They’re taking her to the cancer ward now. Everyone there is bald. Which is hard to see, that is hard too, but if you’re bald, you don’t have hair NOT to brush and so you don’t look matted up, and crazy, and neglected, and old. You just look less.
I manage to get up out of the hospital bed, and holding on to the wall I trail Lisa in my hospital nightgown. The moon is shining through the glass, a dome of blue, making shadows the color of morning sky on the pale tiled floors. We go to see her mother.
She is a sleeping skull against a thin white pillow, Lisa is so bristlingly alive with everything, I feel like she has absorbed all the flourescence accidentally. She goes to the bed, and sits there on the edge of it. She puts her drawing on the side table, and starts to sing
a song about kick ball Her mother still sleeps. I look down my side, through my hospital gown, and the gash is as thick and deep as it can be without severing something, and I try to move the skirt to hide it but hospital gowns tend to show a little leg. If she turned, she could see it.
A piece of me: gone.
I wait for her to turn. I am waiting for her to turn. I am watching the back of her head, and waiting for her to find out.
You. Hey-. You’re not what I thought.
Against the wall, I am doubling over. This is a bad feeling. I want to scoop up Lisa and take her to get ice cream in the cafeteria but I’m a one — legged lady with a crack in her shin and it’s getting harder and harder to move.
Race me, she says, dashing off in a blur, and she laps the hall four times, cheeks red from exertion, alive! alive!” panting, done by the time it takes me to hobble to the doorway and watch her go. The look on her face when she sees how little I’ve come.
Inside my apartment, I put down the ax.
The morning was still dark when I left. Hauling the ax over my shoulder, I walked to the school, let myself in, and went straight into MATH. Flicked on the light. The room illuminated-dim, wrong. The cutout numbers were curling inside their frames. The chalkboard still had Friday’s date on it.
Classrooms only look right in daylight. The whole place made me feel tired.
I searched in the cabinets until I found what I needed, then pulled an orange plastic chair to the wall, hammered some nails, and hung the ax up high. I hung it backward, blade to the left.
When I was done, the room began to warm with light, and through the windows from the hall I could see the sky widening and opening, the first cars tooling down the streets. I sat in a chair and put my head on the desk and finished sleeping.
When the sun was up, the main doors flung open and a wallop of kids charged in, so full of energy they made my teeth ache. I got up and made myself a cup of tea, then headed in to see the kindergartners.
I forced myself to focus. We went over addresses and phone numbers. The first graders added 4 and 5 and i together. No one said anything about the new decoration.
By third period, it was, naturally, Lisa Venus who noticed first.
She saw it hanging on the wall within five seconds of entering the classroom.
I like the 7, she said, pointing up. I grinned, huge, at her.
What’s that for? asked Mimi Lunelle, walking in wearing a pink dress with ribbons tied in bows all over it.
People sometimes use it to chop wood, I said, but we’re going to use it as a 7Ann walked in the door and sat in her seat. She glowered, listening for a minute, then said, in her usual flat tone: That is a hatchet. That looks nothing like a 7.
I felt a little better just having it nearby, a testimonial to my twentieth birthday, to the morning in my apartment. In the back of my head, I could feel the 5o, like a just-emptied rocking chair, always moving, always one part of my peripheral brain occupied. His birthday was in a month.
Lisa was sitting at the table, sorting through buttons.
The rest of the kids were in their chairs too, eyes awake, the spastic sleepy push of Monday in their blood. They seemed more Dr. less healthy after their Friday bout with disease. I could hear the science teacher next door, voice bright and awake, unfired.
If the school had been a restaurant, I would’ve quit by now. Hung up my apron and washed my hands and walked off. More time to worry, to find a new job, the whole day free to torture or injure myself.
But instead, I stood myself up, tired and heavy, shoved the 50 out of my mind for the moment, and drew a big < on the board.
Good morning second grade, I said. Let’s do something different today
Bird beak! called out Lisa.
It’s like a mouth, I said. Here we go. 1 < 2. What do you think that means?
The mouth is talking to 2 because it’s mad at 1, said Lisa. The mouth is talking to 2 because i is so boring, said Ann, The mouth kisses 2 because 1 ignores him, said Elmer.
i is number one, muttered Danny, miffed.
I smiled. I’d missed them. I’d almost been absent today.
Well, I said, breathing out, no. The mouth is always hungry, and 2 is more than 1. The mouth always wants to eat the greater one.
That’s it? asked Lisa.
I wrote another: 55 > 23.
John raised his hand. The mouth eats 55 because it’s more, he said.
Right, I said.
I erased the board.
You missed part of the 5, said Ann, pointing. There was just a little chalk line left. I wiped it off. Ann couldn’t concentrate unless the board was cleared of fragments.
Next door, one of the third-graders in science class let out a long moan.
These are called Greater Than and Less Than, I said, louder. I Put up 44 and 90. Brought Ellen to the front. I put up 2800 and 2300. Danny did that one. >, he wrote, in a dark slash. Mimi goofed on 11 and 111, but as I was explaining the difference, some one next door let out
a cough so rip — roaringly loud I thought he’d expelled a lung. There was a smattering of applause from the science classroom.
Then I did something I probably shouldn’t have done. I wrote on the board: Fake Sick Real Sick.
I gave that to Ann, who walked up and did a bored < between the two. But the minute I’d written it up there, Lisa’s energy had tripled, and she started hopping up and down in her chair.
I want to make one up! she said as — soon as Ann was done. Can we make up our own?
I looked at the clock. We still had eleven minutes. The room had several chalkboards so I said okay, and told each kid to go ahead and stake out a space and write some numbers on the boards and we would all decide which was Greater, which was Lesser. Lisa pushed out her chair in a flash and the class followed suit. John wrote 5 and 1,000,000, and Mimi wrote lz and 4, and Elmer was just starting to write when Lisa scrawled, in her big fast lopsided writing: Sick and Car Crash. Which is Greater Than? she announced to the class.
Everyone looked over.
Real Sick or Fake Sick? asked someone.
Real, said Lisa.
I’m tired of Lisa, said Ann, stuck with nothing on her board. Can we have free time?
I walked to Lisa’s board, and picked up the eraser. That’s different, I said. You can’t compare these two. Try something else.
Outside, a girl slumped down the hall, crying for lemons.
I get scurvy this week, I heard Ellen whisper to Elmer.
Why not? Lisa said. She wrote a huge > on the board. Cancer she said. Woo — woo. She held her arms high in the air like the winner of a boxing match.
This upset Danny, who marched over to her board and swiped a chalk from the metal ledge and put War next to Sick. He made a mouth facing War so now it went War > Sick > Car Crash.
War beats cancer’s butt, he said.
Lisa tried to grab the eraser from me. No way, she said. I could feel the flutterings of helplessness in my chest. Kids, I said.