Quickly

by Bezalel Stern

Bezalel reads Quickly

…..Years later, when the events of those days were little more than a fast receding memory (this was after he met the woman, a girl then, who would later be his wife; after he joined the army and went to Afghanistan, only to be sent home three months later due to the failure of an IED to explode on impact when the tank he was commanding ran over it, so when he got out to check, figuring rationally – or perhaps not so rationally – at the time that the device was a dud and would need to be cleared, a routine business really, so when it went off, two minutes too late, the insurgents faintly visible from beyond a ridge looking over at them, something he didn’t notice, of course, something nobody noticed except the tank’s gunner, briefly, late, too late, when it was already exploded, the IED, when the leg that had been attached to him was no longer there, when he felt the first pangs of grief that would last, he assumed, in the hospital days later when he was awake and refreshed and felt, again, for the first time, something like himself, the rest of his life; after his vacation to the wilderness of Maine as a boisterous teenager, where he met the girl who would not become his wife but who would very much become his first love, when he, legs pumping with youthful energy, wandered into town and met this girl, standing in front of a general store – yes, a general store, conveniently named General Store, that’s just how things were in Maine back then – and, bucking his natural shyness, he went up to her and introduced himself, she gave him that half-loped smile that he would never forget, not until the day he finally expired, that he knew, he knew it the moment his leg was blown off by the side of the road and there was nothing there but a phantom where limbs and sinews had been moments before and his first, his last thought before being knocked out by the pain and the shock was of her, not of her so much as of her smile, that long loped, stuck-up smile that made him desire both her and his own, lost youth, and he smiled back at her and asked if she wanted to go for a walk, she wasn’t a local or anything it turned out, even though she was standing smack in front of the General Store like she owned the place, but the daughter of a scientist and a botanist – the two were different, she explained – the scientist-father, a researcher at an Ivy League college down the coast, the botanist-mother, a horticulturist who worked part-time in Boston’s public gardens, pruning trees, planting flowers, feeling at all lengths inadequate to the tasks she wished she could perform and far, far above the tasks she had in store for her, this he only understood later, after they – he and the daughter, the girl of the General Store – had kissed briefly, passionately, under a suitably shady birch in the forest, no more than a ten minute walk from the cabin where he was staying with some friends, just a summer weekend during his senior year of high school, he had wanted to get away, smoke some dope and play the guitar, not think about the years ahead, his few friends going off to college while he – with his c minus average and lack of clear ability to do much except for the things he clearly wanted at the time – thought about maybe joining the army, there was a war on, it was true, he knew that, this was no nineties army shooting missiles at invisible foes in the Balkans or guarding an invisible border in Korea, no, this was real, this was kill or be killed, do or die, still he didn’t scare easy and he figured the regularity of it could do him some good, a reason for joining which when he told her, the girl of the General Store, she grimaced, how could you go over there she said, fighting that man’s war, that man said in a patrician sneer and for the first time – after all, it had only been a couple of hours since they met, they would nevertheless be practically inseparable for the three days they had remaining until the time she went back to Massachusetts with her patrician liberal family – he realized they would never be together, not for the long term anyway, that he was lucky, that it was only by a sheer fluke, some confluence in the stars or the meteors or whatever it was that made incredibly unlikely things incredibly happen happen, that she was talking to him at all, taking any interest, real or imaginary, although it was certainly real, he found that out on the second night when she took him to her family’s place – they owned, of course – while her parents were out at some concert and, bringing him to her room, instructed him on the various methods and ways in which it was alright to lose one’s virginity – of course she had lost hers years before, contrary to his assumptions the liberal princess was far more well-versed than he himself on the ins and out of sex, while he, the country bumpkin, the boy who was seriously considering fighting that man’s was, although he was by no means religious, if anything was agnostic to the point of apathy, was apathetic about most things, really, although not sex, not the pleasures of the female form, it was just that there had never been an appropriate time, never the right moment, which is to say he had never found anyone to do it with, he was not dumb, no, just inexperienced – and she, explaining as best she could, with her voice and then with her hands, showing him how the condom fit, laughing at him or maybe with him while he smiled back at her, helpless, small, wondering how long it would take before the whole thing was over and this long, first interlude in his life was finally, grandly finished, and then, in and out and it was done, and she was smiling, laughing, and they heard a key in the lock and suddenly jumped so he hit his head on the low ceiling above them – her room was in the attic – and, scrounging around for clothes, the two of them smiling and laughing at their own exuberant youth, although neither would have put it like that at the time, neither would have realized that it was in fact youth that was making them simultaneously shy and ferocious, allowing their hearts to beat steadily in their chests yet at a far faster than normal pace, so that when he calmed down, hours later, by rubbing himself physically and panting to himself as he wished she had panted when he was in her, he realized for the first time that his heart was beating steadily once again, that he was not having a heart attack but was only simply living; after the time when a child of twelve, although a child only in size – he