Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

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WE WOKE UP LATE on the birthday, Saturday. The father was already gone. We walked around a pond. He took me to the Newton library and read me a poem in one of those soundproof study rooms. I didn’t really hear the poem. When we left the library, I tried to call my friends who’d had a party the month before, the party where we’d met, but both of their voicemails picked up after no rings.

“Hey,” I said, over dinner with just us, “when you turned twenty, did you care about real estate then?”

We were high up on plump cushions, intimidated by our steaks.

“I guess. Sure.” He started to cut a piece.

“How about when you were sixteen?” I looked at my knife, fork, perfect on the white cloth. I didn’t want to bloody them. It occurred to me that he would pay for dinner and that the paying would matter after I broke up with him. I was taking pains to wait until the birthday was over, but unless I waited a week, it would still be his birthday. And he would have paid even if I had broken up over dinner, to show that he would.

“No, then I wanted to make films, I guess — documentaries.”

“What did you want to document?”

“I wasn’t thinking about what I would shoot. My mother.”

He excused himself to the bathroom, and I told the waiter it was his birthday. The waiter frowned like he knew I didn’t want to be the one surreptitiously ordering the one-candled mousse. It wasn’t my fault dinner had been changed to just us. If I didn’t sing the song, who would? It was his birthday.

Every time this guy went to the deli, he embarrassed me with deli flowers. He got cookies for himself. He apologized. He was officially good, and I enjoyed berating myself for not appreciating his goodness. What pleasure I took in scooting ahead to a door before he had a chance to hold it. I’d shove myself through, sometimes grabbing it back and holding it for him, winning a race against chivalry nobody but me knew I had signed up for.

When we got back to the house, it was just like the night before, except for feeling full in an expensive way. The dad was asleep again. The lights were left on in the kitchen again. We started making tea. We started making out. I got down on my knees. I was happier than I’d been, suddenly. It was like when a kid goes underwater and gets to hear her own quiet for the first time all day. Down there was sealed off from his mild wrong, the vague suck of him. I sucked. I held on. The teapot squealed and I hissed, “Turn it off.”

“Maybe we should go up?”

Then we were jogging through the living room, past candelabra in the fireplace, and Marilyn Monroe framed in the corner, and I’m thinking, “The dad decorates?” I wished we’d stayed in the kitchen. But he had his pants. He was up the stairs. The sheets on the guest bed hadn’t been changed recently, since there had been no guests. The room had permanent guest bed smell. The room was maybe a room for a visitor who’d come to see the sick parent, a room for a visiting female relative who always knows more than you do about the statistics of your parent’s illness, the chances of her sibling’s or her cousin’s survival, and so unpacks her toiletries and waits at the kitchen table to ambush you with printer pages, with sighs, when you’re trying to just get home from school, to snack on fruit-filled cookies or jams or whatever it is you snack on, while your parent is fighting statistics upstairs.

Ovarian — does anyone survive that? What my dad had, nobody survives. Okay, somebody does, and the guy gets an article written about him in a journal of hope. One guy, hang gliding, balding in a wet suit, gets to continue to do extreme sports. My dad had sports, but maybe they weren’t extreme enough. Nobody wants to rescue a guy who gets to continue jogging.

My bag was on the floor, clothes erupting out of it, starting their sickening sprawl across the carpet, underwear hang gliding in the jeans. I was at the door, pushing in the lock, but it wouldn’t catch.

“Lilah, he’s definitely sleeping.”

“Maybe we should go back downstairs.”

Documentarian — that’s what everyone wants to be before they decide to be something else. It’s a good imagined profession. Creative, yet factual. Lions, yet poor people. Shots through the grass, the hut, the chew. Or snakes that don’t chew, that just suck the bump down.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said. I went down the hall and peed, peed through the turn-on swell, then washed my hands with a gray ball of soap. It didn’t tingle. I had never had a boyfriend I hadn’t liked. The one before this, I had liked him a lot. He was captain of his street hockey team. He carried his stick around, even on days when there was no practice, even though he was thirty-three. He probably still carries it around.

Back in the guest room, I said, “Listen.” I said, “I feel.” He backed onto the guest bed, pulled me on top of him to stop “I feel.”

“Okay,” I said. He smiled, relieved. We were still on. It was still his birthday. The track lighting lit the wine scabbed on his lip, gave his mouth a little Marilyn in the corner. I sat on his mouth. That had happened every time since we’d met, and made it feel like we’d known each other longer.

“Keep going,” I said. It was my version of “Don’t stop.”

“Good!” I said.

“You’re doing great,” I said.

“Can you breathe?” I said.

He hummed the first few bars of “Happy birthday.”

“Hold it,” I said, climbing off his head. “You were doing great stuff, but I feel a little nauseous right now.”

“From the wine?”

“A little. I’m not going to throw up.”

Disappointed, he tried to make it up with a snuggle, a hairstroke/whisper move. I felt sorry for myself for all the times I had been on the other side, whispering. It wasn’t just the hockey captain. There were others, guys who’d let me hopelessly cuddle them for months, years. How had they let me go on, me not knowing what they knew? In return, I would agree to let them be depressed.

Nobody had ever liked anybody.

HE HAD FOUND ME on the internet, and now I was going back to the internet. He could know me through my college newspaper quotes (“The new student center is a costly mistake”), my discussion board tips for fermenting your own sauerkraut, the time I disagreed with an actress’s choice of shoe. He could check the friend sites to see if I had any new friends, if I was growing my hair.

I am growing it. It’s getting less blond every day. I wasn’t blond for very long. Long enough to make some mistakes. The dating sites are full of them. Pics of them at sunset somewhere. Their favorite books that meant something to them. Them just wanting someone to make them laugh, stay up all night laughing.

Some like blondes or brunettes, but the terms are dated now. They want nerds who like to be tied up, tits in a certain shape. Are my tits shaped like the tits of request? I wonder.

He had found me, searching girls with my zip code, body type, religious beliefs. I see these girls, knocking down toilet paper at the same bodegas, reaching for lettuce from the same salad bars, one-hundred-twenty-pounders who never think about God.

He had found me at work, in between trips to the copy machine, where he was Xeroxing his résumé for a different job, one he wouldn’t need to call a day job, even if it took place during the day. He had found me, or a thumb-sized version of me, sunburned at a street fair, jubilant in a tube top.

“Nice funnel cake,” he wrote.

“Thank you!”

I volleyed back his better jokes, introduced new queries. We sent additional pics — me squeezing my tits together, him toasting the end of the calendar year. We exchanged birth towns, sibling counts. We mentioned coffee, but decided on drinks. Coffee always gets mentioned. Drinks always wins.