The Rest is Silence (18 page)

I went back to school, got my degree, and two years later moved to New York. By the time I got there, my wish to be left alone had come true. My mother was dead of cancer.

19

New York City

Benny ran up the stairs again, gut-punched by nausea at the eleventh floor but carrying on. On the landing of the fifteenth she stopped, bent over gasping, and checked her pulse. Thirty beats in ten seconds. Her heart was ready to burst through her ribcage. Rachel was there already, doubled over with her hands on her knees, having finished a few seconds ahead of Benny. When Benny's heart slowed down, she was able to revel in the blood coursing through her limbs and the breath heaving into and out of her lungs. They walked back down the stairs to start again.

“I love this feeling,” Benny said. “It's the reason I run.”

“It's for
this
that I run.” Rachel grabbed her own butt and laughed.

“There's nothing wrong with your ass.”

“Nothing that running seventy miles a week won't cure.”

Benny had met Rachel while running in the park late one afternoon. She caught up with a pack of women jogging together and spoke to the one nearest her.

“What running group is this?”

“Lesbian environmentalists.”

The woman was fast despite being short. She wasn't straining herself as the others in the group huffed along, red in the face. Benny sped past them and carried on around the loop before heading home. She saw the woman again a few days later, running alone one morning. This time Benny had a difficult time catching up with her.

“Where are your tree-hugging girlfriends?” Benny asked once she had.

“They only run once a day. Wimps.”

“I usually run by myself,” Benny said.

“I noticed. When you passed us the other day I wondered if you'd be into running with me. I prefer company, but only if she keeps up with me.”

With that Rachel picked up her pace, moving ahead of Benny before she could figure out what was happening. When Benny caught up with her again, Rachel smiled as if Benny had passed a test. They ran together, saying little, the rhythmic pounding of their feet on the pavement and their exhalations serving as conversation. As they approached the path leading out to Fifth Avenue, Benny slowed her pace.

“This is where I leave,” she said.

They stopped and faced each other. The skin of Rachel's cheeks and forehead was pocked from an adolescent bout with acne and her dark hair had the beginnings of dreadlocks, cut like a mop above her shoulders. It looked like she was her own barber. She wore a hoop ring through the right nostril of her pudgy nose. She held out her hand straight in front of her and Benny gripped it. After they told each other their names, Benny searched in vain for something else to say to prevent her hand from being let go. Time stopped. There was no sound, the trees had ceased to sway in the spring breeze, the birds were caught in mid-air. There was a runner frozen mid-stride on the road. Then, just as quickly, her hand was let go and she was returned to time's irreversible march forward.

“I'm here every morning at quarter of seven,” Rachel said. “Rain, sleet, ice.”

Benny jogged crosstown, dodging cabs. She altered her training schedule to maximize her morning runs. She and Rachel were a boon to each other. Rachel was fast and pushed Benny further in her training than she would have gone by herself. Rachel ran 10K races in the park every second Sunday and was training for the marathon as well. Rachel liked Benny's company since she didn't like to run alone. Rachel studied herbalism at the New School, and once a week, after her classes, she ran uptown from the apartment she shared with her ailing grandmother on the Lower East Side to run stairs in Benny's building.

Once they got to the first floor they started up again. Rachel pulled ahead. There was nothing wrong with her body. She was muscular and healthy.

Benny had won a spot on her college's cross-country team after her father died. She trained hard and became as fit as she would ever be. Her abdominal pains recurred. Still no period. She started to see herself as separate from her body. She gorged on bagels and cream cheese, strawberry Pop Tarts, and Oreos before going to class. Sitting through class, she loathed herself for giving in. She stuck her finger down her throat if she could find a private bathroom. She tried Correctol, up to thirty in a day, but this got in the way of her training. She would go a day or two without eating, subsisting on nothing but pots of strong coffee. She went from feeling bloated and so full her stomach ached to an emptiness that could only be filled with more food. Or else she'd run and run and run.

It was her college classmate and friend, Alicia, who knocked her out of this cycle. Being the only women in most of their engineering classes, they sat beside each other. Near the end of term, during a physics lecture in which Benny kept dozing off, Alicia passed her a piece of lined paper torn from her binder, on which she had written,
Purger or non-purger?
Benny folded the note into a tiny ball without looking at Alicia and poked it into the back pocket of her jeans. She was awake now but couldn't focus on the rest of the lecture. Alicia looked at her when the class ended, waiting for a response.

“What?” Benny said.

“Don't fuck with me.” Alicia sounded fatigued.

Benny left the class and didn't go back for the next week. She was lying on her bed when there was an insistent knocking at her door. She continued to count the marks on the ceiling and trace the cracks in its stark white paint. Alicia came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She stayed there a long time before speaking. She had been a purger, she said. Alicia made her an appointment at the university health service and soon Benny was admitted to a psychiatric clinic. Young women were bingeing and purging and starving themselves all around her, hiding from one another. She had group and individual therapy, but no matter how much she talked and was listened to, the void inside did not shrink. She wanted it filled.

She ran, adding more miles to her training. She wasn't running as a means to punish herself, nor as a means to stay slim. She didn't need running to do that. Her body, with its narrow hips and muscular limbs, was programmed not to gain weight. She ran because she felt disconnected from her body. Running hard connected her to it. It made her body real. She ran to inhabit a body in which she had never felt at home.

Now, she and Rachel ran the fifteen flights twice more, slowing each time, then agreed to call it quits for the night. They went back to Benny's apartment.

“Do you want to have a shower?” Benny said.

