Cloven Hooves
Cloven Hooves
Megan Lindholm
A magical, classic tale of the transformative power of love from Megan Lindholm, who also writes as Robin Hobb. Evelyn is a solitary child, preferring to wander in the woods in all weathers rather than socialise. Her secret is a fantastic companion: a faun with whom she plays in the woods. Years later Evelyn finds happiness as a wife and mother, but life turns sour when the family move to Tacoma where her husband is asked to fill in at hisfather’s business. Evelyn’s husband’s wish for them to stay permanently with his family causes a rift between them and then a terrible tragedy makes the situation even more impossible. Miraculously, when she needs a friend, Evelyn’s childhood companion reappears in Tacoma. Pan, now an adult satyr and a secret friend to both her and her son, eventually becomes her lover. He leads Evelyn on an odyssey out of her failed marriage to fulfilment in the woods of Alaska.
CLOVEN HOOVES
Megan Lindholm
Who also writes as
Robin Hobb
Copyright (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
HarperVoyager
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Megan Lindholm Ogden 1991
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © Jackie Morris
Robin Hobb writing as Megan Lindholm asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008287399
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008363956
Version: 2019-06-07
Praise (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
‘Hobb is one of the great modern fantasy writers … As addictive as morphine’
The Times
‘A little slice of heaven’
The Guardian
‘The feelings of anguish, ambiguity, fear and failure [in her novels] are as familiar as those in a novel by Jonathan Franzen’
Independent on Sunday
‘Hobb is always readable. But the elegant translucence of her prose is deceptive … That is the ambition of high art. The novelists in any genre are rare who achieve it with Hobb’s combination of accessibility and moral authority’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A series that recalls HBO’s Game of Thrones, and The Lord of the Rings’
The Telegraph
‘In today’s crowded fantasy market Robin Hobb’s books are like diamonds in a sea of zircons’
George R.R. Martin
‘Hobb is superb, spinning wonderful characters and plots from pure imagination’
Conn Iggulden
‘Magic is the word. Absolutely riveting’
Barbara Erskine
‘Hobb seamlessly blends intrigue, action and characters who feel so real that they become more than words on a page’
SFX
‘Glorious and beautiful storytelling from Robin Hobb’
SciFi Now
Contents
Cover (#u412e7488-d872-556b-a70a-2bf53a63dad0)
Title Page (#ua5809da3-20b2-5f1b-a4c4-f8e043e8c063)
Copyright
Praise
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
About the Author
By Robin Hobb
About the Publisher
ONE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
In Flight
11 March 1976
I turn away from staring out the window, lean over to check my child in the seat beside me. There’s nothing to see out there, anyway. Outside the oval airplane window, a night sky jets soundlessly by. Overcast covers all but a few stars. Nothing to keep my mind from chewing on itself. Inside is the sound of the engines, of the tiny seat fans whirring as they stir the stale air. Rows of red upholstered seat backs, backs of heads. Most of the overhead seat lights are off. Tiny airline blankets are tucked around the shoulders of some dozing passengers. Others read newspapers and magazines, smoke, or talk softly to seatmates. A few drink industriously. Nothing in here to keep my mind busy, either.
Teddy is asleep. He had asked for the window seat, and of course we had given it to him, even though we knew there would be little to see on this night flight from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Sea-Tac Airport in Washington. Still, he got to watch the tower and runway lights vanish away beneath us, caught a brief glimpse of the lights of some little town down there a while later. Then he used the airplane’s bathroom twice, giggled over finding the barf bag in the seat pocket, got a coloring book and crayons and plastic pilot wings from a stewardess, colored for a while, and got bored and wiggled for a while. And now, finally, he is asleep. I carefully move his copy of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are because the corner of it is digging into his cheek. I give a sigh of relief that is partially anxiety. With Teddy dozing, there is nothing to distract me from my worrying. Except Tom. I turn my attention away from my five-year-old son and to my husband.
Who is also asleep in his seat on the other side of me.
Light hair is falling over his forehead. He breathes softly, evenly, at peace with the world and himself. I know I should let him rest. This is the horrible leave-Fairbanks-in-the-middle-of-the-night, -arrive-in-Seattle-too-early-to-be-awake flight. I should let him sleep, so he will be fresh and alert when his parents come to meet us at the airport. I shouldn’t wake him just to talk to me and reassure me. I really should let him sleep.
But I touch his hair lightly back into place. He smiles, and without opening his eyes, his hand comes up to hold mine. For a time we are silent, shooting through the night. Strangers occupy other seats around us, and doze or smoke or read papers or sip drinks. But Tom and I are alone among them. It is something we have always been able to do, make a quiet, private space around ourselves, no matter what the circumstances.
“Still worrying?” he asks me softly. His eyes remain closed.
“A little,” I admit.
“Silly.” His hand squeezes mine briefly, then relaxes again. He sighs, shifts in his seat to face me. He leans his face against the seat back while he talks to me, as if we were in our bed at home, lying face-to-face, heads on pillows, talking. It makes me wish we were, that I could snug my body up against his and hold him while he talks. He speaks softly, his deep voice soothing as a bedtime story. “We’re going to have a good time. Well, you will, anyway. I’ve got to fill in on the farm and in the shop until Bix’s shoulder heals. Fields to plow, tractors to fix. But you and Teddy will have a great time. Teddy’s going to have the farm to run around on. Eggs to gather, chicks, ducklings, pigs, all that stuff. And my mom and sisters are going to love having you. Ever since I married you, Mom and Steffie have been dying to get their hands on you. Go shopping, introduce you around. Steffie had so many plans when I talked to her on the phone, I don’t know how you’ll keep up with her.” He smiles at the thought of his younger sister.
I edge closer in my seat, lean my head close to his. “That’s just it. I don’t know how I’ll keep up with her, either.” I think of Steffie as I last saw her, on a brief Christmas visit two years ago. She had been just out of high school that year. She’d come home from some party, into the living room of the farmhouse, dressed in a dark green velvet sheath and high black heels, begemmed at ear and throat and wrist. Like a magazine cover come to life, but rushing to hug us, to say she was so glad we’d been able to fly down for Christmas. The memory reawakens in me the same twinge I’d felt then: awe at her beauty, and a shiver of fear.
Why?
Because she was so beautiful, so perfect. The ugly little jealousy that beautiful women always awoke in me had stirred. That she was Tom’s own sister hadn’t mattered. It wasn’t a sexual kind of jealousy. It was the knowledge that I could never compete with women like that, that I’d never learned to be elegant and feminine and charming and stunning and all those other adjectives that Steffie and Mother Maurie embodied so easily. Yet these were the type of women that Tom had around him when he was growing up. How could he have settled for a mouse like me? What if he woke up one day and realized he’d been cheated?
I tune in suddenly that Tom is still talking. “Steffie and Ellie love you. Mom and Dad think you’re great. Of course, I think a lot of that is that they were amazed that any woman at all would have me. Probably secretly grateful you married me and whisked me off to Alaska and out of their hair.”
He is teasing, of course. No one could ever wish to be rid of him. Tom is as perfect a product as Steffie is, tall and handsome and muscled, charming and kind and intelligent. Tom could have had his pick of women. I am still mystified that he chose me. But he did. And six years of marriage have taught me that I can believe in that miracle. So I can say to him, honestly, “I’m just afraid I’ll do something wrong. Put my foot in my mouth, spill soup in my lap. We’ve never stayed a month with them before, Tom. That’s a long time to live in someone else’s house, see them every day. I don’t know how I’ll handle it.”
He refuses to share my worry. “You’ll handle it just fine. They’ll love you just like I do. Besides, we’ll be in the little guest house. You’ll have time to yourself. I know you aren’t into socializing all the time. They’ll understand when you need to be alone.”
He believes it. There’s no mistaking the calm assumption in his voice. I wish I could.
He senses my doubt. “Look, Evelyn, it’ll be easy. Just let them make a fuss over you. They’ll love that. Go shopping. Get your hair done, buy some earrings, do, oh, I don’t know, whatever it is that women do together. You’ll have a great time.”
I look down at my sedate black skirt that matches my sedate black jacket that covers my simple white blouse. I think of the jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers in my luggage. I try to imagine shopping with Steffie. Green velvet. Sparkling earrings. The images don’t fit. “I’ll try,” I say doubtfully.
“I know. You’ll do fine.” He squeezes my hand again, leans back in his seat.
“What about your dad?” I say softly.
Tom grins suddenly. “That old fart still got you buffaloed? Look, Evelyn, it’s a big front. Just stand up to him and give him the same shit right back. He’ll only push you as far as you let him. I found that out a long time ago.”
“That’s easier said than done,” I mutter disconsolately, remembering his father’s piercing black eyes and square jaw. “Kinda skinny, ain’t she?” he’d remarked loudly to Tom the first time we were introduced. I’d stood still, too stunned to speak, until Mother Maurie shook my hand merrily and said, “Oh, don’t mind him, he’s just teasing.” But I hadn’t seen any laughter in his eyes. Only evaluation, like I was a heifer Tom had brought home for breeding stock. “He scares me,” I confess.
Tom laughs softly. “Only because you let him. Hey, he’s had to be that way to get where he is. If he hadn’t been direct and assertive, and pushed people for all he could get out of them, he’d still be plowing the back forty and trying to pay off the mortgages. He pushes. I know that. But it’s not like it’s just you. He’s like that to everyone, just to see how far they’ll push. Draw a line.” He sees the doubt in my face, offers an alternative. “But there are other ways to get around him. Hell, look at Steffie’s way. Be Daddy’s little girl when he’s looking, and do what you please later.” He chuckles fondly at how well Steffie gets around their dad.
It is all so simple for him. Tom is like that. People are easy for him. He meets them, he sizes them up, he knows just how to handle them. And they always like him. Instantly, the first time they meet him. And they go on liking him, always. When we were in college, all the girls had crushes on him and all the guys thought he was a helluva friend. The freaks and the bikers, the druggies and the straights, the profs and the frat guys: they’d all liked him. He shifts gears effortlessly, is never out of place. I have always envied him that talent; he is able to be anything that anyone needs, as required.
And to me, he is everything. Husband, lover, best friend. There are very few people in my life, but I have never felt alone since Tom came to me, he fills all the niches for me. I look at him and a wave of tenderness breaks over me. After all he has done for me, surely I can do this simple thing for him. Live near his family for a month, make them like me, be pleasant to them. It won’t be hard. Make Tom proud of me. In a way, it is a thing I owe them. And whenever things get hard, I’ll just remind myself that these people are Tom’s family, that without them, he wouldn’t exist.
For a moment, I flash back to the fact that without Tom, I wouldn’t exist. Not as I am now. He had taken a horribly introverted, socially hostile girl and made her over into a competent woman who was satisfied with her life. I think of our little cabin and ten acres of woods, of my job at Annie’s Organic Foods and Teas. I have friends now, real friends, something I’d never had when I was growing up. Annie and our regular customers, and Pete and Beth down the road, and Caleb our mail carrier and all the others that Tom had so effortlessly befriended for me. I’d ridden into those friendships on his coattails, learned to socialize by watching him. I should be past all these stupid doubts, should set them aside with the old scalding memories of grade school and high school and all the failed efforts of those times.
But still I hear myself say, “It’s just that the way they live and do things is so different from, well, from the way I was brought up and the way we do things. I mean, Mother Maurie’s house looks like something out of a magazine, and Steffie always looks like she’s going out to tea with Queen Elizabeth.”
Tom snorts a chuckle. “Yeah, well. I know what you mean. Sometimes it gets to me, too. But it wasn’t always like that. When Steffie and Ellie and I were kids, the money was a lot tighter. I remember plenty of hand-me-down clothes from the cousins, and lots of secondhand furniture. I remember when Mom’s end tables were wire spools with cloths over them. But in the last ten years, since the equipment dealership took off, Dad’s been able to do better for the family. And he likes that. He likes giving Mom and the girls nice things, likes living good with new furniture, and indulging Steffie and stuff. Hell, I know he can remember enough hard times for us. He’s worked damn hard to get the family where it is; don’t look down on him for liking to flash around that money isn’t so tight for them anymore. It’s a point of pride for him. But it doesn’t mean he’s going to look down on us for being broke, and having to keep things simple and cheap. He knows where that is, too.” Tom sounds a little hurt that I would find his family’s prosperity daunting.
“I know, but …” This time even I can hear the whine in my voice, and I stop a fraction of a second before Tom says, “Hush. Stop it, now. You’re just working yourself up over nothing. Relax. They’re going to love you. All you have to do is just relax and be yourself.”
“Okay,” I concede. I can hear his unspoken hope that I’ll stop chewing on my worries, and let him doze again. So I lean back in my own seat and close my eyes. I pretend to sleep.
TWO (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Fairbanks, Alaska,
1963
Eleven. Betwixt and between. Two pigtails, the color of dirty straw. Fuzzy pigtails, down past my shoulders, the hair pulling free of the braid like strands breaking loose in old hemp rope. They have not been taken down, brushed, and rebraided in days, perhaps weeks. It doesn’t matter; no one scolds. My mother has six children, and her two older daughters are at a much more dangerous age than I am. They are the ones who demand all her watching. What is it to her if my hair has not been brushed and combed, the stubborn snarls jerked from my tender scalp, the long hair rebound so tightly it strains at my temples? It is summer, school is out, and we live in an aggressively rural area. There is no one to see her youngest daughter running wild as a meadow colt.
And I do. Both knees are out of my jeans, and my shirt has belonged to two older siblings before me. Boy’s shirt, girl’s shirt, only the buttons know. It lies flat down the front of my androgynous chest. There are holes in my sneakers, too, and my socks puddle around my ankles. Yes, that is me, eyes the color of copper ore, hard and green, a scatter of freckles across my nose. Unkempt, neglected child? Hardly. Free child, unwatched, unhindered, unaware of being free, as it is the only thing I have ever known. Free child in the deep heat of July, the forest baking around me in the seventy-some degrees of the Fairbanks summer sun.
I am where I should not be, but I do not even know it, nor would I care if I did. I am between the FAA tower on Davis Road and what will eventually be the Fairbanks International Airport. It is supposed to be a restricted area, but no one really cares about that. Not at this moment in time. If I want, I can follow the surveyor cuts through the forest until I’d come out to the small plane tie-downs. A bit farther, and I’d come to wide pavements of the airport, where the airplanes let people down right on the asphalt of the runways. There would be people and noise and traffic. All the things I hate. Where I am is much better. I am sitting on the bank of the slough and thinking it is the most beautiful place in the world.
The slough varies with the seasons, like a snowshoe hare varying its coat, but it is always beautiful to me. During winter it is a wide white expanse of snow, broken only by the protruding heads of the tallest grasses. The snow humps strangely over the mounds and hummocks of coarse grasses. Owls hunt over it, watching for tiny scurrying shrews and mice to break to the surface and brave the flat whiteness. If I walk cautiously, I can move across the frozen crust without breaking it, standing tall above the earth, my feet supported by millions of tiny ice crystals. Treacherous trickling sunlight sometimes softens my floor, and then I break through it and wallow up to my hips in snow that infallibly finds every opening in my clothing. That is the winter.
Then comes spring and breakup, when the slough fills with water that reflects the sky and the tangled branches of the trees on its banks and the tiny leaves budding on them. The white snow sinks down to isolated hummocks cowering in the narrow tree shadows, bleeds to death as seeping water that fills the slough. The slough flows with a perceptible current then, carrying off the melted snow to the Chena River, and birds cry above it, ravens black against the transparent blue sky. The wind of breakup reddens my cheeks, and my old socks wad down inside my battered boots. During the spring thaw, the slough is deep, how deep I do not know, for it is much too cold to think of wading in it. I jump from tuft to hummock to clump of grass to cross it, and at its highest flow I cannot cross it at all. I go home wet, my hands red-cracked claws of hands, my nose dripping, my eyes green with spring.
But that is not now. It is summer now. The early greenness has passed. There are tall yellow grasses, higher than my head, with waving tasseled heads of wild grains. The water has hidden itself beneath the living earth, only appearing in secret pools of shallow water banked with green mosses and ferns and squirming with mosquito larvae. Low-bush cranberries, tender little plants with tiny round leaves, no taller than my hand-span, coat the bank where I sit. Behind me, closer to the edge of the true forest, are twiggy blueberry bushes, bereft now of their tiny bell-like flowers, and not yet heavy with round blue fruit. Today I have seen a red fox with a spruce hen clamped in its jaws, and a litter of tiny rabbits just ventured from their burrow. I have seen the green bones of a winter-kill moose acrawl with beetly things, and pushed the bones aside to see the white grubs squirming beneath them. Myriad small creatures besides myself live and hunt here. The faun is one of them.
He is beside me, likewise lounging on the bank. He is stretched out to the lingering touch of the sun on his belly. He is totally unremarkable and completely marvelous. I love him as I love the sound of wolves at night, and stories of wild horses in thundering herds on the plains. I love him as I love my hands and my hair and my ice-green eyes. He closes the circle of who I am, and makes me complete. In loving him, I love myself. In my mind I call him Pan, but aloud I have never spoken a word to him, nor him to me. We are the closest of friends.
He has a boy’s face and arms, a boy’s curly thatch of hair atop his head, interrupted only by the nubbins of his horns, stubby things shorter than my thumbs, shiny brown like acorns. He has a boy’s chest, tanned and ribby, flat nipples like brown thumbprints. From the hips down he is neatly and unoffensively goat. His hooves are pale and cloven, slightly yellower than my toenails but much thicker. The hair on his legs is like that on any goat, smoothly brown, growing so closely it hides any trace of skin. His penis is gloved as neatly as a dog’s, held close to his lower belly in its coarsely haired sheath. The most I have ever seen of it is the pointed pink tip, moist like a puppy’s. To my eleven-year-old mind it is a superior arrangement, much better than my younger brothers’ dangling, wrinkled genitalia. More private in a way that is not prissy.
He rolls to face me, yawning, and then smiling. His teeth are white as only the teeth of young carnivores are white, and his eyes are a color that has no name. His eyes are the color of sunlight that has sifted through green birch leaves and fallen onto a carpet of last year’s leaves. Earth eyes, not brown nor green nor yellow. The color of a forest when you stand back from it.
He rises and looks at me askance, and I shrug and rise to follow him. My dog falls in at our heels. He pants delicately in the heat of the summer, making hardly a noise at all. Not for him some doggy lolling of a long pink tongue. He is more than half a wolf, my Rinky, with his sleek black coat and his pale cheeks and eyebrows. In the woods with me, he is all a wolf, and I am his cub as surely as Mowgli belonged to Akela. He has taught me everything, this dog, that a young creature must know to stay alive in the forest. From him I have learned to be still and to be silent, and to move with the forest instead of through or against it. I have watched him and seen how well he fills the niche that nature has allotted to him. I, too, will be as he is, perfect in my place.
We follow Pan, Rinky and I, and he leads us down the slough. We walk in the flat troughs that meander between the hummocks of grass. Short weeks ago, water flowed where our feet walk now. We flow as it did, silent and seeking our level. Pan has neither hips nor buttocks, but only the sleek flanks of an animal and the restless tail of the deer kind. His cloven hooves leave more of a mark than Rinky’s wolf feet, and my sneakers leave the least discernible track of all. Insects chirr around us, and the air is heavy with pollen and sleep. I can believe that, save for us, nothing larger than a shrew is stirring in the forest at this hour.
Then the duck explodes in front of me, right before my feet, her brown pinions slashing my face as she rises on her battering wings. Her nerve has been shattered; she withstood the passing of Pan and Rinky so close to her nest, but I, a human, am too totally foreign to her experience. I fall back with an incoherent cry, my hands rising to protect my face, but she is already gone. My eyes tear from the slapping they have taken, but that is the sole extent of their damage. When I lower my hands and blink my eyes clear of tears, they are laughing at me.
Rinky’s pink tongue does loll now, mockingly, dangling over his picket fence of white teeth and his smooth black doggy lips. Pan is worse. He clutches his belly, bends over it, brown curls falling into his eyes as he shakes with silent hilarity. His teeth are very white, his mouth is wide with mirth. Miffed, I ignore both of them, and crouch to examine the nest.
The nest is a late one, probably the duck’s second effort this year. To the casual eye, it is empty. But with thumb and forefinger I lift the soft blanket of down that covers the fourteen pale turquoise eggs. The eggs are not much larger than grade-AA chicken eggs from the store, but they are much more real. Eggs from the store are cold and bony white, their surfaces dry and chalky, trapped in cardboardy trays. These eggs are warm, and smooth, almost waxy to the touch. I take two and Pan takes one, and we carry them off with us, leaving the duck free to return to her brooding.
We go back to the sunny bank of the dried-up slough and sit on the moss and eat our eggs. Pan and I bite the ends off ours and spit the crumpled bits of shell aside before we suck out the warm white and the sudden glop of the yolk. Rinky puts his between his front paws and delicately breaks it with his teeth so that he can lap up the egg and eat the shell that held it.
And that is all that there is to this day, but it needs nothing more. It is complete, like the scene trapped inside a glass paperweight, a whole sufficient to itself. I am eleven and lying there between a dog and a faun. We three make a circle, from human to beast and back again. I love them as I love my hands or my hair, unthinking, totally accepting. They are the two most important creatures in my life and always will be. When we grow up, I will be Pan’s mate and we will live and hunt in these woods and Rinky will always run beside us. I know these things as well as I know that the summer sky is blue and permafrost is cold.
THREE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Tacoma
May 1976
I hate to shop for clothing. I hate to try things on. I hate the cramped dressing rooms with curtains that gape at the sides, with their floors littered with straight pins and tags. I hate pulling stiff, unfamiliar clothes on over my head, clothing ensorcelled with hidden pins and buttoned buttons that snare me inside their unyielding depths. I hate standing nine inches from a full-length mirror trying to see what I look like in this foreign garment, my hair mussed and my makeup smeared by my struggle to get into it. It makes me sweat.
Stupid. Stupid is how I look. The bosom gapes hungrily for my nonexistent cleavage. My socks-and-sneakered feet stick out the bottom where sheer-stockinged calves and slender ankles and chic white sandals should be. I smooth the dappled-leaf muteness of the fabric, loving it, wishing I could look as if I belonged in it. But I cannot. I look like a homely carnival Kewpie doll stuffed into Barbie’s prom dress. Ken would be horrified. I claw and fumble the buttons open, begin an attempt to slither out the bottom of the dress. It jams on my too-wide shoulders.
A saleslady whisks the curtain open. My olivine eyes peer at her from the dress bodice, my pale thighs goosebump in the sudden draft. “Oh, dear,” she says, and I am sure her sympathy is for the dress, not me. “You didn’t like it. Can I bring you a different size, perhaps? Would you like to try it in another color?”
Another body, I think. Another face. Bring me those, and I’ll try the dress again. “No, thank you,” I say aloud, and her eyes narrow with disapproval. She must be on commission. Mother Maurie and Steffie trip merrily past my compartment. They are having a wonderful time. Both my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law love the gay whirl of shopping, adore endlessly trying on clothes, just for the fun of seeing what they will look like. I, exposed still, shiver as they pass. Another saleslady trails them, her arms heavy with bright garments. “Evelyn,” Steffie calls without pausing. “We are absolutely starved! We’re going to that restaurant, you know, the one down near Fredericks? Okay?”
“Okay,” I mutter. I don’t know the restaurant, having never been there. I am not even absolutely sure where Fredericks is. It doesn’t matter. I’ll cope. The dress has a half nelson on me. My saleslady sighs and whisks herself off to another dressing compartment. She peeks into that one, exclaims delightedly, “Not everyone can wear that look, but, oh, on you!” She clasps her hands delightedly.
I free a hand and arm somehow, and tug the curtain back so that it gapes no more than three inches on each side. I inch painstakingly out of the dress, making a sincere effort not to tear the shoulder seams. I shiver in my underwear as I wrestle it back onto its hanger and suspend it from the hook in the dressing room. Once on its hanger, it resumes its original gentle lines, looks beckoningly lovely as it never will on my frame. I snarl at it as I stoop for my jeans and shirt, catch the snarl reflected in the mirror. For a brief instant I am eye to eye, fang to fang, with myself. It is not a pleasant experience.
Someone who once said he loved me compared me to a stag. An odd compliment, and not one that reassures one’s femininity. But a compliment, nonetheless, to be collected and clung to. I straighten and look at myself in the mirror, trying to find the stag he saw. I see only pieces of myself, I cannot perceive myself as a whole. Sensible cotton panties that magically guard me from yeast infections. Legs that remind me of the dark, footed legs of my great-grandmother’s piano bench. I can see the lines of my ribs. There are muscles in my belly, good, that is good. I think. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it isn’t feminine. How do you get rid of muscles on your belly? I wonder idly. My stubborn breasts have refused to follow me into womanhood. They are a seventh-grader’s breasts, their disgrace hidden inside smooth cups of foam-lined nylon that bring them almost to woman size. My collarbones stand out, my shoulders are wide, my neck is long and graceful. Is this the stag he saw? I roll my shoulders, watch the smooth muscles move under the skin. My face. I cannot see my face. I see the lines in my forehead, I see my wide cheeks, I should have plucked my eyebrows, the lipstick looks silly on me, not a clown’s mouth, no, more like I have eaten something unwholesome and it has stained my mouth this wretched color.
“Can I show you anything else?” It is the saleslady, peering in at me. She can show me nothing that I have not already seen. I clutch my jeans and shirt to myself.
“No,” I mutter. “Thank you, no, not today. Thank you.”
She leaves again. I wonder if someone is waiting for this dressing room. A tall, elegant woman, garments draped gracefully over her arm, folded money inside her pocketbook. Her high cheeks smooth as polished wood, salesladies never wrench her curtains open. Things like that are reserved only for those like myself.
Stop making yourself miserable, I scold myself. Why stop, I respond, when I do it so well? Everyone should be good at something. I pull on my jeans. Wranglers, size nine, as familiar as my own skin and more becoming. My shirt. A plain and simple button-up-the-front blue shirt, tuck it in, zip my fly and button it, buckle the leather belt. Better than armor and buckler is a pair of jeans that fit well, a leather belt that buckles snugly, a blue work shirt that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I button my cuffs, and grin at myself in the mirror. Better. I take a worn tissue from my jeans pocket, smear the lipstick from my mouth. Better and better. I feel more like myself.
There are bright plastic sacks laden with trove collapsed in the corner of the dressing room. I gather them. Sears, The Bon, the 3-5-7 Shoppe. Mother Maude’s and Steffie’s bags, full of dresses and shoes and … No. Gay little frocks, and bright sling-back pumps and sun togs and beach cover-ups. Maurie and Steffie would never buy anything so mundane as dresses and shoes. I smile at the thought. Their bags hang on my arms, cut into my wrists as I hurry down the wide avenue of the mall, looking for them.
I am not good at malls, either. Steffie has tried to make me feel at home in them, but it does not work. They are too foreign to my experience. She swims through them as easily as a tropical fish glides through its pebbled and planted tank. But I am constantly distracted, bombarded by their infinite variety. There are too many possibilities, too many things to buy. Usually, I buy nothing simply because I cannot decide what to choose. Steffie selects effortlessly from the racks, tries a dozen garments, and buys two, never worrying that perhaps in the next store there will be a dress even more fetching, slacks even more flattering to her derriere. I envy her that certainty. I know I will never achieve it.
I slow, or try to. The stream of moving people pushes me on, so I continue down the mall. Perhaps I mistrust places where the sun never shines, where time stands still and the weather never changes save for the window displays. I lose all sense of direction, all ability to make decisions. Streams of people move both with me and past me. Sometimes I feel giddy and wonder if I am standing still while they pass. But here I am, at the end of the mall, and it is the wrong end, Fredericks is at the other end of the mall. I about-face and begin the trek back.
I wonder if Mother Maurie and Steffie will be impatiently waiting for my arrival. Or will they order without me, and begin their meal with no more thought than they give to a cockapoo waiting outside in the car? I have been a member of their family for six years. What is wrong with me that I cannot feel toward them as I should, cannot be free and easy as if I were really part of their family? It’s not them. It cannot be their fault. They are always correct, always calm and composed, always kind. Steffie is so polished, so incredibly perfect in all her roles. Today she is the fashion-conscious woman of the world. And Mother Maurie is, as always, perfect in the supporting role of “Steffie’s Mother.” I know I am jealous of them and the easy way they fit into this place. I know they do not intend to make me feel awkward and homely and provincial. But they do.
I am halfway up the mall when it happens. From out of nowhere, a man’s arm around my waist, closing tight, pulling me from the stream of shoppers as easily as a bear hooks out a salmon from a spawning run. He is a rapist, a ritual killer, a mugger, and I am too startled to even speak, and then a voice by my ear says, “Evelyn.”
I have never heard his voice before, so how do I know it? Is it the way he says it or the timbre of his throat that slackens my muscles, leaves me standing in the circle of his arms like a doe poised in oncoming headlights, my smile as blank as the mannequin’s watching us from the display window?
He grins at my expression, his brown curls falling into his eyes, his teeth very white, his mouth wide with mirth. He holds me in the backwater of his arms, safe from the current of mindless shoppers that brush past us. He is taller than I remember, and his eyes a more honest shade of brown. We stand without speaking, and I have the eerie sense of a circle completed.
He leans forward then, his mouth by my ear. His breath is warm. He smells like the summer forest, like wild raspberries and leaf mold, like tamarack trees and high-bush cranberry blossoms. Like Alaska. “I was afraid you had forgotten me,” he says, his voice like the wind through branches. “But you haven’t. Not any more than I’ve forgotten you. I’m still here. If you need me. If you want me.”
“I …” It is all I can manage. The mall is suddenly a cardboard set for a pretentious play. It cannot contain me. I need not act the part that has been assigned me. I could knock over the stucco wall, step out into daylight and wind and forest. Step back into being whole and belonging to myself.
“Come with me,” he urges me. His fingers track down my spine. “Now. Come back.”
I want to. In that instant, I really want to. But a jaw trap holds me fast. Boundaries spring up around me. The mound of laundry left unfolded on the table at the guest house. The refrigerator needs defrosting. Things I should do, things I meant to do, things I must do before I can call my time my own. Commitments. Duties. Things that make me real. Oh, and people. Belatedly, I remember people. I have a small son, a husband. They depend on me. They love me. What would they think of me if I just ran away like this, abandoned my responsibilities? Who would respect me if they didn’t need me? Who would I be, shorn of them? And I, don’t I love them, aren’t they my whole life? How could I even think of leaving them, even be momentarily tempted? The thought shocks me. I’ll tell him all this, tell him I am happy where I am, that there isn’t room for him in my life anymore. That I don’t need him anymore.
“I …” I repeat, choking on the word.
“Come soon, then,” he invites me, sure of my assent. His forefinger touches my jaw, a fleeting farewell.
Then he releases me, and he is gone, blending in with the flow of people. I stare after him. He wears only a denim vest over his bare chest, and cutoff jeans do little to mask his strangeness. His hooves clack clearly on the smooth linoleum of the mall floor, but no one notices him, no heads turn to watch him pass. Only I stare after him as he is borne away by the current of shoppers. I hear his hooves long after I lose him in the rippling tapestry of people.
I close my eyes, try to still the quivering that besets me. Glass cold against my sweating hands, smooth against my back. I realize that I am backed against a display window, leaning against the cool pane. I straighten guiltily. My palms leave their imprints outlined in mist on the smooth glass. The bags of garments have fainted, have crumpled about my feet. Absently I pick them up, smoothing their sides. All my many minds are chattering at once. Someone is hoping that Maurie and Steffie will not notice how crumpled the bags are. Someone else is shouting that he spoke to me, that he uttered my name, that I have finally heard his voice. But the one in charge hushes all of them, tells them to be still. Firmly I tell myself that I have been daydreaming again, silly escapist fantasies to make myself feel important, and that if I don’t hurry up and get down to the restaurant … I am not sure just what will happen if I don’t get down to the restaurant soon, but I have an oppressive feeing that it will be dreadful. The chance for something to be wonderful has come and gone in a heartbeat, and I have missed it. Only the dreadful is left. So I go, sacks swinging with my stride, moving purposefully now, cutting in and out of the crowd like a freeway driver weaving among the slower cars. I try not to think I am disheveled, guilty, musky with secrets. I forbid my eyes to watch for him.
The restaurant is a dark cave that opens up suddenly in the wall of storefronts on the mall. There are no doors, there is only the open space with the rack of menus, the cash register, and a hostess standing guard. Beyond, all is dimness and muted music. The tables are shrouded with deep red cloths, the menus are gilt and scarlet, the place is cushioned with a red carpet. One wall is mirrored, but it takes some moments for me to realize this, to see that I have been scanning the mirrored tables for a glimpse of Mother Maurie and Steffie. The hostess does not approve of me, and makes no attempt to greet or seat me. I am used to such as her. “I’m meeting someone,” I say, and breeze past her, trying in vain to keep my bags from brushing the backs of chairs and catching on the corners of tables.
