Bobbit by Rosalind Helsinger

Bobbit

by Rosalind Helsinger

CONTENT WARNING: The following piece contains graphic descriptions of suicide and mental illness. Reader discretion is advised.

When I was a little girl, I watched a woman walk into the sea. I saw her go under. I can picture it now—the moment her head submerges and she just keeps walking, her hair floating behind her like strands of bladderwrack seaweed. No one ever believed me.

My father waved the idea off again and again on our front porch, fanning himself with an old National Geographic magazine. C’mon, Bobbie, you were so young. But I wasn’t Bobbie then. I was Bobbit. My Aunt Ellery christened me Bobbit after I took a liking to punching other children in the throat. She nicknamed me after a worm that dwelled on the ocean floor, snatching up fish. You are an ambush predator, darling, she said with her scrunched-up smile.

When I was young, I thought Aunt Ellery knew everything. Every species of tree from one look at the bark, every breed of bird from the sound of their songs, and every squirming creature in the ocean that washed up by the shoreline. She made her own honey, cared for her own chickens, raised crooked peach trees in her backyard. She thrilled me with bedtime stories of the bobbit worm. It has teeth, she said. Some of them grow up to ten feet.

Maybe that’s what happened to the woman who walked into the sea. A bobbit worm unfurled from the depths, ribboned around her leg, heaved her down, struggling, strangling, and swallowed every inch of her. They never did find her body.

I didn’t mean to start. The throat punching thing. I can’t remember why I was so angry as a child now, but I was feral then. When I was in a mood, I would run and hide somewhere small, like a school cabinet or a laundry hamper. I felt the air around me get thick. I heard it crackle. I bared my teeth. Struck anyone who reached in to touch me. Ambush predator, yeah, something like that. I relished striking my bony knuckles into the fleshy throats of other children. I grew out of it by the end of fourth-grade summer, but my classmates still hid from me during the sweat and mulch of recess long after. My mother sat sweltering once a week in the vice principal’s office, her dark circles covered with concealer, promising better behavior with a hollow smoker’s throat.

When I mention my childhood hunger for violence now, as an adult, my mother tightens her lips and continues chopping thick, sweet onions. It was a hard year for everyone, Bobbie. But she remembers it wrong. That whole year is consumed in her brain as the year her sister died. Everything that happened that year—my outbursts, my father losing the partnership at the firm, my sister breaking her finger falling off her Razor scooter, even the leak in the attic—is because Aunt Ellery died. Even though all those things happened when she was still alive. She was there when I was a playground menace. She talked me down from tantrums when I smashed the glass in the china cabinet and ripped my science homework into snowflakes. How could my anger come from her death

when she wasn’t dead yet? I suppose my mother doesn’t remember that Aunt Ellery was the only reason I was called Bobbit at all.

The throat punching came to a stop after I clocked my sister in the trachea. Chancey didn’t talk to me for a whole week. Partly because she swore she didn’t do anything to deserve it, partly because I’d hurt her vocal cords. She was sour about it because she fancied herself a future opera singer. Chancey teaches middle school choir now. I don’t think she ever stopped blaming me for strangling her inner-coloratura soprano.

I wasn’t always angry, but Chancey was always angry at me. I remind her often that she hit me first. Smacked me on the side of the head to get out of her way while we were both sardined into our little bathroom. She wanted to curl her hair. She was always hitting me for no reason. Maybe it was an older sibling thing. Back slapping, shoulder shoving, hair pulling, arm punching, cheek smacking—the Cain Instinct.

I guess Abel didn’t have my right hook. I slugged her right in the larynx. She vomited after, stomach-acid oatmeal on my bare feet. One look at it, and I vomited too. Our father ran in, the two of us screeching, Chancey’s voice croaking, covered in puke, the curling iron smoking.

That year, we both got sent to New Jersey for the summer to live with my Grandfather. My mother couldn’t take us striking each other after Aunt Ellery died. The beach will calm them, our parents prayed. They didn’t know Uncle Ted had the same idea, shipping off his newly motherless children to Jersey until Chancey and I were already on the bus to the shore.

Our Jersey seaside summer punishment wasn’t so bad. I remember missing Philly though. I bet my cousins missed their DC home too, but they never mentioned it. They were always quiet, napkin-on-the-lap, never-splashing-in-thewater kids, but it was even worse that summer. I don’t remember the four of them ever speaking a word. They knitted themselves together and seemed to telepathically communicate. Most of all, I remember their mouths. They had Aunt Ellery’s mouth. Her thin, Burt’s Bees smoothed lips, never still for a second, curling around her chipped canine tooth, smoking Sweet Afton cigarettes, laughing with her mouth open wide enough that I used to see her uvula shiver. It was the first summer she was dead. Her mouth sat smeared on her silent children’s faces. Aunt Ellery took her sound, her stories, and her love of the sea with her.

