Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

Then, Michael, you have to meet the real power here, she’s who really runs the place , Nancy had said, leading over the new guy, the new operations manager, who shook hands pleasantly and laughed at her embarrassed retort to Nancy and later that week saw her drinking peppermint tea, day after day— Honey, what about that cabbage diet, what about fasting once a week? — all day with no lunch, and so a few weeks later brought her a Lipton’s Herbal Mint Sampler, who two months later invited her for a cheesy afternoon high tea at the Hilton to discuss accounts and blinked, bewildered, when she refused cake, then ordered her a bowl of fresh berries instead and fed her the first one, spread with clotted cream, by hand. She remembers touching her throat and neck, confused, ruffled, and suddenly feeling the strap of her bra, still wearing a maternity bra then, although Justin was two, the huge cotton cups the only kind that felt like support. This new guy, this Michael, this now faceless and arbitrary person, smiled, and she remembers hoping he wouldn’t see the strap, and then hoping that he would. And she remembers remembering those drawerfuls of abandoned lace, the feeling of blood rushing to a hot swell.

But she can’t wear any of it now, maybe ever again, not after he saw it on the floor, his lingerie, his peach lace bra and panties on the floor. She knows he still sees it. And it still hurts. It hurts both of them, still. She can’t even wear a bra right now, not since she had it done. She gets into bed wearing his nightshirt, and this time she does reach over to him, she reaches determinedly for his hand. For the first time, he lets her. She tugs, and he rolls over toward her, but not meeting her eyes. She puts his hand on her neck, her throat, she wants him to reclaim her. She wants his weight pinning her, flattening her out. His fingers tighten a moment on her throat and then stroke. She unbuttons the three buttons of the flannel pajamas’ top and brings his hand down to her breast, her left breast, it’s still sore but the itching has stopped, the slight scabbing has worn away.

Look , she says to him, but he shakes his head, this is agony for him, and he closes his eyes. The needles had hurt most around her nipple and over her breastbone, her collarbone, the thicker needle for the outline a deeper, sharper pierce, the finer needles for shading like a ruthless scratching of cats’ claws, like relentless bee stings. A good hurt, a willing, penitent hurt. Please, look , she implores. He opens his eyes and sees what she’s done: his name, thick, black, cursive, etched wide across her thorax, her left breast engraved with a scarlet heart. A seal, a label, a brand, she’ll wear it forever, I’m all yours, forever , it pleads. He covers his scripted name with his hand, his face warps; he presses his mouth against her throat and starts to cry. She kisses the top of his shaking hair. Believe me . His grip on her breast grows tighter, distorting the scrawl. He cries, and she cries, too, grateful, thankful that he’s crying like one of her babies she can comfort, do for, make everything right for, finally, then he takes her nipple in his mouth with a hard suck, a bite. She’s grateful for that, too, remembering the needle there, the black ink stabbed into the thin rosy skin of the areola, but then he bites harder, beyond bruise, beyond show, grinding his teeth on her flesh. He’s going for blood, she realizes, and she cries out for him to stop.

He does, he shoves her away, and she closes her eyes in failure. And shame, that she couldn’t take it, couldn’t begin to bear what he has had to. She hears him leave their bed. She hears the faucet blast violently in the bathroom, hears the splash of water and the slick, lathery rub of soap.

INTERESTING, WHAT HURTSand what doesn’t. Piercing the fleshy lobe of your ear is a dull crunch, there are no nerves there, really, no blood, no pain, or you misinterpret the sudden needle punch as pain when it’s really just something abrupt. Esther wants to get her ears pierced like her mother’s, but she’s told her she can’t until she’s thirteen. Esther hates her for that now, too. Five years old, and she’s lost the right to be her mother. Esther knows that, she wields it, and she’s right. She’s glad Justin is still too young, too innocent, to really understand. Maybe there’s still a chance for them, a chance for her little boy’s unadulterated love.

Ice helps. She bleeds, she swells, but the ice pack, clutched clumsily as she makes her way to the car afterward, numbs her out. It didn’t, doesn’t really hurt. Not like the hurt she’s caused him. Not like the hurt of knowing how what she’s done to him hurts.

Feel , she says to him a few weeks later. Here, feel . His back is to her, still, always, but the curve of it is less tight, as if his exhausted spine and muscles can no longer sustain such rigid guard. She slides her whole body toward him, carefully, and presses up behind. His hand is lying on his thigh, unclenched, the fingers limp as a child’s. The fingers tremble a bit. She puts her hands on his shoulder and gently tips him onto his back. He lets her. She lies carefully on top of him, careful not to crush, her head in the pillow above his shoulder so he doesn’t have to see her face, and after long, tense-relax, tense-relax moments, she feels his arms steal around her body, a hand caress her hair, his fingers pressing into her waist. She takes his hand, carefully places it between her legs.

Here, feel , she says. She feels before he does, though, she feels his fingers clutch at the heat, the damp, the hair, then stop. She feels the jolt in her nerves, and then she feels the confusion in his hand. His fingers fumble with the two tiny rings in her swollen flesh, the cold surgical steel chain. The links clink. A tiny metal lock, too, in the shape of a heart, like you’d find on a young girl’s diary, the kind that opens with a tiny medieval-looking key. She hands him the key.

No other man will ever touch me again , it vows.

She rolls onto her back and draws her legs apart. There are tremors all through him, but he’s growing hard; he grasps the key tight, determined, his eyes narrowed on it, and unlocks the tiny locked heart that seals her closed, unthreads the chain from the rings, and spreads her wide. He sits back on his knees, pulls her toward him from under her hips, his eyes still focused there, and enters her abruptly, good, an abrupt and tearing drive. She’s waited until she was mostly healed but not all healed, because she doesn’t have the right to be all healed before he is. Then, he does it harder.

You’re a whore, you know that? he says, moaning. You’re just a fucking whore to me now.

She hears a padded shuffle in the thick carpet pile outside their bedroom door, a hiccup, Justin’s sweet baby hiccup— Whore, cunt , he says, louder, and a crueler plunge — and she cringes at her little boy on the other side of their door, needing her and hearing this. She cringes, and then she hears a soft, hesitant pad of retreat. It’s too late, there’s nothing she can do but stay where she is, wide open, apart, and flat. Each deeper thrust he makes is both a splitting and a pact. She arches and spreads wider for him, the only way to show him she’s his, all his, that she’s willing to sacrifice. To exist with him wholly in a slick open pain, to become all wound.

No one will ever love you as much as I did, he groans, and now, she realizes, it is a curse.

THEY WERE GIVENservice for twelve: the Rosenthal china (“Eden” pattern: dinner, salad, bread and butter, coupe soup) and Baccarat crystal (wine goblet, champagne flute, tumbler) she’d cut from a magazine. She chooses a flute, sets it at a place for one. An ivory lace cloth on the dining room table, and the kids, his kids, gone to bed without protest, a brief hug from Justin, a cold, resigned peck from Esther. This is how it is now, how it will always be, as long as she lives in this house, his house. She sits, takes a deep breath, admires the silverwork on the polished handle of the sterling knife, steadies herself, then cuts with much care. She slowly fills the flute, and the crystal turns warm in her hand.