Just when I am sure they are not here, that there must be another restaurant near another Fredericks, I see them. They are sitting in a booth at the very back, looking cool and chic in their summer city dresses, an advertisement for champagne or lip gloss. I stack the bags against the end of the booth and slide in beside Steffie. I realize I am breathing as if I have run a footrace. I push the hair back from my face and feel the sweat wet on my palm. I don’t believe Steffie has ever sweated in her life, and she stares with frank amusement as I wipe my palm over my forehead and then slide my hand down the leg of my jeans.
“Did you get lost?” Steffie asks kindly.
“A bit,” I admit. “I always get turned around in malls.”
“Oh, me, too,” she lies companionably. She is perfect, as Steffie is always perfect. She wears a perky little outfit that reminds me of tennis whites, made dressy by her earrings and the slender bracelet on her graceful wrist. She dresses to go shopping with more care than I dressed for my wedding. Her skin is golden tan; her huge eyes are brown; if I were a man I would kneel at her feet.
In the silence that follows, Steffie takes a long sip of her drink. I cannot help but feel it is a thing she has been taught to do, that at some point in her adolescence Mother Maurie sat her down at the kitchen table and taught her just the way to sip discreetly from a tall glass of iced tea. She does it too well for it to be an accident of nature. I watch her as the naked brown savages must have watched Magellan claim their lands. The same awe and incomprehension. She glances at Mother Maurie and then back to me. Then she clears her throat, having selected a suitable topic for conversation with me. What, I wonder, were they discussing before I arrived? And why are they so painstakingly kind to me, when I obviously do not belong to their world?
“Did you decide to buy that green dress you were trying on? We didn’t mean to hurry you, but I was simply dying of thirst. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all,” I lie, half a lie. What I would have minded even more was if they had waited for me outside the dressing room, chirping helpful comments. Sometimes they do that. I suspect they believe that if they had enough time and money, they could fix me. Like detailing a used car for resale. Cut my long unruly mane into something cute and perky, dress me in cunning outfits that disguise my unshapely legs and flat chest. Transform me into a wife worthy of Tom Potter. The idea terrifies me. It makes me talk too much, too fast. “I didn’t get the dress. At the last minute, I decided it was just too young for me. And I always feel naked somehow in a sleeveless dress.”
“You make yourself sound like an old lady,” Mother Maurie chides smilingly. Her smile seems a bit stiff. Suddenly I realize that my remarks have not been exactly tactful. The dress I have rejected is cut very similarly to the one Mother Maurie is now wearing. But on her its youthfulness looks appropriate. Mother Maurie is a tiny, delicate woman, a ceramic doll with large blue eyes, and Steffie is a long-legged golden blonde, a beach-party Barbie. It strikes me that they are the two ends of the spectrum for American femininity, and that I do not fall anywhere between them. Off the bell curve, that’s me.
“What are you having, Mother?” It is Steffie, considering a red-and-gilt menu. “Shall we have just a bite, or dinner?”
“Let’s go ahead and eat dinner. The boys will be ravenous when they get here, and it will save us the trouble of cooking and dishes at home.”
I smile and nod, pushing my tangle of brown hair back a little from my eyes. The boys, I think as I peruse the menu, the boys. And we are the girls, at least Maurie and Steffie are. The boys are her husband, my husband, her brother, her son, and my son. And yet there are only three of them. Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy, and Bess, the old nursery riddle-rhyme rushes unbidden into my mind. Five names for three men. Or boys, I mean. All boys, forever boys. And we are the girls forever. Even when Steffie gets around to getting married and settling down, she will still be a girl. And probably a virgin, as near as I can make out. All the women in their family are virgins, except when they are “in a family way.” Then Grandpa Potter’s teasing is vigorous and crude beyond my belief or endurance, as if they were children caught in a dirty game.
I order and eat mindlessly, finishing while they are still dividing sandwiches into dainty triangles, still nibbling small forkfuls of cottage cheese. I drink coffee to pass the time, adding more sugar and creamer each time the waitress refills my bottomless cup. I roll the empty sugar packets and the foil-lined creamer packages into tiny tubes, and make stars and hexagons and parallelograms on the tabletop. Infinitely amusing. Only boring people get bored, my mother used to tell me. “… any other errands for you, Evelyn?” I jump, and sit up straight in my chair. Both Steffie and Mother Maurie are staring at me, polite inquiry in their eyes. Sleeping in school again.
“I, uh, I want to stop at the music store and look at the tapes.” Suddenly it seems like a very juvenile errand. As well to say I was stopping by the candy store, to get red and green suckers and a handful of Double Bubble. I am embarrassed, and they know it.
“You and your music!” Mother Maurie gives a condescending snort of laughter. “All right, but you’ll have to do it while we’re in the drugstore picking up Tommy’s prescription. Did you remember to bring it?”
She goes right on talking as I dig through my purse, finally coming up with the small empty pill bottle for Tom’s allergy medication in my coat pocket. It is sticky, Teddy must have played with it, and I surreptitiously wipe it on my napkin before I hand it over. I try to find the threads of the conversation again, only to realize no one is talking, they are all waiting expectantly.
The men are here, and I don’t know how or when they’ve arrived. Grandpa Potter, stooped but daunting still, rests his big hands on the edge of our table. His eyes scan the table, feasting on his wife and perfect daughter. He is given to saying things like “The Potter men have always been proud to say that their women dressed well, no matter how bad the harvest has been. We take care of our women.” His eyes skid over me, roll briefly toward heaven. He is a strange old man, I think, proud of his wife’s and daughter’s gentility and polish, but equally proud of his own rough edges and crude ways. He never minces words, never worries about giving offense. Of all Tom’s family, Grandpa is the one who never bothers to hide that he does not understand me, does not believe I will ever quite fit. He scares me, and I wish I could hide that from him. Right now, I want to sink under the table to escape that sharp stare. But suddenly Tom pushes into the seat beside me, his thigh warming against mine, and instantly all is well, no price is too great to pay for possessing him. Tall and golden he is, blond hair, brown eyes, big hands, and one big hand surreptitiously strokes my thigh before coming to settle demurely on the tabletop. He smells of Old Spice tinged with diesel oil, the mechanic’s smell that never quite leaves his skin. The hostess has followed them to the table, and I feel her eyes move from Tom to me and back again. She does not understand it any more than I do, why does this man who looks like a cigarette billboard cowboy, this gorgeous perfect man, sit down beside a woman like me? I move closer to him, and set my hand atop his on the table. The hostess looks away, moves away. I take a breath. I am safe now. My Tom is with me.
My Teddy is with him, clinging to his grandpa’s hand, his small head looking defenseless, his hair newly shorn and slicked. I don’t like it, and for a moment my anger flares, who does that old man think he is, always carrying out his compulsion to “keep those boys looking like boys” upon my little son? No one asked me if he needed a haircut. I love his dandelion tuft of fine hair, I don’t care if it covers the tops of his small pink ears. But Teddy is looking at me, his brown eyes big and round. He has been brave this time, not flinching when the buzzing razor nibbled down the back of his unprotected neck. I smile at him and try to put my approval in it, try not to remember how, when we first arrived in Washington, Grandpa took him to the barber, without my knowledge or consent, and brought him back, red-eyed and disgraced. “Momma’s little tit cried when the barber tried to shave the back of his neck and over his ears. Well, no grandson of mine is going to run around looking like a goddamned hippie. You wanna be like that, you stay with your mommy, baby boy. I’ll tell you, no son of mine ever behaved like that in public! Five years old, and he acts like a goddamned baby.”
And I had watched Teddy shrink with each contemptuous statement, and had foolishly made it worse by putting my arm around my little son, hoping to shield him from his grandfather’s disgust. And Teddy, my Teddy, had flung my arm aside and pushed me away, run out of the little house and into the fields to cry, newly ashamed of being afraid of something unfamiliar, newly ashamed of letting his mother hold and comfort him. And that wicked old man had glared at me and said, “You coddle that boy too much. Gonna ruin him. Time he was with men more often, instead of hanging around your skirts like Momma’s little tit.”
And I, too cold with anger to speak, had stared him down, driven him from the little house with my frozen green eyes.
But that was in another time and another place, and I cannot afford to think about it now. Instead, I make my mouth smile, and reach past Tom to hold out a hand to my Teddy. But my little son only smiles, a smile that is at once secretive and begging. He slides into the other end of the circular booth, forcing everyone to scoot over and sending Steffie up against me on the other side. Grandpa has missed none of this. “He’s Grandpa’s big boy today, Mommy. He’s gonna sit over here with me.”
Grandpa’s eyes are black, like little bits of anthracite coal set into his pale, soggy face. He was a big man once, had stood tall and had tanned, weathered skin. Maybe then the lines around his eyes had been laugh lines. Now he looks bleached, like something found under a pile of old trash, a soup label with the colors gone all wrong, the green beans turned blue, a farmer turned entrepreneur, a corned and blistered foot crammed into a pointed Florsheim shoe. I could have pitied him if he hadn’t been so hateful. Our eyes don’t meet, I don’t let him have the victory. I squeeze Tom’s hand and look into his eyes instead.
“Did you find the part?” Mother Maurie demands.
Tom nods. “Junkyard had it.” He turns to me. “You eat already?”
“Yeah, but if you …”
“How much was it?” Mother Maurie cuts in irritably. This is business, and Tom has no sense, mixing it up with a conversation with his little wife. Mother Maurie has shifted gears, is no longer the chic shopper but is now the shrewd businesswoman, versed in every facet of the family’s farm equipment dealership.
“Seventeen-fifty. New one is twenty-two, but if old man Cooper wants his tractor back in the fields by Tuesday, he’s gonna have to be happy with secondhand parts.” Tom goes back to scanning the menu hungrily, fielding Mother Maurie’s agitated questions easily.
She is upset with the parts supplier and doesn’t care who knows it. Wants everyone to know it, as a matter of fact. If they think they can get away with treating Potter’s Equipment this way, they are in for a surprise, she’ll go right to the factory for parts after this, just cut them out entirely, and let them eat that. Why, she must order two or three thousand dollars’ worth of parts a year from them, and for them to let us down like this just isn’t good business, as they’ll soon find out. Her own ruthlessness is giving her great satisfaction. She speaks clearly and almost loudly, so that other people at other tables hear and know just how hard-nosed a little businesswoman she is. She is proud of her savvy, and so is Grandpa Potter, for he nods sagely as she carries on.
Tom’s fingers close over mine and hold me fast. The others at the table are talking, and he is replying to them, but his fingers against mine are a different conversation, and a different man is speaking to me from the one who they know. I listen to him alone, letting the other voices fade into a background hum like summer bees. I know I do not belong in their world. What matters to me is that somehow, Tom’s world and mine have intersected, and that in that brief crossing, we can be together.
FOUR (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Fairbanks
Winter 1963
My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.
People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.
The GVEA building is grey with black windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.
The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.
That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. I’d rather have chilblains and frostbite.
Making me go to school in winter is one of the cruder things my parents do to me. Although all my brothers and sisters attend school also, I always take it as a personal torment my parents insist on inflicting on me. I do not complain much about it. I am even good at school, very good, if academics are what you consider important. I am academically vindictive, ruining class curves with my hundred per cents, doing fifteen book reports instead of the required five, but it is never enough to counteract tights that go with your dress and match the ribbons in your hair. Vaguely I know that I do not know how to compete. I always put my energies into the wrong arenas.
But it is more than that. School is not my turf. I resent wasting the brief daylight of the winter days trapped in a classroom instead of running through the white and silver of a Fairbanks winter landscape. Yet even that isn’t it. I believe there is something unnatural about school, something damaging. To take a young creature and force it into an enclosed space with thirty others like it, all of the same age … would you do this to a puppy or a young chimp? You know what happens when you do it with chickens or rats. The same thing happens when you do it with children, only the damage is less visible. If I were a chick, pecked until my entrails hung from my rectum, someone would have taken pity on me. But I am a child and children are expected to endure the tortures of the damned stoically. I believe, perhaps self-pityingly, that it is worse for me than it is for other children. The ones who play in playgrounds, who visit one another’s houses, collect toys, and have sleep-over parties, never perceive how peculiar an institution school is. But I am a healthy young animal, taken from my hunting, from my running and growing, and thrust into an exhibit more inhumane than any concrete-and-steel zoo pen. From the moment I step onto the bus every morning, all power deserts me, and I am less than ordinary. I am prey, and I know it. Within the walls of the school, I know that fauns are Fantastic Animals, imaginary creatures those benighted and bedamned Romans and Greeks believed in, and that good little girls put their faith in Jesus Christ alone. Playing with a faun is probably a mortal sin, like calumny and detraction, niggardliness and sloth. I think I am going to hell. I think there is nothing I can do about it, anyway.
But release me from the bus in the evening, and the world is mine. The misery of the classroom seems an imaginary fairy-tale dungeon, nothing worth telling my parents about. The bus drops us by our orange mailbox on Davis Road. My brothers and sisters start the walk down the lane, but I stand on the road, waiting until the bus breaks down into orange and red taillights and then disappears altogether. My siblings hurry through the dark, eager to be out of the cold. I stand, clutching my book bag, waiting. Around me is the silver darkness of an Alaskan midwinter afternoon. The stars are out, and the Big Dipper swings low. Silver birch and cottonwood line the lane to our house. Our house is the only house on the lane, and not even its lights can be seen from the road. I do not know why we call our driveway the lane. We just do. It is only one car wide, and in winter it divides itself into two tire tracks with a hump of brushed snow down the middle. My siblings are far down the lane now. I walk alone between trees that lean in over me with their burdens of snow like ermine capes upon their bare arms. It is night, and yet it is easy to see. The snow is white on the ground and on the branches, the trees are ghostly grey, and in between there is darkness. The dry snow of the lane crunches and squeaks under my boots.
First the house is a few stripes of yellow light through the trees. Then I come to where we have cleared for our garden. The trees are cut away and the once-furrowed soil is now covered with a wavering quilt of snow. I see the house squatting darkly amid the snow, long and low like a crouching animal. The snow-load is heavy on the roof, but earlier snows have slid off the peaked aluminum, to create a wall of snow around the house that makes it look like my home has pushed up from under the earth and snow like a mushroom.
And then I am up on the wooden porch that rattles under my boots, and the door must be shouldered open because the frost always coats the bottom edge of it and tries to freeze it shut. I thud it open, breaking into my mother’s territory. Our house is made of dark logs chinked with pink and yellow fiberglass, and the ceiling is low. Yet I remember it as being full of an amber light, rich as honey, breathing out the warmth-and-cookies smells of home. Moose stew, as inevitable as thrice weekly math assignments, is already bubbling over the blue flames of the gas stove. The radio is always on, and my mother is always doing something in a highly untidy and inefficient manner. When she does laundry, she does mammoth loads of it, heaping chairs full of warm laundry, weighting the table with stacks of folded underwear and towels, heaping a box to overflowing with mateless socks. If she bakes cookies, there are tall leaning stacks of sticky bowls, showers of flour on the counters, the floors, and the husky dogs that sprawl everywhere in their sleep, and scatters of cookies cooling on every horizontal surface in the kitchen. When she knits us hats and sweaters, one pattern is never enough to please her. She must combine patterns, change the colors, rework the instructions. She has knitted my father a parka with twenty-seven different colors in it that is a combination of fourteen different patterns. It is an epic work of needles and yarn. My mother is of mythic proportions in my mind. To say that I love her is like saying I love the earth. My love is a puny thing beside her, unnecessary to her continuance. She is the home, the house, the food, the warmth, the hearth-witch. She leaves me almost entirely to my own devices; this makes me love her even more.
Down into the basement, rattling down the steep old stairs. Down here it is like a den, beds here, walls there, more beds, more walls. A veritable maze of nesting places for children, stacked bunk beds, green metal army surplus bunks, a menagerie of dressers, every horizontal surface festooned with laundry both clean and dirty, with papers, books, and a scattering of toys. I change clothes, pulling on layer upon layer upon layer of worn-out jeans and corduroy pants and T-shirts and shirts and sweaters and a surplus US Air Force parka. Put on my socks, my brothers’ socks, and my father’s socks and a pair of canvas military surplus mukluks. And up the stairs and out the door with Rinky at my heels. Disappear into the night of the forest. Run silently down the rabbit paths, bent almost double to keep from disturbing the snow that rests so delicately upon each twig and swooping branch. Rinky ranges ahead and beside and beyond and behind, but is always there whenever I pause and crouch down in the snow. He grabs the sleeve of my old parka, leaving teeth marks in the fabric. Sooner or later, all my clothes bear the mark of his teeth. I do not mind. He tugs at me until I rise, and then we range together, he and I, following the paths we have created and keep packed, looking to see what is different from the last time we passed this way. Here is the blood-speckled trampling of the snow that marks a fox’s kill. Here something has gnawed the bark from a fallen branch, and there something large and heavy has crossed our path. This trail and its faint musk fills me with excitement. Moose. Moose in our woods. The time will be soon.
I never need to tell my mother when I have found signs of moose. She knows. Perhaps she is a witch, the way she knows. I will find the knives sharpened on the counter, I will see a new roll of butcher paper. Days ahead of time. Then, one evening, it will happen. All six of us will be clustered around her table, our heads bent over our books. One cannot move an elbow lest one obscure a sibling’s math book, shuffle the pages of someone’s report. Pencils scratch, the dogs snore beneath the table, someone mutters over a stubborn calculation. It is unnaturally quiet for a house inhabited by eight people. My sisters have their hair in curlers, there is the muted chink-chink of my father’s pipe against the ashtray.
Then it happens.
“Evelyn. Turn off the lights.”
My mother is standing close to the cold blackness of a window. I rise and turn off all the lights, flicking switches until the darkness outside flows in from the windows, oozes out from under the couch, and fills up the room. No one moves, save my father. As I stand by the light switch in the darkness, I hear his heavy tread as he crosses the room to stand beside my mother. They peer out the window and speak softly to each other.
If I am silent and unobtrusive, I can slip to a parallel window and likewise peer forth. They will be in the garden, pawing the snow away from what remains of the cabbage patch, churning to the surface a scatter of frozen leaves, a half-rotted head, a tough green stalk now frozen solid. They remind me of ships, tall sailing ships, I cannot say why. This time of year their racks have fallen, leaving their heads misshapen and knobby. Their noses are long and seem saggy, like stuffed animals without enough stuffing. Their huge Mickey Mouse ears swivel in the darkness like antennae, but they are not really alert. Their attention is all for the paltry leaves of cabbage, the frozen broccoli stalks, the forgotten head of cauliflower they have churned to the surface. They are unaware of the darkened house and the silent watchers marking one of them for death.
There are four this time. There is a game I play, predicting which one we will take down. I play it now. Not the cow. Never shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs. Leave the cow. Not the old bull. Why he is with them now, at this time of year, I will never understand. But there he is, and his meat is sure to be tough. That leaves two, the young calf, born this spring by the look of him, and the older calf from the spring before. It will be him, the older calf, I am sure. But of this I say nothing aloud. The chain of command does not appreciate such speculations.
“Let’s get ready,” says my father. And it is all he needs to say. My younger sister and my two little brothers are already gathering their books and heading for the basement. They are all still too small to be anything but a nuisance out there tonight. I hear them go down the darkened stairs, and in a moment a light clicks on in the basement. Yellow light wells up from the stairs, bleeds into the darkness around me, lending vague shapes to the hulking darkness of the furniture. Sissy and Candy, my two elder sisters, drift toward the basement and down the stairs to find suitable clothing. It will be hard for them. They own very little that can tolerate blood spatters and possible rips, very little that will keep out the deep cold as we crouch to our bloody work. I am already by the door, pulling on the garments I frequently leave heaped there, much to my sisters’ disdain. By the time my father has pulled on his parka and chambered a round into the 30.06, I am ready.
He jerks the door open, letting cold spill into the warm room. The icy air condenses as it flows into the room, making great ghost fogs that venture a short way into the house before disintegrating. He shuts the door quickly behind him but not before I have slipped out. He does not notice me, or he ignores me; it doesn’t matter which, it amounts to the same thing. I shadow him as he steps from the porch.
With night has come a greater cold. It is a cold that freezes the tiny hairs inside my nose, that makes my eyelashes stick together for a fraction of an instant when I blink my eyes. I push my muffler up over my nose and mouth to shelter my lungs from the icy air, and try to resist the temptation to lick my dry lips. All moisture has been frozen from the air, and the snow is a dry dust that creaks under my father’s weight as he makes his way across the yard. We move slowly, drifting in the night like bodiless shadows, not stalking the moose, but moving easily and quietly in the darkness.
The old bull lifts his head. A frozen cabbage leaf dangles from his pendulous lips. He alone watches us, his ears cupping toward us like petitioning hands. He gives no sign of alarm, issues no warning snort. He only watches. I wonder if he knows what is to come.
My father stops and I halt behind him. We stand silently. He doesn’t turn to look at me, but proffers the six-cell flashlight he has been carrying. “Put the spot right behind his ear,” he says. I nod as I take the flashlight, but he doesn’t see me.
He doesn’t need to turn and watch me nod to know I will obey. He is my father. He rules this night. He is the one who knows where to send the bullet to drop the moose. On other nights, he has stood in this yard and shown me the constellations. He has shown me Sputnik winking by, and told me that if I want it badly enough, I can go to the moon someday. He believes this of me, that I can do anything I want, if I want to do it badly enough. It is both terrifying and uplifting to have someone believe in you so. I point the flashlight at the young bull we have chosen. I watch my father lift his rifle to his shoulder. When he is ready, he makes a tiny move that is less than a nod. I push the button on the flashlight.
The light explodes, bursting the moose into reality. The shadowy shape leaps into detail, frosted whiskers drooping from his muzzle, shaggy hair on his neck, a great fringed ear, a single lambent eye capturing my light. In less than a breath, the rifle explodes beside me, and the moose falls, dropping from my circle of light into death and darkness.
It is done.
I click off the light. We stand in the darkness together, my father and I, looking at the thing we have done.
Animals are put together so neatly, almost as if they were intended to be taken apart. Interior organs packed together like a Chinese wood puzzle, awaiting the human hand, bared to winter but warm with fresh blood as it snakes in to lift the liver up, free it with a swipe of the knife. I put the liver in the bowl that is nestled in the snow, and surreptitiously take a lick from the knife. Electric. Fresh blood is electric on the tongue, like sparks snapping inside my mouth. It warms me, almost. An hour has passed since the shot, and I have not been inside. My toes are wooden inside my mukluks. I should have worn more socks.
My father’s flashlight finds me. “Did you get the heart and liver?” he asks, and I nod briefly toward the heavy bowl. He tosses the tongue he has just freed, and I catch it deftly in the bowl. I rise with it and start toward the house. “Take the knives,” my father tells me. “They need sharpening again.” They lie in a row on the packed snow beside the body, and I stoop awkwardly to gather them. Their metal blades are cold, and one sticks painfully to my bared fingers.
I am halfway to the house when Sissy reaches me. She comes from the warmth and light, and I can tell she still has her hair curlers in under the woolen knit cap she wears. “I’ll take them,” she tells me eagerly, and I let her. She would rather take the gut meat into the house, rather sit by the table with the oil and stone and put the edges back on the knives, than crouch in the darkness by the fallen moose, rendering it into meat. I do not understand her.
I think about it as my father and I work to break the moose up into smaller pieces. Some of it is hatchet and ax work, some of it is for the meat saw. Head off, front quarters, hindquarters, backstrap, neck. My sisters are sickened by this work. They flee the great darks and the heavy cold of the night, they shun the bright blood and the musky smell of just downed meat. Even my father does this work grudgingly, thinking of getting up at six tomorrow to go to work, wondering if we will be caught poaching, cursing when the heavy head refuses to come free of the neck section. None of them feel it the way I do.
They can no more understand what I feel than I can comprehend their feelings. I know what they think. They feel debased by this confrontation. Meat from the store in cardboard trays wrapped in plastic, meat with tidy price stickers and labels, that meat is food, is flank steak, chuck roast, ground round. None of it is labeled, “Cut from the shoulder of a large dead animal in a snowy field at night.” There is nothing to remind them that the hide was pulled away from the flesh while it was still warm, and the steam rose into the night to the greedy waiting stars. They do not want to remember they are predators, carnivores. They’d rather eat the flabby muscles of an animal raised hock-deep in its own shit, castrated and injected and inspected, a smack in the head to fell it, a large white room to chill it, humming machines to cut it into neat slices. De-animalized meat. The thought disgusts me, as they are disgusted when they think of their sister putting her knife to the dead flesh of an animal, kneeling on it as she pushes the blade into the dead flesh. Once the guts are out of the way, the hindquarters are separated from the rest of the animal at the place where the ribs stop and only the spine connects. We hurry, hacking at it with knives and saw and hatchet, trying to ruin as little steak as possible. Then the hindquarters are spread, to reveal the inner side of the backbone, and we work down it with a hatchet, and then knives, cleaving it into the separate legs.
“You done?” my father asks, and when I nod he takes a grip on one hindquarter and heaves it up. I help, guiding more than lifting, and the leg is dumped onto a piece of polyethylene sheeting. I am obscurely shamed that I could not lift the moose quarter by myself, and so I am determined that I will at least ferry it to the garage on my own. There my father will tie a piece of yellow nylon rope to it, piercing through the leg between the bone and the long tendon, and hoist it up to the rafters and let it sullenly drip blood for four or five days. Bleeding the meat, this is called, and it is important, for otherwise the meat will be tough and taste gamey. But for now my father has turned back to his butchering, is using the hatchet to chop through the vertebrae. A tiny fragment of splintered bone flies up to sting my cheek. It reminds me of what I am supposed to be doing.
The piece of black polyethylene is the size of a bed sheet. I turn my back to it, grip two corners of it, and bring the corners up over my shoulders like a harness. The moose leg is heavy, but the polyethylene is slick against the snow. Once I have it moving, it glides along over the snow behind me. When we reach the packed snow of the driveway, it moves even more easily. I roll the leg off the sheeting onto clean snow by the garage, and run back for another load.
Before midnight, all the meat is hung. My father and I contemplate it. It swings slowly, eerily, with gentle creakings. The garage is unheated, but it leeches enough heat from the house that it stays just above freezing. The slow patterning of blood drips will continue to speckle the concrete floor. We nod in satisfaction, and my father slowly tamps tobacco into his pipe. He lights it, sucks it noisily to life, and then turns away from the moose. I pull the string that turns out the light. We step out of the garage into the night, and he reaches up to pull the heavy door down. We are in the blackness of night again.
My father’s streamer of pipe smoke rises up, like the steam from the moose’s exposed entrails. He has shoveled snow over the gut sack to hide it. By morning it will have frozen solid. The dogs will dig down to it, and spend weeks nibbling and licking at the frozen delight until it is gone. There remains only the head. We both know that.
“Get rid of the head,” my father says simply, and turns toward the house. I watch him go. The windows of the house are warm and yellow. I know that by now my brothers and younger sisters are in bed, probably my older sisters as well. The skin of my face is so cold, it feels like a stiff cardboard mask. I can move my toes, pressing them down hard against my mukluk soles, and awaken them to pain. The moisture of my breath has frozen into a solid cake of frost on the muffler over my mouth. I want to go in.
But there is the head.
The door thuds behind my father and I am alone in the dark. I dare not even go in to fetch Rinky for company, for he would be too interested in the head and guts. He’d only make the task harder. I snatch up the black polyethylene sheeting and start off toward the garden.
A head is not as big as a hindquarter, but it is an awkward shape, and heavier than you might think. The best way to lift one is to grip it by the bases of both ears, keeping the hacked-off neck turned away. The nose is pressed to my chest, the empty jaws gape tonguelessly. Even in the frigid air, the smell of moose and blood is strong. I turn quickly, letting go of the ears so that the momentum of my turn flings the head neatly onto the polyethylene sheet. I diaper the head up in the sheet, leaving myself one corner to use as a handle.
The night is clear and cold. I turn my back to the house with its warm yellow windows, and I pull. The head rides along at my heels as I leave the yard and the tire-packed snow of the driveway and enter the woods. I have already decided where I am going.
I follow one of my favorite trails. The trees are cottonwood and birch, alder and diamond willow. My path winds among them. Smaller bushes claw briefly at my burden, but don’t manage to rip the plastic. I drag it on, leaving a peculiar wrinkled trail, like the path of a giant worm. The head pulls easily, the polyethylene gliding over the snow. I am able to walk at a normal pace, and fifteen minutes later I am where I wish to be.
Here there are spruce trees, sudden groves of them in the deciduous forest. For some reason, they grow in irregular huddles, in groups of ten and fourteen and nine. But almost always in the center of each huddle is a tiny clear space where no trees grow. I get down on my knees and crawl beneath the outer swoop of branches, past a trunk, and here the snow is shallower, for the upper branches have caught most of it. Then out again, through deeper snow, and I am suddenly inside the grove. A moat of snow and a wall of needled branches surround me. Looking straight up, I can see the black sky and the Dipper hung on it. Unceremoniously, I dump the head here and leave it. I wad the black plastic up under my arm and crawl out again. The walk home seems longer than the walk here. The woods seem lonelier and darker, and I am shivering before the lights of the house crack through the trees to beckon me on.
My father is in the bathtub, my mother is reading in bed when I come in. No one calls out or questions me. No one save Rinky greets me, and he greets me with a wriggle of delight, his hackles rising excitedly at my blood smell. I shed my outer clothing by the door, and do not turn on the light as I go down the stairs. Everyone down here is asleep, vague blanketed shapes like furniture in storage. I am still shivering when I strip in the darkened basement and climb into bed. Rinky is snorting and rooting through my bloodied clothing as I fall asleep, my head cradled on arms and hands that still smell of sweet, sticky blood. I dream of bright white sunlight on the snow, and a faun gouging the frosted brown eyes from a moose skull and slipping them into his mouth. It is a good dream, and I smile in my sleep.
FIVE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Tacoma
The Farm
June 1976
Ten or fifteen years ago, the farm was a dairy farm. And the room that I stand in now was genteelly referred to as the milking parlor. Now it is a living room, and is part of what Mother Maurie calls “the little house” as opposed to her own “big house.” When she speaks of it to company, she calls it “the guest cottage,” but to her own family she calls it “the little house.” I find this an interesting dichotomy. Lately I find interesting dichotomies in many things Mother Maurie says.
It is like a cancer, growing in me, a constant hidden nastiness I can no longer control. A little secret anger, like red eyes in the dark. When I first came down to visit, and was shown the many ways in which the Potter women were vastly superior to me, I was willing to concede to them. It was the easiest path. It was also hard to argue. I cannot shop, I do not color coordinate, I have never ordered from the Avon Lady or hostessed a Tupperware party. I was willing to be unschooled and unsophisticated, the country mouse come down from her little Alaskan cabin to be overawed by the style and gaiety of the life in the Lower Forty-Eight. A week, a month, or even two, I could sustain the proper humility. But now it is all wearing thin. I am becoming defensive about my inferiority, protective of it. I will be as I am. I am also beginning to suspect their veneer may be only contac paper. The Avon fragrances are beginning to smell suspiciously like air freshener. My anger is a simmering acid thing, eating me from the inside out, whetting my tongue, putting cruel edges on my every thought.
But that is my problem, not Mother Maurie’s. And this living room is also my problem. We have been guests here since March. It is a bright and cheerful little place, cuter than the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. There are big windows with wispy white curtains that let the bright sun spill in onto the white tiled floors. The furniture is white wicker and yellow cushions. There is a little glass-topped table, too unbearably cute to be useful, homey little rugs scattered everywhere, and two kerosene lamps with colored water in them instead of kerosene.
The kitchen is even better. There is a tiny white range, with a little red ceramic kettle sitting on it. The kettle is a masterpiece of Woolworth’s engineering, flawlessly useless, with a spout that dribbles and a body that holds less than three cups of water. Next to it, centered on the range, is a spoon holder shaped like a yellow ducky. The tiny kitchen table has a red-checkered oilcloth on it. There are plaques on the wall that say things about the Number One Cook, and For This I Went to College, and No Matter Where I Serve My Guests, They Seem to Like My Kitchen Best. There is a cookie jar shaped like a fat pink piggy. The dishes in the cupboards are sturdy plastic with jolly red roosters on every plate.
The bedroom is okay. The patchwork quilt came from Sears, and the patches are only a pattern, but I can forgive that. I can even forgive the lampshades with the covered bridges painted on them, and the bases of the lamps that are shaped like old-fashioned pumps.
