Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

She knits security blankets of bargain-bin yarn for homeless abandoned infants, because she is maternal.

She knits chemo caps soft as kitten bellies for brave, hair-shedding friends with translucent skin, because she is supportive and merciful.

She knits because studies show knitting reduces the risk of dementia, and she will not become a fogged, unraveling person who must rely on mocking, merciless tribal friends for survival.

She knits until her hands are swollen and carpal tunneled into witchy old-lady knuckle knobs, into burning nerves. She knits into numbness, into scrim.

She knits and knits like Madame Defarge in her chair, content in the breeze of the guillotine blade, knits until she feels the blood has risen warm to her ankles and it is suddenly, surprisingly, her turn now, sees she has blindly knitted herself into the wooly smothering thing that will bag her own cold, twiggy bones, and that is all she has ever made, or done.

My boyfriend’s other girlfriend is at his home in his bed right now, with staples in her scalp. This time was a brow lift. The doctor slit her scalp from ear to ear at the hairline, hitched up an inch or so of face and forehead, and stapled the skin seam shut. My boyfriend demonstrated this to me in the Japanese restaurant, sliding his hands across my own scalp, under my hair to the roots, my ears mashed flat against his palms. He made kachunk noises as he pantomimed the stapling. Then he blew a strand of my hair from the manila folder next to his plate of sashimi. He’d called that afternoon to tell me to meet him, that he could get out for a few evening hours, that I should wear a shortish skirt, and that I should download the treatment for his new screenplay he’d attach in an e-mail, take it to the copy place, and bring him ten copies of it at dinner. The manila folder holds the original. He gives the copies to friends, for feedback. Right now, his girlfriend thinks he’s copying. She’s lying in his bed, swollen, bruised, in pain, icepacks chilling the tiny stainless-steel clips, thinking he’s off at the copy place to make ten copies of his treatment, but instead he’s eating pricey sashimi with me, stretching the smooth skin of my face up by my ears and hair to illustrate her, and making loud kachunk noises as he knuckles a stapled line across my scalp.

On the floor next to me is the stack of treatments. Also, a plastic grocery bag. He’d called me back to tell me to pick up a few things. After the copy place, he’d told her, he would stop at the market. I was to pick up milk, bread, orange juice, broccoli, cooked chicken breasts from the deli counter. Everything organic. Toilet paper. Whole-grain bread.

Oh, and fruit, he’d called back a third time to whisper. She wants some fruit. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you back.

That’s okay, I whispered back, I have to go to the store anyway.

I didn’t want my dad to overhear I was doing this, buying groceries for my boyfriend. He’s never liked my boyfriends, but I know it’s just paternal gut reaction, all the worry. It isn’t that he doesn’t trust me — I’ve had his Visa card since I was fifteen, he trusts me to be smart and use it wisely for whatever I need, that I won’t abuse the privilege.

I shift away and twirl a finger at the waitress, indicating I’d like more sake. My boyfriend is twenty-six but always gets carded. I never do, for some reason, although I’m only almost twenty-one.

I wonder if the girlfriend will like the organic Fuji apples I selected, the juice with calcium and D and extra pulp. The expensive, brand-name juice I always buy for her. My boyfriend never keeps these kinds of things in the house on his own, for himself or me, only for her, for when she comes to town to get work done, and then to him, to heal. She lives near San Jose with an eight-year-old daughter she’d had on the teetering edge of being too old, and after acting failed, whom she refuses to raise amid the glitz and decay of Los Angeles. The daughter, my boyfriend has told me, goes to stay with her father when the mother is here, the ex-husband. The mother has been here a total of twenty-three weeks in the past two years, I calculate, the same two years I’ve been with my boyfriend, to undergo then recuperate from the work on fatty eye deposits, liposuction on tummy and hips, collagen injections, breast augmentation, facial chemical peel, and the current brow lift, which means the little girl has spent those same twenty-three weeks with her father, the ex-husband. I feel sorry for the little girl, her mother leaving so much. But it’s probably a special treat to spend that time with her father. I imagine he takes her on Ferris wheels at carnivals, clumsily braids her hair and ties bows, makes sure she washes her neck, holds her hand when they cross the street or go for strolls to get ice cream, tells her how wonderful and pretty and smart she is. The special kind of father stuff.

Meanwhile, my boyfriend icepacks his girlfriend’s body, changes gluey dressings, washes her rank hair in a basin, and gently feeds her the bread, orange juice, and fruit I buy. He watches over her full time, devoted, and slips out to spend little gaps with me. When she’s healed enough to go back to San Jose, her daughter, and her current business venture, the last of the fruit will rot and the bread will grow mold and the juice will ferment to foam, and my boyfriend will return to me and his screenplays and his staples of beer and salsa and fried pork rinds for protein. He will spend a portion of the money she leaves him to stock up on margarita mixes, frozen pizzas, and canned cream soups and bank the rest. He keeps blue icepacks stuffed in with the frozen burritos and quiches and taquitos. It’s the kind of food we eat when I go over to his place, and I often wonder when that diet is going to kill him. But when she’s in town, and giving him extra money, he spends much of it taking me out to pricey dinners.

A couple of years ago she bought a pair of thigh-high leather boots, a boned spandex bustier, and a studded crop and placed an ad in the local paper. Silicon Valley guys called, lined up, became regulars, and she rose a tax bracket. But she got tired and worried about keeping it all up. She started getting work done, the minor nips and tucks, the same kind of work she’d eschewed when it might have helped an acting career in L.A. but now, well, her options were narrowing and she needed to make the most of what she had.

I don’t judge her, I had said to my boyfriend when he told me about her. She has a daughter to take care of. Food, clothing, rent. Life’s expensive. You do what you have to.

Exactly, he’d said. I keep telling you that.

The waitress brings another warm white bottle, and I pour.

So, she’s taken it online, he tells me tonight. Given she wasn’t actually fucking anyone anyway, you know? Customers e-mail requests, she links up maybe a dozen or so who want the same thing, just acts it out live online. She doesn’t even have to see these guys. She’s making a shitload of money. For just mind-fucking. Boilerplate B and D. The Come-to-Mommy crowd. No real fluids, no real skin.

So, why is she still getting all this work done? I ask.

He shrugs. Hey, even online she needs to look good. Who wants to get tied up and spanked by some old pig?

He tells me her website address, in case I want to “check out the competition.”

Yeah, right, I say. Gross.

He laughs. You have nothing to fear, he says. Hey, did you get a receipt?

He’s caressing the manila folder, and I realize he means for the copies, not the groceries. He can write off copies.

That’s okay, I tell him. My contribution to the arts.

God, you look pretty tonight, he tells me. He tugs my face over to him by my bangs and one ear lobe, gives me a kiss. I love you, he says, but it’s the tugging that hits home.