In His Element

When I was little, I’d suck on a bearing ball. This was on my father’s order, so softly given I couldn’t tell if it was admonition or guidance. I decided the ball was meant to keep me quieter than I already was, a deterrent to the mere thought of a rash or impertinent word. Everything I wasn’t supposed to say compressed in that tiny weight. Until the day my father whispered, So you’ll always be ready for whatever happens as he tipped one from the cardboard manufacturer’s box into my palm like a daily vitamin. I had no idea what he meant, but I obeyed because I loved my father more than anyone or anything. And because I wanted to know the steel in him that undergirded the slouch, the paunch, the shuffle.

My father was patient as I got used to the slick sphere, the frightening oddness of it there in my mouth. His encouragement was gentle, routine, no different than when he’d taught me to tie my shoes and ride my bike. In time, I mastered the gag reflex, the urge to swallow the thing or spit it out. I got used to its solidity, its lemon-squeeze kick. I could leave it tucked under my tongue so it felt light as an abscess, a snuck Jujube candy. My features set so no one knew it was there, not even my father. I grew skilled at elusiveness, which seemed to please him, especially when I answered my stepmother’s barks and snipes with thin, quicksilver smiles. In school, I’d raise a muffled clatter in my closed mouth while shrugging along with the baffled teachers, the keen-eyed bullies. All of them unnerved by a sound in the air they couldn’t pinpoint, of something trapped and struggling. At day’s end, I’d dribble the ball into a Dixie Cup and tongue the pucker imprinted on my palate. I’d watch my father through my bedroom door—his body fused to the recliner, the gravy on his dinner plate solidifying, chads from keypunch cards stuck to his slacks and shirt like filings to a magnet—and wonder if he’d grown up, too, with that spinning roundness carted inside. If by his age and circumstance, a bearing ball tasted as flat and familiar as a glass of warm milk.

When I was a wife, I’d suck on a bearing ball. Old habit by then; my own secret. I’d listened to my father’s whispered words about readiness again, on my wedding day, tossed rice from the church salting his sparse hair. But there’d been warning in his tone. And sadness. Soon enough came the seep of dread in my gums like a briny harbinger. My new husband coming home at day’s end, belt buckle wrapped around his fist, knuckles soot-grimed from boilers he cleaned in houses far warmer than ours. Before we were married a year, I lost my touch for carrying things lightly. Even the delicate sheers and laces I stitched into drapes and runners, afloat in tissue for delivery to the oil wives’ mansions. The only handiwork that hadn’t been all drudgery, that sparked some blood in my chill-stiffened hands and kept me from dwelling on the lie of those first attractions—the way he’d once smoothed my lap and lay his heavy head on it as If You Go Away played on the transistor, the way he’d drawn out my sighs and smiles, tender from worry that my reticence might be indifference. I puzzled at the numbers on the bearing ball box: rating life, load capacity, crush strength. How much could a marriage withstand?

I began to doubt my father’s maxim, the point of readiness if it couldn’t be acted upon. I weaned myself a little from the bearing balls. Bristling under my husband’s eye at the obligatory potlucks and card game nights. In our bed, trapped like an insect specimen he’d pinned to felt. Holding to silence beyond any silence he demanded. Occasionally, I stuck a bearing ball deep in my jaw like a dip of tobacco, desperate for the old tang, for impetus, but the ball sat there unspinning, unable to move me along, away.

Then one night, soon after I’d buried him, my father spoke to me in a dream. His figure faint but his voice firm. When I awoke at dawn, I couldn’t recall what he’d said, yet I was drawn to the kitchen where I buried a bearing ball in a jar of beans. Later, while eating his supper, my husband yelped and asked how such a thing got in his soup—hand on cheek, a cracked incisor. He looked quickly at me, then away, scolding himself to be less careless with his tool box, his pockets, his liquor.

Another morning, after another dimly-recalled dream, I sewed a few bearing balls deep inside his work boots. For weeks, he probed about the fleece and leather with lampblack-caked nails for what chafed him, to no avail, finally tossing the boots into the greasy marsh outside our house. His favorites, replaced by others that maddened from the same defect, each pair leaving his feet more blister-bloodied than the last. I was heartened. This, I could do—make him doubt every mouthful, every bootstep. I could lodge in him nightmares of cinder stews and rusty nails in puddings, of dense clots coming loose in his bloodstream, of my nipples hard and biting like nuggets of iron. I could make him fear slippery, rattling things without ever saying a word.

