Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

That’s good, that’s my baby, yeah , she says.

My hand sticky and acid-wet, rubbing with her, rubbing faster, my eyes on the ceiling, hearing her slaps, she’s breathing hard and I’m breathing hard and then Now, yes, yes . I look at her then and see the sheen on her upper lip, her perfect, chemical-burned upper lip, they were right, it does hurt them more than it hurts me. Then candy, then ice cream.

Thank you, Mommy , I type.

My pleasure, baby , she says, sunny.

Then the screen goes blank and a message comes up: I’m Going On Vacation, Honey! W hen I’m Back In Town, You And I Will Spend Some Very, Very SPECIAL Hands-on QUALITY TIME Together! Meanwhile, You Be A Good Boy!

ISN’T SHE FINISHEDyet? I ask. I move aside the plastic grocery bag of skinless chicken breasts, broccolini, whole-grain pitas, fruit, and skim milk and sit closer to him in the booth.

She’s a work-in-progress, he tells me. He leans past me to riffle in the bag. Oh, shit. I forgot to tell you. No more dairy. She’s switching to soy.

I’m sorry.

That’s okay. I can stop on my way home, I guess.

We don’t speak for a moment, just eat our pasta primaveras without garlic, our salads with fennel and grape tomatoes. I’d ordered a forty-dollar bottle of Pinot Grigio, and we drink it.

So, I say, what’s she doing this time?

Tummy tuck. The liposuction made her pretty saggy. Although she says it was even like that before, from having a kid. He glances under the table, at the seat to the other side of me. Hey, didn’t you get my e-mail?

He has abandoned his old treatment, started all over again, same story but a completely different take. I’m realizing, I think, that this is what he always does. I wonder if he’ll ever be ready to go to script.

Yeah, I got it. I printed it out for myself, but I had finals today, I couldn’t get to the copy place. I’m sorry.

Shit. I’m supposed to be copying right now.

I’ll go tomorrow. Maybe I can drop the copies off at your place?

Excuse me?

Oh, yeah. Well, maybe you can get away and meet me tomorrow afternoon? Or tomorrow night?

Maybe. It depends. I’ll just do it myself. He nudges me with his elbow. How’d your finals go?

Okay. They’re over. Just one semester left.

Yeah, congratulations. Then it’s welcome to the real fucking world, kiddo.

I know.

Wait’ll you have to pay bills. Wait’ll you have to find a decent place to live.

Fine by me. I can’t wait to get out of there. I’m so fucking sick of being treated like a kid.

He shrugs. You just don’t appreciate what you’ve got.

So, what did they do to her? I ask.

It’s like this. . he leans over and reaches under my shirt, trying to pull up a handful of belly flesh. It’s like they squeeze as much of her stomach skin as they can get. .

He pulls, and there isn’t much to grab, so it hurts. But I like the hold he has on me.

. . and they staple it like this — he makes those kachunk noises — she’s got these dozens of staples all across her gut. He finishes kachunk ing across my torso. And they cut off all the extra.

Won’t that leave a scar?

She says she can wear a belt over it or something. And you can rub vitamin E over the scar so it won’t be so bad.

You didn’t ask me to get any vitamin E.

You do that later, after they take the staples out. Right now her stomach’s all puffed up, like she’s pregnant. She looks like shit. And it hurts, she can barely move.

Right now I’m out celebrating finals being over with my friend Stacy, I tell him.

Yeah?

I can stay out pretty late.

Yeah, listen. . I actually better get going soon. No dessert, even.

What do you mean?

I’m sorry. But now that I have to stop at the store and everything. . and she’s in bad shape this time, I probably need to get back. .

Oh.

He lets go of his grip on my stomach to scoop up the last of his pasta.

Come on, no big deal. You look like you’re going to cry. I need to take care of her, all right? Don’t be so fucking selfish. She’s really hurting. You want to be a big girl about this, or what?

I DECIDE Imight as well stop at the copy place tonight, maybe he’ll be able to slip out for breakfast tomorrow and wouldn’t it be a good idea if I had copies ready for him then. The treatment for his new script is twelve pages long, and the original has been cut up into pieces and scotch-taped and paperclipped back together — I don’t want to trust the counter guys to do it right, so I grab a key for the self-service machines and stand in line with my manila folder. Although it’s almost midnight, there’s a long wait. The whole mall is busy. It looks like half of Los Angeles is out strolling in couples or having coffee at the coffee place, ice cream at the ice cream place, or in here copying their screenplays and treatments. I glance at the pages of his treatment as the copied pages collate, wondering how he’s changed his story, but I’m thinking about the girlfriend, how she keeps coming back and back and back for more work. How much more of herself she can replace, shore up, wire together? I marvel at what she’s putting herself through, how she can keep standing all the pain, how worth it it all must be.

I finish at the copy machine and go to the central table for stapling. I staple and staple, still thinking about the girlfriend at his home in his bed right now, with all that pain, and those icepacks and punctures and clipped-shut swollen seams, and I glance up, outside, to see strolling past the coffee place what looks like my boyfriend, I’m sure it is, I think, holding hands with someone, both of them slipping their tongues around ice cream cones in perfect and blithe sync. I can’t tell if it’s a grown-up-looking little girl or a girlish, well-held-together mature woman. I can’t tell if it’s a mother or a daughter, or either, and does it even matter, I realize I don’t know which story to believe, which is more real or more made up. Maybe no one was ever in pain or thrall. I just see the hand-holding, and the stroll, and my insides are all going to spill, like I’ve been gutted, split open, then left alone on a hook to hang.

I look down and see I’ve stapled a finger, clean through the very tip, where it’s all nerve and just a very little flesh, no blood, really. Driven through and punched tight, and it feels like absolutely nothing at all. Surprising, that it feels like nothing. I would have thought it would feel completely like something else.

DADDY?

It’s late and my father’s bedroom light is out. But I knock, anyway. I was thinking that just maybe he’d be waiting up, that he’d grill me about where I was or who I was with. I can’t remember the last time he did that. I can’t remember the last time he questioned me as he used to, the last time he was worried or strict, the last time he braided my hair or bathed me, told me I was pretty or wonderful or smart, dressed me, came into my room at night, sweet, undressed me, punished me, cared. The special kind of father things.

There’s no answer, but I open the door and go in, anyway.

They’re in Needles for the night. At least, that was the plan. But Rick had shut his phone off against her early in the day’s white glare and she’d lost sight of the weaving truck after his angry, game-play cutoff on the westbound I-40, just past the Arizona border. Day’s end she spotted the heat-rippled Needles off-ramp and the Motel 6 sign. Worth a try. She has her panting, paw-sweat little dog with her, and all Motel 6’s take little dogs — it’s been their chain of choice the last three nights since leaving Des Moines. Her driving her car in front, hands clenched at 10 and 2, Rick coasting along back of her in the rental truck, with a diminishing cooler of beer and a year’s worth of her accumulated thrift store crap she just couldn’t bring herself to leave behind this time, homeward bound, heading west, convoy ho. She’s sick of baking macadam, and pink-furred roadkill bounced to the shoulder, and Christian radio static. She’s sick of strategy and bluff. No truck in the Motel 6 parking lot, but she doesn’t care, she’s stopping for the night.