Pandora by Paola Ferrante
If I told my daughter this story, I would say don't ask why, or what if it had happened another way. I would say the way the story goes, there was a woman and there was a particular box and this particular box had a guy inside it; actually the box was a white cube van running down the middle of a busy sidewalk, full of women on a sunny afternoon. I know you want to know, we all do, but don't ask why those particular women were chosen by the guy in the box, women walking their dogs or running in yoga pants outside the new development which had ripped up all the old trees and put in saplings; I already told you it was sunny. The guy in the box which was a van had the doors locked, the windows rolled up on what was a 90 degree day in the sunshine. Don't ask why anyone would do such a thing. When the van hopped the sidewalk, those sapling trees in planters, oak or elm or beech, I never could tell the difference, they didn't even slow him down. If I told my daughter this story, I would want her to know the difference between oak or elm or beech; I would teach her to climb those trees when they got older and they were large trees, the kind of trees your mother warned you about at night in ravines, the kind where it's possible to think you've climbed so far up you're seeing the rooftops of the whole world, even when you're not. Don't ask me if anyone taught the guy in the van to climb a tree; if his mother made him go outside instead of being cooped up in the basement all day shooting things on a screen. My own mother warned me about women climbing trees, about Icarus; even on cloudy days she always told me I needed to put on more sunscreen in case I got burned. But my mother didn't know anything, really, about climbing trees; she went only three inches off the ground in her wedding heels.
If I told my daughter this story I would say the first time I climbed a tree, just outside my bedroom window, I was in a tutu for ballet class. That first time, my friend went up the tree behind me; he told me look up, not down. When I looked up, I saw the moon hanging in the sky in broad daylight; I didn't see when the sequins caught on a tree branch, ripping the whole skirt apart. My mother screamed about the torn tutu for at least a week; she asked why would you do such a thing? Don't ask me if the guy in the van ever wore a tutu; maybe it was his sister's when he was five and he just liked how the sequins felt smooth, how they flashed in the light like a mirror to whole other worlds until his brothers found him. Don't ask if his brothers boxed him, put sharp elbows between his legs, put out their cigarettes on his arm to make him cry because real men don't. Maybe it happened in an alley at the end of the street, or in a bus shelter, the kind I was waiting in when I heard the glass shatter because of the van on the sidewalk on a sunny afternoon. Don't ask if the girl he liked saw, if the next day at school he waited for her to walk by the desk he sat in alone, flapping his hands. Don't ask if he tripped her, if she cried when everyone saw what was underneath her dress. I don't know, even if you want to. If I told this story from on the ground inside a shattered glass bus shelter, I would tell my daughter that the boy and I didn't only climb that tree; we raced to the top like Russia and the U.S. did in the fifties; he was more Armstrong, I was more Luna 2. Technically I won. I would tell her that after that boy and I climbed the tree I told him that humans had only explored ninety meters of the moon's surface, that I was going to be an astronaut so I could map the rest. I wouldn't tell my daughter how when I said liked him, he called me a “cow,” how I could have said “but cows don't climb trees, they can't even go down stairs,” but I didn't. I wouldn't tell her how instead I went to the bathroom and lifted up my shirt, pinching a roll of belly fat around the navel, hating my body's lack of definition, its roundness that was later the reason a man I loved left. I wouldn't tell my daughter, the one I never had, that the moon looks smaller when viewed from the ground, between your legs. Don't ask me if the girl that guy in the van liked thought he was too round; if he ever looked at the moon from his window and wanted to leave the four walls surrounding him, the earth. If I told this story to my daughter, the one I'll never have, I would say both the moon and a box are in three dimensions; time is a fourth, existing outside of boxes. It lets the mother of the guy in the van and me play the “what if” game; what if he hadn't spent so much time alone and surrounded by four walls? What if her son had not flapped his hands when he was scared, knowing girls would call him weird? What if she had known about the cigarette burns; what if he had never learned to drive? Then I could ask, what if I had driven more than a thousand miles, taking the corners like it's NASCAR in a diaper designed for space so I wouldn't have to stop until I knew from the man I had loved who had wanted “a break” why her and not me? What if I had worn a skirt? What if we knew this was going to happen?
If I had had a daughter, I hope she wouldn't ask what if I had never climbed trees or tried to look at the moon in first place; what if I had not been waiting for a bus at this particular time, on that particular day? Would I still be looking at the sky from the ground, alone but surrounded by tiny pieces of glass, shattered sirens, surrounded by people asking what could they possibly do or have done to help? Would I have had a daughter? Would the mother of the guy in the van think about that; would she think about how could she have known? If I had had a daughter I would want her to know the moon is there to be viewed from oaks or elms or beeches, that she has the right to know the topography of Tycho, Copernicus, the South Pole-Aitken basin, the moon is there to be walked on. On the moon I want my daughter to know there is nothing to break open; there are no corners to turn.
Paola Ferrante's debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published Spring 2019 by Mansfield Press. Her work has appeared in The Puritan, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Fiddlehead, CV2, Room, Joyland and elsewhere. She won The New Quarterly's 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and Room's 2018 prize for Fiction. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and resides in Toronto, Canada.