The Marble

My life began in a dentist's office in a prize basket shaped like a treasure chest. The office was a fascinating place. All day long, people and children of all ages cycled through the chairs as treasures of all kinds cycled through the basket: sticky, extendible jelly hands; temporary tiger tattoos; jade-colored beaded bracelets; spiky balls with spikes that ballooned out when you squeezed them. The dental work itself was almost always the same: 30-minute cleanings and 15-minute cavity fillings.

I don't know how long I was in the prize basket. Long enough to know the available toothpaste options by heart (bubblegum, warm cinnamon, mint). Long enough to know that one dental hygienist (Annemarie) always took X-rays from left to right, and the other (Francesca) took them from right to left. Long enough to know that I and my 11 marble companions tied up in our old velvet bag were not a very appealing toy.

There were no other marbles in the basket. Where did we come from? Did one of the hygienists or dentists donate us? I have no idea. My earliest memories are the whir of electric tools, the smell of polished teeth and polished floors, and the words said over and over again, to every patient, every day: bubblegum, warm cinnamon, mint.

My marble companions were resigned to their fate. I was not. I loved that every day was different within a predictable routine. Even if they never chose us, I liked seeing the children's faces. Some were teary and relieved, but others were feral and almost wild. I looked forward to hearing Annemarie and Francesca gossip with their adult patients. It was largely a one-way conversation, but still I enjoyed hearing them speak, telling the same stories, tweaking the details depending on who was in the chair.

Also, there was a TV in the high corner of the room. During the day, when the oldest patients shuffled in with their soft, comfortable-looking shoes, the TV played what Annemarie and Francesca called "the news." In the early afternoon, the kids hopped and skipped in with shoes that lit up at their movement. Then the TV played more interesting shows with more color, more adventure, and more songs than the news. These were called cartoons. In the evening, the middle-aged adults walked in with their heavy leather shoes or tiny tapping shoes. Their TV programs fell somewhere in between news and cartoons. The two shows I remember were called Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! The enormous spinning wheel on Wheel of Fortune was mesmerizing to watch and, as a prize myself, I enjoyed watching for the prizes, but Jeopardy! was my favorite.

I love to learn things, you see. And you learned 61 new things every day by watching Jeopardy!, all in 30 minutes! In the length of one cleaning, you could learn about potent potables, rivers of Africa, history, opera, baseball players, chemistry, and rock hits of the 1980s. There were daily doubles hidden among the clues where contestants could gamble on their knowledge and bet to double their money (or their losses). The final Jeopardy! question required a blind bet based on the category before the clue was revealed. Smarts, luck, guts - you had to have it all to be a Jeopardy! champion. If someone had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wouldn't have said "dentist" or "dental hygienist." I would've said, "the host of Jeopardy!"

This was my daily routine and thus my life: seniors and news, kids and cartoons, middle-aged adults and Jeopardy! Cleanings, cavities, and x-rays. Bubblegum, warm cinnamon, and mint. Seven days a week except for holidays. I expected it to be that way forever, and that was okay. Like Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, I believed that you didn't need much to live happily (I learned this from Jeopardy!).

Annemarie and Francesca presented countless children with the prize basket shaped like a treasure chest after their appointments. Some kids reached in with greedy fists only after the shiniest, noisiest toys. Others evaluated us seriously and reached in gingerly, taking only a sticker or two. But none of them ever gave me, my 11 companions, or our little velvet bag more than a passing glance.

That is, until Nadia.

The first thing I noticed about Nadia were her eyes. They were overlarge in her tiny face, almost perfectly circular, unblinking, and a mix of green and blue. She had the look of the more polite children, if a little more fearful. I thought she'd choose a lovely periwinkle blue dolphin sticker that'd just come in the day before, but no, she chose me. Us. And she chose decisively. Annemarie couldn't coax her into trading us for anything else or persuade her to take anything in addition to us. Nadia gripped us tightly into her miniature palm and shook her head.

She was the bravest person I ever knew.

***

So, my life began again! "One can live for years sometimes without living at all," the playwright Oscar Wilde said, "and then all life comes crowding into a single hour." I bet you already know where I learned that one. It proved true. Within the hour I left the dentist's office, I rode in a car for the first time. I saw stores, traffic lights, trees, and lamp posts whizz by. I went into a house for the first time. I felt hardwood and carpet beneath me. I smelled a million new smells, heard a million new sounds, saw new people and their shoes.

I was a part of games for the first time. I didn't know I was capable of more than waiting and watching. Nadia would play "Shooter" with us, using me to try and knock the other marbles out of a ring she set up with tape. We also played "Bounce," where Nadia would try to get us into a plastic cup a few feet away. Nadia made mazes out of anything she could find around the house - pens and stuffed animals, books and the TV remote (they had a TV, too!) - rolling us through the twists and turns. Sometimes, Nadia would line us up or cluster us together in a circle and just look at us.

I don't have proof that I was her favorite except that I was always the "shooter" marble, that she always bounced and rolled me first, and that sometimes, when we were all lined or circled up like soldiers, she would pick me up and hold me in the palm of her hand letting the light shine through me.