It was as quiet as her wake on the beach that day, the day I saw a woman walk into the sea. Other summer tourists shouted, wailed, and whined about the gulls, the heat, and the high tide. Our family barely said a word. Grandfather was sweet, but couldn’t hold up much of a conversation in those days. The cousins were a no-go. If asked with help on a puzzle, a pillow fort, or movie night selection, all four pairs of birch bark brown eyes stared back with an endlessness that made me stop asking altogether.

It was the kind of day where you could see both the moon and the sun in the

sky. The sun beat down on our greasy, sunscreen-smeared backs while the little moon watched Chancey bury me in the sand. The waves that day were nearly too much for little kids. They were the salty, kelpy waves every kid with a boogie board dreams about. They hoisted me up into the wind, then sent me crashing back down on the heavy sandbar. The force of the crash sent kids flying off their boards, and the unlucky ones still had their boards tilted down when the wave smacked them. I was unlucky that time.

My stomach slipped off the board, but my little fingers wouldn’t let go of the sides. All the water around me rushed up before smashing into the sandbar. I felt the blunt end of the board dig right into my stomach and it knocked the wind clean out of my lungs before I flipped, submerging in the shallows. I tumbled, somersaulting underwater. I knew all I had to do was stand up, but I couldn’t get my footing before tumbling again. I breathed in the saltwater while sea pebbles encrusted themselves in my ear and so deep in my hair that it would take three showers to get all the sand out of my scalp. I slunk out of the ocean, gasping and gulping, and limped up to our tilted rainbow umbrella, seawater dribbling down my chin.

No one looked up at me when I heaved my way up to our spot on the beach. Chancey sprawled out on a pink towel, reading her new hardback. My cousins huddled together on their phones and various consoles protected in Ziploc bags that I couldn’t believe they risked getting sandy. I was always jealous of my cousins—their phones, their money, how they got Aunt Ellery to themselves all the time. Though I supposed there wasn’t as much to be jealous of that summer.

Grandfather stepped back to our beach blankets, beaming, water ice in each hand. Everyone looked up. The cousins hadn’t asked for any, and huddled back in their little formation after Grandfather gingerly sat down. He shifted his weight in the sand. He was one of those old people who liked to feel the sand on their skin even though there was a perfectly good towel right there.

“Chancey.” He handed her a dripping root beer scoop in a paper cone.

“Thank you, Grandfather.”

Grandfather pulled his baseball cap down further to block the sun out of his eyes. “They didn’t have cotton candy, Bobbit.”

I wiped the snot from my nose. “Is it watermelon?”

He nodded.

I beamed and reached for it. “Oh, that’s alright then.”

He laughed. Grandfather had a good laugh, a warm one that felt like hard caramel candy.

“What do you say?” Chancey didn’t look up from her book.

Chancey always remembered to say thank you.

“Thanks.” I suppressed the urge to punch her in the throat again.

The watermelon was a nauseating sugar-sweet, even to a child. I dug my feet into the sand and watched the water ice leak all down my arm and onto my swimsuit. It was my favorite one: neon pink camo that zipped up the front, though the chunky plastic zipper left marks on my chest after. I could blend in at a watermelon water ice factory.

The youngest of my cousins answered his ringing phone and the other three huddled in like field mice. I tried to be extra quiet sucking down my water ice so I could spy, but the only word I could make out was “Dad.”

Uncle Ted was a weird guy. He always had one wireless earphone in, so whenever I tried to talk to him, he waved me away because “This is important.” I couldn’t imagine as a kid how you could be on the phone all the time, even at the dinner table, and have every call be important. Surely, at least one would be boring enough to hang up and talk to your niece. I don’t remember him hanging up for anyone, even his kids, except Aunt Ellery. When she would ask him a question, Uncle Ted took the earphone right out and looked her in the eyes. I was sure he loved her, but just before she died, he sold her backyard beehives, slaughtered all her speckled chickens, and slashed down her over-ripened peach trees.

The cousins sat enraptured by the phone call. I’m sure if I had walked up to them, they’d have waved and said in unison, “This is important.” Chancey looked only at her book, sucking her root beer water ice. Grandfather stared off at the horizon, playing Count the Ships. I watched his mouth move, whispering, “Five… six…seven.” Aunt Ellery taught me that game. Grandfather must have taught her.