was a late bloomer, with a fast-paced intellect, precocious, his teachers called him – he was sitting in school having been beaten up again by the class bully for once again knowing the right answer – the school was small, it was a country town after all, even though it was New Hampshire and not really the country, even though he was not yet a country bumpkin, when the teacher sat him down in the classroom – everyone else was outside, playing, doing whatever they did when they weren’t beating up on him – and asked him, in his stern voice, why he had been beaten up, and when he said he didn’t know the teacher rolled his eyes and looked out the window, and he wondered later, when he thought about it in Afghanistan, when he had so much time to think about it and so many other things until suddenly he had no time to think about anything at all, until his leg and his future in the army were both suddenly absent, what the teacher had been thinking when he looked out that window, whether he had been thinking about what programs were on the two local channels that night – he was certainly too cheap for cable – whether he had been pondering his own, youthful indiscretions in childhood, whether he had been thinking about him, actually, at all, when he was looking out at the fields of gray grass, crowded thickly under the gray late afternoon sky – it was late fall, the weather had been bad that year – although in retrospect it didn’t matter, not in the least, what he was thinking, what mattered was what he said – even though, thinking about it in Afghanistan, when there was still time to think, he wondered how much it even mattered then, wondered if it had mattered at all, if life would have taken the very same course even had the teacher been struck by a bolt of lightning the day before he was beaten up and never come to school again – and what he said was you know why you were beaten up, you were beaten up because you’re too much of a smart show off, and maybe if you let the other kids have a turn sometimes they wouldn’t be so rough on you, and he had taken it to heart, and he had shut up, and they had forgotten about him) he turned to the woman who became his wife (she was seventeen when they met, and even though he was already twenty-three it didn’t seem to matter, the age difference, what is age anyway, she had thought, and it’s not like he has any degrees she doesn’t, she wasn’t the one to run off to the army because she had nothing better to do, in fact her plan was to go straight to nursing school, make some money, build up a life for herself, she wasn’t the schooling type, but that didn’t really matter, because she was both smart andcaring and those types of people – the smart and the caring – don’t often go together, not these days, that is what her mother told her, when she went downstairs on that day, the first day of the rest of her life, and told her, her mother, that she knew what she wanted to do, she wanted to become a nurse, she wanted to save lives, but without the schooling it took to become a doctor – doctors were not looked well upon in her family since the day her father got home from the emergency room after a bad stomach cramp made him go there against his will, he couldn’t get off of the toilet and had to be physically lifted by his wife and daughter (not her, her sister) to get to the car which she (her sister) drove to the hospital, and when he came out of the hospital, that evening, sedated with something but with the news that something big, something cancerous was stuck inside his belly, something too big to come out without a surgery that was too risky at this point to perform, ever since that time – he had passed away, in pain and moaning, not far from the toilet, three months later – the family had not been too keen on doctors; nurses, though, they were alright, a nurse would have been able to figure out the problem in no time flat and would have known just the thing to do, this her mother was certain of, although she – but not her mother – could never be sure why it was that a nurse could figure out the situation when a doctor, who probably, she assumed, had much more training as well as experience in the area of large cancers in the belly, could not, although in any case she knew it wasn’t her place to argue, not with her mother, not about this, this issue that happened when she was only a child of seven and didn’t really understand what was going on, her father was at once there and then not – it’s not that she was stupid, nothing of the kind, as her mother always said she was both smart and caring, it’s just that, as she saw it, when she was so very young – young enough, anyway – that her opinions on life, on things, on people hadn’t been formed yet while her father was still alive, so his very essence, in retrospect, seemed to fade in and out, like an old silent black-and-white film they show in documentaries sometimes, where there are spots of solid white or solid black between the reels, that was her father to her; anyway it came as no surprise to her, when she thought about it later, when she was married to him but before the children that would come later and that would change everything, fundamentally, that would be to him like another phantom, like the leg he didn’t have and the father she still only half believed had once existed, that she had decided to become a nurse, the routine had been drilled into her almost since the day of her father’s funeral, when he mother irrationally said – with an irrationality that, with time and repetition, became at first a mantra and then, within a year, a fact – that it was the doctors who did this, that the nurses, they would have fixed him up, and it was her own fault, she should have called in a nurse instead of going to that goddamned emergency room where the goddamned doctors just butchered their “patients” – she actually framed air quotes around this word – all night long (her father had been brought to the ER. at ten-fifteen in the evening), that nurses would have fixed everything, in retrospect she saw that, at seven years old, her fate was sealed, it would be nursing or nothing; she hadn’t realized then, just as she hadn’t realized at seventeen that nursing required a diploma, that a diploma required more schooling, for while her mother was always quick to say that she was both smart and caring, she (her mother) would always follow up with a simple qualification, “street smarts” – in air quotes again – thereby both dignifying and sullying her daughter’s intelligence, but it wasn’t so much