She never said it out loud, but I knew.

***

On Jeopardy! I learned that the "Wheel of Fortune" was not just the name of another game show but an actual concept. Like a turning wheel, Fortune is always on the move. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on one's position and perspective. Those on top of the wheel with all the luck in the world will fall. Those on the bottom with all the bad luck will rise. Up and down, round and round, forever.

I had been at the top of Fortune's wheel. The wheel turned.

The day it turned started like any other. Savory and sweet breakfast smells, birds calling, summer light, already warm, flooding the kitchen. It must have been a weekend, because Nadia patted into the kitchen barefoot and late and played with us for the rest of the morning.

Oh, if only I had known this would be the last morning like this!

But I didn't know. And I think it was better that way.

We were playing a game of "Shooter" on the linoleum floor. Nadia crouched behind me and flicked with her pointer finger and thumb toward the other marbles. It was a good hit. I ricocheted off at a strange and powerful angle. The kitchen swirled in a colorful blur around me. I skidded over the smooth, quick linoleum without stopping. I felt like I was falling through the universe. The laws of gravity abandoned me. I was weightless.

Two things happened simultaneously, and I couldn't explain either one. Everything went dark, and I came to an abrupt stop.

I imagined that some kind of end had come. It was dark, and there was nothing. No Nadia, no marbles, no light, no sound. Then a sound did burst forth, strange, without warning, and right over my head. It sounded like the droning of an enormous bee. Terrified, I expected a stinger to crash down on me at any moment. But the moment of terror didn't come. Slowly, I started to adjust to the darkness around me. There was a sliver of perfectly straight light, like the horizon over the sea, in front of me.

The droning cut out as unexpectedly as it began. The light from the horizon inched closer and closer to me as I began to see my surroundings better. Two things hit me at once: where I was and what had happened.

I was stuck under the refrigerator.

***

A new phase of my life had begun, though, at the time, it felt like an ending. I was alone in darkness, just the sliver of light in front of me and the refrigerator droning above me. For the first few days after the accident, I could see the shadow of Nadia's face pressed sideways against the floor, looking for me. She couldn't see me. Over time, Nadia's peering under the fridge became less frequent. I think she was upset to lose me in such a shocking way, but she had 11 other marbles to play with, though she never played with them in the kitchen again. The fridge also couldn't be moved. Nadia was too small and her grandmother too old, and they didn't have many visitors. By the time the holidays came around, the ones that closed the dental office for a few days in the winter, I was forgotten.

No patients, no Jeopardy!, no other prizes, no games, nothing to look at except shoes. Shoes became my sole link to the outside world - pun intended. Oh, I was never one to wallow! I didn't like my situation, but I made the most of it. I could still watch and learn. I could still see Nadia and her grandmother. I could hear bits of their muffled conversations. We were still connected, albeit one-way, albeit faintly.

I quickly learned the routines of the shoes. Nadia wore socks around the house and either her Velcro dress shoes or Velcro sneakers to school. Her grandmother wore her soft, comfortable shoes to run errands and bring Nadia to school and her purple house slippers inside. She replaced her slippers with a fresh but identical pair every year, and this is how I kept track of time.

After two new slippers, Nadia started wearing shoes with laces. A pair of new slippers later, she brought home pastel pink ballet shoes. I watched her learn to wobble up on pointe, pirouette, and arabesque across the kitchen. The summer after five new pairs of slippers, Nadia had a cast on her right leg. Her toes stuck out the front and were painted a new, bright color every week. She looked and hobbled around like a mummy.

I also memorized their gaits and could immediately tell when a new person came into the house. Nadia's friends never walked, skipped, or jumped how she did. The adults who came over picked up their feet (or didn't) very differently to how Nadia's grandmother did.

Five more pairs of slippers came and went. The ballet pointe shoes stayed, tap shoes made a brief appearance, tall boots that went to Nadia's knee arrived, and a few versions of cleats made their debut. Nadia left Velcro and laces behind and started wearing flats, slip-ons, and small heels. Nadia's grandmother's shoes stayed the same, but I noticed that they moved a little less frequently and a little more slowly every year.

Instead of friends with similar kinds of shoes, now boys with very odd shoes were coming over. They wore what I can only describe as rounded tissue boxes on their feet: enormous, flat, with intertwined white letters or a letter that looked like a lower case "M" or someone's interpretation of the letter "E" on the sides.

Two more pairs of slippers later, Nadia vanished. She did come home in the winter and for most of the summer, but in the spring and fall, she was gone. The house felt emptier without her. Her grandmother shuffled in little circles through the house. She hardly went outside. Three more pairs of slippers and Nadia vanished almost for good. She came once or twice a year, but for only a few days. When she came, she no longer skipped or played games. The pointe shoes were long gone. She and her grandmother either sat on the couch watching TV (which I could hear faintly when the fridge was quiet) or at the kitchen table, their feet pointed toward each other.

***

I've pieced together these separate sections to form a continuous whole (what is a montage?), but these changes took time. They happened gradually, nearly imperceptibly, day by day. And yet the lesson of the earlier days of my life, that Oscar Wilde quote, came back again. The house had housed one or two people with brief visits from outsiders for many years, all the years I'd been under the fridge. Then, one morning, it simply all changed.