What I cannot forgive is the bathroom. The theme seems to be that defecating children are cute. On a plaque over the toilet, a curly-haired cherub squats on a potty. There is also an adorable little statuette of a small boy with his bib coveralls around his ankles and a look of concentration on his pink-cheeked face as he sits on his little ceramic toilet. Even the toilet has theme clothing. The tank sweater and lid hat match, both depicting a little boy, his innocent bare butt toward us as he “waters mother’s flowers.” There is even an ashtray shaped like a toilet, with the motto “put your dead butts here” on it. The final touch is a tall book that hangs on a chain by the toilet. The cover proclaims it as Poems for the John. Few things are more excruciating than to be trying to make breakfast in a cutesy kitchen, and to have one’s spouse holler from the john, “Hey, honey, listen to this one.” Lately, Tom has begun to subject me to this.
It is a trap I have fallen into, all unawares. Even as we carried our suitcases in, Mother Maurie painstakingly pointed out to me that the furniture was “practically new, not a scratch on it.” She walked me through the guest house, showing me all its marvels, and requiring me to chuckle appreciatively as she giggled over the “naughty but cute” bathroom things. Steffie did the decorating, she told me. Steffie may someday take some classes in interior decorating, she seems to have such a flair for it. Some of the ideas, she confided, Steffie got from magazines, but most of it came right out of her own head. And isn’t that amazing?
And of course Mother Maurie knows she can trust me to keep it neat as a pin, and to make sure “that terrible Tom” takes his boots off before he comes in, and don’t let “that rascal Teddy” roughhouse all over the furniture, it would just break Steffie’s heart if anything happened to this place, all the work she put into it to make it just as cute as a doll’s house … And I nodded and blithely agreed, for such an agreement seems easy when you are only planning to stay a month and may not even unpack your suitcase all the way.
But that was March and it is June. Useless to whimper for my sturdy little house in the woods near Ace Lake on the Old Nenana Road. Foolish to think of a place with painted plywood floors, and a boot-scraper driven into the ground outside the door. I miss my sagging couch with its ratty afghan that all three of us can cuddle under while Teddy hears his good-night tale from Just So Stories. I miss the high bunk that Tom built for Teddy, with all the shelves under it for toys and books. I miss my wood stove, and the sound of pinecones falling onto the corrugated tin roof at night. I want to go home.
But we can’t. Not just yet, but soon, Tom tells me. As soon as Bix is better. Bix, Ellie’s husband, is a very slow healer. Ellie is the eldest daughter in the Potter household, seldom spoken of, but there, nonetheless. And Bix is her sturdy hired-hand husband, as practical as a strike-anywhere kitchen match. A good son-in-law, none too bright, but handy around the place. Until he broke his collarbone. It’s hard to run a tractor with a broken collarbone, and the fields have to be tilled and planted. The farm has to look prosperous and well run, for in front of the farm, less than an acre away, is the farm equipment dealership that fronts onto the highway. Tom’s father owns it and runs it, with Mother Maurie and Steffie to do the bookwork and order parts and dust the shelves. Tom’s older sister, Ellie, keeps the big house in order for them all. And Ellie’s husband, as big and good-natured and farmy as she is, does his best to help out anywhere he can. But he’s not the same as a real son, Tom has confided ingenuously to me, not to his dad. Dick Potter likes to know that the crucial work of the farm is in family hands. It’s just like that fool Bix to have broken his collarbone in spring, the busiest time of the year. And so Tom must stay, just a little longer, to get the fields tilled and planted, to move the irrigation pipe that waters the tender young plants, to mechanic on the equipment that does the work, and to be Dick’s son. It is his family. Family is important. I understand.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I am sweetly reasonable. Sometimes I understand all that Tom tells me, about how important his family is, and that they expect and need his loyalty. There is something all-American about the concept of the extended family and the old family farm, and pulling together to get through the hard times. Sometimes it is a thing I want Teddy to learn, and sometimes I want him to grow up remembering early mornings on the farm, feeding the chickens, riding the tractor behind Bix or Tom, going to town in Grandpa’s red truck, sitting by Grandma’s feet and watching television in the evening.
And sometimes I want them back, all to myself, my Tom, my Teddy. I don’t want to be Tom’s wife. I want to be Evelyn, in the cabin Tom and I built, in a place more forest than farm. I want to go home to my own house, to my own furniture, to my books and garden and woods. I don’t want to be careful of the rattan furniture and the bright cushions that show every smear of dirt. I want to flop down on my own couch and sigh heavily, and let all the tension out. I want to be home.
Lately, when Tom speaks of home, he means this farm. “Let’s go home now,” he said to me yesterday when I had stolen him away, to have him to myself for a few guilty moments on a spurious errand. I wanted to stop at a cafe, to have a cup of coffee and talk with him. But he was restless, his mind full of uncompleted chores. “I have to get home,” he repeated, and my heart sank. Is my home now different from his? Sometimes I see it all as an elaborate con worked upon me, as when I was in grade school and there were cliques I could never belong to, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried. I am no different from Ellie’s husband, I will never be as good as a real daughter, never part of the real family. And sometimes the Potter family farm reminds me more of a Japanese corporate structure than Old MacDonald’s Farm. Sometimes I suspect them of shaving and shaping Tom, like a faulty cog that doesn’t quite mesh, machining him to fit into the gear chain instead of causing it to jam. I think they will steal Teddy from me, will teach him that he is a real grandson of the real family, and therefore belongs with them, not with his mother who is only a married-on artificial part of the family.
If I think about these things, I can work myself up into a frothing rage. How dare they! I won’t let them! Mine, all mine, Tom and Teddy are mine and they shall never have them!
Sick. Selfish. Sad. I know. But there is so little else for me to do. Tom goes off to work and Teddy trails off with him, or is “borrowed” by Grandpa to be shown off while he sits in Hanks Diner and has his morning coffee with the other good old boys. I stay here, in Snow White Steffie’s enchanted cottage, and try to deal with an oil smudge on a yellow cushion, Teddy’s sticky fingerprints on the glass-topped table, and the increasingly obvious sag of the rattan chair that was never intended for a man of Tom’s size. I know Mother Maurie will quietly mention these signs of wear to other family members as evidence of my waywardness and inferiority to a real daughter. And I experience the amusing dichotomy of watching myself mutter that I never wanted to be treated as a real daughter even as I try to get peanut butter out of the weave of a rattan armrest.
When I run out of hopeless housework to occupy myself, I can fill my days with endless paperbacks. Passion’s Proud Fury and The Angry Heart and The Elegant Suitor and Flames of Desire. Steffie has a wall of them in her room, and she has told me that I can borrow them whenever I like. They are all romances, in different series, and she keeps them arranged by number. She marks a little X inside the cover of each one she has read, so she doesn’t accidentally start reading it again. It’s easy to forget, she tells me, which ones she has read, and she used to get deep into one before she realized she had already read it once before. The X’s, she tells me, keep her from wasting her time. The other books in the big house are technical manuals for tractors; Steffie is the family bookworm, all the Potters agree, and they are proud of her endless reading.
There is an alternative to rattan maintenance and Passion’s Proud Fury. I can go visit the big house.
In the day I can go over and watch Ellie work. She is a big rawboned woman, Dick Potter’s frame accidentally bestowed on a female child. Both seem ashamed of the error. Ellie minimalizes it by hunching around the house, wearing her plaid housedresses as if they were a clever disguise, like a tablecloth thrown over a packing crate. Ellie does only one thing. She works. She mops tile floors and sweeps hardwood floors, she scrubs walls, she pounds yielding white dough into loaves, she chops vegetables and tumbles them into simmering pots, she polishes windows and dusts shelves. She never stops. If I arrive during the day, she assumes I have some purpose there and ignores me. She is not one to stop and have a cup of tea and chat. Conversation with Ellie is a difficult thing, a trailing net of words that follows her from room to room as she straightens and tidies, snagging on feather dusters and Pledge cans and sponges and Comet cleanser. How is she? I am fine, and excuse me, I have to mop where you’re standing. And how is Bix? Bix is better, save for a crick in his back, serves him right for trying to work in his good boots while his shoulder is still banged up, and excuse me, I have to go get the Pine Sol.
What else can I do with myself? Once I got up early and fed all the chickens, ducks, and pigs. I gave the chickens too much, the ducks too much, and the pigs not enough, and the poultry food is expensive, almost seven cents a pound now, and the pigs will break out of their yard if they get hungry during the day, and of course Mother Maurie knew I was only trying to help, but it’s not like farming’s in my blood, like in Tom’s, so I’m bound to make mistakes, but the wrong amount of feed can put the poultry off their laying, and of course that’s critical this time of year, so maybe I should let Ellie do it like always, but thanks for trying to help, it was so cute of me.
Is it me?
Sometimes I think it’s just me. I think there’s something wrong inside me, something mean and selfish and small that puts the worst interpretation on anything that’s said to me. When I try to tell Tom about what happened, he looks at me, puzzled. “Well, the wrong amount of feed can put the chickens off their laying,” he says, as if that explains everything, and goes back to reading his tractor manual.
It is evening, night in the little house, but not at all peaceful. My nerves are trembling inside my body, I want to explode, to shriek and scream. And Tom, once so tuned to me he could answer my unspoken questions, does not even notice. So I will be good. I will be patient. I will be a good wife, and contain this unreasoning anger. I will think of something worthwhile to do.
“I think I’ll go get Teddy,” I say. “It’s getting late, and I think he’s had enough television for one night. This time of evening, there’s probably nothing on that will interest him, anyway.”
Tom grunts, flips back to the index, turns more chunks of pages, traces his finger down an already grimed schematic. My hand is on the doorknob when he speaks.
“Oh, Teddy’s sleeping at Mom’s house. He fell asleep on the couch, so Mom just covered him up. No sense waking him.”
“But,” I say, and stop. But what? But I want my baby? I want to read him a story, tuck him into his madeup bed on the rattan sofa, look up from Passion’s Furious Pride to watch his chest rising and falling under his blanket, his small mouth pursing in his sleep? Don’t be silly, Evelyn. Let him sleep where he is, don’t wake the child and drag him outside and across a damp yard just to put him back to bed again. Likely the boy will catch a chill from a foolish thing like that. You just leave my grandson be. I take my hand from the doorknob, return to my yellow cushion and white rattan seat. I try to immerse myself in Marlena’s thwarted passion for Duke Aimsly, to believe in people who cordially hate each other for months and then fall into bed with each other, muttering about raven hair and bee-stung lower lips and throbbing towers of maleness and secret chasms of womanhood. I look up at Tom.
I met Tom in the winter of 1969. My parents had sent me “outside” to college, to the University of Washington, and we met during an anthropology class. It was one of those huge 101 classes that every freshman faces at least once. Every day a wave of students poured into an auditorium, flowing into the crowded seats with no set pattern, dragging up the tiny flop-out desktops that were never quite big enough to support a full-sized notebook. There was no personal interaction with the professor at all. He came, he lectured, he left. Attendance was taken by a paper passed for signatures. Tests were mostly multiple choice. It embodied all the worst elements of mass education.
But I had always been a dedicated student. I sat every day in the front row, center. I stared up at the professor. I strained to hear his words over the muttering and shifting of the restless student herd, and to make out the spidery notes he scratched on the portable blackboard. Tom sat beside me. After several weeks, we noticed each other. He was the handsomest boy who had ever looked at me and smiled. It is good to remember that on evenings like this.
Later, I am still thinking of him as I watch him undress. I am already in my nightgown, sitting on my corner of the bed, drawing a brush through my hair. My hair is the color of mahogany from the sun, and unruly as always. It is neither straight nor curly, but when it is damp it makes waves of itself, and wraps itself around the brush bristles and the handle. I draw the brush slowly down my hair as I watch Tom unbutton his shirt.
One of the nasty little intrusive thoughts is that watching him undress is not as intensely pleasurable as it once was. It is my attitude that has changed, not the man, for Tom takes pride in keeping himself in good condition. His body is fine, and more than fine, much better a body than my own deserves. Tom could pose for beefcake. I could pose naked, and folks would have to look twice to see if I was female. I try not to be grateful for his body, for his sharing himself with me, for a small part of me insists that ungraceful and curveless as my own is, it is still a sturdy and useful vessel, a fine little animal to live in. But I cannot help taking pride in Tom and basking in his reflected glory.
I watch him now as he bends over slightly to tug his T-shirt off over his head. He is tall and well muscled and he bends gracefully, the muscles of his back delineated along his spine. He straightens, and his soft blond hair falls back into place, almost brushing his shoulders. I love his hair. When we are making love, it falls forward and brushes my cheek. I like to reach up and grasp the nape of his neck, feeling the muscles beneath my hand and his hair soft against my fingers, like the mane of a stallion. Dick Potter hates his son’s soft hair. Goddam Hippie Hairdo, he calls it, all in caps. But I feel a small victory in that Tom has not given in to his demands for a haircut.
He has been going shirtless for this last week or so, and the skin of his back is golden. When he straightens and looks at me, he is all tawny colors, golden skin, soft blond hair, and gentle brown eyes. Lion colors. He knows I have been watching him and he smiles, anticipating pleasure. He is so incredibly beautiful to me that an aching swells inside me. Not of desire, but of love thwarted. I love him so. And I am about to start a quarrel.
“Tom, honey, when are we going home?”
He stops in the act of lowering his pants and actually sits down on the bed in surprise. He turns to face me, his boyish face wrinkled with perplexity. He has been thinking of sex, not of neglected cabins and gardens going to weed. His fine lion hair is rumpled where he has drawn his T-shirt off over his head. His amber eyes, now the color of sunlight on beer bottles, go wide. “When are we what, Lyn?”
“When are we going home?” I repeat doggedly, patiently. “We were only going to spend a month here, remember? Just a pleasant spring interlude on the old family farm, camping out in the guest cottage, get Teddy out of Alaska for a while, let him see what a real spring planting time is like. Then somehow it became a month or so. Okay, May is fine, even though there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to get done on our own place. Teddy’s had a great time with the piglets and the chicks and the ducklings and all. But, honey, we’re in to June now, and I was thinking we’d be headed home any day now. Then, at dinner tonight, all of a sudden your dad starts talking as if we’re staying here the rest of the summer, and this winter, too.” I hear the stridency in my voice, take a deep breath. I stop ripping the brush through my hair as I realize my scalp is sore. Carefully, I soften my voice. “Babe, can you tell me what’s going on?”
Tom heaves the long-suffering sigh of the nagged husband. It is a new trick of his, one I don’t particularly care for. “Lyn. Honey. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve gotten so touchy lately. Yes, Dad did ask me if I would consider staying out the summer and part of the winter. You know Bix hurt his shoulder. Well, it’s going to lay him up for longer than we thought. So that leaves Dad trying to run the place and the business. And this is the busy time of year. Not only the farm to tend, but this is the time of year when folks are buying equipment. Being a man short around here is no joke anytime, so Dad invited us to stay on. That’s all. Just until Bix gets back on his feet. And between you and me, I don’t think that’s going to take as long as Dad thinks it will. Probably only another month or so. That’s all. And I didn’t give him a definite answer, because I wanted to talk to you about it first. But you know how my folks are. They think that if they just act like something is going to happen, it will.”
And it usually does, where we’re concerned, I think. No, I have said the foolish words aloud, I can tell by the sparks that light suddenly in Tom’s eyes. He finishes undressing in silence, kicking his pants away into a heap on the floor. He pushes the covers aside and swings his long pale legs into bed. His posture tells me I won’t be getting any tonight. He pulls up the covers before he speaks again.
His voice is a lie and a deception, reasonable and sweet. “If you want to take that attitude, then I suppose there’s no point to our discussing it at all.” You idiot, you spoiled brat, you cowering, narrow-minded little wretch, his attitude says to me. Refusing without even hearing me out. Heartless bitch. He hunches his shoulder under the white sheet and blue blanket. His soft hair fans out over the pillowcases. The pillowcases are white, but the cuffs feature Mother Maurie’s cross-stitch embroidery. A gaudy rooster on Tom’s, a plump little hen for me. The cross-stitched motto on Tom’s proclaims that he’s “all set to strut and crow,” while my hen petulantly affirms that she’d rather “set awhile.” They match a set we were given for a wedding gift. Steffie thinks they are adorable. They make me want to retch. Tom’s voice draws me back to our argument. “I’ll just tell them you didn’t like the idea, and that will be that.”
Oh, goody. You do that. I’d love to see their faces. I take a deep breath, put pettiness aside. “Tom. Don’t snap at me. You know what I’m thinking about, or at least you should. There’s our house. It’s been sitting empty since March, and we’re just asking for vandalism. God knows it’s probably full of mice and red squirrels already.”
“Pete and Beth said they’d keep an eye on it.”
“Pete and Beth both work, honey. Driving into our place twice a week only means they can let us know after the windows get broken. We’re not as isolated as we once were out there. Last summer I saw hikers and backpackers almost every day. And poor Bruno will be wondering what happened to us. I know they’ll feed him, but he’s only a pup. He’ll be half wild when we get back there as it is. And there’s Teddy’s school. He starts kindergarten this fall. I don’t want to have him start here, and then pull him out halfway through the year. Starting school is tough enough on a kid without doing that. And, last but not least, there’s the small matter of my job.”
In spite of my best effort, my voice was getting cold and rocky. Don’t make this a fight, I beg myself. Make it a discussion. He has to see the logic of what you’re saying, you don’t have to be a bitch about it. Just tell him. Lay it all out for him. I pause a moment, hoping he’ll say something. He doesn’t. I take a breath and go on.
“It took a lot of nerve for me to ask for this much time off. If Annie weren’t my friend as well as my boss, she’d never have said yes. But she can’t keep running the store on her own. She’s got some kid in there for the summer, but come winter the kid has to be back in school and she’ll be on her own. She’ll have to hire someone to take my place, and there won’t be a job for me to go back to.”
I pause and gather the reins of my self-control. Tom will see. He’s a reasonable man, one who has always treated me as an equal, as a person to be considered. But the silence lengthens and it looks as if he is having to struggle to control himself before he speaks. Neither of us are good at this, at quarreling. We do it very seldom, most things are settled conversationally, or one or the other of us will demur to the other’s area of expertise. I let Tom select the used truck we bought, he let me choose the insulation for the attic, we recognize there are areas where one of us is more knowledgeable than the other. But this is a different thing, an area of opinion based on emotions. And we are both experts on our own emotions.
“Jesus Christ, Lyn,” he sighs at last. “You make it sound like I’m contemplating murder. All we’re thinking about is spending a winter here with my folks and giving them a hand over a hard spot. I mean, hell, they paid for my college, they brought me up … I feel I owe them. And I have thought about all the stuff you mentioned. There’s a good school for Teddy just down the road from here. The school bus stops right by the gate. And I bet Pete and Beth could rent our place out for us in only a couple of weeks, if we let them know the kind of tenants we want. Taking care of Bruno would be part of the deal. And, hey, Dad said that if we were staying the winter, he saw no reason why Teddy couldn’t have that little pony that Red has up for sale. You know how he drools over that little pinto every time we drive past there. His eyes practically popped out when Dad mentioned it.”
“You discussed that in front of him? Tom, that’s not fair! You get his hopes all set up, and when Mommy wants to go home, that makes her the bad guy. And you still haven’t mentioned anything about my job.”
I am honestly angry now, paying no heed to the little sane voice inside telling me to be cool, be an adult, try to see both sides. Tom is frozen by his outrage, stiff as a corpse between the cold white sheets. The tendons stand out against his jaws when he speaks.
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Teddy is big enough to understand that what he wants isn’t always what he gets. I don’t see why you always have to get so mad. Any idea I have, if I talk it over with Mom or Dad first, you automatically hate it. It’s wrong, no matter what it is. And so what about your job? Clerking in some weird little shop, that’s not a big deal. I mean, what are you going to become, manager of the fruit and nut section? The buyer for organic teas? It’s not a big deal, Lyn! You can always get it back, or another piss-ant job just like it!”
“It is a big deal! It’s a big deal to me! And you’re damn right I don’t like it when you take your ideas and plans to your parents first! You’re supposed to be my husband! Remember? Usually married people make their decisions with each other, not with their mommys and daddys. And I happen to like my crummy little unimportant job. It’s hard to find a job you like, you should know that. You’ve walked out on enough of them. And my crummy little job was just fine with you last winter when it was the only damn thing that was feeding us!”
I stop suddenly. Carefully I fit my knuckles against my mouth and teeth, feeling where they would strike if I could hit myself, wishing I could. I wish I could. I’ve gone too far, way over the edge, past the unspoken boundaries we’ve set up for our quarrels. Never have I thrown things like that at Tom. He cannot hold a permanent job, that is something we both silently acknowledge, not as a fault but as a facet of his independent ways. Never have I thrown it at him like a dagger.
His eyes are wide open with vulnerability and hurt. I have struck true and deep, wounding him where the blood will puddle and congeal inside him. I have demanded my own way as something that is owed me, throwing his failures in his face to make it his duty to comply. He looks at me silently, his pain trickling through his guts, too badly injured to even fight back anymore.
“Tom, Tom, I’m sorry. I just got so mad, I started to say anything to hurt you back. I didn’t mean it that way, you know I didn’t mean it. I understood about those jobs. I didn’t want you to stay with them. But I’m hurt, too. When you go to your folks all the time, for advice and make decisions with them, it makes me feel so small and unimportant. There’s nothing for me here, and it makes me feel like nothing.”
“Teddy and I are nothing.” He says it acceptingly, dully.
“No. No, that’s not what I meant. You and Teddy are everything. Don’t listen to my words alone, you know what I mean behind the words. Please, Tom. I’m sorry for what I said.”
I crawl across the bed to him, wrap my body around his stiff one, my belly to his warm back. I bury my face into his hair, so soft against my face, and rock his unyielding body on the bed. My anxious hands run over his body, kneading at the hard muscles, stroking, caressing the stiffness out of him, massaging away the anger and hurt that divides us. Eventually he relaxes in my embrace. He rolls in my arms, embraces me.
“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” he mutters, his lips by my ear. “Let’s just forget it.” His voice is soothing. “We’re both too tired to be discussing anything, much less fighting about it. We both said a lot of nasty things. If you want to go home at the end of the summer, well, that’s all there is to it. I can understand how you might feel a little overwhelmed by my family. Mom and Dad have had to be aggressive, just to survive in this business, and they encouraged it in us kids as we grew up. Grab the buck, make the deal … you know how they are. So when I saw a chance for us to make rent off our place, and both of us pull in wages here, and Mom picking up the grocery bill, well, I thought it might really set us up, financially. Put us on our feet, give us a second swing at things. I didn’t know you felt so strongly about going home, that’s all. I’ll just tell the folks tomorrow that summer is the end of the visit. They’ll just have to understand.” His eyes are opened wide as he says this, honesty and hurt gleaming in them as he gives it all up for me. Sacrifices it all.
And he has me. I capitulate instantly, telling him I hadn’t thought of the financial angle, that certainly we can stay at least until the end of the summer, and we’ll talk about winter when we’re both rested, yes, it would be wonderful for Teddy to have a pony, and the job was, well, only a job. On, and on. Giving it all away. Making up for the hurt I had done. What did it matter, anyway? Tom and Teddy, they’re what is important. What did I matter, anyway? Surrender to Tom, and it won’t be scary anymore. I won’t have to ask myself what would happen if just once I stuck to my guns, insisted on having my own way. I won’t have to wonder if he’d dump me, or tell me to lump it or leave, wonder what would happen to me without him. Give in to Tom, and it isn’t frightening, we aren’t quarreling anymore.
Long after he tells me what an angel I am, and how much he loves me, and weren’t we silly for arguing, and how much his folks will appreciate his help, yes, and long after he falls asleep, I lie awake and look at myself naked and helpless in my own mind.
I think of the little shop Annie runs. It’s in the front half of an old house at Ester, not that far from the Malemute Saloon of Robert Service fame. Not that far for me to drive, even when the roads are white with packed snow-ice and my headlights cut through the black Alaska day. It is a warm place, a wood stove in the center of the room, and then all the bins full of nuts and seeds and organic grains and little cans full of spices and bright boxes of teas with wonderful names like Dragon’s Mane and Orchard Spice, teas that Annie mixes herself in the tiny back rooms. It is an alchemist’s shop for food, a place where the ordinary becomes gold. The walls are planks of honey-colored wood, and they are covered with shelves and hooks and alcoves full of merchandise, soft leather bags with porcupine quill embroidery on them, massage oils in precious bottles, ceramic teapots with whimsical faces, created by an old friend of Annie’s, treasures and surprises, delightful things to sell …
I won’t be going back to that. I know it suddenly, with a sureness that trembles through me. My place there is gone, taken by another. If I go into that store again, it will be as a customer, as one who stands in the public area, not one who goes behind the Dutch doors and talks over the bottom half as she mixes a special tea. I won’t be the one to indulge someone’s child in a horehound drop or a stick of real licorice root.
I touch Tom, running my hands down his long flanks, wanting him to roll back and hold me. I imagine him running his hands over me the same way I am touching him, stroking my flesh, making it desirable by his touch. Make me special by wanting me. I want him to put his hands over my diminutive breasts and make them important by pinching the nipples between his fingers, by testing his teeth gently against them.
I have stirred myself to heat, and I need him, I need him to bury me in physical sensations so my mind will shut up. I don’t want to think about where I have heard those arguing techniques before. I don’t want to remember Mother Maurie applying them to Steffie all this spring, how she acts hurt by her daughter’s refusals but politely accepts them, all the while pointing out how logic and reason and good manners are all on her side. Eroding Steffie’s belief in herself until Steffie gives in, and then pampering Steffie to show her how smart she is to obey her mother. It works every time for her. Don’t I know how well it works?
I clutch at Tom, slipping my hand over his hip and down, cupping his balls, and then gripping his penis firmly. I will it to swell in my hand, to become a sword that will subdue my doubts. But he only mutters, sleep’s grip on him more sure and intimate than mine. He doesn’t need me, not the way I need him. He can quarrel with me, make up, and then turn away, go to sleep, forget our temporary division. He is not frightened when we disagree. My nipples are hard, I press them into his back, feel the contact as agonizingly tantalizing. I rub against his passiveness, driving myself crazy. Turn to me, touch me, I beg him silently. Make me desirable, make me important, make me real.
“Lyn,” he complains, wriggling out of my embrace, away from the thigh I have thrown over his hip. He’d only have to roll to face me, make himself hard for me, I’d do all the rest. “Honey,” he rebukes me gently, “I’ve got to get up extra early tomorrow.” He takes a deep breath, sighs it out. I lie in the warm place on the sheet that he has just vacated. His scent is on the pillows, and I breathe it in, savoring where his flesh has been like a dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. “Gonna show Teddy a deer,” he mutters to his pillow. “Been watering at the duck pond. Saw his sign this morning. Don’t know how he’s been getting past the electric fence, but there’re hoof marks all over down there. Gotta sleep, baby.”
He goes away, off into sleep as surely as he will go off to work tomorrow, leaving me aching and alone. Unimportant. Of what value is a woman undesired, a woman who does no task, fulfills no function? The sheets chill around me, become wide plains of glacial whiteness, Tom a distant mountain range I will never scale. I’m alone.
Not alone.
His face fills my mind suddenly, and the musk I smell is not Tom’s anymore. The lust that hits me now is sudden and unexpected as a hammer blow, a directed passion that makes my desire for Tom a mere itch, a passing fancy. I know him suddenly, more thoroughly than I have known any man. His tongue, I know, would be raspy like a cat’s tongue, eager to seek out my secrets, and his cock would fill me and swell against me. To him I would be everything, companion, friend, lover. Merely by being me. I imagine the sleek fur of his flanks under my hands, how my fingers would find the rumpled nubs at the base of his horns as I directed his mouth on my flesh.
I move against the sheets, my nipples rasping against Mother Maurie’s percale, and surrender to my fantasy. But my imagination is not enough to sate me, and I am still too proud to touch myself. Sleep is the only one who takes me this night, and my dreams touch me too softly to ease me.
SIX (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Fairbanks
Spring 1964
He is always there for me, in the woods. He is not a god to me, nor an animal. But in one sense he is like a spirit. He is the essence of the forest, of the moss and mushrooms and animals and trees and plants. When he is with me, then the forest is with me as well. And the forest is the only place where I feel whole. My world is divided into three parts: the school, the home, and the forest. Only the forest is peaceful, healing. Only the forest is mine.
With each passing year, school only gets worse. The pressure is on. Not for grades. I assume As are my right, and I get them, without fail, despite teachers who dislike me and other students who harass me. I batter them out of Mrs Haritsen, drowning her in extra-credit work I don’t really need to do, always flapping my hand frantically with the correct answer, writing a five-page essay when a three-page is asked for, always using complete sentences, punctuating faultlessly, writing large and clearly on all my papers.
She hates me, of course. But she isn’t allowed to show it. She’s a lay teacher, a volunteer at the Catholic school. She’s not a nun, and to my way of thinking she isn’t a teacher at all. She is from the states and is young and is afraid of Alaska. I can tell. And that makes her hate me.
She can force me to do things. She will be giving the spelling test, strolling between the aisles of desks, giving a word, a sentence with the word, and the word again. “Pneumonia,” she says. “The doctor says the sick child has pneumonia. Pneumonia. Oh, heavens!” The whole class looks up, startled, from their papers. She is standing over my desk. “Evelyn. Look at your hands! I am not going to correct any paper handed in by such a dirty girl. You go and wash them this instant!”
And I rise and go back to the big sink in the back of the classroom, to wash my clean but badly chapped hands. I use the coarse powdered soap in the barely warm water, and dry them on rough paper towels. She continues the spelling test without me, as if I do not matter at all, and, of course, to her I do not. I store the spelling words in my head, “psychiatrist,” “physician,” “symphony,” as I scrub at the backs of my hands where the constant chapping of cold water and wind has turned the abused skin dark, nearly black. I sand some of it off, leaving my hands raw and sore, and return quietly to my desk. I fill in the words quickly, ignoring the bird-black eyes she turns on me, hoping, hoping that I’ll raise my hand and ask her to repeat them. I must never give her that chance to smash me. I know that tomorrow it will be something else.
One day I came to class after PE, having changed too quickly, and all the boys laughed as I came in the door. I glanced down, chagrined, to find my shirt buttoned unevenly, the childish lace-necked little-girl T-shirt beneath it showing all my flat ribby chest and small green-raspberry nipples through its soft fabric. Any other teacher might have seen my scarlet face and called the class to order, pulled their attention away from me. Any of the nuns would have. But Mrs Haritsen has none of the softness and kindness the nuns hide behind their flat black exteriors. All Mrs Haritsen’s softness is on the outside, in her curling soft hair and pastel dresses. Within she is colder than black flint. Mrs Haritsen required me to stand at the board and write sentences. “A Catholic girl is a modest girl. A Catholic girl is a modest girl.” Until the board was filled with my handwriting, and my arm ached with holding my hand up and my head ached with pounding blood. But I did it. And she must give me the As I have earned.
I know what I am like to her. I am a wild and savage little animal. She perceives me as refusing the good civilization she offers me. Like a muddy feral kitten, rescued from a thunderstorm, spitting and sinking its impotent fangs into the hands that seek to smooth its rough fur, scorning the saucer of warmed milk offered it, choosing instead to huddle beneath the sofa and hope that someone will leave the door standing ajar, if only for an instant, so it can risk its draggled tail in a dash for the dark and storm outside. I am neither cute nor likeable.
So she puts the pressure on me, and it is not for grades, nor for anything else I understand. I don’t know what she wants me to give her. I only know that if I give it, I will no longer be me. Me is all I have, and I cling to me, instinctively, without even knowing how tightly I hold on to my selfness.
I am not like the other girls, who ask her questions about her clothes and her hair and her nails, who listen giggling in a circle around her desk at recess as Mrs Haritsen tells them something cute her husband said, or something “wild and silly” she did in college. I don’t like it when she talks about how much she misses Idaho, and how much we are all missing by growing up in “this wild place.” She feels so sorry for the other little girls, and her pity makes them vaguely insecure, wondering what wonderful things they are missing that evokes so much condescension from her. I don’t want her pity. If she doesn’t like Alaska, she can leave. Does she really think the woods will turn into a city because she wants them to, that the roads will widen and be paved, that the winters will become less cold and dangerous because petite Mrs Haritsen thinks they should? She’s stupid. I force her to give me As, and hope she will go back to the states soon. I pray that a nun will teach me next year.
Home is almost as bad. My sisters fight over boyfriends. Jeffrey met Sissy at a dance, but when he came to visit her at our house, he met Candy, and now he’s asked her to the movies instead of Sissy. My mother is at a loss as to what to do about it. She tells my sisters that they must sort it out for themselves. She asks them, rhetorically, if either of them really wants to date a boy who could be that insensitive. Of course they do. He has a car. My mother folds her lips and irons a mountain of laundry, refusing to listen to any more squabbling. So Sissy cries and calls Candy “that bitch” when I am the only one around to hear it. And Candy primps endlessly in the bathroom mirror, ignoring the pleas of those with bursting bladders, when she isn’t sulking because Sissy won’t lend her blue eye shadow to her.
