If You Turn Your Back You Lose

Me and Jenna would twist dandelion necks into love knots and slide them down our fingers. This secret ceremony honored boys we wanted to kiss. Ooh-la-la. We love David and he loves us, and we have the hollow wedding rings to prove it. Love you forever. Marry us. Come to the field. We would collapse into the grass, fanning out our arms and legs and make hairy green angels; the same kind we’d made in the snow for the boy we loved last winter, Timothy. 

Jenna visits and I ask, “Do you want any of these sweaters?”

“No, I’m giving mine away,” she says.  Our throats burn up as if we’ve mistaken a jar of bees for honey.

Twenty years later and we’re having one of our silly arguments.

I wore the costume in Vancouver--Jenna.

No, in Chicago--me.

No, in Vancouver--Jenna.

We were in that ridiculous house with Steve Job’s assistant—or was it Paul Allen—with the hot tub--Jenna

Ski-in, ski-out. We agree.

In Vancouver, Jenna came out wrapped in a towel. She opened it up, showing off her Wonder Woman outfit. She twirled and twirled in front of the fireplace.

“I don’t even remember where I bought it,” she said. 

“Who cares. Super skimpy underwear, girl. Nice banana-sized bra,” I said.

Jenna did a striptease, her body backlit by the scorched red logs. Steve Jobs’ or Paul Allen’s assistant and I stared. The blaze was so bright, we looked through her as if we were looking at an X-ray. There was no gray tumor in her breast, just her beautiful skin and her rose-pinched nipple.

Jenna moved far away and I’m alone. I need to build my own costume. Butterick pattern #6695 is spread across the living room floor. The gorilla suit is outlined on flesh-colored tissue paper that I don’t have the heart to cut. The nude-tone ape is outlined in soft blue lines that warm me. I need this suit for protection. Thick gorilla skin won’t let anybody in—you’d need a machete, not the razor blade my father keeps on the glass shelf in the metal cabinet next to the shaving cream; the Barbasol that foams up his face. For a minute he looks like Santa Claus.

If needed, I could slice through tough skin as well as I could cut milk with scissors. I have strange hairs and under the maple light I resemble a beast. I am uncaged below the knees.

Years back, my grandfather died on a white bed in the ER.  There was a sheet angled over his nose and the protrusion made a small tent. He looked as if he might say BOO, any minute like he did when I was small. I pushed the sheet up his nose, precisely where it covered his nostrils.  I gave him ghost-eye holes.

I wanted to cut off his hands because they’d been so useful through the wars—between countries and family. Those bare hands switched trains and killed wild boars—thick, spotted old-fruit hands. I held on to his thumb, feeling it start to stiffen and cold.

I crawl inside the homemade gorilla skin. I’m wild. I’m strong. I scream Tarzan all day long. I help David #2 rub one out in the rusty Buick outside his house, hoping he’ll love me. The candlelight glow of the radio and three soft moans. Aah. And then I’m gone.

I could tell Jenna was cradling the old phone with the coiled cord, hanging upside down off the side of her canopy bed.

“Is your room still the same?” I ask.

She clicks her fingernails into the phone’s acrylic mouth, tapping out a beat.

“It’s like I never left,” Jenna says.  She’s on the same yellow princess phone from fifteen years ago. Big cartoonish daisies paper her walls.  Jenna tells me, “You know, I had two offers to go see Bon Jovi.”

“With whom?” I ask.

“Aaron Woolen.”

“What? I don’t remember that,” I say because it seems like something big that I should remember from high school. 

“Yeah he and Todd Kremer, oh gross, kreeem-er going to cream his pants.”

We snicker.

“Aaron had a bitching TransAm, but I didn’t go. I knew what they both wanted,” she says. 

I can see her smile even though I can’t. Her lips are thin as apple peels.

            “John Bon Jovi has bees,” I say.

“What if they flew into his foxy hair?” Jenna says because she thinks hair left wild in the wind always poses a problem.

“Why would they?” I say.

“Why does he have bees?” Jenna says.

“Maybe he just wants to be human.”

There is a pecan-sized lump in Jenna’s breast. We don’t talk about it. She’s still on her farm in Sequim surrounded by fields of grass as tall as a kitten. We’re not pretending the cancer isn’t there, but it’s not going away anytime soon so there’s no urgency for discussion. Jenna tells me that she fell asleep an acre out from her back door and had a vision that a yellow-haired doctor was chasing her with a scalpel. The cell phone starts to sizzle pop and I catch every other phrase…surrounded by moose…opened my arms to the sky…Oh Mighty Isis…and I woke up saying no, no. She would not have the operation, nor would she subject herself to chemo. She’d lived an organic life. The chemicals were disinterested in her survival, not like the mushrooms and tealeaves she steeped every few hours that bled out their essence in an attempt to shrink her persistent stone.

I met Spider-Man when I was six at the Jewel parking lot. He was already on the ground by time mom pulled her green beast into a spot and parked. It was really cold that day. Spider-Man wore a red windbreaker on top of his suit and I was mad because he wouldn’t talk to me, staying mute to his character. He autographed a blank page from a coloring book. A helicopter buzzed overhead and Spider-Woman used her hands and feet to scale down a sturdy rope ladder. I liked her red boots. I showed her mine were red, too; but they weren’t shiny patent leather like hers.  Mine were German so my feet grew right. I invited her back to my grandma’s house. I told her that we’d probably stink of mold when we left but all she had to do was wash her outfit. I hoped she’d spend the night and my mom would throw her costume in the wash. I’d sneak out of my bed and shrink it in the dryer. It would become mine.

