The Perpetual Motion Machine Read online

  THE

  PERPETUAL

  MOTION

  MACHINE

  THE PERPETUAL MOTION MACHINE

  A MEMOIR

  Brittany Ackerman

  The Perpetual Motion Machine

  Copyright © 2018 by Brittany Ackerman

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book layout by Mark E. Cull

  ISBN: 978-1-59709-691-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018032432

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, the Riordan Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Red Hen Press

  www.redhen.org

  Acknowledgments

  The story, “Space Mountain,” first appeared in No Tokens Issue No. 7 in 2018.

  To my mother, for always being there and helping us through.

  Contents

  Fire Drill

  You Can Fly

  The Big Apple

  Into the Hudson

  Papagalos

  Prisoners

  Bullfight

  Square Pizzas

  Escape from the Bottom

  Mario Saves the Princess

  Apples to Oranges

  The Transportation Center

  A Brief History of Partying

  In the Forest

  Birthday Girl

  Much Needed Prayer

  The Perpetual Motion Machine

  Space Mountain

  Fire Drill

  My mat is in the middle of the room. I usually prefer an edge, a wall to run my hands and feet up and down, to make like an upside-down candlestick and pretend to drip, drip. But today I have to make a home for Snowman. Snowman is a stuffed toy with a red crown. He’s from some book I’ve never read. I hate his crown because it’s made of felt. I’ve tried to rip it off, but my brother says he’d look weird without it. He has yellow buttons down his middle, but his hands and feet are my favorite. They are large and puffy and I suck on them sometimes. I bite his flesh and small strings of fluff stick to the roof of my mouth. He’s not here with me on my mat. We are only allowed one toy at rest time. I’ve chosen a set of silk paintings I made in St. Martin. I have four, and I can fashion a makeshift house with three walls and a roof. I set up the foundation as I’ve done many times before.

  Snowman is in my backpack, and if I pretend to go to the bathroom, I can sneak there and get him, bring him back to my mat, rescue him from the nothingness of the inside of my school bag. I never rest at rest time and I don’t understand the kids who do. My best friend, Gillian Price, has been moved away from me for talking too much or else she’d put her Ellie the Elephant inside my house. I don’t like it when she does that because Snowman needs his own place, a space to keep him warm. I can hear her on the other side of the room talking to Greer Goldbloom. I can’t hear what they’re saying, just girlish whispers thin as baby hairs. I focus on my house. It really is a beautiful house; the silk paintings are done in bright blues, golds, greens, and purples, my favorites.

  The walls of the house keep falling down and I pick them back up. I can’t get the structure right today. I think about Snowman’s face, his dumb happy face in my bag. I think about my mom picking me up from school and giving me a milk box and then I feel a little sick, like I need her here. Matthew Zimpkin is asleep next to me and his sleeve is covered in snot. He is sick and maybe I’ve caught his sickness. I wonder if he’s even still alive in his navy blue turtleneck. I hold one of the silk paintings to my face, the one with the fish in the middle that the lady at the hotel in St. Martin traced for me. All I had to do was color it in with the paint. Gold, orange, black, blue, purple. The eyes are done in purple. I remember the way the paint bled into the silk.

  I drift off and dream about St. Martin. The year we went there instead of Aruba, our usual vacation spot. The heat in the middle of December, a family vacation for the winter holiday, the way Santa came down in a helicopter and gave all the kids presents. He was wearing a bathing suit. All the kids ran toward him and his bag of toys. He was waving at us, smiling, sweating. I was sweating too, my hair sticking to my forehead, my shorts sticking to my thighs, and my brother was running, faster than me to receive his gift from the fake Santa. It was so hot, and I kept thinking about how we were Jewish and shouldn’t even get presents. And I wake up on my mat and everyone is gone. Matthew, Gillian, Greer, my teacher. Everyone is gone and I’m on my mat, face down and sweating in my purple sweater. My ears hurt and my eyes water. A fire alarm is muffled but I hear it, the way it stops and starts again. I need to leave. I have to get outside.

