Susan Steinberg - Hydroplane - Fictions

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.