It makes my life miserable. First, Kimmy tells on me when, in agonized desperation, I go into the woods across the lane from the house and pee. Never mind that Candy was the one hogging the bathroom. I am “uncivilized” and my mother scolds me for it, not privately but in the kitchen where my little brothers hear and giggle endlessly about it. “What did you use for toilet paper,” they demand, interrupting the scolding. “Leaves? Moss? Birch bark?” They giggle wildly, uncontrollably, even when my mother turns her scolding on them. They are unremorseful, and I am able to escape her, leaving her to tell them “It’s not funny” as I tiptoe down the stairs.
But the room I share with Candy and Sissy is a sulfurous and brooding place. Candy is pulling her hair out of curlers, and Sissy is lying on her bed, reading, and not watching her. She is not watching her so intensely it is like the sharp edge of a knife blade pressed into the silence, and I am tempted to beg her to watch Candy, to stop ignoring her. One glance would be all it would take to ignite the storm, and then they could shriek and wail and slam hairbrushes down. The tension would be broken, and I could relax then, could read a book while they quarrel as imperturbably as I can sit out a storm under a spruce tree.
But Sissy won’t look, and Candy is so miffed that she turns from the mirror and attacks me instead. “Did Mom tell you to stay in the basement when Jeffrey comes to pick me up?” she demands.
“No,” I say, trying to make it withering, but not succeeding. I am too surprised, and I am not able to hide it.
“Well, she said she was going to, so make sure you do.” Candy turns back to the mirror.
This may be the opening Sissy has been waiting for. She slams her book and sits up ramrod straight, her face going rocky with righteous indignation. “She did not. She said you could ask Evvie nicely, and that sure wasn’t nicely. I’m telling.”
“Go ahead. Who cares? Not you, for sure. You don’t care what people think of our family. Look at Evvie, for crying out loud. Look how she runs around. Susan Adams told me that Kerry Pierce asked her if Evvie was a girl or a boy. He couldn’t tell by looking at her. No one could! Look at her! Last time Jeffrey was here, she was running around in that same shirt, and I swear the same dirt on it. He’s going to think that’s the only clothes she owns!”
“She’s just a little kid!” Sissy jumps to my defense. “Leave her alone. She can’t help how she looks!”
“Maybe not, but she could at least be clean. Look at her! Mud on her knees, God knows what on her chin, her hair full of twigs, probably from shitting in the bushes somewhere. Like a little animal.”
“Whose fault is it that she couldn’t use the bathroom?” Sissy demands.
I don’t say a word. I am looking at myself in the mirror, over Candy’s shoulder. It is a large dresser mirror, and I can see nearly my entire body. I stare at myself. I cannot remember the last time I studied myself in the mirror. I suddenly see what it is about, why Mrs Haritsen hates me, why I eat my lunch alone. I suddenly see the raggedy dirty jeans and the shirt with the elbows out. I think of what I wore to school on Friday, the green pleated skirt with half the hem dragging out, the yellow blouse with the little flowers on it that has a coffee stain on the stomach. I wonder why I have never thought about it before, why I have seen everything else so keenly and never myself. I wonder why my mother lets me run around this way, and then I know. She doesn’t have the time to worry about it. Squeaking wheels get oiled. If I don’t demand new clothes, a trip downtown to get my hair cut and styled, money for hand lotion and nail polish and new socks, new shoelaces, jeans that aren’t hand-me-downs, I will never get them. The money is already stretched as tight as it will go. Thank God for one child who doesn’t nag and whine and beg. I think of Sissy’s new nail polish, Candy’s white mohair sweater, Kimmy’s new Barbie doll camper, and I know that it should have been mine, my new dress, my new jeans. But what I don’t demand I don’t seem to need, and if I am content, no one will jar me from it.
I come back to the room and they are still fighting, my sisters, screaming at each other, ostensibly over me, but actually over Jeffrey. “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings, not Evvie’s, not mine, no one’s, as long as you get what you want!” Sissy is saying, and tears are running down her face.
“That’s not true. You know that’s not true. It’s not my fault that Jeffrey liked me better, and it sure isn’t my fault that Evvie looks like a pile of barfy rags!”
I snatch up Sissy’s book from her bed and I let it fly. It’s only a paperback, it shouldn’t matter, but when it hits Candy in the face she screams, and even before the book is all the way to the floor, I can see the blood rushing out of her nose. She screams again, air bubbling past the blood from her nose, the blood that is falling on her white mohair sweater, and then I am gone, up the stairs, eeling past my mother as she comes down, making my escape before she knows I am the culprit. I grab a knife and a small bucket from the kitchen as I dash through it, trusting they will help me buy my way back into her good graces when I return. Rinky picks up on me as I race out the door and attaches himself to me like a sidecar. We careen down the lane and across Davis Road. And into my woods.
The path under my feet is hard, bare earth, beaten out by my own feet, and I fly along it, jumping fallen logs, veering around boggy spots. I could run this in the dark, I know it so well, and frequently do. It is fairly clear at first, as my path follows an old grown-over survey cut, but then it gets to the slough, still full of water this time of year, and I veer off, paralleling it, crouched over to run down an old rabbit trail, ignoring the branches that snatch at my hair and clothing, going to earth like an animal, fleeing into deeper forest. I run until I am sure I won’t be able to hear them call me, even if they send one of the boys up to stand by the mailbox on Davis Road and yell for me. Then I stop and drop, panting, onto the deep moss. Rinky gives me one sniff, to be sure I am all right, pushing his cold black olive nose against my cheek and into my ear, and then goes off on his own business, whatever that is. I am alone with my images of Candy’s blood bubbling over her mouth and onto her sweater. Dark red blood, clashing with her nearly auburn hair. I can’t remember that she has ever had a bloody nose before, at least not one from getting hit with something. I know she will blubber for at least an hour, and Jeffrey is due to pick her up in only half an hour. I am betting the blood won’t come out of the mohair sweater, even if they soak it in cold water and put meat tenderizer on it. Well, I reflect savagely, at least I won’t be around to humiliate her when Jeffrey does come.
My small bucket is beside me on the moss, the short kitchen knife inside it. I pull my knees up, start to rest my chin atop them. Then I stop and look at them. Muddy, where I knelt down earlier today when I was roughhousing with Rinky. And torn, so that my knee, too, is dirty, and showing through the rent denim.
So? So.
I cannot forget the grubby, unkempt kid I saw in the mirror earlier. That is not how I’ve been imagining myself, all this time. I think of myself as me, as looking like me. I’ve been seeing myself in terms of what I can do rather than how I look. Runner. Stalker. Tree climber, ditch jumper, mushroom hunter, game spotter. I had no clear physical image of myself. I’ve only seen the view from my windows. I never thought to wonder how I really looked, to others.
It was bad.
And yet a stubborn part of me doesn’t want to yield, refuses to rush home and wash up, brush my hair, put on clean clothes, and nag my mother for new clothes and new shoes. A part of me says, tough for them. Maybe I’ve only discovered this today, but I suspect they’ve known it all along. All along. They haven’t done right by me, and even if I never knew it until now, they knew it all along. So let them live with it. If they’re embarrassed by my looks, too bad. That’s how I am. And if they’ve never cared enough to come to me kindly, to gently help me change, then screw them. I’ll look this way. Always. Forever and ever and ever. And let them be ashamed. I won’t ask for new clothes, for new shoes. And if they offer them, I won’t want them. Not ever.
I close my eyes, imagining how horrible it would be if I went home and my mother and sisters had gone out and bought all new clothes for me, new shiny shoes, a coat with no teethmarks on the sleeve, jeans with knees in them. And if they gathered around me and brushed my hair and cut it and curled it. And then I went to school. And everyone would see the big change in me, and they’d gather around me and ask me questions. “Where’d ya get the new dress?” “Are those new shoes?” “I like your hair that way a lot better.” “You really look nice.” And I would have to smile and let them sniff me over. It would be admitting that I had been wrong, had been unkempt and shaggy. It would be admitting that they had been right to feel sorry for me all this time, to be disgusted by me all this time, to ostracize me all this time. It would be surrender. It’s too late. It’s gone too far, I can’t even surrender now. Not if I want to survive as me.
My eyes are stinging like I’m going to cry, but this doesn’t make sense. I’m angry, not sad. Angry. I take the knife from my bucket and stab it deep into the moss. Angry. I stab the moss again, and again.
Rinky comes back, snuffles my hair, snuffles at what I’m doing, nearly getting his black nose cut off by my knife in the process, finds it incomprehensible and hence uninteresting, and goes off again. Comes back a second later, licks my ear comfortingly, and leaves again.
The music begins, tentative and breathy. I lift my chin a fraction of an inch, and freeze, listening. There are only five or six notes to the simple melody, and it seems familiar, but I cannot put a name or words to it, nor say where I have heard it before. I turn my head slowly, listening. Sound travels strangely by water, and it takes me a minute before I am sure I have my direction. Across the slough. Damn.
I stand, catching up my bucket. There is a place to cross the slough, one where I will not get more than knee wet, and I head that way. As I go, I keep an eye out for wild mushrooms. My mother loves wild mushrooms, and has taught me twenty-seven different edible varieties, as well as those that I must not touch, and those that are merely useless or unsavory. I find several orange delicious, their caps actually a mottled green, but a secret orange ring hidden within their stems that makes identification easy. I draw the knife tip across the gills, watch the milky liquid rise to the cut. Lactarius family. Same as the pepper cap. I roll Latin names on my tongue as I scavenge mushrooms and walk.
The bottom of my bucket is covered with mushrooms by the time I get to the crossing place. I stand on the bank, picking my most likely path, and then set off, stepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, edging along an old log for part of the way, and then working my way again from tuft to tuft. Rinky comes, crashing and splashing to catch up with me, and nearly knocks me into the slough as he races past me. I have only two misses, and it is the same foot each time, so when I reach the other bank, I am only knee wet on one leg, and ankle-wet on both feet. Not bad.
The music has not ceased, but is smoothing out, as if the player is becoming more practiced. I know who it is, I do not need to catch the elusive tracery of his scent upon the air. I follow my nose and ears now, follow the sound and scent trickling between trees and brush, still pausing every now and then to add another mushroom or two to my bucket. Here is a hedgehog hydnum, a shingled cap with spiny little underpoints instead of gills, and a small orange boletus, its orange cap still tight to its white stem, hiding the soldierly rows of tubes that substitute for gills on it.
And here is a faun, goat legs akimbo, perched on an old log, cheeks red with puffing, eyes merry at my approach. He doesn’t stop playing, but plays for me, deliberately, showing off how well he blows his pipes. For they are genuine panpipes, the little wooden tubes bound in a row with some vegetable twine. They look new, the wood unscuffed, unworn, new-made for spring. I sit next to him on the log, watching how it’s done, how his mouth leaps from pipe to pipe. He is sweating, his curls are damp as they bob on his forehead, and I am struck again by his odor, sweeter than the warm breath of nursing puppies, pungent as crushed herbs, like tree resin and squashed raspberries and rich crumbly loam in the hand. Like all the sweetness of the earth embodied by a scent. It is a pleasure to sit beside him and smell him, and the music he plays has a similar unity to it. Breathless and soft it whispers like wind, like water over pebbles and rain dripping from branches, like birdcall and yet like the trumpetous sounding of an elk. He plays on and on and I listen.
When he stops, it is not the end of the song, but only the end of his breath. The song goes on around us, paler now, slurring its notes, but still there, breathing through the forest, and I understand what he has been doing. Not harmonizing with the forest, but amplifying it, anticipating its song, and playing beside it. He sees in my face my wonder and grins at me, unabashedly proud of himself. He wipes his pipes down one of his hairy thighs and offers them to me.
I take them cautiously, fearing for an instant that it is some kind of challenge from him, a dare for me to play as well as he has. If it is, I know I will not try. Something inside me is in full retreat from dares today. But in his eyes there is no challenge, only sharing. He watches me eagerly as I lift the pipes to my mouth, try my breath cautiously against one. It hoots softly, wistful as an owl, and my heart leaps in me with joy. Each pipe speaks to me with a voice I already know, and I forget the faun, forget everything but playing with the sounds I can utter now. It is like speaking a new language, no, like being mute all my life and then being granted speech, the speech of my dearest friends. I speak as the water, and then as the wind through branches, speaking as they do, not their thoughts but only their own being.
The faun’s hand is on my knee, and I suddenly feel it, breathe the last of my breath down the pipe. I stop reluctantly, and wipe them on the cleanest part of my sleeve and then offer them back to him. He takes them with a smile that says, “Wait, wait now, just a minute.” He holds them in his hands, and his rounded nails are the same color as his hooves, and two shades lighter than the tiny points that push up from amid his curls. His horns are growing this year, and I lean forward to touch one, knowing he will not flinch away nor resist my curiosity. Hard horn, smooth as polished wood yet knurled like diamond willow almost, the tip sharp against my palm. He angles his head away from my touch, gives me a glance that is through his lashes and over his cheekbones, then leans his head back, baring the browned swell of his throat, and lifts the pipes to his mouth. He closes his eyes.
He plays Pan.
He plays a glimpse of sunlight on a dappled flank in a birch grove, he plays brown eyes that light green with laughter, he plays the unwary clack of a cloven hoof against a glacier-worn stone, the deep breath drawn after a race through the woods, the grip of strong fingers on my wrist when he bids me be silent, the nudge of his shoulder against mine when our heads are close together over the first pale wood anemone, he plays the wind through brown curls and the trickle of rain over his shoulder blades. My throat closes up with how beautiful he is.
When I open my eyes, he has lowered the pipes, and I do not know how long I have been listening to the silence that is also a part of his song. He meets my shining eyes and his cheeks rose with more than the flush of his playing. He scratches his head, digging lovingly at the bases of his nubbly horns. With his free hand he offers the pipes to me again.
But this time I do not reach for them at all. I know what he wants to hear, and I do not wish to play it. I will not play ragged jeans and dirty knees, runny nose and scaly knuckles. I will not play my shame, and I try to pretend I don’t notice he is offering the pipes to me. So he pokes me with them, and when I still don’t respond, he pokes me again, hard, prodding me in the short ribs with their hardness.
I glare at him. He makes a face at me, sucking in his cheeks and hogging out his eyes. I snatch the pipes from his hand before he can jab me again. Immediately he settles back on his log seat, attentive and polite. I want to call him a bad name. He sits watching me, waiting for me, and I don’t understand why he is being this mean, this nasty, to demand this of me. I know what I am, and he can already see what I am. Why demand it be given a tongue? But he is still watching me, waiting, his face smooth, and I look long in his eyes, trying to find where he has hidden the malice that makes him demand this.
But he is too deceptive for me, and at last, in anger, I lift the pipes to my lips. I close my eyes, and squawk out bony dirty knees and snarled hair. The pipes shriek hilariously of a smudged face and hands rougher than a dog’s toepads, of ragged clothes that flutter in the wind they croak, and then of thin arms and a bony chest.
The pipes smack against my front teeth, jarring me to my very spine and cutting my upper lip and gum before they fly past my face. I open my eyes, frightened, and his hand is still lifted, palm toward me, as if his hand will fly back again and this time strike my face. His eyes are outraged and hurt. We stare at each other across the torn place between us, and something is bleeding, I am cut in a place that isn’t even on my body and he shares the wound, feels it just as I do. The hurt lasts a long time, and I don’t know how to make it stop.
I stoop slowly and pick up the pipes. They are unhurt, save for a drop of my blood on the end of one. I wipe it off on my shirt, cautiously offer them back to him. He takes them as if they are encrusted with dog shit, by two disdainful fingertips. He gives me a look I cannot interpret and hops off the log and rubs the pipes over the moss carefully, rips loose a handful of green willow leaves and scrubs the pipes with them, staining them green but ridding them of whatever uncleanliness he imagines on them. He is puffing when he sits back down. As he starts to lift the pipes to his mouth, I rise. I’ve had enough music for today, I decide. Especially I fear that he may play his own beauty again, a wicked counterpoint to my latest performance.
Walnut fingers grip my wrist, clenching tight. He has always been stronger than I am, but never before today has he used that, except in play. I refuse to struggle, knowing I cannot break free. Instead, I glare at him, then make my face cold and impassive as a bank of blown snow. I look past his shoulder into the moving shadows of the woods, for the wind has risen slightly and is stirring branches and grasses to dance. With the corner of my eye, I see his left hand lift the pipes to his mouth.
He plays, and I must listen, but I don’t have to show I’m listening. I continue to stare past him as he plays a tiny green frog clinging to the underside of a leaf, a cluster of high-bush cranberries dangling beneath an umbrella of rosy leaves, tiny alder cones rattling down on new-fallen leaves, and spruce sap glinting in the sunlight. I watch the shadows sway.
He pauses, but not for breath. He shakes me, hard, by my wrist, and I try not to sway with his rattling. I look at him, making my eyes cold and hard. Something in his forest eyes keeps me from looking away from his gaze, even when he lifts his pipes and puts them to his mouth. He plays again, the same tune.
But this time I cannot deny the slender ankle wading past the frog, the strong brown fingers reaching for the cranberries, the laughter that echoes the rattle of the cones, the fan of hair the wind blows past the spruce tree that glints the same as the shining sap. He plays on, watching my face, and I hear warm breath stained with wild strawberries, the curved back of someone curled and sleeping in the deep grass, green eyes blinking with snowflakes on their lashes. What I hear is me, and not me, like a reflection in a pool is both me and the leaf-dappling light on the soft mud at the bottom.
He plays it twice again before he will let me go, his eyes watching me as if commanding me to commit it to memory. Evelyn Sylvia it is, Evelyn in the forest, the Evelyn he knows, and the notes are my name as his pipes say it, as the forest itself breathes it.
His fingers loosen around my wrist as he continues to play. I draw my hand free of his, and gather my bucket to go. Rinky comes to my tongue click, and splashes beside me as we recross the slough. His black tail is curled up tightly over his shining back, and I think of going back and asking Pan to play Rinky for me. Another time. Another time. His music follows me still, rising and falling with the stirring wind, but as I get farther and farther away, it blends with the forest’s own singing, and I cannot tell if I am hearing the forest itself or Pan’s rendition of it.
His music has driven the sense out of my head. I see my mother’s face as I shut the door behind me, and the sound of the door shutting is like the clack of a jaw trap on my ankle. Too late to run, and the mushrooms I offer are not enough. I am required to sit at the table and peel potatoes while I listen to a recital of my sins. She admits that Candy said a lot of cruel things, but that doesn’t excuse my physical violence. Sissy and Candy come up from the basement, both to listen and to chime in with any crimes my mother may miss. Candy’s nose has stopped bleeding, but as I suspected, the mohair sweater, though still soaking in cold water, is probably ruined. I bite my tongue, refusing to say aloud that now she will probably give it to me, hand down the stained, worn-out stuff to Evelyn, she’s too stupid to know the difference.
Candy’s eyes are both blacked, too, and this explains Sissy’s sudden chumminess with her. Jeffrey showed to take Candy out, but when he saw swollen nose and puffing eyes, he backed out of the date, none too graciously. Now they both agree that Jeffrey is an asshole, but have no gratefulness to me for revealing that to them. Candy is demanding I pay for her sweater, which is a joke, as I never have any money except at my birthday or Christmastime. I am judged and condemned to clean up the room that we share. I don’t say a word as they rant at me, and I can feel how much angrier this makes my sisters. But it only seems to make my mother more thoughtful. As she swoops up the heap of potatoes I have peeled and splashes them into a bubbling stew and stirs it, she stares at the blank wall over the gas stove, and her grey-green eyes are distant, almost as if she were listening to music rather than to the nattering and bleating of my sisters.
The next morning I find that the hem of my pleated skirt has been resewn. The mohair sweater is dyed a uniform brown before it is folded into my drawer. I say nothing, and neither does anyone else.
SEVEN (#ulink_e8b74d7a-418b-5ca9-9008-9e55607164ea)
The Farm
June 1976
“Are we gonna stay so I can have a pony?” There is a ring of orange juice around Teddy’s mouth, like a visible question mark at the end of his sentence. He phrases the words casually, but his eyes are vaguely accusing, as if he expects me to selfishly snatch all his hopes away. As if someone has warned him in advance of my cruelty.
I refuse to let their warning be fulfilled. “I guess so, honey. Daddy and I need to talk about it a little more. Do you want to stay here all winter?”
I reach across the table and rumple his hair, but it is too short to tousle now. He reaches up to smooth it, looks briefly puzzled at how short it is. But it will grow again. It is not permanent, none of this is. They can change the outside of him, but they cannot change what I have put within him. Child of my long days with you, full of stories read by me, of questions I have answered and questions I have asked, grown within my own body and then nourished by my mind. My own. My boy, I thought, mine. This one is all mine, Mother Maurie. You may be able to whistle up Tom, but not my Teddy. This one I’m keeping.
I cancel that thought as soon as it surfaces, disturbed by my own growing paranoia. I cannot understand what is happening to me. Sometimes, when I think about it, I am frightened.
Teddy considers my question gravely, and I await his answer solemnly. “Yes, Mom, I think I would like to stay. I could have a pony, and go to school in the very same school that Daddy attended when he was a boy my age. And when Bix gets better, he’s gonna teach me to run the big tractor. And I’ll be a man, not a little sissy.”
His eyes light up as he finishes this speech. No doubt the thoughts please him, but it disturbs me a little to hear them couched in phrases fresh from Grandpa’s mouth.
“Well, I suppose we’ll probably stay then,” I say lamely. A cruel temptation rises in me. It would be so easy to say, “Too bad your poor puppy will be all alone this summer. Too bad your Tonka trucks have to sit on their shelves and get dusty, too bad Eddie-down-the-road will have no one to swim with him in the gravel pit this summer. But I guess a pony is worth it. I hope our Bruno puppy doesn’t run away because he’s so lonely. I hope no one breaks into our cabin and steals all your toys. I hope mice don’t chew up your stuffed animals.” I could show them how it’s really done, how you twist a kid’s head until he doesn’t know what he wants, how you scare him and torment him into wanting what you want him to want.
But you don’t do that to children you love, and that is how I know they don’t really love Teddy. By the way they use him to manipulate Tom and me. Perhaps tonight I will point that out to Tom, open his eyes to how we are being used. Or perhaps tonight I will step in front of a speeding locomotive and halt it with my upraised hand. Teddy finishes eating and carries his dishes unsteadily to the sink. He lifts his hand in silent farewell, the ultimate in cool, and I respond in kind. He grins suddenly and flashes past me and out the door, is gone faster than a red fox disappearing into tall grass. He will do whatever it is small boys do all day when their mothers are careful not to bother them. I will not spoil things by asking what it is he rushes off to do. Whatever it is, it belongs to him. A boy needs time on his own.
But what if he is not on his own? I begin to tot up the time he spends at home with me, as opposed to the time he spends at Grandma’s big house. Well, they have the television. Add a lot of time on that score. And they have a full-stocked refrigerator, and a freezer that Auntie Steffie keeps full of Fudgsicle bars and Eskimo Pies. A major draw. And no one imposes discipline on him. If he becomes unbearable, they simply send him back to me. More and more, I slowly realize, I am becoming the punishment, the place you are sent when you’re bad. I’m the “take a bath, pick up your toys, brush your teeth, go to bed” person. The candy-givers live next door.
I realize my teeth are clenched so tightly that my jaw aches. I have been polishing the same spot of table for the last five minutes. I rock back on my heels and raise my cold hands to my sweaty forehead. Try to calm down, I tell myself reasonably. Every day you get further and further out. These are not wicked evil people. They are simply run-of-the-mill grandparents, enjoying their grandson during the first long visit they’ve had since he was born. All grandparents love to spoil their grandchildren, love to give them candy and privileges, toys and ponies. If Mother says no, ask Grandma, says the T-shirt. I smile ruefully to myself. Calm again. Real.
What is coming over you, I ask myself soothingly. What makes you think these wild things? What ignites your territorial fury, what sets you off so quickly these days? A shiver of cold fear touches me. What is happening to me? Lately I see only the worst in anyone’s motives, including Tom, Tom who I love above all else, beyond all reason or safety. If I can doubt Tom, who is left for me to believe in? What has happened to the safety of our marriage? We never quarrel, we never nag each other, we laugh together, and he holds me warm at night. He is tall and handsome and strong and he loves me. I know this is so. But sometimes it seems that whenever his parents come into the picture, we are at each other’s throats. What is becoming of my serenity, the inward peace I have so carefully cultivated? I feel pieced together, like a shattered china cup mended with the wrong glue, knowing that the next time they fill me, I will again shatter, scalding all within reach.
I make another little space in my self. There, I tell myself, you’ve seen the problem. Well, it’s simply solved. Just start fresh, today, turn over a new leaf, be a better person, refuse to be prey to these feelings. Make a resolution, right now. No more nagging. No more emotional arguments. Decide all on logic. Show Tom a little more affection, make him love you again. Support your husband in this thing he needs to do. He perceives staying here as the payment of a debt, as evening out with his folks for all they have done for him. How can I begrudge him that? He needs to do this thing, to make peace with himself.
I make a hot cup of tea to calm myself. Tea bag in the cup. Water in the kettle. Kettle on the stove. Put the dishes away while the kettle heats. Pour the steaming water into the cup. Breathe in the comforting aroma of brewing tea. Remove the bag. Put in the sugar. Sit in the chair by the window. Concentrate for just a few moments on these very simple movements, let them be a ritual of serenity. Breathe deeply and unwind.
I sip my tea and shut my eyes for a moment. The old familiar images rise to my mind. Think of a black room, completely dark. A small shining white thread stretches across the floor of the room. That is my idea of sanity. If I can spend my whole life walking through that dark hall, balancing on the white thread, never breaking it, then I will remain normal. Be accepted. But it is such a temptation to just relax, to let go, to fall from the sharp and cutting edge of rationality into the deep warm blackness of my own world.
Pan comes from my blackness. I know that. Pan had to come from the blackness. When I had decided I wanted to be real, all those years ago, I had banished him to that blackness, to the hidden closet of my mind. Traded in a bizarre illusion for a real life, for Tom and later Teddy. I had left the old loneliness behind, and with it I had abandoned the dreams I had fabricated for dealing with it. Pan, my imaginary companion, had been a defense mechanism, a tool for dealing with isolation. And now he is back. What does that mean? Forget it. Just forget it for now. Turn to the matters at hand. Chores to do, a life to lead. I sip at my tea. It’s cold.
The rest of the day slips past me just as elusively. I do housework. That is all there is for me to do. There are no vehicles free for me to drive to town, and one does not drive to town frivolously, not when Mother Maurie is keeping track of the gasoline. The gardens outside the houses belong to Mother Maurie and are faithfully tended by Ellie. One must not walk through the planted fields lest one crush the new plants. There are the woods, of course, beyond the chicken yard. But there is nothing there for me, and no reason to go there.
So I do housework. Generic tasks. Sweeping the same floor I swept yesterday, dusting the same shelves, cleaning the same bathtub. I fix a careful lunch for myself at noon. Tuna-fish sandwiches, cut into triangles, a handful of potato chips, a pot of tea. Tom will not be home for lunch, he is discussing business at the big house. Teddy is with him. I eat my tuna in careful bites, wondering what would happen if I went over there, if I knocked on the door and walked in. Would they all look up from the big table in astonishment, wondering who had come to disturb them at their meal, who had come breaking into a family’s time together? Ridiculous. They’d smile and greet me, make a place for me at the table. But there’d be the question, from Mother Maurie, most likely. “Why, Evvie, how nice! And what brings you over today?” And I would have no answer, would die before I said, “I’m lonely, I want to see my husband, I want to watch my baby eat.” Those reasons are not good enough for practical people like the Potters. I have no real reason to go over there, nor desire to sit through a noon discussion of hydraulic hoses and whether the stock of gaskets is sufficient. It would be pointless to go over there, and silly.
After lunch, I have my lunch dishes to wash, and to dry, and to set carefully away. It is good to be busy. After the dishes, I read a romance. This one is about pirates. Their captain is actually a kidnapped nobleman who has won the respect of the pirates and becomes their captain by his skill with a sword. All he wants is to regain what is rightfully his, and he sets out to recapture one of his own ships, now carrying the loutish cousin who arranged to have him kidnapped so he could inherit the pirate captain’s rightful place. Also aboard is his loutish cousin’s beautiful and willful fiancee, Desiree. She has raven tresses and a bee-stung lower lip. She pouts beautifully, and doesn’t wish to marry the loutish Alfred, but has been forced into it by her father, who thinks only of money. David, of course, captures the ship and takes her prisoner and holds her for ransom, thinking to make his loutish cousin Alfred very unhappy. Desiree hates David at first, thinking he is just a greedy pirate, interested only in money, much like her father. But even as she is hating him, she has to think constantly about his broad shoulders and white teeth, his roguish smile and dancing blue eyes, and the elegant way he put his own cloak around her to cover her after one of his less civilized pirates had ripped her bodice …
“If we’re staying here this winter,” I say, being careful to always say, “if,” not “since,” “then I suppose I should look around for a job. What do you think?”
“Just a sec,” Tom said, not even looking up. Evening has come, greying the windows and leaking shadows into the house. The table is an island awash with yellow light. The rest of the kitchen is a gloomy, huddling place. Tom’s heavy tractor manual has a yellow cover, stained with diesel. Tom’s notes and a schematic take up the rest of the tabletop. There is no room for me to share the table. “I’ll talk to you in just a second, honey. I’m sure the problem is in this section of the hydraulics, and I think I can find it if I’m just left alone for ten minutes straight. Okay?”
I don’t answer, but he doesn’t notice. He is already submerged in valves and lines, filters and clamps. It doesn’t bother me. There are other things for me to do. Teddy is ready for bed, has been tubbed and scrubbed, and now waits, red-cheeked, for a bedtime story. He is a little pinto himself now, my boy, his innocent butt white still, but the rest of him baked brown right down to the top of his sneaker lines. His fair hair has turned ashy white, his face tanned so dark that his blue eyes are a shock. I sit on the floor by the wicker sofa that has been spread up as a narrow bed.
“What shall we read?” I ask, but it is really a rhetorical question. Where the Wild Things Are is already set out by his bed. We have read it every night for the past three months, and he shows no sign of tiring of it. I do not mind, even though I can now recite it. There is something in this book for Teddy, and once he has digested it, he will be ready to go on.
“This one,” he says, and presents me with a Little Golden Book about Scooby-Do. With some reluctance I accept it, leaf through its stiff newness.
“Auntie Steffie gave it to me. He’s our favorite. When I go over Saturday mornings, we watch Scooby-Do together, with Pop-Tarts.”
The ultimate cultural experience. We read the new book slowly, with Teddy taking great care to examine every picture. It is the same story that they use for all the cartoons, and Teddy seems pleased with its familiarity. When we are finished, I cannot resist saying, “Well, I think I like Where the Wild Things Are better.”
“It’s okay,” Teddy concedes. “But it’s not real.”
“And a talking dog that hunts for ghosts is real?”
He frowns. “It’s real in the story. Not a dream. Auntie Steffie says that Max falls asleep in his bed and just dreams the Wild Things. She says that he had a bad dream because he went to bed with no dinner, and that’s what the story is really about.”
“Oh,” I say. I try to find the right words. “I don’t think it’s a dream in the story. It never says he falls asleep and then wakes up again.”
“But then how did he get to where the Wild Things are?”
“In the boat. His bed turned into a boat.”
“No. ’Cause that can’t really happen. He just fell asleep and dreamed it. It’s a dumb story, just about a dream someone had.”
He stuffs the Scooby-Do book into the place of honor under his pillow. I pick up Where the Wild Things Are as I stand and take it with me. I think it is my book now, a thing Teddy has outgrown and cast aside. Perhaps I am a thing Teddy has outgrown and cast aside. I feel gutted, hollow. Why did she have to take that away from him? I wonder. Did she even know what she was doing? Is it a malicious cruelty, or only ignorance? And why is it so important to me? Am I worrying about Teddy, really, or am I worrying about me and what she has taken from me, the thing Teddy and I shared? I feel Teddy’s eyes on me and turn back to him.
“Can we get some new books next time we go to town? I had lots of books at our old house and here I don’t have hardly any. Can we get some new ones?”
“What do you mean, our old house? Your books at home still belong to you, and they’ll still be there when we go back. If we stay here much longer, maybe I’ll send for some of them. But not too many, because we’d just have to pack them up again when we go home.”
“Can’t we just get new ones?”
“Maybe. A few. We’ll see.” I tug back the covers that are sliding off his feet, snug them around him. “Don’t worry about it. Daddy and I are going to talk tonight and decide all about when we’re going home. Then I’ll tell you in the morning, and things won’t seem so confusing. We can plan better.”
