Anything

            by Ari Usher

 

The page was blank except for a small vertical line in the top left corner that blinked in and out of existence. The whiteness of a new Word document is always daunting, but tonight it was another experience entirely for the girl sitting cross-legged on the bed. She stared at the screen, eyes bulging and bloodshot, thoughts indistinct and fuzzy. The second hand on the clock nailed to the wall behind her ticked, ticked, ticked. The line on the page in front of her blinked, blinked, blinked in time. She knew that if she didn’t look away she would stay like this forever, a skeleton 200 years in the future, elbow bones glued by the ages to her knee bones and memories of eyes still fixed on the screen, which would be continuously bright even after all those years – the ultimate proof of a machine’s superiority to a human.

            Okay, snap the fuck out of it, she told herself. She shook her head sharply, removed the batteries from the clock, opened a new new word document, and wrote:

           

Sometimes upon waking up on a morning before school, the world outside my broken-down mattress and worn soft purple sheets is just a little bit too harsh. I look out of my window and see the first rays of sun falling softly on people to busy to sigh in their warm caresses, and their inanely important ramblings so early in the day make me think of cockroaches. My street in the morning is a bustling center of human life; garbage men shout and hurl cans, Solano shopkeepers park their sturdy cars and walk to their stores, and retired men with to many memories to sleep late power walk through my line of sight. Each is like a horse with blinders on, never looking to the left or right, top or bottom, of his or her prescribed line of sight. They definitely don’t see me, resting my elbows on my second story window frame and my chin in the palms of my hands, quietly taking them in. Downstairs my own family is stirring; father making coffee and brother brushing his teeth to a sparkling white. They are getting ready to fulfill their duties as Americans and go through the routine of work and school. My father flings words up the stairs –

“Ari, it’s six thirty!”

 His unabashed disrespect for my sleeping mother shows his complete indoctrination; it is time for the day to start, time to wake up, time to report for inspection. Any other day I would throw back my covers and boldly step forth. Hello, world, do your best. Today, though, I yell back down to him,

“Okay!”  But I make no move get out of bed. I am frozen in place, and even if I wanted to get up I wouldn’t be able to.

            By seven o’clock it is almost too late to get ready for school in time. I wonder how long it will be before someone barges in to my room and demands my cooperation. Five minutes, as it turns out. Cat-a-corner to my own door, I hear my mother’s open. I am surprised she is up – I must have missed her alarm clock. She pads down the hall to my door and gently knocks. She asks, “Ari, are you awake?”

I don’t answer. As she opens the door I scrunch lower under down and satin, and think about a fake snore. Would that be too much? I settle for the purity of deep breathing and hope she will leave without another word when she sees me sleeping. I can imagine her sighing to herself how hard her daughter works, how tired she is, how much she deserves a rest. And while this may or may not be true, I hope that this morning she believes it.

            But she doesn’t, at least not yet. My fake sleep, stunning performance though it is, is not enough to convince her. She walks to my bed and sits down on the edge, her added weight causing the 30-year-old mattress to dip into a U. She smoothes the hair back from my forehead. She smiles at me. I in turn watch her through my eyelashes, unsure of what comes next. I haven’t pulled this kind of thing since I was five, and I don’t know how she will react.

            But we have always had a good understanding of each other, my mother and I. She knows what I want without me having to say it, without me having to beg and plead. I open my eyes slowly, and she whispers, “You can stay home today if you want.” I nod. She is out of my room in ten seconds, door closed firmly behind her, and downstairs in twenty. I don’t know what she tells my father; I don’t even listen. Instead I roll over and hug my covers to myself with a sigh and a smile, warm and contained like those little sausages with pastry outsides – a pig in blanket. The first rays of sunlight fall on me, and I am not too busy to notice them, but too asleep.

            When I finally wake up my cheap plastic clock blinks 10:01. The street is quiet, the house is quiet, and everything is in its place except for me. I am an intruder on a weekday in the mid-morning and feel like a thief as I steal down the stairs in my pyjamas. Even the cat knows I am not supposed to be there, and carefully regards me from her throne through half-opened eyes. The daytime house is her kingdom, filled with patches of sunlight to sleep in and beds to knead. I would be wary too if I was her. So I go over and stroke her head. She purrs, satisfied, and I move on to the kitchen. What to eat for breakfast? I wonder. The choices are unlimited; I am overwhelmed.

 

This time she tried to narrate my life from atop her green Formica table. The four pathetic light bulbs dangling from her ceiling fan (one blade each in a bright, childish color; blue, green, red, yellow, orange) didn’t manage to illuminate entirely her face, and shadows gathered in the corners of her eyes, nose, and mouth. An outsider walking into the room would be surprised at her stillness, and comment that she looked almost like a statue. In fact when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored tray beside her, she almost cried out in fear. Was that hard-faced shadow woman her? In the world behind the mirror there seemed to be infinite variations of the girl. Cute girl, mean girl, sad girl; She started suddenly at the thought that she herself was nothing more than a girl behind the mirror. When Alice in Wonderland goes Through the Looking Glass, does she ever really know which side is real? Is anything real? As the hour hand of her clock once again scraped past twelve, the girl again began to write:

           

The first thing I can remember my father telling me once I had gained the power of complex thought was,

            “You can do anything you put your mind to.”

