to come with?”

“Aw, Becs. I thought it might make you sad. That you can’t ride so many of the rides now.”

I sighed. No one was taking to my request to be called by my full name.

“And, besides, I think it was meant to be that I wandered alone for a while, because I met Bruno.”

“Tell me more about this Bruno.”

“He graduated from Lane too. He’s taking some time off deciding what to do for college. Right now he works as a projectionist at a movie theater on Western. He’s a real dude, but I talked to him about my art and he seemed really into it.” She paused to cough. “I was taking a bunch of photographs that night with plans to use some for paintings. Wanna see? Come here. I’ll show you.”

I wandered over to her laptop set up on an old door balanced on two sawhorses. Bruno filled the screen. He was no one I would picture my sister with. He had on a Sox T-shirt and baseball cap. “This is the guy who won you the fish?”

“Yup, I named the fish Bear in his honor.”

“That’s really special, Cecile.” I rolled my eyes, and she shoved me.

“Quit it, Becky. He’s really sweet and he’s actually super smart. He knows so much about movies and reads the Trib everyday. He’s way up on current events. He made me feel dumb with how little I knew about Chicago politics.”

“Awesome. I only hope I can find someone to make me feel stupid some day.”

“Oh, Lord. Fine. I don’t know when you got so cynical, kid. I’m going to invite him to dinner at home here next week. You’re gonna have to be nice.”

“Good luck with that,” I said, taking my shirt off and easing onto the stool set up for me.

Cecile cranked some sad song and I heard her scrape another cough out of her throat. She’d been smoking. Suddenly I knew.

When I walked into the dining room the next day, there was a pigeon chained to the table. Every few seconds it’d remember it was trapped and flap its wings frantically. I had no desire to watch that bird pull its own foot off. “Cecile!” I hollered. This was too much. She wandered downstairs, stretching, rubbing her eyes. “Cecile,” I said, “we live in Chicago, not the fucking country.”