Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

I climbed into bed. Since Josh had left I’d slept far to one side, almost on the edge, so as not to disturb his blanket and mattress space. So his imprint was still there, and a strand of hair, the smell of rock. I thought of his body burned into the California desert, if the heat had turned the desert sand to glass. I wondered how long the scar of his footsteps’ trek would last. I wondered if they searched for and found every last shred of him, packed up every scrap in tiny ziplock bags. Leave no trace. Or if a limb was left behind. A dead, rotting Josh limb, now food and home for the termites and kangaroo rats, his energy recycled, transformed. He would have liked that.

I got up and went back to sleep in the bathtub.

AFTER A FEWweeks, Paul had the idea to transfer to UCLA. He decided to just forget about fall quarter at UCSB so he could stay in L.A. and hang out with me, then start winter quarter down here. What he really wanted to do, he confided one night, was drop out altogether and do something really cool and free-spirited like Josh. He didn’t really want to be a doctor, but his parents were pretty invested in it. In one of their sons achieving, being successful. And now , you know. . His voice trailed off. He asked me if I had talked to my parents. If maybe I wanted him to call them for me. And I said No, they never even met Josh, I haven’t even seen them for a few years. We’ve never been very close. They’re not your kind of parents, all nurturing and invested, I told him. My parents were always off being very busy, always leaving me to go off by themselves.

Paul was sleeping in the bed by then. I’d given him Josh’s space. I was sleeping in the bathtub, but I’d leave the door ajar and the shower curtain tugged open to talk at night until we fell asleep. And after a few months he decided he didn’t really need to get his own apartment, that he should probably stay with me so I wouldn’t be all alone and he could take care of me. I gave him Josh’s clothing to wear, all of which is too big for him and full of threadbare spots, but he likes it. He wears Josh’s French Foreign Legion caps. Josh would have liked that, too. Their parents call every few weeks to see how we’re doing. I hear Paul tell them he’s worried about me. They tell Paul they read an article that says the first year is the hardest, but then it gets better. They tell Paul they’re going to send the article, so that I can read it. They say they want to come visit us. None of them seems to realize it’s my fault we all lost him. That it’s because of me we all have to cling to each other and shrivel up and pay.

Paul tries so hard. He goes to the grocery store and makes us pizza from scratch. He goes to the laundromat. He downloads all of the newest releases, because I won’t even debate the idea of going out. He seems to think I’m very fragile, about to wilt and expire, or explode. He says he doesn’t like to leave me alone, but I think he just doesn’t like to go out by himself. I urge him to go. I tell him We don’t have to spend all of our time together, do we? I tell him to make some friends from school. I tell him he needs to give me more space, and his scared look has started coming back.

I’M ASLEEP THEnight he comes home sometime in April, after hanging out with his new friends from school. I wake up because he’s loud and stumbling, a little drunk, and comes into the bathroom to tug on my arm. Please, Holly , he says, wake up. Please come sleep in the bed with me tonight . He strokes my hair and my shoulder. We’ve never touched. We’ve been together almost a year, and we’ve never even slightly brushed against each other. I barely even sense him in the apartment, rarely sense his energy or heat. He starts crying now, I miss Josh, he says, trying to grip me, I’m lonely, please, isn’t it time, aren’t you lonely? and I think What difference does it make? I let him pull me out of the tub’s cool hug and pull me into the bedroom. We get in the bed together, both of us in Josh’s T-shirts, and he’s fondling, clutching at me. My skin just feels numb. It’s dead skin, and he’s rubbing me as if trying to make it alive. He enters me, I’m dry as dust and I don’t even feel it. He’s trying to get further inside me, and I realize, then, what he’s really trying to do. Get me to unfold, to pulse. It’s April, and he’s trying to get me to flower again. He’s trying to peel back a layer of me to get where it’s pulpy and soft. He’s feeling so much, and he’s trying to make me feel, too, expose me to where it’s dangerous and full of unseen, searing threat. He’s touching me as if he’s capable of that. But he isn’t. He’s weak, insignificant, a pale imitation. And he’s just clutching at me because I’m here, not because I mean anything, am anything to him, really, he’s just clinging to whatever happened by. Anyway, I won’t let it happen. I suddenly see myself making love to Josh, then, opening up to all of it, I feel myself start to get wet and I chew my tongue to bleed and keep me from it, so I won’t cry, fall apart, split open into the tenderness and the sweet. I hold myself stiff as wood, I gulp and gulp to hoard up all the wet, keep it inside of me, and when he finally finishes I gasp and prickle with relief.

I LIKE TOkeep the front door triple-locked, and it takes me a moment to remember, deadbolt first, that’s right, then knob. I leave the chain on and peek out through the gap at the empty street, the sleeping ceramic child, the cactus. It’s grown bigger. It’s taller than I am now, cuddly and blameless-looking, its spines silver and luminous in the moonlight. I unchain the front door and step outside. The outside air feels exactly the same as the inside air, and I think Of course, there is no difference . It isn’t safe anywhere you go.