When I was a mother, I’d suck on a bearing ball. There at my throat, it steadied me those mornings I visited my father’s grave, snowfall battering the stone, my infant son furled inside my coat, my husband waiting in his truck, prodding me with engine revs. I could only take as much time as it took him to finish the bottles stashed under his seat—beers that made him testy and superstitious over all the erratic aggravations he still couldn’t account for. One day, I refused to get in the truck and instead walked home with my baby steaming against me. My adamantine boy. I hoped his birthright was to always be soft like the plates of his skull that never fused, hard like the titanium mesh that made him whole. I steered us toward the glittery forest at the shoulder, so we could flee, but then I remembered my father’s last words—You run from troubles, they’ll catch up soon enough—and kept to the road while my husband taunted from behind. I would wait for a better time.

At the hearth fire, my milk came in sweet pinches, warm and familiar. I stroked my baby’s fontanel, the pliant grid of it. I whispered songs and he stared marveling at my bright flash, reaching for it, as if it were the music’s source, the carrier of my voice. Sometimes I took the bearing ball from my mouth and rubbed it along his lips, too eager for the someday when I’d bestow my father’s directive, plant in him the quiet language of steel. He startled and shivered at the touch of metal, while inside me flashed memories of hot tears on my forehead, of suckling from a cold vessel of skin, of my long-dead mother’s hovering face and her own whispered song. When I blinked them away, I saw that my babe had found my nipple and latched on for more. Together we floated in the wash of let-down, of forgetting.

One evening, I heard my husband gasp at my back—he’d seen the bearing ball at my boy’s mouth. In a rage, he wrested him from my arms and threw me into the basement. When I came back to consciousness—hours later? days?—the darkness spun. The dank stench of stale kerosene, my vomit, dried blood on my palms from the shards of the ceiling bulb. My husband’s bootsteps overhead, my baby’s wails, my own cries. I felt about, but no flashlight, candle, match. I crawled to the top of the stairs, flung my body against the door, begging, swearing I would never harm our child.

I couldn’t know how much time passed. Occasionally my husband would crack the door to throw some food at me—old cheese, a tuber of bread, a cratered apple—but I was never fast or strong enough to meet his force, to wedge through and out of my sarcophagus. I tore up rags stuffed in mouseholes and plugged them in my ears so I wouldn’t hear my boy’s whimpers, my husband’s brusque and inept attentions, his shouts of Witch! and Devil! and worse.

Exhausted, I curled into deep sleep. Dreamt. Saw my father standing sure-footed upon a shoreless sea of bearing balls, mute this time, but with a carriage taller than I had ever seen it in life. When I woke up, I felt something with my fingertips: the ball I’d rubbed on my baby’s lips, there inside my apron pocket. I slipped it in my mouth, summoning my earliest memory of it, how sharp it had tasted, how bold in that tender place. Above me, my husband paced, unnerved—I could tell—by my silence, my stillness. I spun the ball with my tongue, made a small rattle of it against my teeth. My husband groaned. I rattled the ball some more. He dropped hard to the floor, howled in agony. I rattled and rattled, a bloody racket filling my mouth. He thudded and flailed like a ragdoll. I kept at it as I crept up the stairs. At the landing, I could hear him on the other side, moaning, Make it stop! I bit down on the ball with my front teeth. Let me out, I ordered without speaking. The bolt slid, the knob turned. I spilled into the kitchen, leapt over his prone body, took up my boy from his crib, bundled us both, and ran out the front door into the blinding bright.

But there I went slow. I knew running would not be enough. The bearing ball turned heavy on my tongue, an anchor. Why this? I thought. I turned around to see my husband stumbling forward, catching up. By some new instinct, I took in breath, and with all my strength, spat out the ball. It landed before my husband with a thud like a boulder, yet the stun was brief enough that he kept up his pursuit. So I opened my mouth to him and out spewed all the words for what he was and had done, every outrage and invective, from deep in my lungs and belly. The sum of what I’d kept inside, landing on the ground as bearing balls, a deafening susurrus, a low-borne hailstorm, a flood.

Then, just as the earth bulges when it cannot absorb more, the ground gave up bearing balls until there was a wide moat of them between my husband and me, my child. I walked backwards, away from the house, the moat growing wider, becoming a lake, its fingers fattening and reaching as far as the greasy marsh. And I watched my husband, belt unraveled in his hand, running and rolling in place on his blister-bloodied, oil-grimed feet, just a bearing ball inside a mechanism of his own device, a man in his element, getting nowhere for all his trying.

I ran and ran, my baby alert in my arms, laughing. After a distance, I turned again. My husband now submerged to his waist in the surge, the flashing quicksand, crying out for help. And a figure, it seemed, in the open doorway of the house, watching me. It might have been my father, surprised at my disobedience, my tongue unburdened, my voice freed. He might have been proud that I was going forth by my own spinning core, made only of flesh. Or he might have been sad, knowing I’d never outrun troubles, not really. That there’s always an aftertaste. Sour, like vigilance. Like old milk.