Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

“You think that was the last time?”

“Yeah.” She takes a bite of a slice of nectarine; her fingers are shaky and she puts the rest down. “It wasn’t good the way it used to be good,” she says. “I mean, it used to be great , you know?”

“Yes,” I say. “I’ve heard.”

“But it was good for all the other reasons it stays good. I mean, it was awkward and uncomfortable, you know, it’s been a long time, but then it had all the things you always hope will be there between you. Like it’s just the two of you in this moment, this space, but in a way that will last. Something you’ll always have. I hope he’ll always have. I hope he’ll remember that part of it forever and forget everything else. I think he’s hoping for that, too. I think that’s why he did it.” She laughs, sheepish. “Or maybe it was just a pity fuck.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I say. I don’t know how he could stand the smell of her, the chemical sweet trying so hard to cover up the waste and rot.

“Or maybe it was just the wig.” She strokes her beautiful long black hair. “You think?” she asks.

I see his mouth still pressed to her waxy, wasted face. I try for patience, for pity. For sparing her.

Do it, I think. It’s what she wants. What she deserves.

“You really want me to be honest?” I say. “Really honest?”

“Yeah, of course. Thank you. What?”

I have her full attention.

“We slept together. A couple of times.”

She looks at me, her face blank.

“Months ago. Before all this.”

There’s a raw twist and crumple to her features, and I feel a joyful rush, a jolt, the lunge for the ball you just know you’re going to smash back hard and win the game with, the thing that’ll let you win the prize, be victorious and serene.

“You were off at your mom’s with the boys, and he thought we’d just watch a movie, get pizza. Like the three of us used to do.”

“I know,” she says.

“except you weren’t there, you were gone—”

“I know, stop,”

“and he invited me over, and—”

“I know ,” she repeats. “Just stop it. Stop.”

I stop.

“I don’t want details,” she says. “That’s between the two of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He told me.”

“He told you.”

“Last night.” There’s the crumple of her again, beneath the glossy bangs, then she takes a breath and her face settles back to smooth. “I knew something’s been wrong. I knew there was something. What you said before, about him going through stuff, too, remember? So I told him whatever it was, he better be looking at the clock, you know?”

“And he told you.”

“It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t pretty. I wasn’t pretty. Believe me, you would not have wanted to be here for what was going on last night.”

“No.”

“But finally, finally, I was all right. It was horrible, but afterward, it was all right. It was good. The two of us. I think it’s even why it was good.” She actually laughs. “Well, that and the wig.”

“What about me?”

“Oh, honey.” She takes my hand. “I was hoping you’d say something. That you’d be honest with me. I’m glad you told me. I’ve always been able to trust you that way, how you don’t leave things unsaid. That’s what I need now. You get to this place where, if it isn’t real, forget it.” Her face is fully content and peaceful now. Her face is a plastic, placid mask. “And hey,” she says. “Don’t think this is weird, but I even had the thought that maybe you two would get together. Afterward.”

“What?” I say. “Excuse me?”

“I know, weird, fucked up. But in a way, it makes sense.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“He’ll need taking care of. And the boys. And it would be all right with me. If that happened. Because it doesn’t change anything. I want you to know that.”

Like some queen granting favors, tossing coins to her servant girl, bread to the peasants, giving her lesser jewels away to charity.

I see his sensitive, devoted hand ceaselessly on her leached-out skin, her toneless body.

Caressing her glorious, extravagant, interminable hair. Stroking her, undyingly.

It really should have been me.

“. . yeah, maybe this really did the trick,” I hear her say.

There’s a chuckle. She’s fussing with her wig, she’s been talking this whole time.

“All the others were a lie. Trying to be someone else. This is really what I wanted.”

“This one is perfect,” I tell her. “It’s you. The perfect you.”

“I want to be wearing it, you know. In the box. Promise me?”

“I promise you.”

“And you have to check my eyebrows are all right.”

“I promise. The eyebrows, and I’ll be sure you have it on.”

She examines a lock. “I got yogurt in it. I want it to be all pretty and clean. You’ll make sure, okay? Even when it gets crazy?”

“Give it to me now. I’ll wash it now. We have that special shampoo.” The clock is ticking, I think.

“You don’t mind?”

“Please,” I say. “It’s what friends are for.”

“Would you close the door? The boys. .” She fusses with her Comfy Grips and gently slips the wig off with practiced care. “Going out in style,” she says.

She hands it over to me, carefully, and I picture the remote, yielding nuns surrendering their precious and painstaking sacrifice. She’s all stripped down to scalp and skull now, illusionless, fetal and wizened. She’s no empress, no Cadillac, no queen, just a drained sack of festering skin and I’m the only one able to see it, spot the patches of sweat on the burgundy satin dress, really know the ugly, bald truth about her. She’s hideous, but everyone else will eternally see only the beautiful fake. I imagine her lying serene in her casket, flushed clean and perfectly groomed, an abiding Nefertiti or Cleopatra.

“Be careful,” she says.

Do it, be unabashed, be bold.

“I promise,” I repeat.

I take the wig into the bathroom with me, close the door. I run the water in the sink. I open the medicine cabinet, still and forever announcing I love you , find the tweezers. I close the toilet lid and sit, cross one leg over the other, take her hair in my hand, her perfect and healthy and human black hair and I begin to tweeze. I pluck each thick, glossy fake strand out by its fake root and let them drift hair by hair by hair down to the cold white tile floor.

She knits as a clumsy, pudge-fingered child, because her mother loves to tell her the once-upon-a-time story of knitting socks for her college boyfriend, painstaking argyle-diamond wool socks for the princely young man who carelessly thrust his foot through the sock toe after all that labor the mother did to show and prove her love, because that was how. She knits because her mother is at a luncheon or antiques show or mahjongg and Can’t the child occupy and entertain herself, and so after school the child trudges to the craft shop and spends her allowance coins on a Let’s Get Knitting! booklet, and fuzzy pink yarn like a long bubble gum worm, and a pair of pointy twig-thick needles she is a little frightened of, because if you walk around with them and trip you could poke out an eye, and on the floor of her canopy-bed bedroom she teaches herself how to cast on , how to loop little nooses of yarn through other loops, scoop the alive loop through and let the old loop fall away and die, loop loop loop, your rows like little crooked corn fields growing, and then you cast off and are done and look what you have made and can do, ta-da!