Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

“Alright, I have to get back to the front desk.” Our interloper ran his fingers through the side of his head that still had hair. “The tubs are open for another half hour, so please be mindful of the other bathers.”

God left us in the Garden of Cultural Appropriation.

“We get to stay!” I said. “In general!”

“I’m going to pay you back,” said the grower. He was putting the pipe away. He was gathering Trojans.

I waved my hand as though money was no object. I wanted to stay in general.

“As soon as Rob gets back from Hawaii,” he said. “I’ll be able to get it to you then.”

“What does this have to do with Rob?”

“He owes me three thousand dollars.”

“Jesus. You lent him that much? What’s he doing there?”

“He’s apprenticing with craftsmen who make ukuleles.”

“No doubt he’ll have the money, then,” I said. “Maybe when Rob gets back, he can tell us whether tropical-fruit-flavored condoms are big in Hawaii.”

The grower muttered something about the variety pack being on sale.

Had I been brought up to be a jerk? Now I had a new number in my head, the amount owed me as a percentage of what Rob owed. It could be an SAT question. The thought stayed in my head as we dipped back into a pool with wrinkle-tanned old people in excellent health. Be us, their bodies seemed to say. Our penises only work intermittently, but our hearts are full.

My tits were going to fall. My eggs would dry up, or run out. I didn’t really know what happened to eggs. I wondered if Gretchen had run out. I wondered if Gretchen had had an abortion, and then I knew she’d had an abortion. That’s what couples went through together in order to hate each other later for the right reasons. That’s why he didn’t know about the plain condoms. They were a secret for people who used birth control consistently.

We still had three days left together. I thought of asking him to drive me to the airport. I’d leave him enough money to get him home. The airport was four hours away, though, and changing my ticket would be another fee. But going back with him had costs, too — dinner, gas, condoms, lube. Maybe we’d get egged again.

How much did a ukulele cost? I wanted to be someone’s girlfriend, not their creditor. What would Jesus do? Would Jesus lend a friend three thousand dollars? Of course he would. Would Jesus’ girlfriend ask for two hundred dollars back? This wasn’t my culture.

He wrapped his leg around mine underwater, then opened his mouth to speak illegally.

“Just be a little patient with me,” he said.

That wasn’t my culture, either. I could cultivate patience, lean against his chest in a tub of hot volcano water, silently workshop my anger, learn more about Rob’s craftsmanship. Or I could go. I couldn’t decide which would be a bigger deal.

A FAMILY filmed themselves, but only on vacation.

The grandchildren have the Super 8 reels transferred to digital. They watch with their grandmother Phyllis.

“Everyone was always swimming,” say the children. “Grandma, you had a body.”

“I was quite thin,” says Phyllis.

Phyllis isn’t fat, just old. Phyllis lifts weights at a gym called Midtown. She is the oldest person at the gym. They feature her in the gym’s newsletter, Alive. Midtown is not in the real Midtown. The gym is in upstate New York, and so is Phyllis.

—

THE FAMILY never films themselves moving, but they move, farther and farther up the state, because of the father’s job, until the mother, Phyllis, says she won’t move again unless it’s in a box. The family stays still. Then the father, Eugene, dies. Phyllis, a social worker, advances to therapist. Eugene doesn’t leave much and she needs to earn to pay the mortgage, to foot the gym bills, to afford her therapist scarves.

Phyllis goes to self-esteem conferences in Canada. She stands on the Great Wall of China. She makes friends on an elder tour in France, where the guide holds up reproductions of Monet’s “Water Lilies” in front of real water lilies, to prove Monet was there.

Phyllis brings back dolls you can’t get in the United States anymore. She brings back visors that say “Galapagos Islands.” She brings back Swedish chocolates, Portuguese tiles, Oaxacan skulls. She brings back tiny Peruvian finger puppets, and makes you wear them.

Phyllis redecorates. Buddhas appear where there had hitherto been no Buddhas. Mirrored wallpaper gets torn down and replaced with mirrored walls. Phyllis needs to see herself in every direction. Picture Phyllis.

Phyllis is a shrink, but she is also shrinking. Osteoporosis does not stop her. She builds muscle, replaces hips, replaces cars.

Phyllis’s hair starts brown, but soon an upstate colorist convinces Phyllis that red would be fun. Upstate, red means fun.

Phyllis’s hairdresser dyes Phyllis’s daughter’s hair red from the same color swatch. Her daughter lives nearby so her children can attend the schools that Phyllis’s taxes make great. Phyllis can’t tell her son to dye his hair red, too, because he is a man and because he doesn’t live upstate anymore. As a young man, this son took out a road map of the United States and drew a circle with a five-hundred-mile radius around the town where Phyllis lived. He put states in between him and Phyllis, several mountain ranges, a river.

Phyllis warned him: If he goes, the family will forget him. Not one of them will recognize his face when he comes back for a visit. “Mark?” they’ll say. “Who?” If he goes, it will kill his sister. It will kill his father, who is already dead.

“I guess I’m only the mother,” sighed Phyllis, at the airport.

Phyllis’s son lives the rest of his life outside the radius. He studies Mark Twain (his favorite Mark), the Impressionists, and a staggering amount of biology. He beds the women of Boston, Toronto, Tel Aviv, weds a woman of Rio de Janeiro, puts his children in a New Jersey school system. He films his children with a VHS camera. They’re in bathing suits. They’re going to visit Grandma Phyllis. Video cameras get smaller. Grandma Phyllis gets smaller. Then Mark’s life starts ending. This too gets filmed. The family’s in a fancy restaurant with a waterfall because why not? What are they saving it for? Someone films the waterfall.

Phyllis belts, “Mark needs hospice care” into the phone to her daughter, brags about how she has correctly predicted organ failure before: Eugene’s colon, Bernice’s kidney. Now this. She remembers her sister Bernice on dialysis, Bernice gone, Bernice nothing. What luck to have a nephrologist in the family. What luck. Phone calls.

The nephrologist is Phyllis’s daughter with the same red hair. She lives five minutes away from Phyllis for thirty years. A quick car ride in case of emergency. They know each other’s alarm codes. The alarms call the police. But that never happens. Nothing happens except Phyllis letting herself into her daughter’s house and punching the code before the end of thirty seconds. Phyllis has the keys.

Phyllis can’t sleep. She keeps the radio on all night, watches musicals about riverboats, state fairs. She is having insomnia from the 1940s. She has lost a husband, a father, a sister, a son. Her mother, Elsie, is a story for another day. Elsie was a health-food nut before it was the custom, in addition to being regular nuts. She snacked on seeds and turned out to be right about red meat. Now Phyllis eats chocolate, only chocolate — chocolate-flavored rice cakes, chocolate éclairs, chocolate-shaped Freud (a gift from a patient), and she can’t sleep. At 4:30 a.m. she drives to Midtown, treads the elliptical, handles the lady weights, gossips about her grandchildren, the careers they refuse to have in spite of doing well in their respective school systems.