Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

I closed the window, then shut down the whole machine. Of course, all men looked at porn. He must have found the boxing late one night when he couldn’t sleep, searching, not exactly knowing what he was looking for. I breathed out through my nose. My own darkness reached toward my father’s darkness, both of us nosy in our sleeplessness, both of us with oily noses.

Still, the sick are supposed to be holy, empty of desire. Their flesh is pallid and their eyes are bright. They tend to be hairless. Maybe he wanted to have desire again, maybe he got bored waiting to die. Well, what was he supposed to be looking at? Girls of the Herman D. Weiss Center for Radiology and Oncology? Bald Sluts? Barely Breathing?

I hurried to my old room, lay down in my old bed, and then sat back up to admire the glow-in-the-dark stars I had pasted on the closet door, because my parents hadn’t let me put them on the ceiling.

—

MY MOTHER was having breakfast the next morning when she saw me come down the steps.

“Six a.m.! How nice of you to join me.”

I’d snuck up on her being happy. She was furious most of the time, but here she was, allowing herself a moment of peace in a blouse, spooning cereal while it was still dark outside.

“Do you want some? I made tapioca.”

“Mommy,” I said. “You seem good today.”

“Yeah.” She twisted her mouth. “I’m wonderful.”

She drove away to have a wonderful day at work. I did a search for “water filters” because I wanted to protect her from the carcinogens of northern New Jersey. When I typed the “w,” “women boxing” appeared as a previous search. He had sought them out. The boxers had enormous breasts. My mother’s breasts were tiny, a few inches of raised skin, nipples the size of pennies. Did he dream of swinging breasts, of humiliation, knockouts, defeat? I thought about my own breasts. They would leak milk one day, harden with lumps the next. Blood would be mopped off the floor. I sat there for so long that the computer switched over to its screen saver, spiraling into infinity.

In my mother’s house, back when it was my parents’ house, back when it was just my house — when I was an adolescent who went to high school and had long hair and lived in a house — my father and I would sometimes bump into each other in the middle of the night. He would go down to the kitchen to sneak cookies, and I’d go to the bathroom to inspect my pimples. Some were red, puffed-up, painful, others purple and faded, and I diligently spread prescription acne cream onto each one. The cream did nothing, but the smell palliated me.

“Dad, when did your acne go away?”

“Mine was worse than yours. I was a pizza face.”

“Are those cookies sugar-free? Sometimes I want to rip my face off.”

“Please don’t.”

“When I was little I wanted pimples and braces. I wanted them.”

—

WHEN I TYPED the letter “r” into the search engine in my mother’s computer, the first thing that came up was “radiation enteritis,” a condition in which the lining of the small intestine gets eroded by radiation therapy. The patient has diarrhea about once every half hour, and winds up having to be fed through hyper-alimentation — a bag pumps liquid nutrients into a vein. The patient takes to wearing a forest-green backpack with the bag in it. The patient and my mother begin to affectionately refer to the bag as “hyper-al,” like it’s a buddy, it’s Hyper Al! Me and Al, we’re going on a little day hike through the house here to, ya know, calm Al down. My mother says things like “Thank God for hyper-al.” But then my father needs a different bag, a bag to hold what comes out of him, a clear bag so you can see greenish orange liquid sloshing around in it, and this bag he doesn’t bother to hide, because, what the fuck, guess what? He’s dying. I load the dishwasher and won’t admit it. Then he makes a joke. Then he’s dead.

What was his joke? No, it wasn’t dirty. It was about me.

“Thanks for loading the dishwasher,” he said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

—

MY FATHER was dead and my mother was loading the dishwasher in his “Guatemala: Heart of the Mayan World” T-shirt. She stuffed some forks into a tough spot. She rinsed empty olive containers, readying them for their new life as leftover storage vessels. Widowhood seemed to be about managing containers, telling you there was no longer coleslaw in what had been labeled “Coleslaw.” Or maybe that was adulthood. I wasn’t sure which hood she represented anymore. I didn’t know what I was standing against.

“You need a water filter,” I told my mother.

“You need a job,” she said. She ran unfiltered tap water over her hands, then shook them into the sink.

“I thought you wanted me to work with people,” I said.

“I’m not people. Dry this.”

“I’m going to show you the latest filtration technology,” I said. “Carbon. Charcoal.”

We dried for a while. She thought I could look into a career in environmental regulation. I thought I didn’t care about the environment, just her house. She was doing her part, reusing containers, repurposing her husband’s shirts. Plastic bags metastasized under the sink, and there was still a lawn to poison and mow, but she could replace my father’s car with a hybrid, or not replace it at all. She had her own car. She could be a one-car family.

“Ma, what do you think about recycling Daddy’s computing magazines?”

“He loved the computer,” she said.

“ PC Today from March 1997? He wouldn’t buy a PC from March 1997 if he were here today.”

She paused drying. She liked to think about what he would do if he were here. I had convinced her to do a number of things by invoking his hypothetical opinion.

“He’d want you to get a haircut. He’d think the ends were getting scraggly.”

“He’d definitely replace the microwave if it was melting.”

“He wouldn’t want me to have a job answering phones.”

That last one was a lie. If he were here, I’d be answering phones somewhere, a receptionist without grief, assistant to a man who didn’t remind me of my father, because men that age wouldn’t.

—

THE WATER FILTER SEARCH was on. I seated my mother in her computer chair. I wanted to foster technological confidence. Do an internet search for your mother, and she’ll get a list of results. Teach your mother to search, and she’ll search for a lifetime.

My mother stared at her computer screen like it was the control panel in the White House Situation Room, while I explained how to move a mouse.

“Down, Ma! Not up! Scroll down.

“The blinking cursor,” I said. “That’s you.

“Type ‘w,’ ” I said.

MY FRIEND is marrying a man against violence. He founded a club called “Men Against Violence” in college, when he was not yet sleeping with my friend.

“It’s not that impressive to be against violence,” I said, “if you would never be violent anyway.”

My friend was impressed. She promoted him to boyfriend and they moved to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the religion that celebrates the holidays of all other religions. I promised to take the train, the bus, but never settled on a mode of transportation. It’s hard to get to Washington when you don’t want to go there.

Soon they were back — law school, divinity school, nothing violent. My friend carried the Bible with her everywhere. She used it to hold our table at lunch because nobody would steal the Bible. I got falafel on the Bible. She paid for lunch. My friend promised to keep me posted, to send more photographs of them getting engaged.

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