Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

Schwartz put his hand over my hand, and started to move the pair of us. It wasn’t rocket science, or even rock science. It wasn’t an earthquake, but something began to move in me. Every test we studied for was nothing. This was the kind of test where they see if babies can breathe. Most of them can.

“David,” I said, “you can let go.”

The hand job worked. I didn’t own any lube then, though we could have used the lotion under Schwartz’s cot. I didn’t use his lotion, or saliva from my tongue, but soon my hand was wet with the infinite possibilities inside Schwartz.

He wiped my fist with a roll of toilet paper he had stolen from the bathroom. There it sat, above his bed, in case he caught a summer cold, or for nights when he had to do it better himself.

“The calculator,” he said. “I can’t find an extra. You’re not going to be able to do well without one.”

“This camp doesn’t count,” I said.

“Who told you that?” His shorts were back on his body, his feet huge in flip-flops. One day you were children together, the next day the boys had giant feet. Tomorrow Schwartz would be hunched over a magnifying glass, identifying crystal formations in closed-toe shoes.

“We just come here to show that we’re curious,” I said. “Nobody cares if we actually are. And I have a calculator.”

“You’re not like anyone in New Jersey,” he said.

I doubted this was true. Somewhere in Teaneck, in Fair Lawn, a girl like me was learning to stroke the college bound.

“You’ve never had a girl do what I did?”

“I lost my virginity at Oceanography Camp,” he said. “But not much has happened since then.”

“You’re not a virgin? Does Spiegel know?”

“Spiegel doesn’t know anything,” he said.

HE BOUGHT ME FLOWERS and a vase. He gave me the vase three days after he gave me the flowers. I don’t know what he thought would happen in the interim, maybe that I would just leave the flowers on the table, and the flowers would die there. He wrote, “Don’t forget to trim the stems!” so I guess he thought I would put the flowers in something, like a jar, which I did do, but the jar was not tall enough for the flowers, even after I trimmed the stems, so I had to go out and buy my own vase.

I bought the vase at a complicated store that also sold chrysanthemums and soap. The woman who owned the store tried to show me a vase that cost more than a hundred dollars, a heavy vase with flowers embossed on the glass. For a minute, I thought I needed a vase that cost more than a hundred dollars. Then I asked the woman if she had anything else. She started removing flowers from a cheaper vase. Maybe she had never sold a vase before.

By the time I got the vase from him, I already had a vase. It only cost twelve dollars. I don’t know how much his vase cost, but somewhere between twelve and a hundred. I’m going to guess forty. Later, I gave the vase he bought me to my aunt.

“This will look good in your dining room,” I told her. “Take it. I can’t look at it anymore.”

My aunt loved that I couldn’t look at a vase a man had given me. Giving her my vase made it seem like gifts from men happened to me all the time, or at least often enough that I would know what to do with one. I had gotten other gifts from other men: a parasol, a record, a box of tea. Those times, I had set the gifts down in the vestibule of my building until someone took them away. The parasol and the record went fast. The tea nobody would take. I watched it sit in the vestibule, next to the mailboxes, day after day. Finally, I brought the tea back upstairs to my apartment and threw it in the garbage.

My aunt told her dinner guests the story of the vase the night she got it, then told the story again a few more times before the vase and the story of the vase stopped being new to her.

THE COMFORT INN was across the street. But we were sleeping by the side of the road. The back of Mindal’s car folded out into a bed, and parked in front of her car was a motor home, where Arlo, our pimp, slept. He wasn’t a pimp in the traditional sense. He jerked off in front of a computer for money, and tonight we would join him, for more money, all to fund the decals for her car, the greens for our salads. “Camming for kale” was what we called it when we were clever, punning, hungry. Our tastes tended expensive. Mindal spoke of dumpster diving, but she never dove. She was still a girl from a gourmet suburb, same as me. We’d had homeroom together, drawn ovaries on each other’s binders. We’d refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, first to protest some invasion, and then, when the invasion had ended, more quickly than we’d expected, to protest the ongoing covert operations we knew were ongoing. Mindal’s mom got that radio station, the one where radical nutritionists had their own shows, told you to stop eating everything and get vitamin infusions. Once a month, Mindal’s parents took her to the city for an infusion.

“I feel terrific!” she’d say, a fourteen-year-old high on taurine and St. John’s Wort. “I feel alive.”

Now she needed to not have a job to feel alive, to have skin burnt because sunblock was full of carcinogens, and I wanted some of this life for myself, though I carried a mini sunblock in my purse and applied it whenever she went to pee in gas stations. I was less scared of the cam, though, had more groove when it came to unprofessional porn, which I had enjoyed on and off, as a consumer, for years.

Arlo was from somewhere north — difficult weather — mudslides, earthquakes, tornado warnings. He was sick of the moss. He was taking donations from anyone who wanted to see him naked in front of a tie-dyed sheet.

“Tips,” he called both the money and the men who gave the money.

“Whatever you ladies are comfortable doing,” he’d told us. “Tips will tip.”

“We’re comfortable making you dinner,” said Mindal, chopping greens. I was on garlic detail. The motor home was homey, had beaded curtains, a spice rack.

“Your place looks nice,” I said. I worried about Arlo sometimes. He was a bunch younger than us. He referred to women as ladies.

“It was my mom’s ride,” he said. “She sold it to me.”

“Does she know about Arlocumsalot?”

“She thinks it’s funny. My son the porn star.”

My daughter the porn star struck me as something that neither Mindal’s nor my mom would find funny, no matter what radio station they listened to. So far we had just licked his cheeks while wearing camouflage bikini tops, played the part of cam bitches in the motor home.

“We’re not on spring break,” Arlo clarified for those watching at home, the working stiffs with wi-fi. “This is our lifestyle.”

“8inchinUtah wants to know: Have you two ever made out?”

“Can’t best friends just be best friends anymore?” asked Mindal.

Best friends couldn’t be best friends and earn anything from Utah. Back in her car, we debated if we could kiss each other on the lips, no tongue. She needed waterproof pants and a special kind of rope. Slacklining was another reason not to have a normal job. The slackers worked on oil rigs, trimmed weed, sold afghans, or, if they were really good, got sponsored by their own equipment. Most of them were men, or the girlfriends of men, but Mindal wanted to subvert the paradigm, or at least become a girlfriend.

Mindal led the crossings and I followed. I didn’t want the rope to break, or even stretch.

“It has to stretch a little,” she said.

She tried to explain how different types of rope worked, the advantages and disadvantages of the jungle knot, the money she was saving for a van, but I started zoning out when talk turned to her van. I turned it back to kissing.