Ben Marcus: Notable American Women

My pajamas were on the hook because I had the window closed and the wind was turned on high out in the world, making my room feel under attack, a bunker keeping the hard sound out. I kept twisting and the wind only got louder, until it was like getting breathed on so hard, it would make me older, with fast air that would turn me into my father. When Pal climbed on and found me with his mouth, I just couldn’t stop laughing, but it was a laugh like an allergy, coming out too hard and strong and choking me, until I lost my breath and went down into the twisted sheets. Pal was part of my body now, but I felt even lighter. I had taken on a passenger, or he had taken on me. Together we were something less, which felt like such a relief, to not be ourselves for a while. I did not know where the rest of me had gone. We could creep from the room without sound. We could casually go to our graves. He would be my camouflage. I rolled over and silently laughed into the pillow, and Pal just sat on my bed on his hands and knees and he drove his mouth into me all day, telling a joke without words, one that tickled and hurt and never quite finished. He kept finding me out until he had solved me, and I was no more than a spill of water on my bed, a leak, soaking the sheets. I was only a bit of math for him to do, and then he had done me, and I was over, solved, finished. I had been answered.

I didn’t start mouthing back until I was older. Jane Dark had moved in and set up her program — a great gymnasium of ladies laboring to be silent — so Pal came to live with us full-time. Father turned scarce, restricted to a shouting position some distance into the field. He raised a fist and yelled, and sometimes he threw a small wooden lance at the house, to little effect. I could imagine small birds breaking against the shutters. Pal and I spent our days in great schemes and chases. Pal would sit back with his legs up and yell at me, but I never knew what he meant. We wrote no notes. To make him stop yelling, I’d put my head down and charge like a bull into the wall. Sometimes I charged so hard, I couldn’t stand back up. Pal yelled louder. We yelled at each other and I tried to learn his language. I would take off my pajamas and play bomber with him, and Pal would calm down for a while, his face bristled and distant, breathing hard, as if it were a language of its own that I should study. I listened to his breath and heard foreign words an old man might say. Then I could approach him and he would pretend not to notice. I could make his breath go steady and slow, until there were no words in it, as if I were washing the air that came out of his mouth, polishing it into my own private wind, until it was a word so pure, it sounded like nothing at all. We would run down near the fainting tanks and sometimes we would play dead for whole afternoons, sprawled next to each other in the grass as if we had been killed far above and had just landed dead like that. When Pal played dead, he invited blackflies around his person, and they would commence to circle and dive-bomb at him. I could hear the whining pitch of their flight. Then he was all of a sudden up fast and running, the flies disturbed from their meal, Pal perfectly happy to have fooled them. I did not much care to stand up after playing dead. My body refused to work. The grass down there was so clean and cold and sharp — I felt plugged in to all those thin green wires. It was the best way to die. When I finally pulled myself up to walk home, all those wires were severed and I operated without power, trying to smile at Pal with my broken, run-down face, which kept slipping down my chest, begging me lower. Trying not to sink back down into the soft shore of the pond, where my face could stay buried.

When I went downstairs the day of Pal’s first visit, my mother said I should wash my face, but she didn’t wait for me to do it. She was quickly on me with a sponge, roughhousing my cheeks, using the sandy side all over my head, until it chafed and strawberried. She showed me notes she must have scribbled while I was upstairs with Pal, admonishments of one kind or another. I was in for corrections. There would be new learning water to drink, new behavior flash cards, and gymnastics against emotion. An itinerary was written out for me with early rising times, and cleaning duty at the fainting tank. The ladies in the room applauded my mother, quietly patting their knees as they crouched like skiers, and my mother just scrubbed me harder, as if she were acting in a play that required her to do this. I thought we were all watching ourselves being serious. I made a serious face and tried to look tired. I held my breath until my vision clouded and I felt older. She showed special vigor on that part of my head that would have had hair on it had I been more like other boys, buffing the very top of me. Some of the girls in the kitchen laughed, imitating me getting scrubbed up. They squinched their faces and dodged about the room, pretending to fend off the sponge. To everything I did, they invented a dance, so that even when I tried not to move, they exaggerated my stillness and strutted like stifflimbed robots. The smallest girls in the background simply hissed through tiny perforations they made between their fingers, filling the kitchen with a young, female wind that was sharp on my skin. I thought my bones might slowly break. It was like being held by a large hand, choked by air that had formed a corset around me.

By the end of this public washing, I no longer had any of Pal on me, but I didn’t need to; my heart was flushed and fast and I could still feel him in the fat wall of my chest, where I had decided to save my day with him, where he pulsed in me. My mother released her sponge to a group of girls, who quickly bagged it and marked the bag with code. The sponge was brought over to Jane Dark, who slipped it into her cloak and coughed.

They led me to the table. Dark wore a burlap hood and was muttering something. I felt happy; my face was clean; my vision had doubled, tripled, so I could see deep inside everyone, even all of the emotion removers, who were stone-faced and dead-looking, who had wept into cloth and laughed or raged into their hard swatches of linen that they wore in bracelets over their wrists. I could see inside Ms. Dark’s hood and through her face and I could watch the tiny women struggling to operate this great lady’s head, even though it was only blood and flesh like the rest of us, even though I only wished her design were something anyone could determine.

Dark took me on her lap, which was the first lap that I had been on. It felt designed for my own body, a seat only I could fit in. I rocked in it and it held me in a perfect mold, like a great warm palm. Mother looked on and turned her hand to some notes. She mimed a smile at me, but her face collapsed too quickly and I wasn’t fooled. I still could not keep myself from smiling back at her, even though I had been told not to, covering my teeth with my hands. She would not hold my stare.

To everything I tried to say, Dark shushed me. I wanted to ask her about Pal, but she put a finger to her lips. When I mentioned that Father was outside, the whole room shushed me at once, the sound of a faucet turned on full. Dark held me closer and squeezed my torso, kneading my ribs and belly as if it were a dough, until I started to huff, just because it felt new so deep in my belly, especially when she held me like that. She placed her hand on me and I shushed the room in a loud expulsion. Little girls gathered near me and helped squeeze at my midsection until the shushing came from way down in my stomach, a silencing hiss I had not heard myself make before, loud enough to fill the room. The women all smiled and seemed shy. I shushed hard and long, with my eyes squinched tight, until my face felt swollen, as though a tourniquet were constricting my neck, and then the shushing seemed to release from my mouth and act on its own, and I could breathe quite separate from it and just listen to the hiss. It was so soothing that I was afraid for the kitchen to be quiet again. The quiet might hurt, without the shush filling the air like a great pillow. The quiet might tear something open.