Seeing as no one was paying attention, I limbered my way down the sand toward the ocean again, my water ice melting down my fingers. It was at that moment the woman passed me, walking to the waves. I remember because I was at the end of the water ice, when it was all liquidy and the paper cone leaked soggy pink. I stuck my sticky hands in the ocean as the woman waded past me. She loomed over me, and for a second, I was curtained in her long ginger curls with gray racing through the strands. I wanted to reach up and pull on them until they tore out of her scalp like perfect red ribbons in my fists. But I got in trouble for doing that to Chancey.

Hands clean, I scrambled back to our spot on the beach. When I sat down on our towel, I saw that she had waded far out. The woman seemed caught in a walking coma, her body hunched and compelled to go deeper. When I remember her now, her arms are too long. Her gaunt, bony elbows swing by her knees. One of her shoulders is bigger than the other. She stepped deeper into the waves and kept walking, walking until the water reached her waist, walking until the water reached her neck, until the last of her red curls were all I could see.

“Chancey!” I shouted.

Chancey hated being called Chancey. She preferred Chandler. She went by it with pride, even though our parents stuck her with a boys’ name, and Chancey was way cuter. She used her full name every time she introduced herself. Chandler

Marie Rice. All grown up. Even at thirteen. She would always be Chancey to me.

“What?” Chancey lowered her heart-shaped sunglasses. She didn’t even put down her ghost romance book.

“A lady went in the ocean.”

She popped her gum. “Yeah, that’s what you’re supposed to do at the beach, Bobbs.”

“She didn’t come out.” I stared out at the empty ocean. “She drowned.”

Chancey turned her page. “Liar.”

“It’s true. I saw it.”

Chancey unwrapped another piece of gum, so the wad in her mouth doubled in size and made a squishy smoosh when she chewed. “If you saw her walk in, she must have walked out.”

“She didn’t!”

“Maybe she’s a trained scuba diver. They can hold their breath for like, eleven minutes.” Chancey smirked. “Why don’t you go wait for her? She’ll come back up eventually.”

“Will you wait with me?”

Chancey put in her headphones.

All my life, everyone preferred Chancey. I would’ve too if I wasn’t her sister. But Aunt Ellery liked me best. She liked my questions, my loudness, and my anger. She said I was a difficult young woman and she had been one too. I took great delight in that before she died. After her funeral, I only feared what would happen when a difficult young woman grew up.

I huffed and marched back down. It seemed to me all the beach involved was walking from the ocean to the blanket spot and back again until it was time to leave. I sat down in a comfortable divot where the sand was damp and thick. Just behind me, the sand was powdery and stuck to my wet feet like flour, but here it was moist as cement and perfect for drizzling little sand towers. Maybe Chancey was right. Maybe I just had to wait and the woman with the red curls would come out again.

I drizzled handfuls of loose dark sand across my toes in a pattern, pooling the most on the big toe. They looked like little sloppy Christmas trees. Aunt Ellery was the one who showed me how to make sand towers. I bit down on my lower lip. There was no use missing her. Aunt Ellery wasn’t like the woman who walked into the sea— she wasn’t coming back.

Aunt Ellery could be mean. Especially when she crumpled can after can of pale ale and fell asleep with the shower still running. She snapped at me in the last couple years of her life, though most of her temper was spent on her own kids. When my family visited them that spring break, Aunt Ellery avoided me. She

slept until four in the afternoon and never took us to see the cherry blossoms as she promised. On our last stroll through her neighborhood, she was quiet. Birds beckoned, but she held my hand and said nothing, even when I gave her an easy one, asking what the whippoorwill’s cry was called. She shrugged, I don’t know, Bobbit. I’ll never forget the way her fingers trembled in my little fist.

I sat and drizzled sand towers until the pile on my toes grew to my knees. The waves sometimes reached the furthest they could and took the sloppy tower off my big toe, but I just rebuilt it with more handfuls. The woman was taking her time returning. Maybe she walked out when I was playing in the sand. No. I would’ve noticed. Maybe she resurfaced, but if she did, I must’ve blinked every time. I focused my eyes until tears welled up in them, staring at the spot she first sunk into. It was too late to go to a lifeguard now. What could I say? A woman went into the ocean an hour ago? I waited for her just like I was supposed to, but she didn’t swim back up.

I heard Chancey’s earrings jingle before I saw her. She scoffed. “You’re still here? She’s not coming back, Bobbs.”

“I saw her.” I hid my face between my knees, feeling the nylon swimsuit make grooves in my cheek.

Chancey’s fresh coat of lip gloss shined in the sunlight. “God, just shut up about your stupid lady already.”

On the horizon line, I could spot four little ships. One. Two. Three. Four.

“No.” I said. “Aunt Ellery.”

Chancey went silent.

The sunset spread across the sky like Superman flavor ice cream, blue, yellow, red, orange scooped thick in the clouds.

I tried to not let my voice shake. “Before she died. I saw her go into the basement.”