“I’ve decided to get a natal chart done by a specialist in Port Townsend,” Jenna says. I think she must know she’s dying. Without treatment a tumor eats through skin and leaves a black open wound, kind of like a bullet hole. A natal chart is her way of seeing the entirety of her existence. “This is what the world was when I took my first breath,” she says, in love with the position of a crooked star. 

When she mailed the chart to me, ripe with symbolic drawings of smiley faces and candy canes and bicycle tires, I spread her life across the kitchen table. I crawled on top of the sun and the moon and the houses full of planets, and nudged the sheet of paper like my cat nudges my arm when he’s lonely and wants to be pet. I rubbed hard against the blue map, wanting to tear a black hole into the daisy wheel and step through the void.

            Me:      Bon Jovi looks SO much better now that he’s old.

            Jenna:  Yeah, I never thought he was that cute when he was young. His face was beefy.

            Me:      His bees are a tax break.

            Jenna:  No, he’s an environmentalist.

            Me:      No he’s not, J. He has bees so he doesn’t have to pay taxes on his seven acres of land. He’s not a farmer.

            Jenna:  Are you sure?

            Me:      No, but does he look like a farmer?

            Jenna:  Kind of.

Jenna asks, “Do you remember that beard of bees guy?”

“Didn’t everyone in the seventies have a beard of bees?” I say.

“Beards are foxy.”  She is laughing into the clunky phone.

She asks, “Do…do you remember when you told the school nurse you were allergic to beards?”

“I thought I was. My mom told me that so I’d stay away from strange men.”

“What-you have to have a beard to be a molester?” she asks. 

“No, you have to be a molester to have a beard.”

 She’s cracking up, rolling on the old Hershey’s kisses bedspread in her high school bedroom.

“How the fuck can you be allergic to a beard? What the fuck did you do whenever you saw Santa?” she says, choking on her laugh.  

“I stayed the fuck away.”

I say I love you. When I call, Jenna has to stand in the dark corner at the top of the stairs for better reception. I picture her like a little troll in clogs, stomping up the wooden steps in her thin cottage, trying to help the weak signal pierce through the miles of night and deep blue farm. I wish I were with her. We could roll through the high grass and somersault through the rows of onions and green peas, get dirt between our teeth.  In my head, the stairway she stands on is a dead end that creeps up to a wall. Isn’t that strange? I picture Jenna wrapped in a wool blanket, hunched over shriveled and grandma-old. But that’s optimistic.

“I think I’d like to go bee bearding,” Jenna says into her pocket phone.  The reception muffles and crinkles as if she’s trying to goop honey around her face, from ear to ear, a big spoonful heaped on to the cleft of her chin.   

“Oh yeah, at Bon Jovi’s house?” I say.

“Too far. I can just walk to the farmhouse next door.”

An acre away and she won’t. She’s tired and needs all of her energy to pack up and move.  She’s driving back with her blue van and her cat Wsyiwyg. He’ll have to mouse in her parent’s backyard. She’d rather stay where the night is everywhere all at once and the distant horizon makes everything pitifully small.

When we were little we’d hold mirrors up to the sky and pinch the stars’ reflections, smudging our fingers on the glass because we were the ultimate star-catching eaters of twinkling fire. We were spits of sparks that would grow into incandescent bodies because we were blazingly, amazingly hot—not because of the colorless chemo she refused to take, the kind I had to because I didn’t have a choice. We were certain that the more star power we swallowed, the greater our destinies would be. We were wrong. I’m glad we didn’t know then. We’d probably have broken the glass and swallowed the shards.

Bye.

Ok. Bye.

I love you.

Love you, too.

I don’t want you to die.

It doesn’t work like that.

The space between my brows itches and crinkles up a memory: Once, I found a baby rabbit’s eye, a slick brown marble a whisker away from the body.  It was in Wisconsin Dells. Jenna and I were in an orchard picking apples.  We thought maybe an eye was even luckier than a rabbit’s foot; but we were too scared to pick it up so we left it in the grass.  The night in the cabin was spent whispering and questioning if we should go back and get the charm. Jenna’s father finally came in and told us to go to bed. I slept on the bottom bunk under a patchwork quilt, hidden from the glitter of stars, worried that I’d left behind something precious. 

The surgeon is a sorcerer who wants to wave his scalpel over Jenna’s breast and perform the greatest trick on earth—Alakazam. Poof. The cancer is gone.  It’s only now, under a dark storm of needles and ivory painkillers that I realize I missed everything I’d ever wished for.

We are small, dwarfed by the seats in the dark hall of the country club. The stage is set with small tables and shiny boxes.  The magician spins around, turning his back to the audience in order to show off his sparkly cape. He tips his black hat our way. We see that the bottom is empty. He whisks his wand over the rim. Alakazam. Out pops a black rabbit and I stare into its red glassy eye. I say, “Don’t look, Jenna!” I cup my hand over her eyes and take the magic.