Rebecca Schiff - The Bed Moved - Stories

THERE WERE film majors in my bed — they talked about film. There were poets, coxswains, guys trying to grow beards.

“Kids get really scared when their dad grows a beard,” I said.

Finally, I had an audience. I helped a pitcher understand the implications of his team’s hazing ritual. I encouraged indecisive dancer-anthropologists to double major. When a guy apologized for being sweaty, I got him a small towel. I made people feel good.

Then I took a break. Then I forgot that I was taking a break. Spring was here. Jake was here. Also Josh. One dancer-anthropologist dropped anthropology, just did dance. He danced with honors.

“Mazel tov,” I said.

The bed moved. Movers moved it. Movers asked what my dad did, why he wasn’t moving the bed.

New guys came to the bed. New guys had been in the Gulf War, had been bisexual, had taken out teeth, had taken out ads. Musical types left CDs with their names markered on — I kept a pile. I was careful not to smudge them, scratch them. (Scratch that, I wasn’t careful.)

“So many musicians in this city,” I observed, topless.

Boxer shorts were like laundry even on their bodies. Guys burrowed down for not long enough, popped up, smiled.

Did I have something? Did I have anything?

I did.

Something, anything, went in the trash, except one, which didn’t. One hadn’t gone on in the first place.

After, cell phones jingled: Be Bop, Mariachi Medley, Chicken Dance, Die Alone.

Nervous, I felt nervous. There was mariachi in the trains, or else it was just one guy playing “La Bamba.” I slow-danced into clinic waiting rooms. Receptionists told me to relax and try to enjoy the weekend, since we wouldn’t know anything till Monday. Sunday I lost it, banged my face against the bed. Be easy, girl, I thought. Be bop. Something was definitely wrong with me — I never called myself “girl.” I played CDs, but CDs by artists who had already succeeded. They had succeeded for a reason. They weren’t wasting time in my bed. One did pass through the bed, to brag. He had been divorced, had met Madonna.

He asked, “Is this what women are like now?”

MOMMY AND DADDY hate the other street. The other street used to be just another street, but now it wants to give us its traffic, to cause us pain. Now Mommy and Daddy host meetings in our house like it is union times. If it were union times, we wouldn’t have a house, or artichoke appetizers for the other angry people, but the spirit would be the same. I’ve never seen Mommy and Daddy so worked up. Usually, they’re at work. They just go to work and they hardly have friends. Not like me, who’s always on the phone, dampening the little holes. They got me Line 2, and when it’s for me, they yell, “Line 2!” like it’s my name. I never even noticed the traffic on our street. I don’t even drive.

“You still call them that?” says Kira, a friend who also has her own line. “I stopped calling my parents Mommy and Daddy when I learned to tie my shoes.”

“You’re so mature,” I say. “Can you give me maturity lessons?”

Daddy tells me to get off the phone, it’s time for Save-Our-Street strategy.

Daddy, he’s incensed about the other street, his neck bullfrogging out over his tie. He’s not even loosening the tie anymore, just gets home from work and starts dialing his new friends, Bruce and Bruce, the other save-the-street fanatics. Daddy’s got a widower friend now, too, and the never-married Vietnamese woman with a Long Island accent who gardens. She plants bulbs, waves him over for the update.

“They’ve got a lawyer now,” she hisses, smushing dirt.

“That’s okay,” he says. “We’ve got the mafia.”

Daddy jokes, but only with our street. With the other street, he makes a point of racing down it, pounding the horn. He goes to town meetings and curses the mayor, whose name is May Hamburger. May Hamburger is in somebody’s pocket on the other street. They claim their street, Longview, is too narrow to have two-way traffic. Last spring, they say, a child almost died. Our street, Hillview, is wider; a thoroughfare, a boulevard. Hillview can accommodate.

But Mommy says they’re just worried about property values. The Longviewers, she says, only care about money.

“That kid did need stitches,” I say.

“Longviewers are selfish. They could care less if we live or if we die.” She’s folding chairs.

“How much did our house cost?” I ask.

“A lot,” says Daddy.

“It’s about safety,” she says, plunking a chair against a chair. “It’s about not getting stepped on. You know, the Longviewers hired a lawyer.”

“This is like the Balkans,” I say. “This is how ethnic conflict gets started.”

We did ethnic conflict last year in Integrated Studies, which is English and Social Studies combined in a classroom with an accordion divider. This year, we’re reading our thirty-seventh Steinbeck and getting quizzed on kamikaze pilots. Did they:

A) Drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima?

B) Fly on wind power alone?

C) Undertake suicide missions on behalf of the Japanese government during World War II?

D) Strafe Longview?

At least we’re not learning about Helen Keller anymore. Sometimes I write invisible letters on Kira’s hand in Integrated Studies. T-H-I-S (flat palm) S-U-C-K-S. We’re not making fun of Helen Keller, just using her techniques to get by. We have our own handicaps. Boys who crack Helen Keller jokes ignore our collective lack of breast. They’re probably from Longview.

No, Kira doesn’t live on the other street. She’s just a friend from the town. Kira thinks my parents are “awesome.” Once, I think, she saw them kissing.

—

AWESOME DADDY is now shouting “Furthermore” into a tape recorder.

“He’s losing it,” says Mommy, not at all scared.

Did he ever have it? I really don’t know. In the photo albums, he looks peaceful, with a fatter tie. The albums are pre-me. Mommy and Daddy slide around under loose plastic flaps, in front of trolley cars, the Dead Sea. Maybe trolley cars are the answer to the problems of street. Maybe monorail. In Technology, we cut out articles about electric cars, then paste the articles onto paper a little bigger than the articles. Electric-car articles hang around the room, next to articles about Maglev trains.

Kira and I sand a lot in Technology. Our bridges are almost soft. But hers, with tighter scaffolding and a two-pyramid base, holds more pebbles. My bridge is not strong. I keep working on it. It keeps breaking. I keep fixing it. The bridge project is a way to pass the quarter until it is time for the end of wood. Then we have Math. Math seems to be about fractions canceling each other out, about objects in space, and the cute fish of infinity.

“Furthermore,” Daddy repeats, almost kissing the tape recorder. “Furthermore, if the town chooses to make Longview Road a one-way street without a fair hearing, then we, the residents of Hillview Road, will be forced to take matters into our own hands and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, take unlawful actions against an unjust government.” He clicks off.

“Are you crazy?” asks Mommy, now afraid. In between “He’s losing it” and “Are you crazy?” lies a whole sea of meaning.

“I’m mailing it to Hamburger tomorrow,” he says. “If she doesn’t respond before Wednesday, we’re taking the street.”

“Our own street?”

Daddy looks around for a padded envelope, and sees instead a potential ally, the girl who just aced her test on India.