The cactus is waiting for me, and very welcoming. It isn’t punishing or mocking; it’s kind. It knows I want my spines back. It knows my moisture, heat, energy, and yearns toward me. It yearns toward my legs, first, my thighs, then the insides of my open arms, my throat, embraces me even before I’ve pressed against it with my breasts, attaches to every inch of my skin with its greedy tines. The cactus needs me. It finds me significant, and I embrace it back, hard, to feel its spines enter and become mine. Each pierce creates a vivid bloom. Each spine taps my blood, then my bones, and this makes me feel boundless, and vast. And this is something I can succumb to, this is something I can feel.

My sweet little dog, Tess, is what they call “apricot.” She has tiny blue eyes, almond-shaped and set close together like Barbra Streisand’s, and the prettiest little dog vagina. I spent twenty minutes examining and marveling at it once with my best friend, Dayna, before she had a boyfriend and we spent a lot of our time together appreciating Tess. Dayna is a biologist, which gave the experience a legitimizingly clinical spirit. It’s a tidy, quarter-inch slit in a pinky-tip protuberance of skin, delicate and irrelevant and veiled with fine, apricot hair. Tess rolled over and spread out happily, trustingly, for us; she lives almost pathetically for love, for attention, like a quivering heroine from some ’50s romance novel. She also lives for food and naps, but mostly for Ball. Tennis balls, squishy rubber ones with bells inside, any spherical object to love will do. I’ve learned hard rubber balls are the best — the last time she had a flimsy plastic one she worked it down to bits, chewed it with such passion there was almost nothing left.

She came with a ball. I’d been living alone in my big new house with a fireplace for six days, came home on a Thursday evening to the still-lingering smell of paint and spackle and fresh-sliced carpet fibers and realized I can have a dog here . Apartment living hadn’t allowed for that, but now I had my own house with a fireplace and a small fiberglass jacuzzi in a small chlorine-scented backyard, all to myself. I was only twenty-five and very proud of having my own house. I walked around and around, and my heels clacked resoundingly on the hardwood floors. Dayna had mentioned maybe coming over, but we’d hung out together the last five nights out of six, she was in a needy, boyfriend-less phase, and her presence was becoming a cloying and oppressive force. She hated sleeping alone — she’s always scared of an earthquake, a fire combusting out of nowhere, a serial-killer-rapist-burglar breaking in — but I wanted my big, new house all to myself, and a dog, and a fire in the fireplace. I went right back out and bought a newspaper and called the first ad for a cockapoo: eleven mos, shots, fxd, hsbrkn, plyful . A cockapoo, to me, meant the large dark eyes of a baby harp seal and a silky spaniel coat, a body thick-limbed but compact and floppy. The true, Platonic image of a cockapoo. I drove to an apartment complex in Northridge. The dog was hideous, at first sight, more blurred, cross-bred terrier and toy poodle than anything else, with skinny, crooked legs that needed to be broken and reset, and those creepy blue eyes. A brown nose, faded like over-creamed coffee. And she was covered with fleas, little dark leaping specks visible through her beige fur. I made polite chat with the owner, a heavy sixtyish black woman named Gloria— That isn’t beige, dear, they call that color “apricot” on a poodle —who couldn’t be bothered with the dog anymore, and then told her that Yes, I knew the ad said she’d be eleven months, but I really did want a puppy. The dog dropped a soiled, shreddy, lime-colored tennis ball in front of me and looked up, her tiny eyes squinting with hope and expectation: You want to play with my ball? Here, look, here’s a ball! You want to play? Please, please! When I ignored her she pounced on the ball with her skinny front legs, her paws shoving it toward me— Ball! Ball! Ball! — until I gave in and threw it for her. But when I got up to leave, I suddenly realized that if I didn’t take her, it meant I would have to keep interviewing dogs. This seemed like an exhausting prospect: continuing to call deceptive ads, inquire about worms, meet imperfect dogs, choose. Also, it meant that I would be going home that night to my big house alone. I told Gloria I would take the dog, figuring that if it didn’t work out I would just get rid of it somehow. I wrote Gloria a check for seventy-five dollars — the cost of getting the dog fixed at five months, and the shots — and she gave me a leash, a quarter of a bag of Puppy Chow, and the dog. At the last moment, Gloria put the soiled tennis ball in the Puppy Chow bag, like a parting gift. The dog’s gotta have that ball , she said, or any kind of ball, you’ll see . I stopped at the drugstore on the way home with the dog, to buy flea shampoo and dog treats, and I dumped the dirty, lime-hairy ball in a dumpster. Through the window of the car the dog watched me do this, anxious, her squinty little eyes made wide and round by alarm.