  I leave my mat, I leave the silk paintings, I leave my backpack with Snowman, I leave my whole life behind in that room. I do not want to die in pre-kindergarten. I run out the side door of the classroom that leads to the playground, then down the big hill to where everyone is lined up according to age and teacher. I see my group, a wave of Velcro shoes and ankle socks. The kids look tired and confused like me, but I’m on fire. My body is burning. I look down the way and see the fourth graders, my brother’s group. I see a boy in denim pants, a brown turtleneck to match his chestnut hair, clean sneakers on his feet. I see my brother and I start to run toward him. His hands are in his pockets and he looks out at the older kids, into the stretch of youths beyond, down, down the massive hill. I am stopped by my teacher, her hands gathering me into her long knit skirt, the black curls on her head shaking, holding me back. I am reaching for my brother. I am reaching and my teacher pulls me away. She feels my warm little body, my head in flames, she tugs at a purple sleeve to feel my clammy hands, she tells another teacher to take me away, and I am crying now, hard, and it hurts the back of my throat.

  My brother turns to face up the hill and I see his eyes, brown like two chocolate chips, and I can’t tell if he sees me. I am screaming, “Skyler! Sky! Sky!” at the top of my lungs and it echoes against the fire alarm. The kids will not remember. The teachers will forget it too. And maybe it didn’t happen this way, any of it. Maybe I was still dreaming on my mat. But my brother remembers the day at the fire drill when his sister was left alone in her pre-K classroom and her teacher dragged her away as she screamed and cried and begged for him. He will remember it forever because it is burned in his mind. He is the brother and he must carry these things.

  You Can Fly

  She takes a package of Goldfish out of her purse when the ride starts. The three of us, my brother, my mom, and myself, are all packed into a fake little ship on the Peter Pan ride in Disney World. It’s the same thing every time. We wait for the takeoff, we put our tiny hands out like cups, we collect the Goldfish crackers from Mom to throw at various scenes on the ride, letting them land where they fall, hoping we will come back and see them next time. This is how we create memories, something to look forward to, something to look back on.

  Skyler can throw them the farthest. He gets the fish in intricate places. He knows the best spots to hide our memories. I stick to the small scenes, leaning down to plop a fish right next to the mermaids. The orange body is obvious, out in the open next to a bikini-clad mermaid s
unning herself, long blond hair down her back, a starfish behind her ear.

  The “You Can Fly” song plays and our ship flies along. Captain Hook captures Wendy. The Lost Boys fight to save her. Peter Pan saves the day. Captain Hook straddles a crocodile with a tick-tock in his tummy. Ripples of color represent struggle in the water. It’s been this way since before I was born. His legs shake as the mouth opens and closes. Our fish are already decaying into the interior of the ride. Soon an attendant will sweep them up and curse the kids who threw them. We can only hope that one of the little snacks might get lost in the ride forever without being noticed, without any attention paid to it, slipping free between scenes and landing on the floor out of view.

  When the flying ship lands, we exit the ride and Mom shoves the bag back in her purse. “We’ll come back in a year and see if they’re still there.” Mom smiles, and even though she knows they won’t be, that the ride gets cleaned and the Goldfish will be thrown away, a part of her believes they might stay, they might make it until then. When we go back and they’re gone, she insists it was too dark to see, and when we replace them again, we give ourselves another year, another trip, more time to believe our own lies.

  The Big Apple

  Skyler loves how New York stands alone on the map. It stands out even though it’s awkwardly shaped and smaller in comparison to most other states. We can see the New York skyline from our apartment in Riverdale. We live on the tenth floor of the building, high enough to see the skyscrapers far away in the city and the Hudson River close to us. We stand outside on the terrace and watch the top of the Empire State Building change its colors every few months with the seasons and the holidays. Skyler and I throw plastic army men off of our balcony and watch them parachute into the pool downstairs. I like to watch them fall, little green guys hitting a swimmer in the head, and we laugh.