“Auntie Steffie says she saw a Sylvester and Tweety book in the drugstore.” His eyes are already closing. I don’t reply but reach to turn off the lamp by his head. As I rise once more, he asks from behind closed eyes, “What if we never go back? What if we live here forever and ever? Then would we send for all my stuff?”
“Don’t be silly,” I tell him. “We’ll be going home, and all your stuff will be there and just fine. Now go to sleep.”
I leave his bedside like an actor leaving a darkened area of a stage, stepping into the yellow light of the kitchen and Tom’s set. The light spills in a circle on the table from the pull-down fixture, illuminating Tom’s manual. His hand moves, scratching pencil notes on a yellow tablet. He looks tired, older. His hands are graven dark with diesel and oil, the nails cracked, the downy hair on the backs of his wrists and forearms eaten away by harsh cleansers. The lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, between his eyes and on his brow, are pale against his tan. He glances up from his manuals, gives me a smile, and goes back to tracing a diagram. As I walk behind his chair he reaches back with his free hand, hooks it around me for a moment, and pulls me up against his back. I hug him suddenly, impulsively, putting my face against his hair, smelling his true scent despite the diesel. He goes, “Mmmm,” and is still for a second. Then he leans forward again, his fingers wander slowly across his diagram, his hand drops away from me. I stand clear of him.
I settle in another chair, across the table from him. I rest my pirate romance on the edge of the table, stealing a bit of light from him, hovering at the edge of his glow, and try to submerse myself in David and Desiree and Alfred. They are all idiots. Boring, stupid people, trapped in a trite plot, who will inevitably do what is expected of them. Alfred will be unmasked as the kidnapper and swindler he is. David will regain his wealth and marry Desiree. How can they be so blind to the other possibilities? And who could have put such an idea in Teddy’s head? Live here forever and ever. The three of us in this cramped little house, forever under the sway of Mother Maurie. I can see me now, a junior wife in the Potter tribe. I smile at the idea and go back to my pirates. But after a while I find myself rubbing my jaw, where the knotted muscles ache.
“Tom? Tom?”
“Yeah, just a sec, Lyn … Okay. What is it?”
He closes his manual on his pencil and looks up at me, sighing. I am seven years old and I’ve been talking during the spelling test. I grope for excuses. “I just wanted to talk to you for a second, honey. Have you given any more thought to staying here for the winter?”
“Sure.” He stretches, rolling his shoulders under his T-shirt. “I told the folks today that it was all settled. Dad was really relieved.” He pauses at the look on my face. “Isn’t that what we agreed on?” He looks genuinely puzzled. Frantically I dig through my memories of the conversation. When had I agreed, when had I told him, sure, go ahead, we’ll stay the winter?
“No, Tom, I don’t think so. I thought we said we’d stay till the end of summer, and talk about the winter. I mean, we need to discuss it more. For one thing, I’d need to find a job, and I can’t think what there is in town. And we’d have to have all our stuff shipped down, which means asking someone to pack it up for us. And we’d have to spend the whole winter here, in this tiny place, and try to find decent tenants for our place and hope they don’t tear it to ribbons …”
My voice runs down. The world tilts around me. Déjà vu. I know what comes next. Control becomes very shaky, things seem to have fuzzy edges. I cannot feel the book I hold. It’s like being washed down a chute. First Tom will be puzzled at my resistance, then irritated. I will surrender rather than anger him. We will stay the whole winter in this wretched little place. Despair washes over me, almost a physical thing. No way to escape this, no way at all. The play is written, I must say my lines.
“Lyn, I can’t go to Dad now, when he’s counting on us, and say that … are you all right?”
I nod, swallowing the nauseous lump in my throat. A great wind of stillness is blowing past me, drowning Tom’s voice. Talk to him, I urge myself, watching his mouth move, his head tilt as he coaxes me to be reasonable. I know what he must be saying, but my ears cannot seem to make out the words. Tell him you’re afraid. Tell him they’re going to take him and Teddy away from you, and you will be left alone in the darkness. Tell him. Tell him now.
But his words are flowing like a river, washing past me, barely touching my ears as they carry us inexorably on. “… that we were staying. It didn’t seem fair to leave them wondering. Mom’s got it all planned out. You can use her washer and dryer on Tuesdays, that fits in with everyone else’s schedule. Steffie was really excited. She’s really a sucker for her little nephew, and she gets so lonely around here in winter. She thought it was great that you and she would get some time together. She’s just full of plans for canning and berry picking this fall, and sewing and cooking together this winter. She really wants to pull you into the family, make you feel like part of the gang. She thought maybe you’d want to go shopping, get some clothes more appropriate for this part of the country …”
The white noise comes up again, washing over me like a wave. I stare through it, trying to see Tom, my Tom. They would pull him into the family machine and absorb him. Then Teddy. Then me. First it would be helping out with the big family meals and sewing and washing in the big house. Maybe by next spring I’d be taking care of the chickens, helping plan the kitchen garden. By the year after it would be as if I’d never existed as a separate person at all. We would all live happily ever after. All I had to do was let go. Surrender. Admit they were right in feeling sorry for me. Admit I needed to be fixed. Stop being me and become Tom Potter’s wife.
“Don’t pull at your face like that, honey. You’ll get wrinkles. So, what do you say?”
Fuck you, Tom Potter, you traitor, traitor, traitor. And fuck me, too, because I am saying, “Well, we’ll have to work out the details as we go along, I guess. It’s just for this winter, right?”
“Of course, honey. You don’t think we’re going to live here forever, do you?”
You bet your ass I do. Why do you smile so warmly and go right back to your manual? I look down at my own book, study the shapes of the words on the page. I read a few, they make no sense. So I try counting them. I used to be able to soothe myself by doing this, counting all the words on a page, but tonight it fails me.
“I’m going to bed,” Tom announces, flopping the old manual shut. He stands and stretches, towering over me in the cramped room. “I want to hit the job early tomorrow, get this tractor back on line. So I’ll get a late breakfast with Dad in town. If you want, I’ll take Teddy with me, you can sleep in.” He pauses. I count words, not looking up from the page. “You’re coming to bed now,” he asks, but it isn’t really a question.
“Yeah, in a second. Yeah.” I turn a page, count some more.
He stands over me a few seconds longer. I can feel his contentment, he has it all. He’s come home to his family, to his old familiar world, his wife is tractable, his son is smart, he has it all. He waits for me a few seconds, then shrugs and trudges off down the hall. As soon as he is gone, I feel my shoulders drop. I can breathe, as if the air has flowed back into the space he occupied. I lean back in my chair, setting my book carelessly atop his scribbled notes, listening to the sounds of Tom going to bed. Water runs in the bathroom. Light switch clicks off in the bathroom, then on in the bedroom. Clump of falling shoes, a rustling of clothing. I hear his belt buckle ring against the floor. More rustling and the bed creaks. Silence. The silence grows longer, becomes indignant.
I know just how he is lying in there. His head is almost under the covers, he is curled on his side. He has left the light burning for me. His eyes are closed but he is far from sleeping. Duty calls me.
I arise and click off the kitchen light. Night flows into the room from the uncurtained windows. There was part of a moon, and stars peeping through the partial overcast. Rain tomorrow, maybe. Rain. Rain for the new crops rising in green rows. Good. Rain for the fields.
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Megan Lindholm
A magical, classic tale of the transformative power of love from Megan Lindholm, who also writes as Robin Hobb. Evelyn is a solitary child, preferring to wander in the woods in all weathers rather than socialise. Her secret is a fantastic companion: a faun with whom she plays in the woods. Years later Evelyn finds happiness as a wife and mother, but life turns sour when the family move to Tacoma where her husband is asked to fill in at hisfather’s business. Evelyn’s husband’s wish for them to stay permanently with his family causes a rift between them and then a terrible tragedy makes the situation even more impossible. Miraculously, when she needs a friend, Evelyn’s childhood companion reappears in Tacoma. Pan, now an adult satyr and a secret friend to both her and her son, eventually becomes her lover. He leads Evelyn on an odyssey out of her failed marriage to fulfilment in the woods of Alaska.
CLOVEN HOOVES
Megan Lindholm
Who also writes as
Robin Hobb
Copyright (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
HarperVoyager
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1993
Copyright © Megan Lindholm Ogden 1991
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover illustration © Jackie Morris
Robin Hobb writing as Megan Lindholm asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008287399
Ebook Edition © August 2019 ISBN: 9780008363956
Version: 2019-06-07
Praise (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
‘Hobb is one of the great modern fantasy writers … As addictive as morphine’
The Times
‘A little slice of heaven’
The Guardian
‘The feelings of anguish, ambiguity, fear and failure [in her novels] are as familiar as those in a novel by Jonathan Franzen’
Independent on Sunday
‘Hobb is always readable. But the elegant translucence of her prose is deceptive … That is the ambition of high art. The novelists in any genre are rare who achieve it with Hobb’s combination of accessibility and moral authority’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A series that recalls HBO’s Game of Thrones, and The Lord of the Rings’
The Telegraph
‘In today’s crowded fantasy market Robin Hobb’s books are like diamonds in a sea of zircons’
George R.R. Martin
‘Hobb is superb, spinning wonderful characters and plots from pure imagination’
Conn Iggulden
‘Magic is the word. Absolutely riveting’
Barbara Erskine
‘Hobb seamlessly blends intrigue, action and characters who feel so real that they become more than words on a page’
SFX
‘Glorious and beautiful storytelling from Robin Hobb’
SciFi Now
Contents
Cover (#u412e7488-d872-556b-a70a-2bf53a63dad0)
Title Page (#ua5809da3-20b2-5f1b-a4c4-f8e043e8c063)
Copyright
Praise
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
About the Author
By Robin Hobb
About the Publisher
ONE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
In Flight
11 March 1976
I turn away from staring out the window, lean over to check my child in the seat beside me. There’s nothing to see out there, anyway. Outside the oval airplane window, a night sky jets soundlessly by. Overcast covers all but a few stars. Nothing to keep my mind from chewing on itself. Inside is the sound of the engines, of the tiny seat fans whirring as they stir the stale air. Rows of red upholstered seat backs, backs of heads. Most of the overhead seat lights are off. Tiny airline blankets are tucked around the shoulders of some dozing passengers. Others read newspapers and magazines, smoke, or talk softly to seatmates. A few drink industriously. Nothing in here to keep my mind busy, either.
Teddy is asleep. He had asked for the window seat, and of course we had given it to him, even though we knew there would be little to see on this night flight from Fairbanks, Alaska, to the Sea-Tac Airport in Washington. Still, he got to watch the tower and runway lights vanish away beneath us, caught a brief glimpse of the lights of some little town down there a while later. Then he used the airplane’s bathroom twice, giggled over finding the barf bag in the seat pocket, got a coloring book and crayons and plastic pilot wings from a stewardess, colored for a while, and got bored and wiggled for a while. And now, finally, he is asleep. I carefully move his copy of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are because the corner of it is digging into his cheek. I give a sigh of relief that is partially anxiety. With Teddy dozing, there is nothing to distract me from my worrying. Except Tom. I turn my attention away from my five-year-old son and to my husband.
Who is also asleep in his seat on the other side of me.
Light hair is falling over his forehead. He breathes softly, evenly, at peace with the world and himself. I know I should let him rest. This is the horrible leave-Fairbanks-in-the-middle-of-the-night, -arrive-in-Seattle-too-early-to-be-awake flight. I should let him sleep, so he will be fresh and alert when his parents come to meet us at the airport. I shouldn’t wake him just to talk to me and reassure me. I really should let him sleep.
But I touch his hair lightly back into place. He smiles, and without opening his eyes, his hand comes up to hold mine. For a time we are silent, shooting through the night. Strangers occupy other seats around us, and doze or smoke or read papers or sip drinks. But Tom and I are alone among them. It is something we have always been able to do, make a quiet, private space around ourselves, no matter what the circumstances.
“Still worrying?” he asks me softly. His eyes remain closed.
“A little,” I admit.
“Silly.” His hand squeezes mine briefly, then relaxes again. He sighs, shifts in his seat to face me. He leans his face against the seat back while he talks to me, as if we were in our bed at home, lying face-to-face, heads on pillows, talking. It makes me wish we were, that I could snug my body up against his and hold him while he talks. He speaks softly, his deep voice soothing as a bedtime story. “We’re going to have a good time. Well, you will, anyway. I’ve got to fill in on the farm and in the shop until Bix’s shoulder heals. Fields to plow, tractors to fix. But you and Teddy will have a great time. Teddy’s going to have the farm to run around on. Eggs to gather, chicks, ducklings, pigs, all that stuff. And my mom and sisters are going to love having you. Ever since I married you, Mom and Steffie have been dying to get their hands on you. Go shopping, introduce you around. Steffie had so many plans when I talked to her on the phone, I don’t know how you’ll keep up with her.” He smiles at the thought of his younger sister.
I edge closer in my seat, lean my head close to his. “That’s just it. I don’t know how I’ll keep up with her, either.” I think of Steffie as I last saw her, on a brief Christmas visit two years ago. She had been just out of high school that year. She’d come home from some party, into the living room of the farmhouse, dressed in a dark green velvet sheath and high black heels, begemmed at ear and throat and wrist. Like a magazine cover come to life, but rushing to hug us, to say she was so glad we’d been able to fly down for Christmas. The memory reawakens in me the same twinge I’d felt then: awe at her beauty, and a shiver of fear.
Why?
Because she was so beautiful, so perfect. The ugly little jealousy that beautiful women always awoke in me had stirred. That she was Tom’s own sister hadn’t mattered. It wasn’t a sexual kind of jealousy. It was the knowledge that I could never compete with women like that, that I’d never learned to be elegant and feminine and charming and stunning and all those other adjectives that Steffie and Mother Maurie embodied so easily. Yet these were the type of women that Tom had around him when he was growing up. How could he have settled for a mouse like me? What if he woke up one day and realized he’d been cheated?
I tune in suddenly that Tom is still talking. “Steffie and Ellie love you. Mom and Dad think you’re great. Of course, I think a lot of that is that they were amazed that any woman at all would have me. Probably secretly grateful you married me and whisked me off to Alaska and out of their hair.”
He is teasing, of course. No one could ever wish to be rid of him. Tom is as perfect a product as Steffie is, tall and handsome and muscled, charming and kind and intelligent. Tom could have had his pick of women. I am still mystified that he chose me. But he did. And six years of marriage have taught me that I can believe in that miracle. So I can say to him, honestly, “I’m just afraid I’ll do something wrong. Put my foot in my mouth, spill soup in my lap. We’ve never stayed a month with them before, Tom. That’s a long time to live in someone else’s house, see them every day. I don’t know how I’ll handle it.”
He refuses to share my worry. “You’ll handle it just fine. They’ll love you just like I do. Besides, we’ll be in the little guest house. You’ll have time to yourself. I know you aren’t into socializing all the time. They’ll understand when you need to be alone.”
He believes it. There’s no mistaking the calm assumption in his voice. I wish I could.
He senses my doubt. “Look, Evelyn, it’ll be easy. Just let them make a fuss over you. They’ll love that. Go shopping. Get your hair done, buy some earrings, do, oh, I don’t know, whatever it is that women do together. You’ll have a great time.”
I look down at my sedate black skirt that matches my sedate black jacket that covers my simple white blouse. I think of the jeans and sweatshirts and sneakers in my luggage. I try to imagine shopping with Steffie. Green velvet. Sparkling earrings. The images don’t fit. “I’ll try,” I say doubtfully.
“I know. You’ll do fine.” He squeezes my hand again, leans back in his seat.
“What about your dad?” I say softly.
Tom grins suddenly. “That old fart still got you buffaloed? Look, Evelyn, it’s a big front. Just stand up to him and give him the same shit right back. He’ll only push you as far as you let him. I found that out a long time ago.”
“That’s easier said than done,” I mutter disconsolately, remembering his father’s piercing black eyes and square jaw. “Kinda skinny, ain’t she?” he’d remarked loudly to Tom the first time we were introduced. I’d stood still, too stunned to speak, until Mother Maurie shook my hand merrily and said, “Oh, don’t mind him, he’s just teasing.” But I hadn’t seen any laughter in his eyes. Only evaluation, like I was a heifer Tom had brought home for breeding stock. “He scares me,” I confess.
Tom laughs softly. “Only because you let him. Hey, he’s had to be that way to get where he is. If he hadn’t been direct and assertive, and pushed people for all he could get out of them, he’d still be plowing the back forty and trying to pay off the mortgages. He pushes. I know that. But it’s not like it’s just you. He’s like that to everyone, just to see how far they’ll push. Draw a line.” He sees the doubt in my face, offers an alternative. “But there are other ways to get around him. Hell, look at Steffie’s way. Be Daddy’s little girl when he’s looking, and do what you please later.” He chuckles fondly at how well Steffie gets around their dad.
It is all so simple for him. Tom is like that. People are easy for him. He meets them, he sizes them up, he knows just how to handle them. And they always like him. Instantly, the first time they meet him. And they go on liking him, always. When we were in college, all the girls had crushes on him and all the guys thought he was a helluva friend. The freaks and the bikers, the druggies and the straights, the profs and the frat guys: they’d all liked him. He shifts gears effortlessly, is never out of place. I have always envied him that talent; he is able to be anything that anyone needs, as required.
And to me, he is everything. Husband, lover, best friend. There are very few people in my life, but I have never felt alone since Tom came to me, he fills all the niches for me. I look at him and a wave of tenderness breaks over me. After all he has done for me, surely I can do this simple thing for him. Live near his family for a month, make them like me, be pleasant to them. It won’t be hard. Make Tom proud of me. In a way, it is a thing I owe them. And whenever things get hard, I’ll just remind myself that these people are Tom’s family, that without them, he wouldn’t exist.
For a moment, I flash back to the fact that without Tom, I wouldn’t exist. Not as I am now. He had taken a horribly introverted, socially hostile girl and made her over into a competent woman who was satisfied with her life. I think of our little cabin and ten acres of woods, of my job at Annie’s Organic Foods and Teas. I have friends now, real friends, something I’d never had when I was growing up. Annie and our regular customers, and Pete and Beth down the road, and Caleb our mail carrier and all the others that Tom had so effortlessly befriended for me. I’d ridden into those friendships on his coattails, learned to socialize by watching him. I should be past all these stupid doubts, should set them aside with the old scalding memories of grade school and high school and all the failed efforts of those times.
But still I hear myself say, “It’s just that the way they live and do things is so different from, well, from the way I was brought up and the way we do things. I mean, Mother Maurie’s house looks like something out of a magazine, and Steffie always looks like she’s going out to tea with Queen Elizabeth.”
Tom snorts a chuckle. “Yeah, well. I know what you mean. Sometimes it gets to me, too. But it wasn’t always like that. When Steffie and Ellie and I were kids, the money was a lot tighter. I remember plenty of hand-me-down clothes from the cousins, and lots of secondhand furniture. I remember when Mom’s end tables were wire spools with cloths over them. But in the last ten years, since the equipment dealership took off, Dad’s been able to do better for the family. And he likes that. He likes giving Mom and the girls nice things, likes living good with new furniture, and indulging Steffie and stuff. Hell, I know he can remember enough hard times for us. He’s worked damn hard to get the family where it is; don’t look down on him for liking to flash around that money isn’t so tight for them anymore. It’s a point of pride for him. But it doesn’t mean he’s going to look down on us for being broke, and having to keep things simple and cheap. He knows where that is, too.” Tom sounds a little hurt that I would find his family’s prosperity daunting.
“I know, but …” This time even I can hear the whine in my voice, and I stop a fraction of a second before Tom says, “Hush. Stop it, now. You’re just working yourself up over nothing. Relax. They’re going to love you. All you have to do is just relax and be yourself.”
“Okay,” I concede. I can hear his unspoken hope that I’ll stop chewing on my worries, and let him doze again. So I lean back in my own seat and close my eyes. I pretend to sleep.
TWO (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Fairbanks, Alaska,
1963
Eleven. Betwixt and between. Two pigtails, the color of dirty straw. Fuzzy pigtails, down past my shoulders, the hair pulling free of the braid like strands breaking loose in old hemp rope. They have not been taken down, brushed, and rebraided in days, perhaps weeks. It doesn’t matter; no one scolds. My mother has six children, and her two older daughters are at a much more dangerous age than I am. They are the ones who demand all her watching. What is it to her if my hair has not been brushed and combed, the stubborn snarls jerked from my tender scalp, the long hair rebound so tightly it strains at my temples? It is summer, school is out, and we live in an aggressively rural area. There is no one to see her youngest daughter running wild as a meadow colt.
And I do. Both knees are out of my jeans, and my shirt has belonged to two older siblings before me. Boy’s shirt, girl’s shirt, only the buttons know. It lies flat down the front of my androgynous chest. There are holes in my sneakers, too, and my socks puddle around my ankles. Yes, that is me, eyes the color of copper ore, hard and green, a scatter of freckles across my nose. Unkempt, neglected child? Hardly. Free child, unwatched, unhindered, unaware of being free, as it is the only thing I have ever known. Free child in the deep heat of July, the forest baking around me in the seventy-some degrees of the Fairbanks summer sun.
I am where I should not be, but I do not even know it, nor would I care if I did. I am between the FAA tower on Davis Road and what will eventually be the Fairbanks International Airport. It is supposed to be a restricted area, but no one really cares about that. Not at this moment in time. If I want, I can follow the surveyor cuts through the forest until I’d come out to the small plane tie-downs. A bit farther, and I’d come to wide pavements of the airport, where the airplanes let people down right on the asphalt of the runways. There would be people and noise and traffic. All the things I hate. Where I am is much better. I am sitting on the bank of the slough and thinking it is the most beautiful place in the world.
The slough varies with the seasons, like a snowshoe hare varying its coat, but it is always beautiful to me. During winter it is a wide white expanse of snow, broken only by the protruding heads of the tallest grasses. The snow humps strangely over the mounds and hummocks of coarse grasses. Owls hunt over it, watching for tiny scurrying shrews and mice to break to the surface and brave the flat whiteness. If I walk cautiously, I can move across the frozen crust without breaking it, standing tall above the earth, my feet supported by millions of tiny ice crystals. Treacherous trickling sunlight sometimes softens my floor, and then I break through it and wallow up to my hips in snow that infallibly finds every opening in my clothing. That is the winter.
Then comes spring and breakup, when the slough fills with water that reflects the sky and the tangled branches of the trees on its banks and the tiny leaves budding on them. The white snow sinks down to isolated hummocks cowering in the narrow tree shadows, bleeds to death as seeping water that fills the slough. The slough flows with a perceptible current then, carrying off the melted snow to the Chena River, and birds cry above it, ravens black against the transparent blue sky. The wind of breakup reddens my cheeks, and my old socks wad down inside my battered boots. During the spring thaw, the slough is deep, how deep I do not know, for it is much too cold to think of wading in it. I jump from tuft to hummock to clump of grass to cross it, and at its highest flow I cannot cross it at all. I go home wet, my hands red-cracked claws of hands, my nose dripping, my eyes green with spring.
But that is not now. It is summer now. The early greenness has passed. There are tall yellow grasses, higher than my head, with waving tasseled heads of wild grains. The water has hidden itself beneath the living earth, only appearing in secret pools of shallow water banked with green mosses and ferns and squirming with mosquito larvae. Low-bush cranberries, tender little plants with tiny round leaves, no taller than my hand-span, coat the bank where I sit. Behind me, closer to the edge of the true forest, are twiggy blueberry bushes, bereft now of their tiny bell-like flowers, and not yet heavy with round blue fruit. Today I have seen a red fox with a spruce hen clamped in its jaws, and a litter of tiny rabbits just ventured from their burrow. I have seen the green bones of a winter-kill moose acrawl with beetly things, and pushed the bones aside to see the white grubs squirming beneath them. Myriad small creatures besides myself live and hunt here. The faun is one of them.
He is beside me, likewise lounging on the bank. He is stretched out to the lingering touch of the sun on his belly. He is totally unremarkable and completely marvelous. I love him as I love the sound of wolves at night, and stories of wild horses in thundering herds on the plains. I love him as I love my hands and my hair and my ice-green eyes. He closes the circle of who I am, and makes me complete. In loving him, I love myself. In my mind I call him Pan, but aloud I have never spoken a word to him, nor him to me. We are the closest of friends.
He has a boy’s face and arms, a boy’s curly thatch of hair atop his head, interrupted only by the nubbins of his horns, stubby things shorter than my thumbs, shiny brown like acorns. He has a boy’s chest, tanned and ribby, flat nipples like brown thumbprints. From the hips down he is neatly and unoffensively goat. His hooves are pale and cloven, slightly yellower than my toenails but much thicker. The hair on his legs is like that on any goat, smoothly brown, growing so closely it hides any trace of skin. His penis is gloved as neatly as a dog’s, held close to his lower belly in its coarsely haired sheath. The most I have ever seen of it is the pointed pink tip, moist like a puppy’s. To my eleven-year-old mind it is a superior arrangement, much better than my younger brothers’ dangling, wrinkled genitalia. More private in a way that is not prissy.
He rolls to face me, yawning, and then smiling. His teeth are white as only the teeth of young carnivores are white, and his eyes are a color that has no name. His eyes are the color of sunlight that has sifted through green birch leaves and fallen onto a carpet of last year’s leaves. Earth eyes, not brown nor green nor yellow. The color of a forest when you stand back from it.
He rises and looks at me askance, and I shrug and rise to follow him. My dog falls in at our heels. He pants delicately in the heat of the summer, making hardly a noise at all. Not for him some doggy lolling of a long pink tongue. He is more than half a wolf, my Rinky, with his sleek black coat and his pale cheeks and eyebrows. In the woods with me, he is all a wolf, and I am his cub as surely as Mowgli belonged to Akela. He has taught me everything, this dog, that a young creature must know to stay alive in the forest. From him I have learned to be still and to be silent, and to move with the forest instead of through or against it. I have watched him and seen how well he fills the niche that nature has allotted to him. I, too, will be as he is, perfect in my place.
We follow Pan, Rinky and I, and he leads us down the slough. We walk in the flat troughs that meander between the hummocks of grass. Short weeks ago, water flowed where our feet walk now. We flow as it did, silent and seeking our level. Pan has neither hips nor buttocks, but only the sleek flanks of an animal and the restless tail of the deer kind. His cloven hooves leave more of a mark than Rinky’s wolf feet, and my sneakers leave the least discernible track of all. Insects chirr around us, and the air is heavy with pollen and sleep. I can believe that, save for us, nothing larger than a shrew is stirring in the forest at this hour.
Then the duck explodes in front of me, right before my feet, her brown pinions slashing my face as she rises on her battering wings. Her nerve has been shattered; she withstood the passing of Pan and Rinky so close to her nest, but I, a human, am too totally foreign to her experience. I fall back with an incoherent cry, my hands rising to protect my face, but she is already gone. My eyes tear from the slapping they have taken, but that is the sole extent of their damage. When I lower my hands and blink my eyes clear of tears, they are laughing at me.
Rinky’s pink tongue does loll now, mockingly, dangling over his picket fence of white teeth and his smooth black doggy lips. Pan is worse. He clutches his belly, bends over it, brown curls falling into his eyes as he shakes with silent hilarity. His teeth are very white, his mouth is wide with mirth. Miffed, I ignore both of them, and crouch to examine the nest.
The nest is a late one, probably the duck’s second effort this year. To the casual eye, it is empty. But with thumb and forefinger I lift the soft blanket of down that covers the fourteen pale turquoise eggs. The eggs are not much larger than grade-AA chicken eggs from the store, but they are much more real. Eggs from the store are cold and bony white, their surfaces dry and chalky, trapped in cardboardy trays. These eggs are warm, and smooth, almost waxy to the touch. I take two and Pan takes one, and we carry them off with us, leaving the duck free to return to her brooding.
We go back to the sunny bank of the dried-up slough and sit on the moss and eat our eggs. Pan and I bite the ends off ours and spit the crumpled bits of shell aside before we suck out the warm white and the sudden glop of the yolk. Rinky puts his between his front paws and delicately breaks it with his teeth so that he can lap up the egg and eat the shell that held it.
And that is all that there is to this day, but it needs nothing more. It is complete, like the scene trapped inside a glass paperweight, a whole sufficient to itself. I am eleven and lying there between a dog and a faun. We three make a circle, from human to beast and back again. I love them as I love my hands or my hair, unthinking, totally accepting. They are the two most important creatures in my life and always will be. When we grow up, I will be Pan’s mate and we will live and hunt in these woods and Rinky will always run beside us. I know these things as well as I know that the summer sky is blue and permafrost is cold.
THREE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Tacoma
May 1976
I hate to shop for clothing. I hate to try things on. I hate the cramped dressing rooms with curtains that gape at the sides, with their floors littered with straight pins and tags. I hate pulling stiff, unfamiliar clothes on over my head, clothing ensorcelled with hidden pins and buttoned buttons that snare me inside their unyielding depths. I hate standing nine inches from a full-length mirror trying to see what I look like in this foreign garment, my hair mussed and my makeup smeared by my struggle to get into it. It makes me sweat.
Stupid. Stupid is how I look. The bosom gapes hungrily for my nonexistent cleavage. My socks-and-sneakered feet stick out the bottom where sheer-stockinged calves and slender ankles and chic white sandals should be. I smooth the dappled-leaf muteness of the fabric, loving it, wishing I could look as if I belonged in it. But I cannot. I look like a homely carnival Kewpie doll stuffed into Barbie’s prom dress. Ken would be horrified. I claw and fumble the buttons open, begin an attempt to slither out the bottom of the dress. It jams on my too-wide shoulders.
A saleslady whisks the curtain open. My olivine eyes peer at her from the dress bodice, my pale thighs goosebump in the sudden draft. “Oh, dear,” she says, and I am sure her sympathy is for the dress, not me. “You didn’t like it. Can I bring you a different size, perhaps? Would you like to try it in another color?”
Another body, I think. Another face. Bring me those, and I’ll try the dress again. “No, thank you,” I say aloud, and her eyes narrow with disapproval. She must be on commission. Mother Maurie and Steffie trip merrily past my compartment. They are having a wonderful time. Both my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law love the gay whirl of shopping, adore endlessly trying on clothes, just for the fun of seeing what they will look like. I, exposed still, shiver as they pass. Another saleslady trails them, her arms heavy with bright garments. “Evelyn,” Steffie calls without pausing. “We are absolutely starved! We’re going to that restaurant, you know, the one down near Fredericks? Okay?”
“Okay,” I mutter. I don’t know the restaurant, having never been there. I am not even absolutely sure where Fredericks is. It doesn’t matter. I’ll cope. The dress has a half nelson on me. My saleslady sighs and whisks herself off to another dressing compartment. She peeks into that one, exclaims delightedly, “Not everyone can wear that look, but, oh, on you!” She clasps her hands delightedly.
I free a hand and arm somehow, and tug the curtain back so that it gapes no more than three inches on each side. I inch painstakingly out of the dress, making a sincere effort not to tear the shoulder seams. I shiver in my underwear as I wrestle it back onto its hanger and suspend it from the hook in the dressing room. Once on its hanger, it resumes its original gentle lines, looks beckoningly lovely as it never will on my frame. I snarl at it as I stoop for my jeans and shirt, catch the snarl reflected in the mirror. For a brief instant I am eye to eye, fang to fang, with myself. It is not a pleasant experience.
Someone who once said he loved me compared me to a stag. An odd compliment, and not one that reassures one’s femininity. But a compliment, nonetheless, to be collected and clung to. I straighten and look at myself in the mirror, trying to find the stag he saw. I see only pieces of myself, I cannot perceive myself as a whole. Sensible cotton panties that magically guard me from yeast infections. Legs that remind me of the dark, footed legs of my great-grandmother’s piano bench. I can see the lines of my ribs. There are muscles in my belly, good, that is good. I think. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it isn’t feminine. How do you get rid of muscles on your belly? I wonder idly. My stubborn breasts have refused to follow me into womanhood. They are a seventh-grader’s breasts, their disgrace hidden inside smooth cups of foam-lined nylon that bring them almost to woman size. My collarbones stand out, my shoulders are wide, my neck is long and graceful. Is this the stag he saw? I roll my shoulders, watch the smooth muscles move under the skin. My face. I cannot see my face. I see the lines in my forehead, I see my wide cheeks, I should have plucked my eyebrows, the lipstick looks silly on me, not a clown’s mouth, no, more like I have eaten something unwholesome and it has stained my mouth this wretched color.
“Can I show you anything else?” It is the saleslady, peering in at me. She can show me nothing that I have not already seen. I clutch my jeans and shirt to myself.
“No,” I mutter. “Thank you, no, not today. Thank you.”
She leaves again. I wonder if someone is waiting for this dressing room. A tall, elegant woman, garments draped gracefully over her arm, folded money inside her pocketbook. Her high cheeks smooth as polished wood, salesladies never wrench her curtains open. Things like that are reserved only for those like myself.