            He was kneeling down as he said this, feeding me the last bite of his ice cream cone, the best bite. There was a tiny reserve of secret sweetness at the bottom, melted chocolate that he had been pushing down with his tongue as he ate the cone. The last bite of my cone was dry – I didn’t know how to use my tongue to push the ice cream down – so he traded me.

I sighed in relief at his words. Finding more and more new things I couldn’t do every day (I couldn’t tie my shoelaces, I couldn’t reach the doorbell, and I couldn’t make a last bite of ice cream like Daddy could) I was starting to worry. His assurance gave me comfort; for each one thing I couldn’t yet do, there were ten more that I could. The world was filled with anything for me to discover, so I crunched the cone between my teeth in one bite and grinned like a shark.

Now, fifteen years later, my father staggers through the kitchen door with a feeble, I’m home. Nobody responds; we are already asleep. I imagine that he sighs on nights like these, nights fit only for owls and cockroaches and other nocturnal creatures, not my father. He wants to cry, or scream, or anything but instead he opens the refrigerator and searches in the electric hum of the light for something to satiate his incredible hunger. He finds cold pizza; he is not satisfied.

The house is too quiet in the dead of night, as it is too quiet for me in the light of mid-day. My father turns on the television: Jerry Springer tells him to call this number if he is involved in a love triangle with an overweight midget.

I’m no better than them, he thinks. Do I really have nothing else to do than work and watch television in the middle of the night?

The next day I am watching Saturday morning cartoons with my brother, lolling listlessly on the couch. My father walks in from the brilliant sunshine, whistling, shirt off. He has just finished cutting the grass.

“It is so nice outside today,” he exclaims. He trots through the room, meriting a groan as he crosses in front of the television, and snaps open the curtains on our glass door.

“See?” He motions outside. I incline my head and squint at the azure sky, blinded by the brilliant sun. I give a small uhng in response.

My father sighs and hangs his head, smile fading from his lips. Then his face hardens as he takes in the room, newspaper strewn over the floor, sticky cereal bowls littering the coffee table, half-finished glasses of orange juice balanced precariously on the arms of the expensive leather sofa.

“Will you clean this shit up?” he demands angrily. We don’t respond. “This is unbelievable. You two are such fucking slobs. Pick it up.”

“But we were going to…”

“NOW!” he snaps. His voice rises up into a nasal falsetto; he is really mad. The air is electric, and I am a three-year-old again, caught off-guard by his intensity. I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, I want to say. My brother and I look at him standing above us, the biggest person in the world right now. Every inch of his body is tense, from his toes curling in his sandals to his fingers clenched into his palms to his mouth tightened under his day-old mustache. We are quick to do as he asks, and he watches over our work, mumbling under his breath about white trash who watch Jerry Springer.

 I know my father feels hopeless and helpless. Stuck in an endless cycle of work, it seems as if he has no purpose in life. Where is his higher calling? If the American dream is upward mobility and happiness, than he is definitely disillusioned. He wants so much more than he lets himself achieve.

“You can do anything you set your mind to,” he told me. This was a warning as much as an encouragement. You can do anything, he meant, but I can’t. I am his legacy, his last chance at being satisfied, his final bet. I can do anything; I am overwhelmed.

 

Looking down from her perch high atop memoirist’s hill, the girl could see her life in sharp focus. The crisp air at 30,000 imagined feet was clear, enlightening. She saw herself, an ant, one among billions, marching her way to oblivion. Philosophically she murmured, What is life? When looked at from this perspective it seemed so inconsequential. One life among many, one planet among infinity – but zoom in close and every second mattered, and her actions defined her particular universe of the moment. Down here the air was thick, and the girl easily confused. The snowy mountain of her consciousness was only a three-legged stool, and the clock still shouted midnight. She wrote:

 

At one o’clock in the afternoon of my day off I am dancing around like a fool to Aretha Franklin. I sing at the top of my lungs, completely uninhibited. And then the phone rings. I am startled into stillness, a deer in headlights. Turning the music down I grab the phone, not even thinking about the fact that I’m not supposed to be here.

“Hello?” I inquire, feeling guilty, immediately regretting my decision to answer. The answering voice is familiar – my father. He is confused.

“Ari. What are you doing home? Did school let out early?” His voice is tinted with sarcasm. He knows I am breaking the rules.

“Mom said it was okay,” I quickly blurt out. These words are met with a static silence, a huge, disapproving silence. I wait.

My father sighs. “Is she there?” He means my Mother – I tell him she is not. We hang up. My conscience throbs, my face burns, but I turn the music back on anyway. I go about my day, pushing any shame to the dusty corners of my mind. It is my life, I think, I justify. I need not offer him an apology.