  One winter, our terrace becomes infested with pigeons. It gets so bad that Mom says it reminds her of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Dad puts on oven mitts and boots to climb outside and swat them away with a broomstick. We all watch from inside. The birds must be attracted to something, finding solace on our balcony, huddling in some warmth that our terrace provides. The birds eventually leave, but their feathers remain.

  In the dining room there is a window that faces the sun. Skyler places his science project of a plant growing through a maze on the windowsill. When he is at school, I hold my breath and see if it moves. I water it for him, probably too much; I want to see if it will grow, if the experiment works, if something crazy like that could really happen right before my eyes.

  We take trips to Toys “R” Us on the weekends. The closest one is thirty minutes away, and on the drive there, we can’t see the sign until we go under an overpass. Then, all of a sudden, it appears as if by magic and we scream. Skyler runs off by himself once we get inside. He’s allowed to; he’s older. Mom accompanies me to the Barbie aisle to pick out a new outfit for my doll, while Skyler goes right to the Lego section. He must have over five hundred Lego sets, but he always wants more. He loves building them on the weekends. He gets a new one on Saturday morning and finishes it by Sunday night. He stays up all night, posing each character perfectly, making sure the pieces move and glide the way they’re supposed to, even spends time painting colorful and detailed accents onto the people in the set.

  He has a collection of Lego people heads, one for every occasion. He has everything from an angry pirate face to a damsel in distress face. He also has a box of spare parts and random things like swords, masks, shiny coins. I steal his Lego treasure chests and collect coins to go inside them. I like to open up the brown boxes and pour out all the coins, then place them back in, counting them one by one, and snap the top shut.

  Skyler builds a Lego Empire State Building, his masterpiece. It is about three feet tall, and he works on it for months. It’s so beautiful, mostly done in all black bricks with clear blocks for the top so it appears translucent. He makes an antenna that reaches up to the sky. He gets everything perfect, down to the last detail. It is displayed proudly in the living room and I must touch it every chance I get.

  “Mom! Get over here!” Skyler shouts.

  I have taken a Lego boy and girl and tried to place them in the Empire State Building model. In doing so, I broke off the antenna and am now standing next to the building, trying not to cry.

  “Brittany broke the antenna,” Skyler yells to Mom as he points at the broken pieces.

  “Why are you messing around with Skyler’s Legos? You know how long that took him to build!”

  “But I wanted the people to see it and go inside.” I look down at the two figures in my hands, a girl with a brown ponytail wearing all pink and a boy with black hair wearing blue.

  “If you want to play with Legos then you can build your own set,” Mom says.

  “But I can’t build what he did. I wanted them to live in the Empire State Building. I want them to have a house and be happy.”

  “Well, then you should know how hard it was for him to build that whole thing! Maybe Sky can help you build something of your own.”

  Mom leaves and Skyler sees me holding the figures. I stare at the building, admire it, and cry because I’m not able to build one. He knows that I couldn’t complete my own Lego set if I tried. I want him to feel sorry for me, sorry enough to help me do the things he can do because he’s good at them.

  “If I build you a Lego house will you stop messing around with mine?” Skyler asks.

  “Yes!” The idea of having my own Lego set that I could play with whenever I wanted fills me with excitement.

  Skyler takes out the plastic bins and begins to build my house. I lay down on the blue carpet. The threads are thick and I grab strands and twirl them around my fingers. I stick the two figures I had taken into the carpet so that only their heads are showing.

  “Look,” I say. “They’re safe.”

  “Safe from what?” Skyler asks as he continues to build the foundation for a house on top of a flat green Lego board.

  “They were cold but now they’re under the grass.”

  “Grass isn’t blue,” Skyler corrects me.