Stop making yourself miserable, I scold myself. Why stop, I respond, when I do it so well? Everyone should be good at something. I pull on my jeans. Wranglers, size nine, as familiar as my own skin and more becoming. My shirt. A plain and simple button-up-the-front blue shirt, tuck it in, zip my fly and button it, buckle the leather belt. Better than armor and buckler is a pair of jeans that fit well, a leather belt that buckles snugly, a blue work shirt that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I button my cuffs, and grin at myself in the mirror. Better. I take a worn tissue from my jeans pocket, smear the lipstick from my mouth. Better and better. I feel more like myself.
There are bright plastic sacks laden with trove collapsed in the corner of the dressing room. I gather them. Sears, The Bon, the 3-5-7 Shoppe. Mother Maude’s and Steffie’s bags, full of dresses and shoes and … No. Gay little frocks, and bright sling-back pumps and sun togs and beach cover-ups. Maurie and Steffie would never buy anything so mundane as dresses and shoes. I smile at the thought. Their bags hang on my arms, cut into my wrists as I hurry down the wide avenue of the mall, looking for them.
I am not good at malls, either. Steffie has tried to make me feel at home in them, but it does not work. They are too foreign to my experience. She swims through them as easily as a tropical fish glides through its pebbled and planted tank. But I am constantly distracted, bombarded by their infinite variety. There are too many possibilities, too many things to buy. Usually, I buy nothing simply because I cannot decide what to choose. Steffie selects effortlessly from the racks, tries a dozen garments, and buys two, never worrying that perhaps in the next store there will be a dress even more fetching, slacks even more flattering to her derriere. I envy her that certainty. I know I will never achieve it.
I slow, or try to. The stream of moving people pushes me on, so I continue down the mall. Perhaps I mistrust places where the sun never shines, where time stands still and the weather never changes save for the window displays. I lose all sense of direction, all ability to make decisions. Streams of people move both with me and past me. Sometimes I feel giddy and wonder if I am standing still while they pass. But here I am, at the end of the mall, and it is the wrong end, Fredericks is at the other end of the mall. I about-face and begin the trek back.
I wonder if Mother Maurie and Steffie will be impatiently waiting for my arrival. Or will they order without me, and begin their meal with no more thought than they give to a cockapoo waiting outside in the car? I have been a member of their family for six years. What is wrong with me that I cannot feel toward them as I should, cannot be free and easy as if I were really part of their family? It’s not them. It cannot be their fault. They are always correct, always calm and composed, always kind. Steffie is so polished, so incredibly perfect in all her roles. Today she is the fashion-conscious woman of the world. And Mother Maurie is, as always, perfect in the supporting role of “Steffie’s Mother.” I know I am jealous of them and the easy way they fit into this place. I know they do not intend to make me feel awkward and homely and provincial. But they do.
I am halfway up the mall when it happens. From out of nowhere, a man’s arm around my waist, closing tight, pulling me from the stream of shoppers as easily as a bear hooks out a salmon from a spawning run. He is a rapist, a ritual killer, a mugger, and I am too startled to even speak, and then a voice by my ear says, “Evelyn.”
I have never heard his voice before, so how do I know it? Is it the way he says it or the timbre of his throat that slackens my muscles, leaves me standing in the circle of his arms like a doe poised in oncoming headlights, my smile as blank as the mannequin’s watching us from the display window?
He grins at my expression, his brown curls falling into his eyes, his teeth very white, his mouth wide with mirth. He holds me in the backwater of his arms, safe from the current of mindless shoppers that brush past us. He is taller than I remember, and his eyes a more honest shade of brown. We stand without speaking, and I have the eerie sense of a circle completed.
He leans forward then, his mouth by my ear. His breath is warm. He smells like the summer forest, like wild raspberries and leaf mold, like tamarack trees and high-bush cranberry blossoms. Like Alaska. “I was afraid you had forgotten me,” he says, his voice like the wind through branches. “But you haven’t. Not any more than I’ve forgotten you. I’m still here. If you need me. If you want me.”
“I …” It is all I can manage. The mall is suddenly a cardboard set for a pretentious play. It cannot contain me. I need not act the part that has been assigned me. I could knock over the stucco wall, step out into daylight and wind and forest. Step back into being whole and belonging to myself.
“Come with me,” he urges me. His fingers track down my spine. “Now. Come back.”
I want to. In that instant, I really want to. But a jaw trap holds me fast. Boundaries spring up around me. The mound of laundry left unfolded on the table at the guest house. The refrigerator needs defrosting. Things I should do, things I meant to do, things I must do before I can call my time my own. Commitments. Duties. Things that make me real. Oh, and people. Belatedly, I remember people. I have a small son, a husband. They depend on me. They love me. What would they think of me if I just ran away like this, abandoned my responsibilities? Who would respect me if they didn’t need me? Who would I be, shorn of them? And I, don’t I love them, aren’t they my whole life? How could I even think of leaving them, even be momentarily tempted? The thought shocks me. I’ll tell him all this, tell him I am happy where I am, that there isn’t room for him in my life anymore. That I don’t need him anymore.
“I …” I repeat, choking on the word.
“Come soon, then,” he invites me, sure of my assent. His forefinger touches my jaw, a fleeting farewell.
Then he releases me, and he is gone, blending in with the flow of people. I stare after him. He wears only a denim vest over his bare chest, and cutoff jeans do little to mask his strangeness. His hooves clack clearly on the smooth linoleum of the mall floor, but no one notices him, no heads turn to watch him pass. Only I stare after him as he is borne away by the current of shoppers. I hear his hooves long after I lose him in the rippling tapestry of people.
I close my eyes, try to still the quivering that besets me. Glass cold against my sweating hands, smooth against my back. I realize that I am backed against a display window, leaning against the cool pane. I straighten guiltily. My palms leave their imprints outlined in mist on the smooth glass. The bags of garments have fainted, have crumpled about my feet. Absently I pick them up, smoothing their sides. All my many minds are chattering at once. Someone is hoping that Maurie and Steffie will not notice how crumpled the bags are. Someone else is shouting that he spoke to me, that he uttered my name, that I have finally heard his voice. But the one in charge hushes all of them, tells them to be still. Firmly I tell myself that I have been daydreaming again, silly escapist fantasies to make myself feel important, and that if I don’t hurry up and get down to the restaurant … I am not sure just what will happen if I don’t get down to the restaurant soon, but I have an oppressive feeing that it will be dreadful. The chance for something to be wonderful has come and gone in a heartbeat, and I have missed it. Only the dreadful is left. So I go, sacks swinging with my stride, moving purposefully now, cutting in and out of the crowd like a freeway driver weaving among the slower cars. I try not to think I am disheveled, guilty, musky with secrets. I forbid my eyes to watch for him.
The restaurant is a dark cave that opens up suddenly in the wall of storefronts on the mall. There are no doors, there is only the open space with the rack of menus, the cash register, and a hostess standing guard. Beyond, all is dimness and muted music. The tables are shrouded with deep red cloths, the menus are gilt and scarlet, the place is cushioned with a red carpet. One wall is mirrored, but it takes some moments for me to realize this, to see that I have been scanning the mirrored tables for a glimpse of Mother Maurie and Steffie. The hostess does not approve of me, and makes no attempt to greet or seat me. I am used to such as her. “I’m meeting someone,” I say, and breeze past her, trying in vain to keep my bags from brushing the backs of chairs and catching on the corners of tables.
Just when I am sure they are not here, that there must be another restaurant near another Fredericks, I see them. They are sitting in a booth at the very back, looking cool and chic in their summer city dresses, an advertisement for champagne or lip gloss. I stack the bags against the end of the booth and slide in beside Steffie. I realize I am breathing as if I have run a footrace. I push the hair back from my face and feel the sweat wet on my palm. I don’t believe Steffie has ever sweated in her life, and she stares with frank amusement as I wipe my palm over my forehead and then slide my hand down the leg of my jeans.
“Did you get lost?” Steffie asks kindly.
“A bit,” I admit. “I always get turned around in malls.”
“Oh, me, too,” she lies companionably. She is perfect, as Steffie is always perfect. She wears a perky little outfit that reminds me of tennis whites, made dressy by her earrings and the slender bracelet on her graceful wrist. She dresses to go shopping with more care than I dressed for my wedding. Her skin is golden tan; her huge eyes are brown; if I were a man I would kneel at her feet.
In the silence that follows, Steffie takes a long sip of her drink. I cannot help but feel it is a thing she has been taught to do, that at some point in her adolescence Mother Maurie sat her down at the kitchen table and taught her just the way to sip discreetly from a tall glass of iced tea. She does it too well for it to be an accident of nature. I watch her as the naked brown savages must have watched Magellan claim their lands. The same awe and incomprehension. She glances at Mother Maurie and then back to me. Then she clears her throat, having selected a suitable topic for conversation with me. What, I wonder, were they discussing before I arrived? And why are they so painstakingly kind to me, when I obviously do not belong to their world?
“Did you decide to buy that green dress you were trying on? We didn’t mean to hurry you, but I was simply dying of thirst. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all,” I lie, half a lie. What I would have minded even more was if they had waited for me outside the dressing room, chirping helpful comments. Sometimes they do that. I suspect they believe that if they had enough time and money, they could fix me. Like detailing a used car for resale. Cut my long unruly mane into something cute and perky, dress me in cunning outfits that disguise my unshapely legs and flat chest. Transform me into a wife worthy of Tom Potter. The idea terrifies me. It makes me talk too much, too fast. “I didn’t get the dress. At the last minute, I decided it was just too young for me. And I always feel naked somehow in a sleeveless dress.”
“You make yourself sound like an old lady,” Mother Maurie chides smilingly. Her smile seems a bit stiff. Suddenly I realize that my remarks have not been exactly tactful. The dress I have rejected is cut very similarly to the one Mother Maurie is now wearing. But on her its youthfulness looks appropriate. Mother Maurie is a tiny, delicate woman, a ceramic doll with large blue eyes, and Steffie is a long-legged golden blonde, a beach-party Barbie. It strikes me that they are the two ends of the spectrum for American femininity, and that I do not fall anywhere between them. Off the bell curve, that’s me.
“What are you having, Mother?” It is Steffie, considering a red-and-gilt menu. “Shall we have just a bite, or dinner?”
“Let’s go ahead and eat dinner. The boys will be ravenous when they get here, and it will save us the trouble of cooking and dishes at home.”
I smile and nod, pushing my tangle of brown hair back a little from my eyes. The boys, I think as I peruse the menu, the boys. And we are the girls, at least Maurie and Steffie are. The boys are her husband, my husband, her brother, her son, and my son. And yet there are only three of them. Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy, and Bess, the old nursery riddle-rhyme rushes unbidden into my mind. Five names for three men. Or boys, I mean. All boys, forever boys. And we are the girls forever. Even when Steffie gets around to getting married and settling down, she will still be a girl. And probably a virgin, as near as I can make out. All the women in their family are virgins, except when they are “in a family way.” Then Grandpa Potter’s teasing is vigorous and crude beyond my belief or endurance, as if they were children caught in a dirty game.
I order and eat mindlessly, finishing while they are still dividing sandwiches into dainty triangles, still nibbling small forkfuls of cottage cheese. I drink coffee to pass the time, adding more sugar and creamer each time the waitress refills my bottomless cup. I roll the empty sugar packets and the foil-lined creamer packages into tiny tubes, and make stars and hexagons and parallelograms on the tabletop. Infinitely amusing. Only boring people get bored, my mother used to tell me. “… any other errands for you, Evelyn?” I jump, and sit up straight in my chair. Both Steffie and Mother Maurie are staring at me, polite inquiry in their eyes. Sleeping in school again.
“I, uh, I want to stop at the music store and look at the tapes.” Suddenly it seems like a very juvenile errand. As well to say I was stopping by the candy store, to get red and green suckers and a handful of Double Bubble. I am embarrassed, and they know it.
“You and your music!” Mother Maurie gives a condescending snort of laughter. “All right, but you’ll have to do it while we’re in the drugstore picking up Tommy’s prescription. Did you remember to bring it?”
She goes right on talking as I dig through my purse, finally coming up with the small empty pill bottle for Tom’s allergy medication in my coat pocket. It is sticky, Teddy must have played with it, and I surreptitiously wipe it on my napkin before I hand it over. I try to find the threads of the conversation again, only to realize no one is talking, they are all waiting expectantly.
The men are here, and I don’t know how or when they’ve arrived. Grandpa Potter, stooped but daunting still, rests his big hands on the edge of our table. His eyes scan the table, feasting on his wife and perfect daughter. He is given to saying things like “The Potter men have always been proud to say that their women dressed well, no matter how bad the harvest has been. We take care of our women.” His eyes skid over me, roll briefly toward heaven. He is a strange old man, I think, proud of his wife’s and daughter’s gentility and polish, but equally proud of his own rough edges and crude ways. He never minces words, never worries about giving offense. Of all Tom’s family, Grandpa is the one who never bothers to hide that he does not understand me, does not believe I will ever quite fit. He scares me, and I wish I could hide that from him. Right now, I want to sink under the table to escape that sharp stare. But suddenly Tom pushes into the seat beside me, his thigh warming against mine, and instantly all is well, no price is too great to pay for possessing him. Tall and golden he is, blond hair, brown eyes, big hands, and one big hand surreptitiously strokes my thigh before coming to settle demurely on the tabletop. He smells of Old Spice tinged with diesel oil, the mechanic’s smell that never quite leaves his skin. The hostess has followed them to the table, and I feel her eyes move from Tom to me and back again. She does not understand it any more than I do, why does this man who looks like a cigarette billboard cowboy, this gorgeous perfect man, sit down beside a woman like me? I move closer to him, and set my hand atop his on the table. The hostess looks away, moves away. I take a breath. I am safe now. My Tom is with me.
My Teddy is with him, clinging to his grandpa’s hand, his small head looking defenseless, his hair newly shorn and slicked. I don’t like it, and for a moment my anger flares, who does that old man think he is, always carrying out his compulsion to “keep those boys looking like boys” upon my little son? No one asked me if he needed a haircut. I love his dandelion tuft of fine hair, I don’t care if it covers the tops of his small pink ears. But Teddy is looking at me, his brown eyes big and round. He has been brave this time, not flinching when the buzzing razor nibbled down the back of his unprotected neck. I smile at him and try to put my approval in it, try not to remember how, when we first arrived in Washington, Grandpa took him to the barber, without my knowledge or consent, and brought him back, red-eyed and disgraced. “Momma’s little tit cried when the barber tried to shave the back of his neck and over his ears. Well, no grandson of mine is going to run around looking like a goddamned hippie. You wanna be like that, you stay with your mommy, baby boy. I’ll tell you, no son of mine ever behaved like that in public! Five years old, and he acts like a goddamned baby.”
And I had watched Teddy shrink with each contemptuous statement, and had foolishly made it worse by putting my arm around my little son, hoping to shield him from his grandfather’s disgust. And Teddy, my Teddy, had flung my arm aside and pushed me away, run out of the little house and into the fields to cry, newly ashamed of being afraid of something unfamiliar, newly ashamed of letting his mother hold and comfort him. And that wicked old man had glared at me and said, “You coddle that boy too much. Gonna ruin him. Time he was with men more often, instead of hanging around your skirts like Momma’s little tit.”
And I, too cold with anger to speak, had stared him down, driven him from the little house with my frozen green eyes.
But that was in another time and another place, and I cannot afford to think about it now. Instead, I make my mouth smile, and reach past Tom to hold out a hand to my Teddy. But my little son only smiles, a smile that is at once secretive and begging. He slides into the other end of the circular booth, forcing everyone to scoot over and sending Steffie up against me on the other side. Grandpa has missed none of this. “He’s Grandpa’s big boy today, Mommy. He’s gonna sit over here with me.”
Grandpa’s eyes are black, like little bits of anthracite coal set into his pale, soggy face. He was a big man once, had stood tall and had tanned, weathered skin. Maybe then the lines around his eyes had been laugh lines. Now he looks bleached, like something found under a pile of old trash, a soup label with the colors gone all wrong, the green beans turned blue, a farmer turned entrepreneur, a corned and blistered foot crammed into a pointed Florsheim shoe. I could have pitied him if he hadn’t been so hateful. Our eyes don’t meet, I don’t let him have the victory. I squeeze Tom’s hand and look into his eyes instead.
“Did you find the part?” Mother Maurie demands.
Tom nods. “Junkyard had it.” He turns to me. “You eat already?”
“Yeah, but if you …”
“How much was it?” Mother Maurie cuts in irritably. This is business, and Tom has no sense, mixing it up with a conversation with his little wife. Mother Maurie has shifted gears, is no longer the chic shopper but is now the shrewd businesswoman, versed in every facet of the family’s farm equipment dealership.
“Seventeen-fifty. New one is twenty-two, but if old man Cooper wants his tractor back in the fields by Tuesday, he’s gonna have to be happy with secondhand parts.” Tom goes back to scanning the menu hungrily, fielding Mother Maurie’s agitated questions easily.
She is upset with the parts supplier and doesn’t care who knows it. Wants everyone to know it, as a matter of fact. If they think they can get away with treating Potter’s Equipment this way, they are in for a surprise, she’ll go right to the factory for parts after this, just cut them out entirely, and let them eat that. Why, she must order two or three thousand dollars’ worth of parts a year from them, and for them to let us down like this just isn’t good business, as they’ll soon find out. Her own ruthlessness is giving her great satisfaction. She speaks clearly and almost loudly, so that other people at other tables hear and know just how hard-nosed a little businesswoman she is. She is proud of her savvy, and so is Grandpa Potter, for he nods sagely as she carries on.
Tom’s fingers close over mine and hold me fast. The others at the table are talking, and he is replying to them, but his fingers against mine are a different conversation, and a different man is speaking to me from the one who they know. I listen to him alone, letting the other voices fade into a background hum like summer bees. I know I do not belong in their world. What matters to me is that somehow, Tom’s world and mine have intersected, and that in that brief crossing, we can be together.
FOUR (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Fairbanks
Winter 1963
My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.
People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.
The GVEA building is grey with black windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.
The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.
That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. I’d rather have chilblains and frostbite.
Making me go to school in winter is one of the cruder things my parents do to me. Although all my brothers and sisters attend school also, I always take it as a personal torment my parents insist on inflicting on me. I do not complain much about it. I am even good at school, very good, if academics are what you consider important. I am academically vindictive, ruining class curves with my hundred per cents, doing fifteen book reports instead of the required five, but it is never enough to counteract tights that go with your dress and match the ribbons in your hair. Vaguely I know that I do not know how to compete. I always put my energies into the wrong arenas.
But it is more than that. School is not my turf. I resent wasting the brief daylight of the winter days trapped in a classroom instead of running through the white and silver of a Fairbanks winter landscape. Yet even that isn’t it. I believe there is something unnatural about school, something damaging. To take a young creature and force it into an enclosed space with thirty others like it, all of the same age … would you do this to a puppy or a young chimp? You know what happens when you do it with chickens or rats. The same thing happens when you do it with children, only the damage is less visible. If I were a chick, pecked until my entrails hung from my rectum, someone would have taken pity on me. But I am a child and children are expected to endure the tortures of the damned stoically. I believe, perhaps self-pityingly, that it is worse for me than it is for other children. The ones who play in playgrounds, who visit one another’s houses, collect toys, and have sleep-over parties, never perceive how peculiar an institution school is. But I am a healthy young animal, taken from my hunting, from my running and growing, and thrust into an exhibit more inhumane than any concrete-and-steel zoo pen. From the moment I step onto the bus every morning, all power deserts me, and I am less than ordinary. I am prey, and I know it. Within the walls of the school, I know that fauns are Fantastic Animals, imaginary creatures those benighted and bedamned Romans and Greeks believed in, and that good little girls put their faith in Jesus Christ alone. Playing with a faun is probably a mortal sin, like calumny and detraction, niggardliness and sloth. I think I am going to hell. I think there is nothing I can do about it, anyway.
But release me from the bus in the evening, and the world is mine. The misery of the classroom seems an imaginary fairy-tale dungeon, nothing worth telling my parents about. The bus drops us by our orange mailbox on Davis Road. My brothers and sisters start the walk down the lane, but I stand on the road, waiting until the bus breaks down into orange and red taillights and then disappears altogether. My siblings hurry through the dark, eager to be out of the cold. I stand, clutching my book bag, waiting. Around me is the silver darkness of an Alaskan midwinter afternoon. The stars are out, and the Big Dipper swings low. Silver birch and cottonwood line the lane to our house. Our house is the only house on the lane, and not even its lights can be seen from the road. I do not know why we call our driveway the lane. We just do. It is only one car wide, and in winter it divides itself into two tire tracks with a hump of brushed snow down the middle. My siblings are far down the lane now. I walk alone between trees that lean in over me with their burdens of snow like ermine capes upon their bare arms. It is night, and yet it is easy to see. The snow is white on the ground and on the branches, the trees are ghostly grey, and in between there is darkness. The dry snow of the lane crunches and squeaks under my boots.
First the house is a few stripes of yellow light through the trees. Then I come to where we have cleared for our garden. The trees are cut away and the once-furrowed soil is now covered with a wavering quilt of snow. I see the house squatting darkly amid the snow, long and low like a crouching animal. The snow-load is heavy on the roof, but earlier snows have slid off the peaked aluminum, to create a wall of snow around the house that makes it look like my home has pushed up from under the earth and snow like a mushroom.
And then I am up on the wooden porch that rattles under my boots, and the door must be shouldered open because the frost always coats the bottom edge of it and tries to freeze it shut. I thud it open, breaking into my mother’s territory. Our house is made of dark logs chinked with pink and yellow fiberglass, and the ceiling is low. Yet I remember it as being full of an amber light, rich as honey, breathing out the warmth-and-cookies smells of home. Moose stew, as inevitable as thrice weekly math assignments, is already bubbling over the blue flames of the gas stove. The radio is always on, and my mother is always doing something in a highly untidy and inefficient manner. When she does laundry, she does mammoth loads of it, heaping chairs full of warm laundry, weighting the table with stacks of folded underwear and towels, heaping a box to overflowing with mateless socks. If she bakes cookies, there are tall leaning stacks of sticky bowls, showers of flour on the counters, the floors, and the husky dogs that sprawl everywhere in their sleep, and scatters of cookies cooling on every horizontal surface in the kitchen. When she knits us hats and sweaters, one pattern is never enough to please her. She must combine patterns, change the colors, rework the instructions. She has knitted my father a parka with twenty-seven different colors in it that is a combination of fourteen different patterns. It is an epic work of needles and yarn. My mother is of mythic proportions in my mind. To say that I love her is like saying I love the earth. My love is a puny thing beside her, unnecessary to her continuance. She is the home, the house, the food, the warmth, the hearth-witch. She leaves me almost entirely to my own devices; this makes me love her even more.
Down into the basement, rattling down the steep old stairs. Down here it is like a den, beds here, walls there, more beds, more walls. A veritable maze of nesting places for children, stacked bunk beds, green metal army surplus bunks, a menagerie of dressers, every horizontal surface festooned with laundry both clean and dirty, with papers, books, and a scattering of toys. I change clothes, pulling on layer upon layer upon layer of worn-out jeans and corduroy pants and T-shirts and shirts and sweaters and a surplus US Air Force parka. Put on my socks, my brothers’ socks, and my father’s socks and a pair of canvas military surplus mukluks. And up the stairs and out the door with Rinky at my heels. Disappear into the night of the forest. Run silently down the rabbit paths, bent almost double to keep from disturbing the snow that rests so delicately upon each twig and swooping branch. Rinky ranges ahead and beside and beyond and behind, but is always there whenever I pause and crouch down in the snow. He grabs the sleeve of my old parka, leaving teeth marks in the fabric. Sooner or later, all my clothes bear the mark of his teeth. I do not mind. He tugs at me until I rise, and then we range together, he and I, following the paths we have created and keep packed, looking to see what is different from the last time we passed this way. Here is the blood-speckled trampling of the snow that marks a fox’s kill. Here something has gnawed the bark from a fallen branch, and there something large and heavy has crossed our path. This trail and its faint musk fills me with excitement. Moose. Moose in our woods. The time will be soon.
I never need to tell my mother when I have found signs of moose. She knows. Perhaps she is a witch, the way she knows. I will find the knives sharpened on the counter, I will see a new roll of butcher paper. Days ahead of time. Then, one evening, it will happen. All six of us will be clustered around her table, our heads bent over our books. One cannot move an elbow lest one obscure a sibling’s math book, shuffle the pages of someone’s report. Pencils scratch, the dogs snore beneath the table, someone mutters over a stubborn calculation. It is unnaturally quiet for a house inhabited by eight people. My sisters have their hair in curlers, there is the muted chink-chink of my father’s pipe against the ashtray.
Then it happens.
“Evelyn. Turn off the lights.”
My mother is standing close to the cold blackness of a window. I rise and turn off all the lights, flicking switches until the darkness outside flows in from the windows, oozes out from under the couch, and fills up the room. No one moves, save my father. As I stand by the light switch in the darkness, I hear his heavy tread as he crosses the room to stand beside my mother. They peer out the window and speak softly to each other.
If I am silent and unobtrusive, I can slip to a parallel window and likewise peer forth. They will be in the garden, pawing the snow away from what remains of the cabbage patch, churning to the surface a scatter of frozen leaves, a half-rotted head, a tough green stalk now frozen solid. They remind me of ships, tall sailing ships, I cannot say why. This time of year their racks have fallen, leaving their heads misshapen and knobby. Their noses are long and seem saggy, like stuffed animals without enough stuffing. Their huge Mickey Mouse ears swivel in the darkness like antennae, but they are not really alert. Their attention is all for the paltry leaves of cabbage, the frozen broccoli stalks, the forgotten head of cauliflower they have churned to the surface. They are unaware of the darkened house and the silent watchers marking one of them for death.
There are four this time. There is a game I play, predicting which one we will take down. I play it now. Not the cow. Never shoot the goose that lays the golden eggs. Leave the cow. Not the old bull. Why he is with them now, at this time of year, I will never understand. But there he is, and his meat is sure to be tough. That leaves two, the young calf, born this spring by the look of him, and the older calf from the spring before. It will be him, the older calf, I am sure. But of this I say nothing aloud. The chain of command does not appreciate such speculations.
“Let’s get ready,” says my father. And it is all he needs to say. My younger sister and my two little brothers are already gathering their books and heading for the basement. They are all still too small to be anything but a nuisance out there tonight. I hear them go down the darkened stairs, and in a moment a light clicks on in the basement. Yellow light wells up from the stairs, bleeds into the darkness around me, lending vague shapes to the hulking darkness of the furniture. Sissy and Candy, my two elder sisters, drift toward the basement and down the stairs to find suitable clothing. It will be hard for them. They own very little that can tolerate blood spatters and possible rips, very little that will keep out the deep cold as we crouch to our bloody work. I am already by the door, pulling on the garments I frequently leave heaped there, much to my sisters’ disdain. By the time my father has pulled on his parka and chambered a round into the 30.06, I am ready.
He jerks the door open, letting cold spill into the warm room. The icy air condenses as it flows into the room, making great ghost fogs that venture a short way into the house before disintegrating. He shuts the door quickly behind him but not before I have slipped out. He does not notice me, or he ignores me; it doesn’t matter which, it amounts to the same thing. I shadow him as he steps from the porch.
With night has come a greater cold. It is a cold that freezes the tiny hairs inside my nose, that makes my eyelashes stick together for a fraction of an instant when I blink my eyes. I push my muffler up over my nose and mouth to shelter my lungs from the icy air, and try to resist the temptation to lick my dry lips. All moisture has been frozen from the air, and the snow is a dry dust that creaks under my father’s weight as he makes his way across the yard. We move slowly, drifting in the night like bodiless shadows, not stalking the moose, but moving easily and quietly in the darkness.
The old bull lifts his head. A frozen cabbage leaf dangles from his pendulous lips. He alone watches us, his ears cupping toward us like petitioning hands. He gives no sign of alarm, issues no warning snort. He only watches. I wonder if he knows what is to come.
My father stops and I halt behind him. We stand silently. He doesn’t turn to look at me, but proffers the six-cell flashlight he has been carrying. “Put the spot right behind his ear,” he says. I nod as I take the flashlight, but he doesn’t see me.
He doesn’t need to turn and watch me nod to know I will obey. He is my father. He rules this night. He is the one who knows where to send the bullet to drop the moose. On other nights, he has stood in this yard and shown me the constellations. He has shown me Sputnik winking by, and told me that if I want it badly enough, I can go to the moon someday. He believes this of me, that I can do anything I want, if I want to do it badly enough. It is both terrifying and uplifting to have someone believe in you so. I point the flashlight at the young bull we have chosen. I watch my father lift his rifle to his shoulder. When he is ready, he makes a tiny move that is less than a nod. I push the button on the flashlight.
The light explodes, bursting the moose into reality. The shadowy shape leaps into detail, frosted whiskers drooping from his muzzle, shaggy hair on his neck, a great fringed ear, a single lambent eye capturing my light. In less than a breath, the rifle explodes beside me, and the moose falls, dropping from my circle of light into death and darkness.
It is done.
I click off the light. We stand in the darkness together, my father and I, looking at the thing we have done.
Animals are put together so neatly, almost as if they were intended to be taken apart. Interior organs packed together like a Chinese wood puzzle, awaiting the human hand, bared to winter but warm with fresh blood as it snakes in to lift the liver up, free it with a swipe of the knife. I put the liver in the bowl that is nestled in the snow, and surreptitiously take a lick from the knife. Electric. Fresh blood is electric on the tongue, like sparks snapping inside my mouth. It warms me, almost. An hour has passed since the shot, and I have not been inside. My toes are wooden inside my mukluks. I should have worn more socks.
My father’s flashlight finds me. “Did you get the heart and liver?” he asks, and I nod briefly toward the heavy bowl. He tosses the tongue he has just freed, and I catch it deftly in the bowl. I rise with it and start toward the house. “Take the knives,” my father tells me. “They need sharpening again.” They lie in a row on the packed snow beside the body, and I stoop awkwardly to gather them. Their metal blades are cold, and one sticks painfully to my bared fingers.
I am halfway to the house when Sissy reaches me. She comes from the warmth and light, and I can tell she still has her hair curlers in under the woolen knit cap she wears. “I’ll take them,” she tells me eagerly, and I let her. She would rather take the gut meat into the house, rather sit by the table with the oil and stone and put the edges back on the knives, than crouch in the darkness by the fallen moose, rendering it into meat. I do not understand her.
I think about it as my father and I work to break the moose up into smaller pieces. Some of it is hatchet and ax work, some of it is for the meat saw. Head off, front quarters, hindquarters, backstrap, neck. My sisters are sickened by this work. They flee the great darks and the heavy cold of the night, they shun the bright blood and the musky smell of just downed meat. Even my father does this work grudgingly, thinking of getting up at six tomorrow to go to work, wondering if we will be caught poaching, cursing when the heavy head refuses to come free of the neck section. None of them feel it the way I do.
They can no more understand what I feel than I can comprehend their feelings. I know what they think. They feel debased by this confrontation. Meat from the store in cardboard trays wrapped in plastic, meat with tidy price stickers and labels, that meat is food, is flank steak, chuck roast, ground round. None of it is labeled, “Cut from the shoulder of a large dead animal in a snowy field at night.” There is nothing to remind them that the hide was pulled away from the flesh while it was still warm, and the steam rose into the night to the greedy waiting stars. They do not want to remember they are predators, carnivores. They’d rather eat the flabby muscles of an animal raised hock-deep in its own shit, castrated and injected and inspected, a smack in the head to fell it, a large white room to chill it, humming machines to cut it into neat slices. De-animalized meat. The thought disgusts me, as they are disgusted when they think of their sister putting her knife to the dead flesh of an animal, kneeling on it as she pushes the blade into the dead flesh. Once the guts are out of the way, the hindquarters are separated from the rest of the animal at the place where the ribs stop and only the spine connects. We hurry, hacking at it with knives and saw and hatchet, trying to ruin as little steak as possible. Then the hindquarters are spread, to reveal the inner side of the backbone, and we work down it with a hatchet, and then knives, cleaving it into the separate legs.
“You done?” my father asks, and when I nod he takes a grip on one hindquarter and heaves it up. I help, guiding more than lifting, and the leg is dumped onto a piece of polyethylene sheeting. I am obscurely shamed that I could not lift the moose quarter by myself, and so I am determined that I will at least ferry it to the garage on my own. There my father will tie a piece of yellow nylon rope to it, piercing through the leg between the bone and the long tendon, and hoist it up to the rafters and let it sullenly drip blood for four or five days. Bleeding the meat, this is called, and it is important, for otherwise the meat will be tough and taste gamey. But for now my father has turned back to his butchering, is using the hatchet to chop through the vertebrae. A tiny fragment of splintered bone flies up to sting my cheek. It reminds me of what I am supposed to be doing.
