Some worries sit in the stomach like old bad food. Most of the time, they are so quiet and dormant you can’t feel them at all.
Oh good, you might think. They’re gone.
The fall marathon was held only once a year on the Sunday of the last week of September. This Sundayof my birthday, of plant food, of axes, of breakfast. The race went through all the neighborhoods, and the small group of local runners spent months training to loop the town. Brief synthetic shorts, heavily muscled thighs. Shoes soft as slippers.
No one I knew ever ran in the marathon. I didn’t set up a folding chair to watch it because I couldn’t stand seeing those people running, the shapes of muscles moving inside their legs like activated geometry. I didn’t like to think about winning it which is always the only thing I thought about when I watched.
I was twirling the ax handle, walking by Mrs. Finch’s house, walking by the Stuarts’ old house, passing folding chair after folding chair, when I reached my destination and saw, edges lifting in the wind, a marathon identification number resting lightly on my parents’ front lawn.
And it said 50I looked at the paper on the lawn.
It said 50, there was no doubt, it was the number-fifty runner.
Black number on white paper, bordered with orange.
I wasn’t on my bike this time. If I tried to sit on that bike, my feet would drag on the cement. I walked over to the paper and picked it up. It was made of that unrippable kind of fabric-not paper, not cloth; it was made of some toxic material created in a factory in a different country, sent over in boxes on a big metal boat.
My mother was older than my father. In July, she had turned 53. His birthday was in a month.
I ran my fingers over the numbers; they were thick, and dark, and certain. 5o.
I used to think death might be hidden somewhere on our bodies.
Tucked behind the pupil like a coin, slid beneath the thumb nail, ribbon-wrapped around a wrist bone. A sharp, dark sliver; a loose, pale pellet. Each person different. Each lifespan set. On the day of your death, it melts out through your entire body, a warm, broken bath bead. Until then, it waits-sealed and silent.
If you knew where to look, you could find it, resting in the curve of your ear, waiting patiently for its right day. Those people who survive brutal car accidents: not their day yet. Those people who die from one bad hamburger: their bead was up. I’ve always steered clear of fortune-tellers, because what if she was real and she found it? Slid it out from beneath your thumbnail, held it to the light, and told you.
On this day. On this hour. You have this much left.
I avoid fortune-tellers for two reasons. For one: what if she glanced at me and said: Mona, and her voice sank. Oh poor Mona.
She can’t disguise her pity. She says: You will die young, you will die a girl who has never found her place in the world. Your heart will quit you before its time.
I exit the tent, shoulders low, body crippling.
But below that lives the other fear, the less known fear, the rumbling flood: what if she said this. What if she said: Oh Mona, and her voice soared. Oh Mona, she said, you will live so long.
You are going to have-a life and it’s going to be something beautiful.
This 50 was not for me; I lived elsewhere. It was not for my mother, she was already past.
I stood on the lawn and the leaves on the tree covering the kitchen window were blinking in the breeze and I could guess where he was inside. In front of the television, half — watching, taking note of everything living inside his skin. Gallbladder?
Check.
Liver? Check. Heartbeat? Check. Brain? ABCDEFG … Check. He is aware of her, puttering around the house, throwing away junk mail without regret. (I’ll never use this coupon, she announces.
Carpet cleaning? Forget it. Trash. She is so good at throwing things out.) I stood on the lawn with the paper fluttering at my feet and the tree fluttering over the kitchen window and the two people I loved most in the world separated from me by walls and years.
I didn’t go in yet. I imagined the Stuarts in Florida. Kids almost grown by now. Tanned. Sidestroke champions. I think of the now youngest Stuart, Joanna; she was ten when the baby died. She’s with her first boyfriend, in his living room, and he has a new baby brother sleeping in a crib nearby. The boyfriend asks her:
Do you like babies? And she says: Babies? Babies? I’m not sure.
He doesn’t ask anymore; he has fulfilled his questioning duties and now removes her shirt. While she feels her breast kissed for the first time in her life, something sweeter than an ache, a sharpened ache, a purified ache, she is thinking about that creamy movement inside the crib. It had been a girl. That had been her only sister. The youngest. She was supposed to outlive them all.
My eyes are closed but I see him inside: my father, 5o, watches TV alone. If I listen very hard, I can hear those electric voices from the television wandering out the open window to reach me.
I don’t move yet.
Somewhere across town, feet firm on the gravel, the fastest and steadiest person in town breaks the tape, and wins the marathon.
a part two — u L 0 Z,
My father was a track star in college. He showed me photos from his scrapbook once, of himself in a line with ten or so other men, each with knobby knees and thighs too exposed, the styles of uniform different then. The terrible vulnerability of his bare skin. The whole thing made me embarrassed to look at, but then he turned the pages and to my surprise there were all the prizes he’d won-blue ribbons, smashed behind plastic, forcing the pages of the scrapbook to lift too high. First place in sprint-fifty-yard dash. First place in relay he was the anchor.
First place in long jump. That one amazed me. Really? I asked, rereading the flakes of golden writing on the blue satin. He nodded. His hands, with their carefully shaped pale fingernails atop the page, looked to me now as though they had never moved fast through anything.
He encouraged me to do track, and before he got sick, we raced until the dust flew, and my lungs grew sharp with air and want. I ran again on the high school track team, but when I started doing really well, of course, I quit. I told my dad it just wasn’t my thing too competitive, is what I said. He’d nodded, but the track coach had been crushed.
She tried to talk to me, but I just recited some well-used slogans: My schoolwork, I explained. She brandished my report card, miraculously, from her pocket. But you’re getting A’s! she said. I would rather focus on the other parts of my life, I said. She hung her head and spoke to the ground. There is practically nothing in the world as beautiful and simple as running, she said.
I couldn’t stand to hear that, and left. I went to two track meets during the year, but all I saw were the mistakes everyone made and was filled with the intense desire to show off, so I stopped going. On high school graduation day, the coach came over to wish me well. She was wearing a dress and looked ridiculous.
Good luck to you Mona, she said, and hugged me.
I felt a vague sense of floating. Her hug was loose and light.
Good luck to you too, I said.
She smiled, then leaned forward.
So why did you quit, really, she asked.
Behind us, hundreds of my peers in their green robes and green hats were hugging parents. I’d already hugged mine; my mother had held my face, proud, and my father had praised and beamed and then sat, exhausted.
I looked back to the coach. The yellow tassel of my hat bobbed near the corner of my eye like a building in the distance.