I walked closer.
Don’t come in, he said, voice urgent. There’s only room for one.
I stopped right where I was. He carefully replaced his left leg with his right. See, they say the disease goes out that way, he said, pointing to the gap. You’ve got to push it outward. Push it off. It seems worth a try. There have been studies. Accordingto the book, Olympic athletes who are ill use it. For some reason it has helped a
fair number of people. He exhaled, breath slightly ragged, and pulled in his right leg, reaching down to touch both his feet.
His back made a crooked curve in the air. I have to stay in the circle for just a few more minutes, he said, speaking to the ground. Did you say you’re going downtown? Could you do me a favor? he asked.
I was standing there and watching him. I felt clearly that I should not have come over. There was something so terrible and private about this act of hope and it made me feel sickened to see him out there, stuck inside a circle doing running stretches, alone, before his wife came home from her job greeting tourists, when she herself had not left town in ten years.
He didn’t look over. I can go by downtown, sure, I said. I leaned my hand out to a potted plant and knocked the thin spindled branches.
Could you pick up some more of that plant food at Jones’s store?
Your mother isn’t going to be too happy about the state of the grass here. That other package was terrific but I already ran out.
Sure, I said, knocking. I’ll go do that right now, I said. Sorry to interrupt. Are you doing okay? My voice was a notch higher than usual.
He leaned his head toward me but kept his eyes outward, looking out the opening of the hole.
Thanks honey, he said. I’m just trying to keep an open mind here, he said.
I turned around, ready to leave him in there and get out the front door because I thought I might suddenly shake into tears, when he let out a deep breath, stood straight, stepped free of the circle, and walked over to me, face ashy. I backed into the living room.
Look at that pretty dress, he said to me. How’s teaching?
Do you want the same grass food as before? I asked. Are you worse?
He sat down on the living room couch and pulled a tissue from a box, using it to wipe his brow. I didn’t want to look at him so I stared at the backyard, empty now, wondering where the illness was supposed to go once it left the circle. I pictured the entire backyard teeming with locusts. Crusting leaves and holed petals.
A swish of darkness. But everything outside looked green as ever.
Everything inside remained tepid and beige.
It’s for athletes, he had said.
My father shifted on the couch. Any kind is good, he said. He didn’t answer my second question.
I heard my mom’s car pull into the driveway and I told him, talking too fast, that I’d drop by with it as soon as I could. He was gone again, distracted, and sat on the couch, leaning forward to turn on the TV. I said good-bye and he said have fun, and both of us seemed embarrassed and uncomfortable, and I mumbled something about Harvard being a school of good studies and he nodded into the TV. His face was sallow as usual but the hope hanging around it made him look worse than ever. I went outside and waved at my mother, who was settling her things together in the car, and she waved back and smiled out the car window at me.
She liked seeing me in a dress. I wanted to go tell her everything in the safe small space of the car but also I knew my father had done it while she wasn’t home and finished before she returned and that this was not something that I should share.
I checked my watch. I had just enough time. I walked fast, touching the rough bark of trees. As I passed lawn after lawn, I thought about my mother-closing the car door, entering the house, going to hug her husband whose brow is murky with sweat and he is saying: Honey, I’m going to lick this thing I tell you, I’m going to lick it, and she nods, nodding, because it gives her some thing to do with her head. She wears nightgowns to bed now and dreams about airplanes. He dreams of racing along the desert, all knees and blur, sand kicking up, the wind making his eyes tear, and he wakes with a start, three A.M.” his heart beating fast, and thinks: Is it death? Is it life? And she wakes up too, a light sleeper, and her fingertips are cool as they check the beat inside his neck. It’s dark and quiet, two people in the house, lying flat, only two left now, two until one, and they both fall asleep again with their fingers clustered together on his throat like plain pink jewelry. By morning, he has forgotten. She remembers, alone in the morning bed, eyes blinking at the wall, but he’s out and about pouring cereal. The circle is dewy and the yard is the same. He is the same. She is the same. I walked and thought about that hole marking up the backyard, thought of going inside my own apartment, kneeling on the living room floor and carefully drawing a big circle in the carpet with the point of a high heeclass="underline"
There. I’d go over the curves again and again until the carpet stems were beaten down and the circle was clearly defined. Then I’d tuck up my knees and curl up within it. Push it outward. Push it off. The same as my father, except my circle would be complete, arc finished, with no break in it at all.
I’d had no intention of going downtown but I barreled straight into the hardware store and found the same green plant food on Aisle Four. Jones was, once again, absorbed in the newspaper on his stool by the cash register. There were stacks of new tools on the floor-bright wrenches just out of the box, piles of big blue buckets against the wall with warnings about children drowning written on the outside. How awful to die in a bucket, what an embarrassingly small way to leave, I took the plant food up to the counter. Good thing I’m open late, was all he said.
Good thing, I echoed. I looked down, then back up, but he had resumed reading by then, pages rustling. His fingers moved expertly into the bins of the cash register, handing over my change. The newspaper was covering my view of the lump under his shirt, and so I couldn’t even guess if it was a bad day or a good one, neither revealed by the neutral expression across his face.
I needed to see the number, right then, to adjust mine according to his; if I ever wanted desperately for him to recognize me and notice something, it was now, but he didn’t even look up.
I crossed the street and walked through the park. When I reached my mother’s tourist office, and turned to look back, the lights in the hardware store had gone out, and the sign on the door was moving slightly, and read CLOSED in big simple black letters.
Back-to-School Night was swarming with people by the time I arrived, lights buzzing bright and yellow. I put the plant food in my classroom and stood by the table of cookies with rainbow speckles. Within seconds, Mimi’s mother with the smooth blond hair came up to me. I wasn’t sure she even knew who I was when she shifted the toddler in her arms, leaned in, and said: It’s so fabulous how Mimi sees numbers in everything now! She calls her green beans ones, and makes her noodles into eights. Mrs. Lunelle beamed. Do you know where that new science teacher is? The toddler was squirming but she just held on tighter. I shook my head. Bye now Mona, Mrs. Lunelle said. Keep up the good work.
I was twitching slightly. My father is sick, I muttered, but she’d left.
As I stood there, eating a dry cookie with a chocolate blob in the middle, more parents came over to comment, to my surprise, on Numbers and Materials. I hadn’t implemented it as a learning tool with any other class, and during school time the remaining groups did look on
with envy as my second-graders marched into the classroom carrying lucky 7’s cut from broken mirrors and small sailboat 4’s. The reading teacher, a bland type, had tried to make a copied version of her own called Letters and Materials, but hers failed miserably after round one, A of applesauce.