“You forward little skank.” She punched Benny on the arm. “You wanna soap me up?” Benny blushed. “I'm teasing you. I'm going to run home. I'll shower there.”

“At least stay for supper.”

“Can't. Brian's gonna meet me at my place. Gotta run home, and I don't want to puke.”

Benny walked Rachel to the elevator.

“Brian?”

“A boy I like to shag from time to time.”

Rachel was smiling as the elevator doors closed.

20

Forest Garden

It's January and we spend the morning trudging through the snow in the forest, cutting birch and maple, working together on either end of a crosscut saw. The low-lying area froze before the dump of snow we got last night. I slide on it in my boots.

“It's like glass. We should come back with our skates.”

“I don't know how to skate,” she says.

I tell her I will teach her. We carry some of the logs back to the cabin and will get the rest tomorrow. Then we'll buck the logs and split them into firewood for next year. I make a lunch of rice and beans and garlic on top of the wood stove while she reads poems to me. This winter we have been visiting Art at least twice each week. The only other place we go is Middleton, and then only when the roads are clear. Otherwise we stay at Forest Garden. I am enraptured, finding joy each morning when I wake. I have Lina all to myself.

She borrows a pair of figure skates from Jen and we walk back into the forest. I'm carrying a shovel. I lace her skates as well as mine, then lead her onto the ice. She stands for a few seconds before her feet slip out from under her. I help her up and she falls again, this time on her tailbone.

“Ow!” She sits on the ice, waving off my offer of assistance. “Just go and skate around and let me figure it out.”

I shovel a path curving around the little islands and outcroppings that shape the pond. My blades make a slicing sound on the smooth ice. Crystal Lake often looked as smooth as the ice under my blades, a mirror on which the lights from the houses surrounding it were reflected. As Lina gets up to try again I lean into the curves, turn backwards, revel in lush movement. Soaring on ice, especially on a pond, is the closest to flight I come. Skating allows me birdlike grace. I glance over at her but she isn't getting it. Soon, she's sitting on the bank and watching me.

She gives it a try again at the end of the month. The full moon shines off the snow. Lina is hesitant to go out in the cold again.

“You will remember this night forever if we go skating,” I say, “but not if you go to bed.”

She bites and our shadows follow us through the trees to the pond. She has Jen's skates laced together hanging over her shoulder, one white skate bouncing against her back. I lace up on the bank and go onto the ice. There has been a slight thaw since we were last here, then high winds and sleet, then the cold of last night. The slushy snow that fell froze and made the surface bumpy. The bumps reverberate through my shins, up to my chest and arms. I call from ahead, skating backwards over the rough surface. Lina's picks keep catching on the roughness, nearly sending her tumbling. She surprises me by running instead of skating after me. She grabs my scarf. As the rest of her body catches up with her lunging arms she stumbles and falls into me, knocking us both down. Her nose is cold and her cheeks are cold but the warmth of her lips is enough for me, enough to keep me warm and moving. Once we're up she stands without falling. I hold her hand and pull her up whenever she starts to slip. After tonight I think she'll be hooked.

Back in the cabin, with the wood stove crackling and orange firelight shimmering on the wall, we lie under the blankets on the bunk. The skin on her neck is smooth under my lips. She is so healthy. It's the joy of having skated outdoors under the moon, surrounded by trees, that has put me in this mood. It's her body next to mine, her skin smelling of wood smoke or olives or something else I can never quite discern, that is feeding my sense of domestic bliss. She nestles her mouth against my throat and hums. The vibration ripples down my side, through my chest, and into my belly. She looks up at me.

“Will you marry me?” she asks.

I laugh. “I'm not the marrying type.”

She stares at me with those eyes.

“Why don't we go to Lorette next fall? See your grandmother?”

She doesn't answer. I nuzzle against her flawless skin.

Lina is sitting cross-legged on the bed with her back against the wall. She has my sweater on, and her hair flowing over her shoulders looks like a black waterfall. I am sitting on the floor with Thunder and half a scarf in my lap. Lina is teaching me to knit. My bowl of porridge and a cup of nettle tea are on the floor beside me. The cabin is warm; the wood stove is large enough for a house, but without insulation in our walls or roof, it's the right size for here. We are waiting for the sun to be higher so it will hit the solar panel and we can get water to wash. Then we're going to visit Art.

The road is clear and dry, the shoulder crusted with frozen slush where we walk. We share two pairs of mittens Lina has knitted, so we each have an unmatched pair. We are hand in mittened hand, the red ones clasped while the green ones swing at our sides. We find Art in his chair by the stove, the
Chronicle Herald
waterfalling from his lap onto the floor. He waves us in and tries to make sense of the paper all around him as he stands up. I shake his hand. He hugs Lina, then kisses her on the lips. It makes her blush, something I have not seen before.

“Says there,” he tells us, waving one of his hands at the newspaper, “that Nova Scotia used to be attached to Africa. Then it broke away and floated off by itself. It used to be an island.”

“It could happen again, with the ice cap melting,” I say. “Your place will be underwater.”

“I won't be around to find out, will I?”

“It's happening fast.”

He shakes his head. “I'm not long for this world.”

“Don't say it if you don't mean it.”

He shrugs. “There's also a piece about all the plastic that's disappearing.” He glares at me from under those two bushy brows. I reach for the paper.

CREDIT/DEBIT CARDS SAFE

FROM PLASTIC-EATING BUGS

There is a small bit of good news amid the crisis surrounding the degradation of many plastics. Credit and debit card manufacturers report having some success with cards coated with a type of plastic they claim is impervious to biological attack. Unfortunately, the technology is taking time to perfect and few people have access to it.