Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

—

MONDAY MORNING, we stand on a lawn on Longview instead. Even the widower’s given up, gone back to his usual routine, transferring photographs of his late wife out of albums that have lost their stick. Our signs have wrinkled, curled. They’re already mementos of this time.

“Longview is kind of scary without sidewalks, Daddy.”

“They could build sidewalks,” snaps Daddy. “There’s certainly enough room on their lawns. Then they’d have sidewalks.”

“Where’s the lady who gardens?” I say.

“Who?” he says.

“Bruce never comes.”

“He’s redoing his dining room.”

“What’s wrong with his dining room?”

“Gene Flusser!”

The driver of a passing car is a famous Longviewer, the one in bed with May Hamburger. Daddy drops his sign and gives Flusser’s bumper the finger.

“Is the finger in the tradition of Martin Luther King?” I ask.

“This one is,” he says. He leaves the finger up, for everybody. I put mine up, aiming it at the other street and also a little at him.

I guess we’re showing Longview what we’re made of.

We’re made of cells. We’re made of fatty tissues, which we either fear or desire, depending on where they deposit. We get labeled in textbooks — organ, organelle. We give traffic the finger.

Except traffic must have seen the finger, because Gene Flusser’s walking back, from kind of far. He can’t drive back because the street’s one way.

“Daddy, stop,” I say.

“Stop what?” he says, tucking his middle finger back into his fist.

“He’s coming.”

“I see him — Gene!”

“Alan! Aren’t you cold standing here?” asks Flusser.

“We’re staying warm,” says Daddy.

“Who’s this young lady?”

“She’s a fighter.”

It’s all very friendly, Longview, Hillview. What the view is of, nobody can say.

“Shouldn’t you be in school?” says Flusser, extending a handshake to me.

“I have a note.” One of my hands rests on my jacket where the new breast should be. The other shoots out to shake. “But I’m learning a lot out here. You guys could use some sidewalks. Why’d you get out of the car, Mr. Flusser?”

“I forgot my lunch, so I’m going back to get it.”

He doesn’t even look at our signs.

—

I’M ON YEARBOOK NOW. I write poems about assemblies, come up with captions for boys who ignore me.

Kira and I didn’t stop being friends because of the street. We’re still friends. Now we’re crying about the Joads. Now we’re sanding boats. They will float on half an inch of water in a stoppered sink. They will never know the sea.

Mommy has a new enemy: the phone company.

“Thieves,” she says, highlighting my calls on the bill. But her heart’s not in the hate. The folding chairs stay folded in the basement. My easel stays folded.

Daddy’s not doing mornings on Longview anymore. He decided it was best to conserve our energy for our own street, because people in gridlock are more likely to be sympathetic. He’s not doing evenings on our street anymore either, though, except that he sits in gridlock with the others on his way home from work.

But walking home, sometimes I think I see him, one block away, planted on our sidewalk, a man with salt and pepper ringing his bald spot, a man with a Windbreaker, Longview’s worst nightmare, the only man with enough love to turn the tide the other way.

SHE WAS A GRIEVING CHAMP — black bra, black jeans, two competing bereavement groups. She kept my father’s computing magazines by his side of the bed, in case he came back to life and needed to order some outdated PCs. She kept his diabetic candies on top of the computing magazines, in case he came back still diabetic. When I came to visit, we looked at pictures in her bed and sucked his candies. I lay in his spot. She slept in his shirts. He had T-shirts championing places he’d vacationed, runs to cure diseases that hadn’t killed him.

She framed photos of him we’d ignored for years — him by the waterfall with the fanny pack, him driving cross-country shirtless before any of us knew him, before men in this country wore fanny packs. My mother made copies for me to take back to Brooklyn. I put the copies in a box under my desk, a box that held knitting needles, a pane of lighthouse stamps from the week I thought I would collect stamps, free NYC condoms. The condom wrappers had the subway map on them, in case you needed to know how to get somewhere while erect.

I left the city every few weeks to be unemployed at my mother’s house and pretend I was there to fix her computer. First we made dinner. I strained broccoli while she tried to convince me that I would like working with people. She folded napkins and I told her to join a book club. Dessert was always called “a treat.”

Then we did albums. The baby ones were best, before the house, the sprinkler, the unlisted number. But pictures at the house were still better than pictures somewhere else, any vacation museum-weary in retrospect. Why had we chosen Quebec that year? Why had we been to tombs, to caves, rushed into darkness by locals to learn millennia along the wall? Stalactites and stalagmites, limestone blown out by flash, cousins waving glow sticks at roller rinks, my father not even in them because he was taking them, leading our family out onto jetties, teaching me that buoy wasn’t the same as boy. I thought their white Styrofoam heads bobbing were a new kind of boy.

“I need an empty dishwasher before bed,” said my mother. “But I hate to bend.”

“I’ll bend.”

I put the forks where I remembered. I stacked damp Tupperware where it didn’t belong. I glided from room to room in my mother’s house, into the laundry room to see what was new there, down to the garage with dinner’s garbage. I peed an unnecessary number of times. There’s nothing to do here but pee, I thought. I needed the internet. This was before you brought your own computer to your mother’s house, before the internet was in every room, so I went to the room designated for hers. Lots of warnings popped up during the dial-up song — my mother needed a new computer — but I had no idea how to fix that. I went to a website for idealists looking for jobs. None of them were ideal. I started opening old WordPerfect files, mostly letters my father had written — angry letters asking the cave tour company for a refund, boring letters to me at camp.

“It’s too bad you don’t love your swim instructor. Diving can be tough. I am enclosing your June report card. What happened in Home and Careers? Regardless, the rest of it is a knockout. Way to go!”

I was still no good at home or careers. Grades predicted something, maybe that you’d only be good at getting good grades. I missed quarterly reminders of what adults expected of me. I missed the old Courier font, 1994 in the corner. His letters were written years before he had gotten sick and had no trace of sick in them — no battle metaphors or gastrointestinal reports.

“The fight goes on. Today was a good day. I even managed to get some ice cream down.”

He wrote daily when he was too sick to work anymore, bleak cheerful missives, cc’d to too many people. I wanted to check to see if he’d written a final letter to me only, something he hadn’t had time to print out. I wanted last words, a story I’d never heard about summers at Lake Luzerne, a drugged-out road trip with an old girlfriend, paternal wisdom that might move me to tears. The meaning of life is love. It’s never too late to learn how to dive. I scrolled down the Recent Documents section — different versions of my résumé, a bill from the urn people, and a link, http://www.msjiz/​boxx374/​mpeg. The link took me to a thirty-second video of two topless women boxing, punching each other and grunting. The women’s breasts swung dangerously. They sneered at each other, but it was a joke, it wasn’t real. The blonde pushed the brunette against the ropes, and the brunette snapped back. She raised her fists and the video froze.