The piece of black polyethylene is the size of a bed sheet. I turn my back to it, grip two corners of it, and bring the corners up over my shoulders like a harness. The moose leg is heavy, but the polyethylene is slick against the snow. Once I have it moving, it glides along over the snow behind me. When we reach the packed snow of the driveway, it moves even more easily. I roll the leg off the sheeting onto clean snow by the garage, and run back for another load.
Before midnight, all the meat is hung. My father and I contemplate it. It swings slowly, eerily, with gentle creakings. The garage is unheated, but it leeches enough heat from the house that it stays just above freezing. The slow patterning of blood drips will continue to speckle the concrete floor. We nod in satisfaction, and my father slowly tamps tobacco into his pipe. He lights it, sucks it noisily to life, and then turns away from the moose. I pull the string that turns out the light. We step out of the garage into the night, and he reaches up to pull the heavy door down. We are in the blackness of night again.
My father’s streamer of pipe smoke rises up, like the steam from the moose’s exposed entrails. He has shoveled snow over the gut sack to hide it. By morning it will have frozen solid. The dogs will dig down to it, and spend weeks nibbling and licking at the frozen delight until it is gone. There remains only the head. We both know that.
“Get rid of the head,” my father says simply, and turns toward the house. I watch him go. The windows of the house are warm and yellow. I know that by now my brothers and younger sisters are in bed, probably my older sisters as well. The skin of my face is so cold, it feels like a stiff cardboard mask. I can move my toes, pressing them down hard against my mukluk soles, and awaken them to pain. The moisture of my breath has frozen into a solid cake of frost on the muffler over my mouth. I want to go in.
But there is the head.
The door thuds behind my father and I am alone in the dark. I dare not even go in to fetch Rinky for company, for he would be too interested in the head and guts. He’d only make the task harder. I snatch up the black polyethylene sheeting and start off toward the garden.
A head is not as big as a hindquarter, but it is an awkward shape, and heavier than you might think. The best way to lift one is to grip it by the bases of both ears, keeping the hacked-off neck turned away. The nose is pressed to my chest, the empty jaws gape tonguelessly. Even in the frigid air, the smell of moose and blood is strong. I turn quickly, letting go of the ears so that the momentum of my turn flings the head neatly onto the polyethylene sheet. I diaper the head up in the sheet, leaving myself one corner to use as a handle.
The night is clear and cold. I turn my back to the house with its warm yellow windows, and I pull. The head rides along at my heels as I leave the yard and the tire-packed snow of the driveway and enter the woods. I have already decided where I am going.
I follow one of my favorite trails. The trees are cottonwood and birch, alder and diamond willow. My path winds among them. Smaller bushes claw briefly at my burden, but don’t manage to rip the plastic. I drag it on, leaving a peculiar wrinkled trail, like the path of a giant worm. The head pulls easily, the polyethylene gliding over the snow. I am able to walk at a normal pace, and fifteen minutes later I am where I wish to be.
Here there are spruce trees, sudden groves of them in the deciduous forest. For some reason, they grow in irregular huddles, in groups of ten and fourteen and nine. But almost always in the center of each huddle is a tiny clear space where no trees grow. I get down on my knees and crawl beneath the outer swoop of branches, past a trunk, and here the snow is shallower, for the upper branches have caught most of it. Then out again, through deeper snow, and I am suddenly inside the grove. A moat of snow and a wall of needled branches surround me. Looking straight up, I can see the black sky and the Dipper hung on it. Unceremoniously, I dump the head here and leave it. I wad the black plastic up under my arm and crawl out again. The walk home seems longer than the walk here. The woods seem lonelier and darker, and I am shivering before the lights of the house crack through the trees to beckon me on.
My father is in the bathtub, my mother is reading in bed when I come in. No one calls out or questions me. No one save Rinky greets me, and he greets me with a wriggle of delight, his hackles rising excitedly at my blood smell. I shed my outer clothing by the door, and do not turn on the light as I go down the stairs. Everyone down here is asleep, vague blanketed shapes like furniture in storage. I am still shivering when I strip in the darkened basement and climb into bed. Rinky is snorting and rooting through my bloodied clothing as I fall asleep, my head cradled on arms and hands that still smell of sweet, sticky blood. I dream of bright white sunlight on the snow, and a faun gouging the frosted brown eyes from a moose skull and slipping them into his mouth. It is a good dream, and I smile in my sleep.
FIVE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Tacoma
The Farm
June 1976
Ten or fifteen years ago, the farm was a dairy farm. And the room that I stand in now was genteelly referred to as the milking parlor. Now it is a living room, and is part of what Mother Maurie calls “the little house” as opposed to her own “big house.” When she speaks of it to company, she calls it “the guest cottage,” but to her own family she calls it “the little house.” I find this an interesting dichotomy. Lately I find interesting dichotomies in many things Mother Maurie says.
It is like a cancer, growing in me, a constant hidden nastiness I can no longer control. A little secret anger, like red eyes in the dark. When I first came down to visit, and was shown the many ways in which the Potter women were vastly superior to me, I was willing to concede to them. It was the easiest path. It was also hard to argue. I cannot shop, I do not color coordinate, I have never ordered from the Avon Lady or hostessed a Tupperware party. I was willing to be unschooled and unsophisticated, the country mouse come down from her little Alaskan cabin to be overawed by the style and gaiety of the life in the Lower Forty-Eight. A week, a month, or even two, I could sustain the proper humility. But now it is all wearing thin. I am becoming defensive about my inferiority, protective of it. I will be as I am. I am also beginning to suspect their veneer may be only contac paper. The Avon fragrances are beginning to smell suspiciously like air freshener. My anger is a simmering acid thing, eating me from the inside out, whetting my tongue, putting cruel edges on my every thought.
But that is my problem, not Mother Maurie’s. And this living room is also my problem. We have been guests here since March. It is a bright and cheerful little place, cuter than the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs. There are big windows with wispy white curtains that let the bright sun spill in onto the white tiled floors. The furniture is white wicker and yellow cushions. There is a little glass-topped table, too unbearably cute to be useful, homey little rugs scattered everywhere, and two kerosene lamps with colored water in them instead of kerosene.
The kitchen is even better. There is a tiny white range, with a little red ceramic kettle sitting on it. The kettle is a masterpiece of Woolworth’s engineering, flawlessly useless, with a spout that dribbles and a body that holds less than three cups of water. Next to it, centered on the range, is a spoon holder shaped like a yellow ducky. The tiny kitchen table has a red-checkered oilcloth on it. There are plaques on the wall that say things about the Number One Cook, and For This I Went to College, and No Matter Where I Serve My Guests, They Seem to Like My Kitchen Best. There is a cookie jar shaped like a fat pink piggy. The dishes in the cupboards are sturdy plastic with jolly red roosters on every plate.
The bedroom is okay. The patchwork quilt came from Sears, and the patches are only a pattern, but I can forgive that. I can even forgive the lampshades with the covered bridges painted on them, and the bases of the lamps that are shaped like old-fashioned pumps.
What I cannot forgive is the bathroom. The theme seems to be that defecating children are cute. On a plaque over the toilet, a curly-haired cherub squats on a potty. There is also an adorable little statuette of a small boy with his bib coveralls around his ankles and a look of concentration on his pink-cheeked face as he sits on his little ceramic toilet. Even the toilet has theme clothing. The tank sweater and lid hat match, both depicting a little boy, his innocent bare butt toward us as he “waters mother’s flowers.” There is even an ashtray shaped like a toilet, with the motto “put your dead butts here” on it. The final touch is a tall book that hangs on a chain by the toilet. The cover proclaims it as Poems for the John. Few things are more excruciating than to be trying to make breakfast in a cutesy kitchen, and to have one’s spouse holler from the john, “Hey, honey, listen to this one.” Lately, Tom has begun to subject me to this.
It is a trap I have fallen into, all unawares. Even as we carried our suitcases in, Mother Maurie painstakingly pointed out to me that the furniture was “practically new, not a scratch on it.” She walked me through the guest house, showing me all its marvels, and requiring me to chuckle appreciatively as she giggled over the “naughty but cute” bathroom things. Steffie did the decorating, she told me. Steffie may someday take some classes in interior decorating, she seems to have such a flair for it. Some of the ideas, she confided, Steffie got from magazines, but most of it came right out of her own head. And isn’t that amazing?
And of course Mother Maurie knows she can trust me to keep it neat as a pin, and to make sure “that terrible Tom” takes his boots off before he comes in, and don’t let “that rascal Teddy” roughhouse all over the furniture, it would just break Steffie’s heart if anything happened to this place, all the work she put into it to make it just as cute as a doll’s house … And I nodded and blithely agreed, for such an agreement seems easy when you are only planning to stay a month and may not even unpack your suitcase all the way.
But that was March and it is June. Useless to whimper for my sturdy little house in the woods near Ace Lake on the Old Nenana Road. Foolish to think of a place with painted plywood floors, and a boot-scraper driven into the ground outside the door. I miss my sagging couch with its ratty afghan that all three of us can cuddle under while Teddy hears his good-night tale from Just So Stories. I miss the high bunk that Tom built for Teddy, with all the shelves under it for toys and books. I miss my wood stove, and the sound of pinecones falling onto the corrugated tin roof at night. I want to go home.
But we can’t. Not just yet, but soon, Tom tells me. As soon as Bix is better. Bix, Ellie’s husband, is a very slow healer. Ellie is the eldest daughter in the Potter household, seldom spoken of, but there, nonetheless. And Bix is her sturdy hired-hand husband, as practical as a strike-anywhere kitchen match. A good son-in-law, none too bright, but handy around the place. Until he broke his collarbone. It’s hard to run a tractor with a broken collarbone, and the fields have to be tilled and planted. The farm has to look prosperous and well run, for in front of the farm, less than an acre away, is the farm equipment dealership that fronts onto the highway. Tom’s father owns it and runs it, with Mother Maurie and Steffie to do the bookwork and order parts and dust the shelves. Tom’s older sister, Ellie, keeps the big house in order for them all. And Ellie’s husband, as big and good-natured and farmy as she is, does his best to help out anywhere he can. But he’s not the same as a real son, Tom has confided ingenuously to me, not to his dad. Dick Potter likes to know that the crucial work of the farm is in family hands. It’s just like that fool Bix to have broken his collarbone in spring, the busiest time of the year. And so Tom must stay, just a little longer, to get the fields tilled and planted, to move the irrigation pipe that waters the tender young plants, to mechanic on the equipment that does the work, and to be Dick’s son. It is his family. Family is important. I understand.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I am sweetly reasonable. Sometimes I understand all that Tom tells me, about how important his family is, and that they expect and need his loyalty. There is something all-American about the concept of the extended family and the old family farm, and pulling together to get through the hard times. Sometimes it is a thing I want Teddy to learn, and sometimes I want him to grow up remembering early mornings on the farm, feeding the chickens, riding the tractor behind Bix or Tom, going to town in Grandpa’s red truck, sitting by Grandma’s feet and watching television in the evening.
And sometimes I want them back, all to myself, my Tom, my Teddy. I don’t want to be Tom’s wife. I want to be Evelyn, in the cabin Tom and I built, in a place more forest than farm. I want to go home to my own house, to my own furniture, to my books and garden and woods. I don’t want to be careful of the rattan furniture and the bright cushions that show every smear of dirt. I want to flop down on my own couch and sigh heavily, and let all the tension out. I want to be home.
Lately, when Tom speaks of home, he means this farm. “Let’s go home now,” he said to me yesterday when I had stolen him away, to have him to myself for a few guilty moments on a spurious errand. I wanted to stop at a cafe, to have a cup of coffee and talk with him. But he was restless, his mind full of uncompleted chores. “I have to get home,” he repeated, and my heart sank. Is my home now different from his? Sometimes I see it all as an elaborate con worked upon me, as when I was in grade school and there were cliques I could never belong to, no matter what I did, no matter how hard I tried. I am no different from Ellie’s husband, I will never be as good as a real daughter, never part of the real family. And sometimes the Potter family farm reminds me more of a Japanese corporate structure than Old MacDonald’s Farm. Sometimes I suspect them of shaving and shaping Tom, like a faulty cog that doesn’t quite mesh, machining him to fit into the gear chain instead of causing it to jam. I think they will steal Teddy from me, will teach him that he is a real grandson of the real family, and therefore belongs with them, not with his mother who is only a married-on artificial part of the family.
If I think about these things, I can work myself up into a frothing rage. How dare they! I won’t let them! Mine, all mine, Tom and Teddy are mine and they shall never have them!
Sick. Selfish. Sad. I know. But there is so little else for me to do. Tom goes off to work and Teddy trails off with him, or is “borrowed” by Grandpa to be shown off while he sits in Hanks Diner and has his morning coffee with the other good old boys. I stay here, in Snow White Steffie’s enchanted cottage, and try to deal with an oil smudge on a yellow cushion, Teddy’s sticky fingerprints on the glass-topped table, and the increasingly obvious sag of the rattan chair that was never intended for a man of Tom’s size. I know Mother Maurie will quietly mention these signs of wear to other family members as evidence of my waywardness and inferiority to a real daughter. And I experience the amusing dichotomy of watching myself mutter that I never wanted to be treated as a real daughter even as I try to get peanut butter out of the weave of a rattan armrest.
When I run out of hopeless housework to occupy myself, I can fill my days with endless paperbacks. Passion’s Proud Fury and The Angry Heart and The Elegant Suitor and Flames of Desire. Steffie has a wall of them in her room, and she has told me that I can borrow them whenever I like. They are all romances, in different series, and she keeps them arranged by number. She marks a little X inside the cover of each one she has read, so she doesn’t accidentally start reading it again. It’s easy to forget, she tells me, which ones she has read, and she used to get deep into one before she realized she had already read it once before. The X’s, she tells me, keep her from wasting her time. The other books in the big house are technical manuals for tractors; Steffie is the family bookworm, all the Potters agree, and they are proud of her endless reading.
There is an alternative to rattan maintenance and Passion’s Proud Fury. I can go visit the big house.
In the day I can go over and watch Ellie work. She is a big rawboned woman, Dick Potter’s frame accidentally bestowed on a female child. Both seem ashamed of the error. Ellie minimalizes it by hunching around the house, wearing her plaid housedresses as if they were a clever disguise, like a tablecloth thrown over a packing crate. Ellie does only one thing. She works. She mops tile floors and sweeps hardwood floors, she scrubs walls, she pounds yielding white dough into loaves, she chops vegetables and tumbles them into simmering pots, she polishes windows and dusts shelves. She never stops. If I arrive during the day, she assumes I have some purpose there and ignores me. She is not one to stop and have a cup of tea and chat. Conversation with Ellie is a difficult thing, a trailing net of words that follows her from room to room as she straightens and tidies, snagging on feather dusters and Pledge cans and sponges and Comet cleanser. How is she? I am fine, and excuse me, I have to mop where you’re standing. And how is Bix? Bix is better, save for a crick in his back, serves him right for trying to work in his good boots while his shoulder is still banged up, and excuse me, I have to go get the Pine Sol.
What else can I do with myself? Once I got up early and fed all the chickens, ducks, and pigs. I gave the chickens too much, the ducks too much, and the pigs not enough, and the poultry food is expensive, almost seven cents a pound now, and the pigs will break out of their yard if they get hungry during the day, and of course Mother Maurie knew I was only trying to help, but it’s not like farming’s in my blood, like in Tom’s, so I’m bound to make mistakes, but the wrong amount of feed can put the poultry off their laying, and of course that’s critical this time of year, so maybe I should let Ellie do it like always, but thanks for trying to help, it was so cute of me.
Is it me?
Sometimes I think it’s just me. I think there’s something wrong inside me, something mean and selfish and small that puts the worst interpretation on anything that’s said to me. When I try to tell Tom about what happened, he looks at me, puzzled. “Well, the wrong amount of feed can put the chickens off their laying,” he says, as if that explains everything, and goes back to reading his tractor manual.
It is evening, night in the little house, but not at all peaceful. My nerves are trembling inside my body, I want to explode, to shriek and scream. And Tom, once so tuned to me he could answer my unspoken questions, does not even notice. So I will be good. I will be patient. I will be a good wife, and contain this unreasoning anger. I will think of something worthwhile to do.
“I think I’ll go get Teddy,” I say. “It’s getting late, and I think he’s had enough television for one night. This time of evening, there’s probably nothing on that will interest him, anyway.”
Tom grunts, flips back to the index, turns more chunks of pages, traces his finger down an already grimed schematic. My hand is on the doorknob when he speaks.
“Oh, Teddy’s sleeping at Mom’s house. He fell asleep on the couch, so Mom just covered him up. No sense waking him.”
“But,” I say, and stop. But what? But I want my baby? I want to read him a story, tuck him into his madeup bed on the rattan sofa, look up from Passion’s Furious Pride to watch his chest rising and falling under his blanket, his small mouth pursing in his sleep? Don’t be silly, Evelyn. Let him sleep where he is, don’t wake the child and drag him outside and across a damp yard just to put him back to bed again. Likely the boy will catch a chill from a foolish thing like that. You just leave my grandson be. I take my hand from the doorknob, return to my yellow cushion and white rattan seat. I try to immerse myself in Marlena’s thwarted passion for Duke Aimsly, to believe in people who cordially hate each other for months and then fall into bed with each other, muttering about raven hair and bee-stung lower lips and throbbing towers of maleness and secret chasms of womanhood. I look up at Tom.
I met Tom in the winter of 1969. My parents had sent me “outside” to college, to the University of Washington, and we met during an anthropology class. It was one of those huge 101 classes that every freshman faces at least once. Every day a wave of students poured into an auditorium, flowing into the crowded seats with no set pattern, dragging up the tiny flop-out desktops that were never quite big enough to support a full-sized notebook. There was no personal interaction with the professor at all. He came, he lectured, he left. Attendance was taken by a paper passed for signatures. Tests were mostly multiple choice. It embodied all the worst elements of mass education.
But I had always been a dedicated student. I sat every day in the front row, center. I stared up at the professor. I strained to hear his words over the muttering and shifting of the restless student herd, and to make out the spidery notes he scratched on the portable blackboard. Tom sat beside me. After several weeks, we noticed each other. He was the handsomest boy who had ever looked at me and smiled. It is good to remember that on evenings like this.
Later, I am still thinking of him as I watch him undress. I am already in my nightgown, sitting on my corner of the bed, drawing a brush through my hair. My hair is the color of mahogany from the sun, and unruly as always. It is neither straight nor curly, but when it is damp it makes waves of itself, and wraps itself around the brush bristles and the handle. I draw the brush slowly down my hair as I watch Tom unbutton his shirt.
One of the nasty little intrusive thoughts is that watching him undress is not as intensely pleasurable as it once was. It is my attitude that has changed, not the man, for Tom takes pride in keeping himself in good condition. His body is fine, and more than fine, much better a body than my own deserves. Tom could pose for beefcake. I could pose naked, and folks would have to look twice to see if I was female. I try not to be grateful for his body, for his sharing himself with me, for a small part of me insists that ungraceful and curveless as my own is, it is still a sturdy and useful vessel, a fine little animal to live in. But I cannot help taking pride in Tom and basking in his reflected glory.
I watch him now as he bends over slightly to tug his T-shirt off over his head. He is tall and well muscled and he bends gracefully, the muscles of his back delineated along his spine. He straightens, and his soft blond hair falls back into place, almost brushing his shoulders. I love his hair. When we are making love, it falls forward and brushes my cheek. I like to reach up and grasp the nape of his neck, feeling the muscles beneath my hand and his hair soft against my fingers, like the mane of a stallion. Dick Potter hates his son’s soft hair. Goddam Hippie Hairdo, he calls it, all in caps. But I feel a small victory in that Tom has not given in to his demands for a haircut.
He has been going shirtless for this last week or so, and the skin of his back is golden. When he straightens and looks at me, he is all tawny colors, golden skin, soft blond hair, and gentle brown eyes. Lion colors. He knows I have been watching him and he smiles, anticipating pleasure. He is so incredibly beautiful to me that an aching swells inside me. Not of desire, but of love thwarted. I love him so. And I am about to start a quarrel.
“Tom, honey, when are we going home?”
He stops in the act of lowering his pants and actually sits down on the bed in surprise. He turns to face me, his boyish face wrinkled with perplexity. He has been thinking of sex, not of neglected cabins and gardens going to weed. His fine lion hair is rumpled where he has drawn his T-shirt off over his head. His amber eyes, now the color of sunlight on beer bottles, go wide. “When are we what, Lyn?”
“When are we going home?” I repeat doggedly, patiently. “We were only going to spend a month here, remember? Just a pleasant spring interlude on the old family farm, camping out in the guest cottage, get Teddy out of Alaska for a while, let him see what a real spring planting time is like. Then somehow it became a month or so. Okay, May is fine, even though there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to get done on our own place. Teddy’s had a great time with the piglets and the chicks and the ducklings and all. But, honey, we’re in to June now, and I was thinking we’d be headed home any day now. Then, at dinner tonight, all of a sudden your dad starts talking as if we’re staying here the rest of the summer, and this winter, too.” I hear the stridency in my voice, take a deep breath. I stop ripping the brush through my hair as I realize my scalp is sore. Carefully, I soften my voice. “Babe, can you tell me what’s going on?”
Tom heaves the long-suffering sigh of the nagged husband. It is a new trick of his, one I don’t particularly care for. “Lyn. Honey. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve gotten so touchy lately. Yes, Dad did ask me if I would consider staying out the summer and part of the winter. You know Bix hurt his shoulder. Well, it’s going to lay him up for longer than we thought. So that leaves Dad trying to run the place and the business. And this is the busy time of year. Not only the farm to tend, but this is the time of year when folks are buying equipment. Being a man short around here is no joke anytime, so Dad invited us to stay on. That’s all. Just until Bix gets back on his feet. And between you and me, I don’t think that’s going to take as long as Dad thinks it will. Probably only another month or so. That’s all. And I didn’t give him a definite answer, because I wanted to talk to you about it first. But you know how my folks are. They think that if they just act like something is going to happen, it will.”
And it usually does, where we’re concerned, I think. No, I have said the foolish words aloud, I can tell by the sparks that light suddenly in Tom’s eyes. He finishes undressing in silence, kicking his pants away into a heap on the floor. He pushes the covers aside and swings his long pale legs into bed. His posture tells me I won’t be getting any tonight. He pulls up the covers before he speaks again.
His voice is a lie and a deception, reasonable and sweet. “If you want to take that attitude, then I suppose there’s no point to our discussing it at all.” You idiot, you spoiled brat, you cowering, narrow-minded little wretch, his attitude says to me. Refusing without even hearing me out. Heartless bitch. He hunches his shoulder under the white sheet and blue blanket. His soft hair fans out over the pillowcases. The pillowcases are white, but the cuffs feature Mother Maurie’s cross-stitch embroidery. A gaudy rooster on Tom’s, a plump little hen for me. The cross-stitched motto on Tom’s proclaims that he’s “all set to strut and crow,” while my hen petulantly affirms that she’d rather “set awhile.” They match a set we were given for a wedding gift. Steffie thinks they are adorable. They make me want to retch. Tom’s voice draws me back to our argument. “I’ll just tell them you didn’t like the idea, and that will be that.”
Oh, goody. You do that. I’d love to see their faces. I take a deep breath, put pettiness aside. “Tom. Don’t snap at me. You know what I’m thinking about, or at least you should. There’s our house. It’s been sitting empty since March, and we’re just asking for vandalism. God knows it’s probably full of mice and red squirrels already.”
“Pete and Beth said they’d keep an eye on it.”
“Pete and Beth both work, honey. Driving into our place twice a week only means they can let us know after the windows get broken. We’re not as isolated as we once were out there. Last summer I saw hikers and backpackers almost every day. And poor Bruno will be wondering what happened to us. I know they’ll feed him, but he’s only a pup. He’ll be half wild when we get back there as it is. And there’s Teddy’s school. He starts kindergarten this fall. I don’t want to have him start here, and then pull him out halfway through the year. Starting school is tough enough on a kid without doing that. And, last but not least, there’s the small matter of my job.”
In spite of my best effort, my voice was getting cold and rocky. Don’t make this a fight, I beg myself. Make it a discussion. He has to see the logic of what you’re saying, you don’t have to be a bitch about it. Just tell him. Lay it all out for him. I pause a moment, hoping he’ll say something. He doesn’t. I take a breath and go on.
“It took a lot of nerve for me to ask for this much time off. If Annie weren’t my friend as well as my boss, she’d never have said yes. But she can’t keep running the store on her own. She’s got some kid in there for the summer, but come winter the kid has to be back in school and she’ll be on her own. She’ll have to hire someone to take my place, and there won’t be a job for me to go back to.”
I pause and gather the reins of my self-control. Tom will see. He’s a reasonable man, one who has always treated me as an equal, as a person to be considered. But the silence lengthens and it looks as if he is having to struggle to control himself before he speaks. Neither of us are good at this, at quarreling. We do it very seldom, most things are settled conversationally, or one or the other of us will demur to the other’s area of expertise. I let Tom select the used truck we bought, he let me choose the insulation for the attic, we recognize there are areas where one of us is more knowledgeable than the other. But this is a different thing, an area of opinion based on emotions. And we are both experts on our own emotions.
“Jesus Christ, Lyn,” he sighs at last. “You make it sound like I’m contemplating murder. All we’re thinking about is spending a winter here with my folks and giving them a hand over a hard spot. I mean, hell, they paid for my college, they brought me up … I feel I owe them. And I have thought about all the stuff you mentioned. There’s a good school for Teddy just down the road from here. The school bus stops right by the gate. And I bet Pete and Beth could rent our place out for us in only a couple of weeks, if we let them know the kind of tenants we want. Taking care of Bruno would be part of the deal. And, hey, Dad said that if we were staying the winter, he saw no reason why Teddy couldn’t have that little pony that Red has up for sale. You know how he drools over that little pinto every time we drive past there. His eyes practically popped out when Dad mentioned it.”
“You discussed that in front of him? Tom, that’s not fair! You get his hopes all set up, and when Mommy wants to go home, that makes her the bad guy. And you still haven’t mentioned anything about my job.”
I am honestly angry now, paying no heed to the little sane voice inside telling me to be cool, be an adult, try to see both sides. Tom is frozen by his outrage, stiff as a corpse between the cold white sheets. The tendons stand out against his jaws when he speaks.
“You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Teddy is big enough to understand that what he wants isn’t always what he gets. I don’t see why you always have to get so mad. Any idea I have, if I talk it over with Mom or Dad first, you automatically hate it. It’s wrong, no matter what it is. And so what about your job? Clerking in some weird little shop, that’s not a big deal. I mean, what are you going to become, manager of the fruit and nut section? The buyer for organic teas? It’s not a big deal, Lyn! You can always get it back, or another piss-ant job just like it!”
“It is a big deal! It’s a big deal to me! And you’re damn right I don’t like it when you take your ideas and plans to your parents first! You’re supposed to be my husband! Remember? Usually married people make their decisions with each other, not with their mommys and daddys. And I happen to like my crummy little unimportant job. It’s hard to find a job you like, you should know that. You’ve walked out on enough of them. And my crummy little job was just fine with you last winter when it was the only damn thing that was feeding us!”
I stop suddenly. Carefully I fit my knuckles against my mouth and teeth, feeling where they would strike if I could hit myself, wishing I could. I wish I could. I’ve gone too far, way over the edge, past the unspoken boundaries we’ve set up for our quarrels. Never have I thrown things like that at Tom. He cannot hold a permanent job, that is something we both silently acknowledge, not as a fault but as a facet of his independent ways. Never have I thrown it at him like a dagger.
His eyes are wide open with vulnerability and hurt. I have struck true and deep, wounding him where the blood will puddle and congeal inside him. I have demanded my own way as something that is owed me, throwing his failures in his face to make it his duty to comply. He looks at me silently, his pain trickling through his guts, too badly injured to even fight back anymore.
“Tom, Tom, I’m sorry. I just got so mad, I started to say anything to hurt you back. I didn’t mean it that way, you know I didn’t mean it. I understood about those jobs. I didn’t want you to stay with them. But I’m hurt, too. When you go to your folks all the time, for advice and make decisions with them, it makes me feel so small and unimportant. There’s nothing for me here, and it makes me feel like nothing.”
“Teddy and I are nothing.” He says it acceptingly, dully.
“No. No, that’s not what I meant. You and Teddy are everything. Don’t listen to my words alone, you know what I mean behind the words. Please, Tom. I’m sorry for what I said.”
I crawl across the bed to him, wrap my body around his stiff one, my belly to his warm back. I bury my face into his hair, so soft against my face, and rock his unyielding body on the bed. My anxious hands run over his body, kneading at the hard muscles, stroking, caressing the stiffness out of him, massaging away the anger and hurt that divides us. Eventually he relaxes in my embrace. He rolls in my arms, embraces me.
“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” he mutters, his lips by my ear. “Let’s just forget it.” His voice is soothing. “We’re both too tired to be discussing anything, much less fighting about it. We both said a lot of nasty things. If you want to go home at the end of the summer, well, that’s all there is to it. I can understand how you might feel a little overwhelmed by my family. Mom and Dad have had to be aggressive, just to survive in this business, and they encouraged it in us kids as we grew up. Grab the buck, make the deal … you know how they are. So when I saw a chance for us to make rent off our place, and both of us pull in wages here, and Mom picking up the grocery bill, well, I thought it might really set us up, financially. Put us on our feet, give us a second swing at things. I didn’t know you felt so strongly about going home, that’s all. I’ll just tell the folks tomorrow that summer is the end of the visit. They’ll just have to understand.” His eyes are opened wide as he says this, honesty and hurt gleaming in them as he gives it all up for me. Sacrifices it all.
And he has me. I capitulate instantly, telling him I hadn’t thought of the financial angle, that certainly we can stay at least until the end of the summer, and we’ll talk about winter when we’re both rested, yes, it would be wonderful for Teddy to have a pony, and the job was, well, only a job. On, and on. Giving it all away. Making up for the hurt I had done. What did it matter, anyway? Tom and Teddy, they’re what is important. What did I matter, anyway? Surrender to Tom, and it won’t be scary anymore. I won’t have to ask myself what would happen if just once I stuck to my guns, insisted on having my own way. I won’t have to wonder if he’d dump me, or tell me to lump it or leave, wonder what would happen to me without him. Give in to Tom, and it isn’t frightening, we aren’t quarreling anymore.
Long after he tells me what an angel I am, and how much he loves me, and weren’t we silly for arguing, and how much his folks will appreciate his help, yes, and long after he falls asleep, I lie awake and look at myself naked and helpless in my own mind.
I think of the little shop Annie runs. It’s in the front half of an old house at Ester, not that far from the Malemute Saloon of Robert Service fame. Not that far for me to drive, even when the roads are white with packed snow-ice and my headlights cut through the black Alaska day. It is a warm place, a wood stove in the center of the room, and then all the bins full of nuts and seeds and organic grains and little cans full of spices and bright boxes of teas with wonderful names like Dragon’s Mane and Orchard Spice, teas that Annie mixes herself in the tiny back rooms. It is an alchemist’s shop for food, a place where the ordinary becomes gold. The walls are planks of honey-colored wood, and they are covered with shelves and hooks and alcoves full of merchandise, soft leather bags with porcupine quill embroidery on them, massage oils in precious bottles, ceramic teapots with whimsical faces, created by an old friend of Annie’s, treasures and surprises, delightful things to sell …
I won’t be going back to that. I know it suddenly, with a sureness that trembles through me. My place there is gone, taken by another. If I go into that store again, it will be as a customer, as one who stands in the public area, not one who goes behind the Dutch doors and talks over the bottom half as she mixes a special tea. I won’t be the one to indulge someone’s child in a horehound drop or a stick of real licorice root.
I touch Tom, running my hands down his long flanks, wanting him to roll back and hold me. I imagine him running his hands over me the same way I am touching him, stroking my flesh, making it desirable by his touch. Make me special by wanting me. I want him to put his hands over my diminutive breasts and make them important by pinching the nipples between his fingers, by testing his teeth gently against them.
I have stirred myself to heat, and I need him, I need him to bury me in physical sensations so my mind will shut up. I don’t want to think about where I have heard those arguing techniques before. I don’t want to remember Mother Maurie applying them to Steffie all this spring, how she acts hurt by her daughter’s refusals but politely accepts them, all the while pointing out how logic and reason and good manners are all on her side. Eroding Steffie’s belief in herself until Steffie gives in, and then pampering Steffie to show her how smart she is to obey her mother. It works every time for her. Don’t I know how well it works?