a degradation as a truism, as she was simply not all that good at school, it’s not that she didn’t try, she did try, she tried damn hard, but she simply couldn’t put her mind around equations or geometry or who landed at Dunkirk in nineteen-forty whatever, it just was not for her, so she was caring, and she was kind, and she figured the life of a nurse would be perfect for her, requiring as she assumed it did both care and kindness and not, most certainly not, algebra or geometry; she was wrong, of course, about the algebra, but it wasn’t until it was too late, until she had graduated high school at the tender age of seventeen (she had always avoided the guidance counselor, preferring, to “go her own route” – the air quotes were hers, this time) and realized she could not simply walk into nursing school but would have to take a test, and the test required a bit more than kindness and caring, quite a bit more indeed, and so she found herself waiting tables at a restaurant about thirty miles from her family’s house in southern New Hampshire, where one day she met a man she only noticed later, after he had asked her out and she, blushing, had agreed to accompany him to the old movie playing in the single movie theater in town, had but one leg) and, smiling, seeing his outline in the balls of her eyes, wondering if he would ever become anything again (this was years later, they were old now, or older, anyway; he had never gone back into the army or done much of anything else, either; he had a business, sure, but it was a gardening business, and how much gardening could a man do with one leg became less of a question than a challenge for him, at least during those first couple of years, when he was relatively successful, even, a period which coincided with the first few years of their marriage, but then, when the economy started to buckle under and one business after another shuttered in the town – more than half of his work was commercial, and the commercial business of their small New Hampshire town took a pretty solid hit in those years – just at the same time she was about to have their first child, a girl, named Lucy, after his mother, who had died when he was young, the business started to dry up, and he took to drink, something he had never really enjoyed before, something he still did not enjoy all that much, but it got him out of the house, it was something to get him out of the house when the calls from the V.F.W. and clients who no longer seemed to exist weren’t coming in, it got to the point where he had to file for bankruptcy, because there was no work, or, even if there was, he was no longer in a fit state to do it; at the same time, she was the one who had to do the filing, she, with a drunk for a husband who she once and still did, to her constant shock and sometimes, despite herself, sorrow, love, she who had a second child on the way and no source of income, none at all, so she had to go back to waiting tables, even though the years when she was not waiting tables, those three years after they were married, when her one legged husband had his business and it seemed to be succeeding, even, at least for a little while, and she dreamed, still, about being a nurse, so she bought the books and did the studying and even took the test but she failed it, or didn’t fail it, exactly, but didn’t do quite well enough to get into any sort of school, and when she called, crying to her mother – she was embarrassed to approach her one-legged husband about this, who had been through so much and was still making very much of a go of it, his life – she said, I always said you were “street-smart”, and she could almost hear the air-quotes through the phone, and she felt like throwing it against the wall, to the far side of the room, but she didn’t, no, instead she buckled down and took the test again and again she failed, and so she resigned herself to the idea that she would never be a nurse, she wouldn’t be the one to save her father’s life, her father was dead anyway, so who the hell cared, anyway), while at the same time she looked back at him (she saw something of herself in him, despite the missing leg, the leg she pretended to see past but always saw, that was more of a phantom to her than to him, it startled her when they slept together, still – which was every night – she could never get used to it, and it startled her that she could never get used to it, after all, he was the only man she’d ever loved, the only man she’d ever been with, practically, and then there was the fact that it was so easy to forget, that, for a time, anyway, until the economy went bad and the businesses around them all closed up and then their business closed up too, he carried himself so high, war veteran, survivor, hero, nobody called him that but you could tell, you could just see it, that he thought this way about himself, so that when he finally turned around and went to the bar and drank himself out of house and home, so they were kicked out of their house by the very same bank that had given them such a nice mortgage a few years back and were forced to rent one of the few apartments in one of the few apartment complexes in the town, this at the time she was almost due with her second child, a boy that contrary to all expectation and belief they did not name after her father but instead named Chris, after their holy father in heaven – she had briefly been taken with religion, a bout that was, like their child, both short and ill-conceived – and her mother called her, telling her how sad she was at this decision, and informing her – no air quotes this time – that she was cutting her off from her will and would never speak to her again, at that point, though, she was numb, simply numb to it, she had two children to feed, three if you counted him – which she did at this point in time – and no way of doing it, other than going back to work at the diner that called itself a family restaurant where you could get anything you wanted, as long as it was deeply battered and fried, and where the owner, before she had her first baby, before she was married or even engaged, when she was only seventeen, had slapped her ass when he was sure no one was looking, knowing full well – as she knew herself – that she would not say a word, she would never say anything to anyone), and wondered the same thing.
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Bezalel Stern exists. Follow him at Twitter.com/BezalelStern. Read more at BezalelStern.tumblr.com

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