Original Publication: San Francisco Chronicle (Page RV – 3)
With a voice as clear as water and a hand that is honest, light and sincere in its intentions, Aimee Bender steers her reader into the depths of her heroine’s private hell. In this fairy tale, Mona Gray is a 20-year-old math teacher in a town of one-dimensional reality and bottomless despair. Her father, a former track star and a role model for Mona, suffers from a debilitating illness with no name. His only symptom is a sudden, overwhelming awareness of his own mortality, an awareness that cripples him and becomes the center of his consciousness. One day he’s young and optimistic. The next, he comes home and announces that he is going to die.
Mona’s mother, a travel agent who dreams of exotic lands, has not left their small town since her husband became ill 10 years before. She believes he will die if she leaves him alone for even a day. He believes he’ll die if he steps outside the town’s borders. And so they stay together, he contemplating his own death, she watching him fade without being able, or even trying, to stop his descent. Instead of traveling to Kenya and New Zealand, Mona’s mother daydreams about those places over an atlas in the living room.
Young Mona is a great runner, a great math student and, as she gets older, a great lover. But her father’s “quitting life” has all but destroyed her. Until the onset of his illness he had been her friend and role model, the one person she thought invincible. When he stops running, so does she. When he stops living, she quits everything she’s good at and takes to knocking compulsively on wood, hoping to avert further disaster. When he becomes a ghost and continues to haunt her, she buys herself an ax and sits on the couch imagining how the blade would look cutting through her flesh:
“Holding the ax high in my right hand, I imagined it first: my arm, swinging down, a loose curve, swing down, and crash, crack, I let the blade bury deep down wherever the swing ends. Sshh, quiet, woozy, dreamy, the girl falls, sshh, tipping over, falling, something has been hit, timber, she’s over, there’s a slice in her leg.” If “An Invisible Sign of My Own” is a fairy tale, it is one of Anne Sexton’s — desolate, depressed yet magnetic in its reality. Here is a world where a dark wind blows through town, spreading signs of death on people’s lawns. Little Mona rides by homes on her bike, watching the signs and knowing what they mean, but unable to warn the victims. The next day, she will ride past their houses again and watch their families mourn them.
It’s a world where children sink into despair while adults watch, unable or unwilling to save them; where old men hang numbers around their necks to indicate the darkness of their mood each day; where Mona’s second-grade student, Lisa, sees her mother suffer from cancer and wishes she had cancer, too.
Salvation comes late, but it comes, predictably, in the shape of a Prince Charming. The new science teacher at the school has burn marks all over his arms and loves to teach the kids the symptoms of scurvy, but he can see through Mona as if she were made of glass.
He’s not afraid to step in and save what little appears left of her. Drawn as she is to him physically, Mona also realizes, with the lucidity of one who has too long envisioned her own end, that the science teacher is her last hope for staying connected to the world. She can either reach for him and, through him, for life — or she can reach for the ax.
In Bender’s hands, Mona’s fate unfolds in poetic yet believable turns. We are drawn to her out of curiosity; we may stay with her, at first, out of fascination with the grotesque; but we see her through out of a need to have the darker forces in life conquered, or at least controlled.
In the end, “An Invisible Sign of My Own” achieves what all good fiction strives for: It gives a face to human suffering but sprinkles it with just enough magic to make reality tolerable.