The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

imaginary baby squalled to be set down gently, far away from me.

      Daddy made a mark in his notebook.

      “In a manner of speaking, you are a baby. What you observe in the person opposing you in a test will determine everything you do. In time, you’ll come to know what a person will do before he does it.”

      I thought I already knew. Dale’s scarf proved that, and so did Mr. Campbell’s straying from his task as he led pupils in recitation.

      Daddy bought a new People’s Regulator notebook for our practice sessions, and by the second evening the pages were curved from his pocket. On each page he wrote our practice date, and the numbers one to ten along both margins to rank my effort. He drew lines across the pages that slanted upward to the ten, calibrating strain. They spiked like a mountain peak if I failed on a first try. On my best days, the lines were flat and even, a well-maintained road from one side of the page to the other.

      From my father, I learned to hear the way a room sounded all of its own; the creaking of a closed door, the drift of air through an open window, the shifts in tone as four walls settled on their foundations. I learned that my thoughts crowded me out of the natural state of a place.

      The same broomstick returned. I practiced holding it steady between us, an equator at chest height. My father and I pushed equally toward the other, my hands at the center of the bar, his a few inches outside mine. As I pushed forward and the smallest bit upward, always matching my force to his, our balance was in my control. I learned to recognize the shiver in my stomach in the split second before he tried to outmaneuver me by pushing harder with his right or left hand or leaning away. Alert to his movements almost before he made them, I secured us both in our stances and rarely lost my footing. I grew quicker and more confident with each try. I had the broomstick trick easy from the third day, but we worked it until he was satisfied that I was more than lucky.

      And then we worked with a chair; different from a stick, with a confusion of right angles that made it hard at first to figure out his intentions.

      “Hold it up here,” Daddy said, pressing his forefinger to my heart.

      I did as I was told, the chair protruding from my chest like a weird appendage. At my side, Daddy laid my arm across the seat, curling my fingers where knees would go. He moved my other hand to the top of the back rail. Hugging the chair to my chest made me shuffle somewhat in my balance. Daddy assessed my predicament and placed his hand alongside mine on the seat. Helping me stay steady, he lay his other hand along the slats. If the chair were a baby, he’d have burped it. This made me laugh, and my laugh got him going, too.

      “Try and put the chair down, but don’t let it go,” he said.

      To set it down I’d have to quit holding so tightly. Bending my knees brought the chair down some, but Daddy pressed the seat and I staggered forward. Leaning forward from the waist like an open knife elicited the same problem.

      “Can’t happen,” Daddy said. “Not without you falling over.”

      My arms ached, and letting go of my hold, I put the chair on the floor where it belonged.

      “Think about what would happen if you were on my side of the chair, and the person where you’re standing now was sure your Magnetic Power kept that chair from sitting like it should.”

      Become the aspect of revelation, Mrs. Wolf said.

      “You keep him off his balance, Lulu. Out-think him.”

      And then Daddy sat in the same chair, with his back to me, rude as anything. As I stood there wondering what to do, that twist in my stomach warned me of his intent to move. The anxiety crawling across my shoulders told me the same thing.

      He rocked the chair back onto his rear legs, and before I could think I clutched at the posts and righted the chair, but I went too far. My father’s feet hit the floor in front of him with a slap, the back legs of the chair lifting before he rocked the whole thing backward again, setting the chair squarely on its four legs.

      He hopped out of the seat gleeful as a boy and turned to reach for me. I stepped back, searching his face for some clue as to what I’d done to make him so happy.

      “Lulu, you lifted me straight off the ground.” He didn’t seem to know if he wanted to embrace me or clap me on the shoulder.

      “Sir?”

      All he’d done was tilt a chair far enough backward to take a spill. Instinct had taken me, and I’d kept him from cracking his head. I shut my eyes against the image of what could have happened then, and what had already occurred.

      “Never mind how I know this,” Daddy said, catching sight of my relief. “I know it is all.”

      He’d already opened an old wound when he told me about the fellow he’d admired as boy. That wound had closed again and closed for good. Whatever blood he’d spilled in telling me about his past was a mistake, and he wouldn’t open that scar for me again. I didn’t want him to. That dark hole was filled with questions and answers, but if I tore it open, I’d know my father as the boy he was, and as the man the world saw. I would know him as more than a father. I couldn’t stomach the intimacy.

      “Lulu, don’t hide from this,” Daddy said. He hugged me, pressing my face into his shirt. Bristles of hair stung my cheek.

      “Open your eyes and see that you have a gift,” he said. His voice held all the confidence in the world.

      “How do you get lifting out of falling backward?” I asked when he released me. One eye opened, then the other.

      “Science,” he said. “And guiding the way a person observes what’s truly taking place around him.”

      Daddy tipped the empty chair backward. I envisioned a seated fellow lazing on a porch, his feet propped on a railing as he watched the day amble by. Until Daddy shoved the chair forward onto its two front legs. Any fellow in that seat would have split his lip on the rail where his feet had been. Before my invisible spectator could recover, Daddy rocked the chair back and set it down innocently on four legs.

      “I weigh well over two hundred pounds,” Daddy said. “With me in chair, it didn’t fly so far forward. This is a story of balance, Lulu, of fulcrum and lever, and how for the moment when you’ve got a fellow in a chair in the place between leaning back and tipping forward, he believes he’s lifted, an inch or two or maybe more. And you, Missy, you believe it, too.”

      We practiced a day or two or maybe more. When my arms were straight out and rigid and my father was seated ahead of me in the chair, I couldn’t lean the chair backward far enough. When my knees locked, I couldn’t tilt the thing forward at all, and the trying strained my stomach muscles and slid my feet out from under me on the rug.

      Daddy’s pocket watch ticked loudly from his vest. He needed to wash. I made myself listen not to my thoughts, but welcome instead the soft cushion of quiet around my breathing. My heartbeat grew louder, and the room around me slithered away through a pinhole.

      Something circulates in the background, Mrs. Wolf wrote.

      I pulled, and the chair groaned, and then it rose, back and up and easy, the front legs hovering an inch or two above the floor, the back legs balanced on their edges. I held my father there, suspended, in the moment of finding the apex between far back and far front. In that single place, there was a real and true lift, at the top of the triangle of man and kitchen chair, rocked back, then forward, by me.

      Daddy’s shout broke open my padded world. Blinking and dizzy, I massaged my raw hands. His grip on my shoulder was hot, and I heard his laugh, but he might as well have been on the other side of a glass. Momma ran in, confused, but Daddy spoke words that stretched and bobbed and made no sense. Momma applauded me, her smile beautiful. And gradually, with his hands on my arms and hers around me, they came through the glass, and my feet were on the ground and my parents were so very happy.

      “Newton, Lulu,” he said. “Fulcrum and lever in action.”

      My