It’s now two o’clock and the phone is ringing again. It’s my mother this time. She says, “Arielle, your dad is very upset. He wants to talk to you about some concerns he has. He wants to have a good relationship with you.” These lines sound rehearsed. My Father, the play write, the baby. Why wouldn’t he tell me this himself? I feel like I am in middle school again – Sierra wants to talk to you, Ari. Annie thinks you are a crybaby, Ari.  I squeeze my eyes in anger and wish my Father would act a little more his age, not like a stupid pre-teen girl. My wish slips away unheard. The gods, the spirits, the stars are all too busy to answer, if they even exist.

“Can you make time to talk to him tonight? How about seven thirty, after dinner? Does that work for you?” My Father, the businessman, to busy to talk to his own daughter without an appointment.

“Fine.” I answer, “Fine, whatever.” I am the perfect picture of an insolent teen, and having slammed the phone down I stand with my arms crossed and brow furrowed. The cat looks mildly concerned as I kick the wall.

Sitting on the floor with all of my brilliant insight, I plan out how the conversation will unravel. He’ll say, You have to stop missing school. I’ll say, I can handle it – I make good grades don’t I? I’ll point out that I might as well stay home for all the nothing we do in class. He will be slightly taken aback, then incensed. You do nothing in your AP classes? Then why am I paying for you to take all those tests? Money, I will think. Of course.

It is always about money; 90% of our interaction these days is centered on cash or ‘following through,’ my father’s own personal philosophy. If a person signs up for something, she (meaning I) must see it to the end. By skipping school I am giving up, I am flaking out, I am throwing my life away. To me it is no big thing; it is easily taken in stride. To him it is a replay of his own smothered teen hood. What he sees is incomprehensible, though, because I am not bowing out because of drugs or abuse. I am healthy and happy – why should I need a break?

My father will wonder aloud at my audacity as our conversation becomes an argument. What is wrong with you? he will shout, at the end of his rope. That I am not letting him give me shit will brighten his eyes with anger and make him sweat. In the end he will walk away, or I will walk away, fuming. And as my father goes farther and farther from me, disappearing like one man in a snowstorm, I will wonder why he even tries.

I laugh as I work through the confrontation in my mind. In my mind’s eye I set the scene with low angle cameras and stark lighting. I imagine two profiles, my father’s and my own, thrown against the wall, mouth comically huge. If this were a movies I would narrate over the top in a seriously serious voice as the underscore reaches a climax- But however melodramatic inside my brain, I know that in real life the end result will be the same. I am dreading seven thirty.

I have spent my whole life training myself to hear my father’s car as it rolls to a stop in front of the house, so I know the exact moment he gets here. But whereas years ago when the rumbling vibrations abruptly shut off I swelled with happy energy, now I only frown. I sit at the table, staring at the wood grain and my fingernails, and chicken scraps on plates, waiting. For all my claims of indifference to his feelings, I am nervous when he walks in. His shadow falls over me I feel like a scolded dog, ashamed, wanting only to be rubbed on the head and told, It’s okay, dear.

“Ari,” he says. I look up slowly and he looks away. “Where is your mom?”

“She’s just in there.” The expression small conversations for small minds runs through my head. What did he want to talk to me about? I can’t even remember.

We stay like this, two people in space, until my mother comes in. She positively glows. “Shall we get started?” she suggests. I guess she is to be our mediator. She is happy in this position, I can tell. She looks back and forth between us, beaming. I shrug; my father takes a seat.

“Your father and I called this meeting to discuss the bad blood between you two at the moment. You have probably noticed.” Again I shrug; I hadn’t noticed.

“He wants to talk to you about a few concerns he has.” My mother takes classes in Non-Violent Communication on Thursday evenings. She is brilliant at discussing concerns and feelings, analyzing every half-baked accusation or threat that comes out of my mouth into tedious infinity. She has told me about her giraffe ears – the mammal with the biggest heart, the giraffe is an incredible listener, and so able to emphasize with even the lowest nasty cockroach – and I can tell she has them on now. I want to roll my eyes, but as I start I catch sight of my father, sitting with shoulders hunched and elbows on the table. He has a piece of something on his cheek. I want to reach over and wipe it off with the pad of my thumb; I want to reach over and slap it off with the back of my hand. He looks so defeated sitting like that it takes my breath away.

“You are your own person, after all,” he breaths, almost as if not intending to be heard. But then he clears his throat and continues.

“It’s just that you have so much ahead of you. College, work, after that maybe a baby. And you don’t even seem to be able to handle high school.”

I feel crushed.

“And college, you know, it costs money.”

I sink down into my seat, willing myself to disappear.

“But I suppose you know that.”

I nod.

“I know you are smart. You do so much, I know that too. The whole world is at your fingertips, Ari.” My father rubs his forehead. Then for the first time he looks over at me while I am looking at him and meets my eyes. “You can do anything you put your mind to. Just make sure you put your mind to something. Alright?”

“Alright,” I answer. I can do anything, the choices are unlimited, and I am overwhelmed. But we are okay, my father and I, at least for the moment.