Invisible Sign of My Own

On my twentieth birthday, I bought myself an ax. This was the best gift I got in a decade. Before I saw it, shining on the wall of the hardware store like a lover made from steel and wood, I'd given up completely on the birthday celebration. On my nineteenth, my mother had kicked me out of the house. On my eighteenth, I had a party of two people, and after an hour, both claimed allergies, and went home, sneezing. On my seventeenth, I made myself a chocolate cake, but since I didn't really want to eat it, stirred bug poison in with the mix. It rose beautifully, the best ever, and when I took it out of the oven, a perfect brown dome, I just circled the pan for a few hours, breathing in that warm buttery air. Some ants ate the crumbs on the counter and died. On my sixteenth, my aunt sent me a beautiful scarlet silk dress, which smelled and felt as delicate as the inside of a wrist. Stroking it in my lap, I sifted through the phone book, finally picking out the name of a woman who lived at an address with 16s in it. Then I mailed the dress to her. Red is not my color. On my fifteenth, fourteenth, thirteenth, twelfth, and eleventh birthdays, my mother and I went shopping, and each year, by the end, one of us was in tears of frustration because I didn't like anything, and I said I really didn't want anything, except, maybe, a new math workbook. You had to send away for those. They came from a big number barn in the South. My mother shook her head; she refused, flat-out, to buy me math supplies for my birthday, so finally we just put the money in the bank instead. The year of my tenth birthday was when my father got sick, and that's when I started to quit. I'd always loved the sound of pianos, so I signed up for lessons and took them for six weeks, and at the end of six weeks we had a recital. I wore a dress and played a minuet and my two hands were doing two different things at the same time and when it was over I drank juice and got hugged and the melody crooned inside my head. I walked my piano teacher to her car, and she smiled at me, proud. The sky clamped down. I lowered my voice: Listen, I said, urgent. You are never, ever to set foot near this house again. Her eyebrows pulled in, puzzled. Mona? she asked. What? Thanks, I said. But this is the end of the line. I told my mother it was too bad, wasn't it, that the one piano teacher was leaving our small town of no opportunity to become a rock star in the big city. Her eyes widened and she picked up the phone and my heart started pounding, but to my huge relief the piano teacher's machine picked up and my mother's message was vague, something like: Good luck and wow! and we wish you all the best. Three weeks later, they ran into each other at the market. What they talked about, I have no idea. I took dance class ten times, and on the afternoon of my first leap, donated my ballet shoes to charity. I had one boyfriend and within two months had hardened into a statue in bed. I ran track like a shooting star and shot myself straight out of orbit. I quit dessert to see if I could do it--of course I could; I quit breathing one evening until my lungs overruled; I quit touching my skin, sleeping with both hands under the pillow. When no one was home, I tied ropes around the piano, so that it would take me thirty minutes with scissors to get back to that minuet. Then I hid all the scissors. I did not stop knocking on wood, which I did all the time, as a way to seal each quit into roots and bark; listen: I tell the wood--look at what I'm doing here. Mark this down. Notice. No piano. No dessert. No track. Nothing. I am in love with stopping. It's a fine art, when you think about it. To quit well requires an intuitive sense of beauty; you have to feel the moment of turn, right when desire makes an appearance, here is the instant to be severed, whack, this is the moment where quitting is ripe as a peach turning sweet on the vine: snap, the coBender, Aimee is the author of 'Invisible Sign of My Own' with ISBN 9780385492232 and ISBN 0385492235.