  “Well, in your room the grass is blue, and in mine the grass is pink.”

  “That’s just our carpet. It’s not grass.”

  “It can be,” I say, removing the Lego people from the carpet. “It’s just pretend.”

  Skyler already has rows of bricks in a square shape inside the green board. It’s coming along nicely and I know he’s working fast to appease me, his little sister.

  “Why don’t you let me finish your house and I’ll bring it into your room when I’m done?”

  “Okay!” I shout, raising my arms with a plastic figure in each hand and running out of the room. I put the Lego figures in my desk drawer and lie down in bed. I love my bed so much. It’s a daybed, so I’m told, and it looks like a couch when I’m not sleeping in it. It has white framing and gold balls on the ends. My comforter is paisley flowers done in pastels and the quilted material is fluffy and comfortable. My stuffed animals hang on my closet doors on hooks that Mom got from a home goods store. Each one has their own spot, some I can’t even reach because they’re up so high, but I put my favorites toward the bottom anyway so I can visit with them frequently. My bookshelf is in the corner of the room with an area for me to sit down next to it. Outside is a view of all New York. I can see the bus stop below where the bus picks us up and takes us to the city on weekends, whenever we want to go.

  Life is so comfortable, so nice, so perfectly placed out in front of us. I drift off to sleep and dream of Lego figures. Later, my brother will wake me up and show me the house, how I can take the roof off to safely place my happy Lego people inside, how to be gentle with the pieces this time.

  Lego heads tumble in the bin. Lego heads frown and smile. Lego heads are pinched and clicked onto Lego bodies. Arms are folded outward. Hands are twisted prongs. Legs are straightened to slide onto rectangle blocks. He
searches for the right Lego face. He searches to find the one he wants, the one that might fit the scene he builds, the one that might represent how he feels. He searches in the bin. He searches. He searches.

  Into the Hudson

  Mom and I are in the car. I’m wearing my brown-and-white fleece jacket (Mom has the same one, but bigger, the adult version) and I drink my box of Hershey’s chocolate milk. We exit the garage of our apartment and drive into the gray daylight. She turns the corner. There is a straightaway looking out at the Hudson River. I’m still groggy from sleep, not a morning child, only soothed by my milk-box whispering, deflating as I drink. My Velcro sneakers don’t touch the floor mat. A winter hat sits next to me that I have to put on before I get out of the car. I fan out my hands to admire my Wizard of Oz gloves. Each finger is a different character. The Tin Man is my favorite, leathery and gray on my pointer fingers. As we turn the corner, Mom slows down. “Why don’t I just drive this car right into the Hudson?” I stop drinking my milk, the box wheezes to a halt and I stare ahead at the river. It looks cold and deep and far away. The trees outside stand still, brown leaves falling and dying as they fall—a story I heard on the playground that I tell myself whenever I see a lone leaf plummet to its death. I don’t answer. Mom presses her foot to the pedal and accelerates. We are headed right for it. She keeps going, speeding up, driving straight ahead, moving forward, fast. I ball my fists and shield each character. I imagine floating coats and cold skin, trying to understand what it would be like to die today, to go with my mom into the water and never return. Maybe this is what she wants, for us to be together. Maybe this is the only way I will ever understand what it is to be a mother. On the first day of school, I say “housewife” when the teacher asks what my mom does. “Stay-at-home mom,” the teacher replies and marks it down in a big book. My lunch bag is always decorated with stickers. There are always fruits formed into shapes: an orange rind carved into a purse, the grapes are little pennies. If my mom wants to go, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll go together into the Hudson. At the last second she swerves. We turn left, the way to school, continue our morning drop-off where I don’t want to leave my mother, don’t want to go to school, am afraid to be alone. I frustrate her with my tantrums. I make her angry when she has errands to run and I say I need her to stay with me, just a bit longer, just for a second more. This is the only love that I know in my life. It is warm and it is comfortable.