Chancey sat down in the wet sand beside me.

I felt nauseous all at once, my watermelon water ice laced with stomach acid in my mouth. “The storm woke me up, and I went into the kitchen. She was there.” My breath hitched. I could feel the plastic zipper dig into my stomach. “She heated a cup of mac and cheese for me. She watched me eat the whole thing.”

Chancey put her hand across my damp back, rubbing a little circle like Mom did when we woke up from bad dreams.

“I gave her her birthday present early.” I’ll never forget the way she smiled at me when I placed the bracelet I made her into her hand. In the darkness, it wasn’t a nice smile. It looked painted onto her face like a haunted doll. But I wasn’t scared then. I was happy to bask in her Sweet Afton cigarette smell, to be with her alone at the table.

In the end, she took this memory from me. With time, it all became chum for nightmares.

I looked up at Chancey whose curly hair haloed out to little flyaways in the wind. I spit the sand out of my mouth. “She said she had laundry to do and that I should go to bed. Then she walked away.”

Chancey never looked more like an adult to me than she did right then. Her brow furrowed, her eyes softened, and her mouth an impenetrable line. “That’s the last you saw her?”

I nodded.

I still remember the sound of the purple plastic charm bracelet rattling on her wrist as she stepped down the stairs. She even had it on when they found her floating in the basement.

Aunt Ellery left the utility sink running when she put the gun in her mouth. No one heard it over the tropical storm rolling through. The sink hemorrhaged water all night until nine in the morning when my mother opened the basement door. It was flooded up to the fifth stair. I never saw it, but I can picture Aunt Ellery’s body floating amongst her children’s uniform shirts and navy pants, her husband’s checkered boxers, her scattered mis-matched socks. They had to throw out all the clothes floating in the flood with her. Chancey told me later they could never repair the water damage. That was the thing Uncle Ted was angriest about—not only did his wife leave her children motherless, but she took the basement and his home’s property value with her.

Chancey reached out to bury me in her arms. “Bobbit—”

“No!” I shoved her arm away so hard she toppled backward, and her hair caked in sand. “You’re not allowed to make me feel better!” I wound up to punch her in the throat with everything I had.

She dodged my sloppy right hook and grabbed me by the shoulders. I never knew her hands were so heavy, her grip so tight. “Stop.”

I hated her. I hated how she was always bigger and stronger and older. I hated her arms and her stupid ruffled bikini, I hated her mouth like Mom’s mouth, and her eyes all wide, all worried. I hated her. The mountain of sand drizzles slowly slipped off my legs. I hated her. I kicked my feet until the sand splattered Chancey’s legs. I wanted to punch her in the throat. I wanted to rip all the baby hairs out of her head. I wanted her dead like Aunt Ellery.

And all at once, I hated my aunt more than I hated anyone. Hated her for promising me that I would grow out of it. Hated her for lying to me. Hated her for dying. Hated her for naming me an ambush predator when inside her thrashed a bobbit in a bottle.

“It’s okay to be upset.” Chancey gripped my shoulders tighter even though I kicked her shins and sprayed her with sand. “I’m upset too.”

I shook my head back and forth like a wet dog, splattering the ground with clumps of sand loosened from my hair. I screamed, my throat raw with strain and salt, slamming my arms into her chest until she let me go. I tried to run but fell face-first into the sand. I spit out the globs in my mouth and wiped the chunks in my nose, weeping the way Mom did at the funeral.

Aunt Ellery said she outgrew her anger, that she never hurt another person. But that was a lie. She was a person too.

My cheeks flushed with anger and shame, my ears already burning. I struck the sand, again and again, struck its ugly, uncaring face until my arms rubbed red.

Chancey would never understand. Her heart was always at low tide. She inherited my mother’s soft temper. I was born with an angry heart that hungered and crashed and tore. I was there, nine years old, sitting in the ocean. It crashed around me, throwing children off their boards, pulling them under, choking their lungs. I was there and I was the ocean. I threw the children off, I pulled them under, I struck their throats, I choked their lungs. I couldn’t explain to Chancey that I knew why our Aunt Ellery died, that she tried to hold the ocean inside her.

Around us, the gulls cried, the children screeched, the waves wept. The ocean’s breath shuddered on the shore between sobs. The beach was grieving, I thought.

“Bobbs.”

I looked back at her. Chancey was sitting down now, drizzling sand across her toes the way Aunt Ellery showed us. “I’ll wait with you, okay?”

I looked at her and knew all of a sudden that this was our last summer as girls. We would never be children again. “Okay.”

Chancey folded her knees into her chest and bound herself up. Her voice was thin and hollow as a reed. She sniffled. “We’ll wait until she comes back.”

I nodded and stared out at the sea.

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