I didn't hear Nadia's grandmother walking about that morning. By the middle of the day, all kinds of new shoes and new people were stomping into and out of the house, hurrying about. There were big brown leather boots and shockingly white shoes. There were sneakers (slip-ons, no laces). A wheeled contraption came in one way through the kitchen and went back out within a matter of minutes. All the shoes walked out of the house, and the house fell silent except for the fridge.

It stayed this way for days until the sounds returned. I heard the front door open. Wheels came through the kitchen again, but much slower and gentler this time. There were no boots, but there was a woman in white stockings and white shoes.

The woman in the white stockings and shoes came to the house very early every day, letting herself in, and left in the evening, letting herself out and locking the door behind her.

Nadia also returned.

She wore flats: some rounded and others that came to a point in the front; some made of a shiny leather, and others with exotic patterns like cheetah spots or zebra stripes on them. She moved back into the house and stayed. She settled into her routines, rhythms, and gaits. I would've recognized Nadia by them anywhere. The woman in the white stocking and shoes still came every day, and she and Nadia spoke in the kitchen every morning and every evening.

Not long after, but exactly how long was hard to know without the purple slippers, the woman in the white stockings and shoes stopped coming, and she never came again. I knew Nadia's grandmother was gone. In place of her own flats, Nadia wore her grandmother's purple slippers. I knew it was her and not her grandmother. Her gait never changed.

Nadia left again. The house fell silent again and stayed that way for longer than before. The fridge, my constant companion, continued its droning: always punctual, always hungry, never satisfied. The light moved about the rooms. The dust, appearing out of nowhere over the past 15 years, continued to gather around me. It grew so thick that it obscured my horizon, my view of the world, my only connection to life.

I started to panic. I realized that Nadia might never return to the house. The dust would pile up and eventually blind me. I would be left alone in darkness. There was nothing for me to watch, nothing for me to learn, nothing for me to do. The nothingness I had felt in my first moments under the fridge returned. For the first time in my life, I felt hopeless.

But Fortune's wheel turns. And Mr. Wilde, for the third time, was right.

A morning came when the house burst back into life. I heard it rather than saw it, for the dust had become a nebula around me. I heard heavy shoes moving through the rooms. I heard the furniture moving. I heard all the doors of the house opening and closing, creaking and slamming. Someone, many people, were cleaning out the house.

The noises grew louder, the footfalls closer. I heard the cabinets open, the chairs squeak and scrape, the tinkling of silverware, glasses, and plates. I heard the sound of appliances being unplugged and moved from their loyal posts.

The sound of appliances being unplugged and moved.

The fridge, my faithful companion for all those years, moved an inch. Then another few inches. Then Two sets of hands appeared under the sides and dragged the fridge from against the wall. The cord was unplugged. For the first time in 15 years, the fridge fell silent.

And I was free.

If I could've blinked, I would've. The light, even through the cloud of dust, was overwhelming. From what I could see, the house had been emptied of its contents, which somehow made it look much smaller than I remembered. It looked old, tired, and indifferent.

"Miss," someone said in what was probably a normal speaking voice, but after my years of isolation, sounded like the voice of God, "there's a few things that were under the fridge. Anything you wanna keep?" The voice moved on.

I heard her coming before I saw her. It was Nadia. She looked down at the dust pile in the rectangular shape of the late fridge. She poked around near the front, finding one plastic earring, a couple of hair ties, and some loose change. For a terrible moment, I thought she would overlook me. But her eyes, still large in her face, still wide and unblinking, saw me.

***

Nadia picked up something small, circular, and covered in dust: a marble. "Where did this come from?" she wondered. Something in the very back of her mind stirred, a memory that was more like a feeling. She couldn't place it. Wiping away the remaining dust, she let the marble rest in the center of her palm. She brought it to eye level. The sun shone right through it, a clear circle with a wave of blue and green suspended through its center.

She loved it in the same way she loved it years and years before as a child sitting in a dentist's chair. She didn't know it, but she felt the same love twice. She made the same choice twice. Nadia squeezed the marble into her palm and dropped it into her pocket.

She let the moving crew know everything else in the house could go.

***

Nadia was a second-grade teacher. Every year, she set up two jars for her students: one was empty, the other filled with multicolored marbles. At the end of every day, a student would move one marble from the fuller jar to the emptier jar, showing how many days of school they'd completed and how many they had left. Eventually, what was once the empty jar became the full and what was the full jar became empty. In other words, the wheel continued to turn.

Every year, Nadia dropped in the first marble at the end of the first day. The one with the blue and green center. The one she found under her grandmother's fridge when she sold the house. The one she didn't know she had loved and lost and had returned to her. The one who began its life in a dentist's office. The one that dreamed of being the host of Jeopardy!. The one that knew an awful lot about shoes.

Over the course of the year, when she happened to look at the jars, that marble would always catch her eye. She swore it listened to every word she and her students said. It made her smile to think so.