Perfect Balance

Judy Bolton-Fasman

photo by Anne Day

Word Count 518

I’m driving up I-84, passing the Asylum Street exit in Hartford, Connecticut, when my brother calls to tell me he wants to die. His girlfriend has left him, his kid has reverted to tics and tears, and his ex-wife wants money he doesn’t have. My brother and I grew up on the suburban stretch of where Asylum Street becomes Asylum Avenue. Our house was on a corner lot of adrenalin and anger and desperation.

My little brother’s voice is a mixture of crying and rage. He wants his girlfriend back. He’s sure she can save him. I tell him he’s taking on too much. I tell him I just saw the Asylum Street exit. Too much happened there, he says.

*

On a Sunday afternoon, my sister and I are learning to ride bicycles. Mine is pink with a banana seat. Hers is dark blue with ribbons streaming out of the handlebars. Her training wheels have just come off. I ride well enough without extra support — a skill I procure for life. I wobble, yet I stay determinately upright. I circle the driveway in broad cautious swoops. My sister stands by her bicycle until our baby brother appears like a lightning bolt, grabbing it and riding away. He’s a feral boy with perfect balance.

*

I can’t stay here, my brother says. His voice echoes in the empty apartment where he is squatting post-eviction. I break down my instructions to him: Take your clothes and put them in a garbage bag. Don’t think, just grab. We’ll sort it out later. Take that bag and put it in the back seat of your car. Start the car, check your fuel level. Drive north and then east to me. It will take you a couple of hours from Bridgeport. Be patient.

*

When my parents realize my brother is the blur up the street, my mother runs after him but stops as my father, in his ramrod annoyance, gets in the car to catch him. My brother is wild, peddling to a secret natural habitat. My mother sits crisscross applesauce on the driveway, head in hands, grieving her troubled little boy.

*

In the emergency room rush hour in a Boston hospital, a nurse guards my brother’s curtained cubicle. The bathroom door does not lock. My brother begs for a cigarette, a klonopin. I sit by his bed and distract him with the story of how he rode a two-wheeler on the first try.

*

My brother is in the backseat of my father’s ‘65 Malibu. My sister’s bicycle, upside down, is next to him, the wheels randomly spinning as if there had been an accident.

*

My brother says he has floated up to the ceiling, looking down on his body – another emergency in this emergency room. He swears he looks like an accident victim. Where is that damn klonopin, he hisses.

A beat later, breathless, he says, Man, I had a great sense of balance back then. We laugh at this remark, ferrous that it is — the taste of cold metal in the word irony fills my mouth.

Judy has published in many literary venues and received fellowships from Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Mineral School, and Vermont Studio Center. "Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets” is forthcoming in September 2021 from Mandel Vilar Press. Visit Judy’s website — www.judyboltonfasman.com — to read more of her work.