I clutch at Tom, slipping my hand over his hip and down, cupping his balls, and then gripping his penis firmly. I will it to swell in my hand, to become a sword that will subdue my doubts. But he only mutters, sleep’s grip on him more sure and intimate than mine. He doesn’t need me, not the way I need him. He can quarrel with me, make up, and then turn away, go to sleep, forget our temporary division. He is not frightened when we disagree. My nipples are hard, I press them into his back, feel the contact as agonizingly tantalizing. I rub against his passiveness, driving myself crazy. Turn to me, touch me, I beg him silently. Make me desirable, make me important, make me real.
“Lyn,” he complains, wriggling out of my embrace, away from the thigh I have thrown over his hip. He’d only have to roll to face me, make himself hard for me, I’d do all the rest. “Honey,” he rebukes me gently, “I’ve got to get up extra early tomorrow.” He takes a deep breath, sighs it out. I lie in the warm place on the sheet that he has just vacated. His scent is on the pillows, and I breathe it in, savoring where his flesh has been like a dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. “Gonna show Teddy a deer,” he mutters to his pillow. “Been watering at the duck pond. Saw his sign this morning. Don’t know how he’s been getting past the electric fence, but there’re hoof marks all over down there. Gotta sleep, baby.”
He goes away, off into sleep as surely as he will go off to work tomorrow, leaving me aching and alone. Unimportant. Of what value is a woman undesired, a woman who does no task, fulfills no function? The sheets chill around me, become wide plains of glacial whiteness, Tom a distant mountain range I will never scale. I’m alone.
Not alone.
His face fills my mind suddenly, and the musk I smell is not Tom’s anymore. The lust that hits me now is sudden and unexpected as a hammer blow, a directed passion that makes my desire for Tom a mere itch, a passing fancy. I know him suddenly, more thoroughly than I have known any man. His tongue, I know, would be raspy like a cat’s tongue, eager to seek out my secrets, and his cock would fill me and swell against me. To him I would be everything, companion, friend, lover. Merely by being me. I imagine the sleek fur of his flanks under my hands, how my fingers would find the rumpled nubs at the base of his horns as I directed his mouth on my flesh.
I move against the sheets, my nipples rasping against Mother Maurie’s percale, and surrender to my fantasy. But my imagination is not enough to sate me, and I am still too proud to touch myself. Sleep is the only one who takes me this night, and my dreams touch me too softly to ease me.
SIX (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)
Fairbanks
Spring 1964
He is always there for me, in the woods. He is not a god to me, nor an animal. But in one sense he is like a spirit. He is the essence of the forest, of the moss and mushrooms and animals and trees and plants. When he is with me, then the forest is with me as well. And the forest is the only place where I feel whole. My world is divided into three parts: the school, the home, and the forest. Only the forest is peaceful, healing. Only the forest is mine.
With each passing year, school only gets worse. The pressure is on. Not for grades. I assume As are my right, and I get them, without fail, despite teachers who dislike me and other students who harass me. I batter them out of Mrs Haritsen, drowning her in extra-credit work I don’t really need to do, always flapping my hand frantically with the correct answer, writing a five-page essay when a three-page is asked for, always using complete sentences, punctuating faultlessly, writing large and clearly on all my papers.
She hates me, of course. But she isn’t allowed to show it. She’s a lay teacher, a volunteer at the Catholic school. She’s not a nun, and to my way of thinking she isn’t a teacher at all. She is from the states and is young and is afraid of Alaska. I can tell. And that makes her hate me.
She can force me to do things. She will be giving the spelling test, strolling between the aisles of desks, giving a word, a sentence with the word, and the word again. “Pneumonia,” she says. “The doctor says the sick child has pneumonia. Pneumonia. Oh, heavens!” The whole class looks up, startled, from their papers. She is standing over my desk. “Evelyn. Look at your hands! I am not going to correct any paper handed in by such a dirty girl. You go and wash them this instant!”
And I rise and go back to the big sink in the back of the classroom, to wash my clean but badly chapped hands. I use the coarse powdered soap in the barely warm water, and dry them on rough paper towels. She continues the spelling test without me, as if I do not matter at all, and, of course, to her I do not. I store the spelling words in my head, “psychiatrist,” “physician,” “symphony,” as I scrub at the backs of my hands where the constant chapping of cold water and wind has turned the abused skin dark, nearly black. I sand some of it off, leaving my hands raw and sore, and return quietly to my desk. I fill in the words quickly, ignoring the bird-black eyes she turns on me, hoping, hoping that I’ll raise my hand and ask her to repeat them. I must never give her that chance to smash me. I know that tomorrow it will be something else.
One day I came to class after PE, having changed too quickly, and all the boys laughed as I came in the door. I glanced down, chagrined, to find my shirt buttoned unevenly, the childish lace-necked little-girl T-shirt beneath it showing all my flat ribby chest and small green-raspberry nipples through its soft fabric. Any other teacher might have seen my scarlet face and called the class to order, pulled their attention away from me. Any of the nuns would have. But Mrs Haritsen has none of the softness and kindness the nuns hide behind their flat black exteriors. All Mrs Haritsen’s softness is on the outside, in her curling soft hair and pastel dresses. Within she is colder than black flint. Mrs Haritsen required me to stand at the board and write sentences. “A Catholic girl is a modest girl. A Catholic girl is a modest girl.” Until the board was filled with my handwriting, and my arm ached with holding my hand up and my head ached with pounding blood. But I did it. And she must give me the As I have earned.
I know what I am like to her. I am a wild and savage little animal. She perceives me as refusing the good civilization she offers me. Like a muddy feral kitten, rescued from a thunderstorm, spitting and sinking its impotent fangs into the hands that seek to smooth its rough fur, scorning the saucer of warmed milk offered it, choosing instead to huddle beneath the sofa and hope that someone will leave the door standing ajar, if only for an instant, so it can risk its draggled tail in a dash for the dark and storm outside. I am neither cute nor likeable.
So she puts the pressure on me, and it is not for grades, nor for anything else I understand. I don’t know what she wants me to give her. I only know that if I give it, I will no longer be me. Me is all I have, and I cling to me, instinctively, without even knowing how tightly I hold on to my selfness.
I am not like the other girls, who ask her questions about her clothes and her hair and her nails, who listen giggling in a circle around her desk at recess as Mrs Haritsen tells them something cute her husband said, or something “wild and silly” she did in college. I don’t like it when she talks about how much she misses Idaho, and how much we are all missing by growing up in “this wild place.” She feels so sorry for the other little girls, and her pity makes them vaguely insecure, wondering what wonderful things they are missing that evokes so much condescension from her. I don’t want her pity. If she doesn’t like Alaska, she can leave. Does she really think the woods will turn into a city because she wants them to, that the roads will widen and be paved, that the winters will become less cold and dangerous because petite Mrs Haritsen thinks they should? She’s stupid. I force her to give me As, and hope she will go back to the states soon. I pray that a nun will teach me next year.
Home is almost as bad. My sisters fight over boyfriends. Jeffrey met Sissy at a dance, but when he came to visit her at our house, he met Candy, and now he’s asked her to the movies instead of Sissy. My mother is at a loss as to what to do about it. She tells my sisters that they must sort it out for themselves. She asks them, rhetorically, if either of them really wants to date a boy who could be that insensitive. Of course they do. He has a car. My mother folds her lips and irons a mountain of laundry, refusing to listen to any more squabbling. So Sissy cries and calls Candy “that bitch” when I am the only one around to hear it. And Candy primps endlessly in the bathroom mirror, ignoring the pleas of those with bursting bladders, when she isn’t sulking because Sissy won’t lend her blue eye shadow to her.
It makes my life miserable. First, Kimmy tells on me when, in agonized desperation, I go into the woods across the lane from the house and pee. Never mind that Candy was the one hogging the bathroom. I am “uncivilized” and my mother scolds me for it, not privately but in the kitchen where my little brothers hear and giggle endlessly about it. “What did you use for toilet paper,” they demand, interrupting the scolding. “Leaves? Moss? Birch bark?” They giggle wildly, uncontrollably, even when my mother turns her scolding on them. They are unremorseful, and I am able to escape her, leaving her to tell them “It’s not funny” as I tiptoe down the stairs.
But the room I share with Candy and Sissy is a sulfurous and brooding place. Candy is pulling her hair out of curlers, and Sissy is lying on her bed, reading, and not watching her. She is not watching her so intensely it is like the sharp edge of a knife blade pressed into the silence, and I am tempted to beg her to watch Candy, to stop ignoring her. One glance would be all it would take to ignite the storm, and then they could shriek and wail and slam hairbrushes down. The tension would be broken, and I could relax then, could read a book while they quarrel as imperturbably as I can sit out a storm under a spruce tree.
But Sissy won’t look, and Candy is so miffed that she turns from the mirror and attacks me instead. “Did Mom tell you to stay in the basement when Jeffrey comes to pick me up?” she demands.
“No,” I say, trying to make it withering, but not succeeding. I am too surprised, and I am not able to hide it.
“Well, she said she was going to, so make sure you do.” Candy turns back to the mirror.
This may be the opening Sissy has been waiting for. She slams her book and sits up ramrod straight, her face going rocky with righteous indignation. “She did not. She said you could ask Evvie nicely, and that sure wasn’t nicely. I’m telling.”
“Go ahead. Who cares? Not you, for sure. You don’t care what people think of our family. Look at Evvie, for crying out loud. Look how she runs around. Susan Adams told me that Kerry Pierce asked her if Evvie was a girl or a boy. He couldn’t tell by looking at her. No one could! Look at her! Last time Jeffrey was here, she was running around in that same shirt, and I swear the same dirt on it. He’s going to think that’s the only clothes she owns!”
“She’s just a little kid!” Sissy jumps to my defense. “Leave her alone. She can’t help how she looks!”
“Maybe not, but she could at least be clean. Look at her! Mud on her knees, God knows what on her chin, her hair full of twigs, probably from shitting in the bushes somewhere. Like a little animal.”
“Whose fault is it that she couldn’t use the bathroom?” Sissy demands.
I don’t say a word. I am looking at myself in the mirror, over Candy’s shoulder. It is a large dresser mirror, and I can see nearly my entire body. I stare at myself. I cannot remember the last time I studied myself in the mirror. I suddenly see what it is about, why Mrs Haritsen hates me, why I eat my lunch alone. I suddenly see the raggedy dirty jeans and the shirt with the elbows out. I think of what I wore to school on Friday, the green pleated skirt with half the hem dragging out, the yellow blouse with the little flowers on it that has a coffee stain on the stomach. I wonder why I have never thought about it before, why I have seen everything else so keenly and never myself. I wonder why my mother lets me run around this way, and then I know. She doesn’t have the time to worry about it. Squeaking wheels get oiled. If I don’t demand new clothes, a trip downtown to get my hair cut and styled, money for hand lotion and nail polish and new socks, new shoelaces, jeans that aren’t hand-me-downs, I will never get them. The money is already stretched as tight as it will go. Thank God for one child who doesn’t nag and whine and beg. I think of Sissy’s new nail polish, Candy’s white mohair sweater, Kimmy’s new Barbie doll camper, and I know that it should have been mine, my new dress, my new jeans. But what I don’t demand I don’t seem to need, and if I am content, no one will jar me from it.
I come back to the room and they are still fighting, my sisters, screaming at each other, ostensibly over me, but actually over Jeffrey. “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings, not Evvie’s, not mine, no one’s, as long as you get what you want!” Sissy is saying, and tears are running down her face.
“That’s not true. You know that’s not true. It’s not my fault that Jeffrey liked me better, and it sure isn’t my fault that Evvie looks like a pile of barfy rags!”
I snatch up Sissy’s book from her bed and I let it fly. It’s only a paperback, it shouldn’t matter, but when it hits Candy in the face she screams, and even before the book is all the way to the floor, I can see the blood rushing out of her nose. She screams again, air bubbling past the blood from her nose, the blood that is falling on her white mohair sweater, and then I am gone, up the stairs, eeling past my mother as she comes down, making my escape before she knows I am the culprit. I grab a knife and a small bucket from the kitchen as I dash through it, trusting they will help me buy my way back into her good graces when I return. Rinky picks up on me as I race out the door and attaches himself to me like a sidecar. We careen down the lane and across Davis Road. And into my woods.
The path under my feet is hard, bare earth, beaten out by my own feet, and I fly along it, jumping fallen logs, veering around boggy spots. I could run this in the dark, I know it so well, and frequently do. It is fairly clear at first, as my path follows an old grown-over survey cut, but then it gets to the slough, still full of water this time of year, and I veer off, paralleling it, crouched over to run down an old rabbit trail, ignoring the branches that snatch at my hair and clothing, going to earth like an animal, fleeing into deeper forest. I run until I am sure I won’t be able to hear them call me, even if they send one of the boys up to stand by the mailbox on Davis Road and yell for me. Then I stop and drop, panting, onto the deep moss. Rinky gives me one sniff, to be sure I am all right, pushing his cold black olive nose against my cheek and into my ear, and then goes off on his own business, whatever that is. I am alone with my images of Candy’s blood bubbling over her mouth and onto her sweater. Dark red blood, clashing with her nearly auburn hair. I can’t remember that she has ever had a bloody nose before, at least not one from getting hit with something. I know she will blubber for at least an hour, and Jeffrey is due to pick her up in only half an hour. I am betting the blood won’t come out of the mohair sweater, even if they soak it in cold water and put meat tenderizer on it. Well, I reflect savagely, at least I won’t be around to humiliate her when Jeffrey does come.
My small bucket is beside me on the moss, the short kitchen knife inside it. I pull my knees up, start to rest my chin atop them. Then I stop and look at them. Muddy, where I knelt down earlier today when I was roughhousing with Rinky. And torn, so that my knee, too, is dirty, and showing through the rent denim.
So? So.
I cannot forget the grubby, unkempt kid I saw in the mirror earlier. That is not how I’ve been imagining myself, all this time. I think of myself as me, as looking like me. I’ve been seeing myself in terms of what I can do rather than how I look. Runner. Stalker. Tree climber, ditch jumper, mushroom hunter, game spotter. I had no clear physical image of myself. I’ve only seen the view from my windows. I never thought to wonder how I really looked, to others.
It was bad.
And yet a stubborn part of me doesn’t want to yield, refuses to rush home and wash up, brush my hair, put on clean clothes, and nag my mother for new clothes and new shoes. A part of me says, tough for them. Maybe I’ve only discovered this today, but I suspect they’ve known it all along. All along. They haven’t done right by me, and even if I never knew it until now, they knew it all along. So let them live with it. If they’re embarrassed by my looks, too bad. That’s how I am. And if they’ve never cared enough to come to me kindly, to gently help me change, then screw them. I’ll look this way. Always. Forever and ever and ever. And let them be ashamed. I won’t ask for new clothes, for new shoes. And if they offer them, I won’t want them. Not ever.
I close my eyes, imagining how horrible it would be if I went home and my mother and sisters had gone out and bought all new clothes for me, new shiny shoes, a coat with no teethmarks on the sleeve, jeans with knees in them. And if they gathered around me and brushed my hair and cut it and curled it. And then I went to school. And everyone would see the big change in me, and they’d gather around me and ask me questions. “Where’d ya get the new dress?” “Are those new shoes?” “I like your hair that way a lot better.” “You really look nice.” And I would have to smile and let them sniff me over. It would be admitting that I had been wrong, had been unkempt and shaggy. It would be admitting that they had been right to feel sorry for me all this time, to be disgusted by me all this time, to ostracize me all this time. It would be surrender. It’s too late. It’s gone too far, I can’t even surrender now. Not if I want to survive as me.
My eyes are stinging like I’m going to cry, but this doesn’t make sense. I’m angry, not sad. Angry. I take the knife from my bucket and stab it deep into the moss. Angry. I stab the moss again, and again.
Rinky comes back, snuffles my hair, snuffles at what I’m doing, nearly getting his black nose cut off by my knife in the process, finds it incomprehensible and hence uninteresting, and goes off again. Comes back a second later, licks my ear comfortingly, and leaves again.
The music begins, tentative and breathy. I lift my chin a fraction of an inch, and freeze, listening. There are only five or six notes to the simple melody, and it seems familiar, but I cannot put a name or words to it, nor say where I have heard it before. I turn my head slowly, listening. Sound travels strangely by water, and it takes me a minute before I am sure I have my direction. Across the slough. Damn.
I stand, catching up my bucket. There is a place to cross the slough, one where I will not get more than knee wet, and I head that way. As I go, I keep an eye out for wild mushrooms. My mother loves wild mushrooms, and has taught me twenty-seven different edible varieties, as well as those that I must not touch, and those that are merely useless or unsavory. I find several orange delicious, their caps actually a mottled green, but a secret orange ring hidden within their stems that makes identification easy. I draw the knife tip across the gills, watch the milky liquid rise to the cut. Lactarius family. Same as the pepper cap. I roll Latin names on my tongue as I scavenge mushrooms and walk.
The bottom of my bucket is covered with mushrooms by the time I get to the crossing place. I stand on the bank, picking my most likely path, and then set off, stepping from grass tuft to grass tuft, edging along an old log for part of the way, and then working my way again from tuft to tuft. Rinky comes, crashing and splashing to catch up with me, and nearly knocks me into the slough as he races past me. I have only two misses, and it is the same foot each time, so when I reach the other bank, I am only knee wet on one leg, and ankle-wet on both feet. Not bad.
The music has not ceased, but is smoothing out, as if the player is becoming more practiced. I know who it is, I do not need to catch the elusive tracery of his scent upon the air. I follow my nose and ears now, follow the sound and scent trickling between trees and brush, still pausing every now and then to add another mushroom or two to my bucket. Here is a hedgehog hydnum, a shingled cap with spiny little underpoints instead of gills, and a small orange boletus, its orange cap still tight to its white stem, hiding the soldierly rows of tubes that substitute for gills on it.
And here is a faun, goat legs akimbo, perched on an old log, cheeks red with puffing, eyes merry at my approach. He doesn’t stop playing, but plays for me, deliberately, showing off how well he blows his pipes. For they are genuine panpipes, the little wooden tubes bound in a row with some vegetable twine. They look new, the wood unscuffed, unworn, new-made for spring. I sit next to him on the log, watching how it’s done, how his mouth leaps from pipe to pipe. He is sweating, his curls are damp as they bob on his forehead, and I am struck again by his odor, sweeter than the warm breath of nursing puppies, pungent as crushed herbs, like tree resin and squashed raspberries and rich crumbly loam in the hand. Like all the sweetness of the earth embodied by a scent. It is a pleasure to sit beside him and smell him, and the music he plays has a similar unity to it. Breathless and soft it whispers like wind, like water over pebbles and rain dripping from branches, like birdcall and yet like the trumpetous sounding of an elk. He plays on and on and I listen.
When he stops, it is not the end of the song, but only the end of his breath. The song goes on around us, paler now, slurring its notes, but still there, breathing through the forest, and I understand what he has been doing. Not harmonizing with the forest, but amplifying it, anticipating its song, and playing beside it. He sees in my face my wonder and grins at me, unabashedly proud of himself. He wipes his pipes down one of his hairy thighs and offers them to me.
I take them cautiously, fearing for an instant that it is some kind of challenge from him, a dare for me to play as well as he has. If it is, I know I will not try. Something inside me is in full retreat from dares today. But in his eyes there is no challenge, only sharing. He watches me eagerly as I lift the pipes to my mouth, try my breath cautiously against one. It hoots softly, wistful as an owl, and my heart leaps in me with joy. Each pipe speaks to me with a voice I already know, and I forget the faun, forget everything but playing with the sounds I can utter now. It is like speaking a new language, no, like being mute all my life and then being granted speech, the speech of my dearest friends. I speak as the water, and then as the wind through branches, speaking as they do, not their thoughts but only their own being.
The faun’s hand is on my knee, and I suddenly feel it, breathe the last of my breath down the pipe. I stop reluctantly, and wipe them on the cleanest part of my sleeve and then offer them back to him. He takes them with a smile that says, “Wait, wait now, just a minute.” He holds them in his hands, and his rounded nails are the same color as his hooves, and two shades lighter than the tiny points that push up from amid his curls. His horns are growing this year, and I lean forward to touch one, knowing he will not flinch away nor resist my curiosity. Hard horn, smooth as polished wood yet knurled like diamond willow almost, the tip sharp against my palm. He angles his head away from my touch, gives me a glance that is through his lashes and over his cheekbones, then leans his head back, baring the browned swell of his throat, and lifts the pipes to his mouth. He closes his eyes.
He plays Pan.
He plays a glimpse of sunlight on a dappled flank in a birch grove, he plays brown eyes that light green with laughter, he plays the unwary clack of a cloven hoof against a glacier-worn stone, the deep breath drawn after a race through the woods, the grip of strong fingers on my wrist when he bids me be silent, the nudge of his shoulder against mine when our heads are close together over the first pale wood anemone, he plays the wind through brown curls and the trickle of rain over his shoulder blades. My throat closes up with how beautiful he is.
When I open my eyes, he has lowered the pipes, and I do not know how long I have been listening to the silence that is also a part of his song. He meets my shining eyes and his cheeks rose with more than the flush of his playing. He scratches his head, digging lovingly at the bases of his nubbly horns. With his free hand he offers the pipes to me again.
But this time I do not reach for them at all. I know what he wants to hear, and I do not wish to play it. I will not play ragged jeans and dirty knees, runny nose and scaly knuckles. I will not play my shame, and I try to pretend I don’t notice he is offering the pipes to me. So he pokes me with them, and when I still don’t respond, he pokes me again, hard, prodding me in the short ribs with their hardness.
I glare at him. He makes a face at me, sucking in his cheeks and hogging out his eyes. I snatch the pipes from his hand before he can jab me again. Immediately he settles back on his log seat, attentive and polite. I want to call him a bad name. He sits watching me, waiting for me, and I don’t understand why he is being this mean, this nasty, to demand this of me. I know what I am, and he can already see what I am. Why demand it be given a tongue? But he is still watching me, waiting, his face smooth, and I look long in his eyes, trying to find where he has hidden the malice that makes him demand this.
But he is too deceptive for me, and at last, in anger, I lift the pipes to my lips. I close my eyes, and squawk out bony dirty knees and snarled hair. The pipes shriek hilariously of a smudged face and hands rougher than a dog’s toepads, of ragged clothes that flutter in the wind they croak, and then of thin arms and a bony chest.
The pipes smack against my front teeth, jarring me to my very spine and cutting my upper lip and gum before they fly past my face. I open my eyes, frightened, and his hand is still lifted, palm toward me, as if his hand will fly back again and this time strike my face. His eyes are outraged and hurt. We stare at each other across the torn place between us, and something is bleeding, I am cut in a place that isn’t even on my body and he shares the wound, feels it just as I do. The hurt lasts a long time, and I don’t know how to make it stop.
I stoop slowly and pick up the pipes. They are unhurt, save for a drop of my blood on the end of one. I wipe it off on my shirt, cautiously offer them back to him. He takes them as if they are encrusted with dog shit, by two disdainful fingertips. He gives me a look I cannot interpret and hops off the log and rubs the pipes over the moss carefully, rips loose a handful of green willow leaves and scrubs the pipes with them, staining them green but ridding them of whatever uncleanliness he imagines on them. He is puffing when he sits back down. As he starts to lift the pipes to his mouth, I rise. I’ve had enough music for today, I decide. Especially I fear that he may play his own beauty again, a wicked counterpoint to my latest performance.
Walnut fingers grip my wrist, clenching tight. He has always been stronger than I am, but never before today has he used that, except in play. I refuse to struggle, knowing I cannot break free. Instead, I glare at him, then make my face cold and impassive as a bank of blown snow. I look past his shoulder into the moving shadows of the woods, for the wind has risen slightly and is stirring branches and grasses to dance. With the corner of my eye, I see his left hand lift the pipes to his mouth.
He plays, and I must listen, but I don’t have to show I’m listening. I continue to stare past him as he plays a tiny green frog clinging to the underside of a leaf, a cluster of high-bush cranberries dangling beneath an umbrella of rosy leaves, tiny alder cones rattling down on new-fallen leaves, and spruce sap glinting in the sunlight. I watch the shadows sway.
He pauses, but not for breath. He shakes me, hard, by my wrist, and I try not to sway with his rattling. I look at him, making my eyes cold and hard. Something in his forest eyes keeps me from looking away from his gaze, even when he lifts his pipes and puts them to his mouth. He plays again, the same tune.
But this time I cannot deny the slender ankle wading past the frog, the strong brown fingers reaching for the cranberries, the laughter that echoes the rattle of the cones, the fan of hair the wind blows past the spruce tree that glints the same as the shining sap. He plays on, watching my face, and I hear warm breath stained with wild strawberries, the curved back of someone curled and sleeping in the deep grass, green eyes blinking with snowflakes on their lashes. What I hear is me, and not me, like a reflection in a pool is both me and the leaf-dappling light on the soft mud at the bottom.
He plays it twice again before he will let me go, his eyes watching me as if commanding me to commit it to memory. Evelyn Sylvia it is, Evelyn in the forest, the Evelyn he knows, and the notes are my name as his pipes say it, as the forest itself breathes it.
His fingers loosen around my wrist as he continues to play. I draw my hand free of his, and gather my bucket to go. Rinky comes to my tongue click, and splashes beside me as we recross the slough. His black tail is curled up tightly over his shining back, and I think of going back and asking Pan to play Rinky for me. Another time. Another time. His music follows me still, rising and falling with the stirring wind, but as I get farther and farther away, it blends with the forest’s own singing, and I cannot tell if I am hearing the forest itself or Pan’s rendition of it.
His music has driven the sense out of my head. I see my mother’s face as I shut the door behind me, and the sound of the door shutting is like the clack of a jaw trap on my ankle. Too late to run, and the mushrooms I offer are not enough. I am required to sit at the table and peel potatoes while I listen to a recital of my sins. She admits that Candy said a lot of cruel things, but that doesn’t excuse my physical violence. Sissy and Candy come up from the basement, both to listen and to chime in with any crimes my mother may miss. Candy’s nose has stopped bleeding, but as I suspected, the mohair sweater, though still soaking in cold water, is probably ruined. I bite my tongue, refusing to say aloud that now she will probably give it to me, hand down the stained, worn-out stuff to Evelyn, she’s too stupid to know the difference.
Candy’s eyes are both blacked, too, and this explains Sissy’s sudden chumminess with her. Jeffrey showed to take Candy out, but when he saw swollen nose and puffing eyes, he backed out of the date, none too graciously. Now they both agree that Jeffrey is an asshole, but have no gratefulness to me for revealing that to them. Candy is demanding I pay for her sweater, which is a joke, as I never have any money except at my birthday or Christmastime. I am judged and condemned to clean up the room that we share. I don’t say a word as they rant at me, and I can feel how much angrier this makes my sisters. But it only seems to make my mother more thoughtful. As she swoops up the heap of potatoes I have peeled and splashes them into a bubbling stew and stirs it, she stares at the blank wall over the gas stove, and her grey-green eyes are distant, almost as if she were listening to music rather than to the nattering and bleating of my sisters.
The next morning I find that the hem of my pleated skirt has been resewn. The mohair sweater is dyed a uniform brown before it is folded into my drawer. I say nothing, and neither does anyone else.
SEVEN (#ulink_e8b74d7a-418b-5ca9-9008-9e55607164ea)
The Farm
June 1976
“Are we gonna stay so I can have a pony?” There is a ring of orange juice around Teddy’s mouth, like a visible question mark at the end of his sentence. He phrases the words casually, but his eyes are vaguely accusing, as if he expects me to selfishly snatch all his hopes away. As if someone has warned him in advance of my cruelty.
I refuse to let their warning be fulfilled. “I guess so, honey. Daddy and I need to talk about it a little more. Do you want to stay here all winter?”
I reach across the table and rumple his hair, but it is too short to tousle now. He reaches up to smooth it, looks briefly puzzled at how short it is. But it will grow again. It is not permanent, none of this is. They can change the outside of him, but they cannot change what I have put within him. Child of my long days with you, full of stories read by me, of questions I have answered and questions I have asked, grown within my own body and then nourished by my mind. My own. My boy, I thought, mine. This one is all mine, Mother Maurie. You may be able to whistle up Tom, but not my Teddy. This one I’m keeping.
I cancel that thought as soon as it surfaces, disturbed by my own growing paranoia. I cannot understand what is happening to me. Sometimes, when I think about it, I am frightened.
Teddy considers my question gravely, and I await his answer solemnly. “Yes, Mom, I think I would like to stay. I could have a pony, and go to school in the very same school that Daddy attended when he was a boy my age. And when Bix gets better, he’s gonna teach me to run the big tractor. And I’ll be a man, not a little sissy.”
His eyes light up as he finishes this speech. No doubt the thoughts please him, but it disturbs me a little to hear them couched in phrases fresh from Grandpa’s mouth.
“Well, I suppose we’ll probably stay then,” I say lamely. A cruel temptation rises in me. It would be so easy to say, “Too bad your poor puppy will be all alone this summer. Too bad your Tonka trucks have to sit on their shelves and get dusty, too bad Eddie-down-the-road will have no one to swim with him in the gravel pit this summer. But I guess a pony is worth it. I hope our Bruno puppy doesn’t run away because he’s so lonely. I hope no one breaks into our cabin and steals all your toys. I hope mice don’t chew up your stuffed animals.” I could show them how it’s really done, how you twist a kid’s head until he doesn’t know what he wants, how you scare him and torment him into wanting what you want him to want.
But you don’t do that to children you love, and that is how I know they don’t really love Teddy. By the way they use him to manipulate Tom and me. Perhaps tonight I will point that out to Tom, open his eyes to how we are being used. Or perhaps tonight I will step in front of a speeding locomotive and halt it with my upraised hand. Teddy finishes eating and carries his dishes unsteadily to the sink. He lifts his hand in silent farewell, the ultimate in cool, and I respond in kind. He grins suddenly and flashes past me and out the door, is gone faster than a red fox disappearing into tall grass. He will do whatever it is small boys do all day when their mothers are careful not to bother them. I will not spoil things by asking what it is he rushes off to do. Whatever it is, it belongs to him. A boy needs time on his own.
But what if he is not on his own? I begin to tot up the time he spends at home with me, as opposed to the time he spends at Grandma’s big house. Well, they have the television. Add a lot of time on that score. And they have a full-stocked refrigerator, and a freezer that Auntie Steffie keeps full of Fudgsicle bars and Eskimo Pies. A major draw. And no one imposes discipline on him. If he becomes unbearable, they simply send him back to me. More and more, I slowly realize, I am becoming the punishment, the place you are sent when you’re bad. I’m the “take a bath, pick up your toys, brush your teeth, go to bed” person. The candy-givers live next door.
I realize my teeth are clenched so tightly that my jaw aches. I have been polishing the same spot of table for the last five minutes. I rock back on my heels and raise my cold hands to my sweaty forehead. Try to calm down, I tell myself reasonably. Every day you get further and further out. These are not wicked evil people. They are simply run-of-the-mill grandparents, enjoying their grandson during the first long visit they’ve had since he was born. All grandparents love to spoil their grandchildren, love to give them candy and privileges, toys and ponies. If Mother says no, ask Grandma, says the T-shirt. I smile ruefully to myself. Calm again. Real.
What is coming over you, I ask myself soothingly. What makes you think these wild things? What ignites your territorial fury, what sets you off so quickly these days? A shiver of cold fear touches me. What is happening to me? Lately I see only the worst in anyone’s motives, including Tom, Tom who I love above all else, beyond all reason or safety. If I can doubt Tom, who is left for me to believe in? What has happened to the safety of our marriage? We never quarrel, we never nag each other, we laugh together, and he holds me warm at night. He is tall and handsome and strong and he loves me. I know this is so. But sometimes it seems that whenever his parents come into the picture, we are at each other’s throats. What is becoming of my serenity, the inward peace I have so carefully cultivated? I feel pieced together, like a shattered china cup mended with the wrong glue, knowing that the next time they fill me, I will again shatter, scalding all within reach.
I make another little space in my self. There, I tell myself, you’ve seen the problem. Well, it’s simply solved. Just start fresh, today, turn over a new leaf, be a better person, refuse to be prey to these feelings. Make a resolution, right now. No more nagging. No more emotional arguments. Decide all on logic. Show Tom a little more affection, make him love you again. Support your husband in this thing he needs to do. He perceives staying here as the payment of a debt, as evening out with his folks for all they have done for him. How can I begrudge him that? He needs to do this thing, to make peace with himself.
I make a hot cup of tea to calm myself. Tea bag in the cup. Water in the kettle. Kettle on the stove. Put the dishes away while the kettle heats. Pour the steaming water into the cup. Breathe in the comforting aroma of brewing tea. Remove the bag. Put in the sugar. Sit in the chair by the window. Concentrate for just a few moments on these very simple movements, let them be a ritual of serenity. Breathe deeply and unwind.
I sip my tea and shut my eyes for a moment. The old familiar images rise to my mind. Think of a black room, completely dark. A small shining white thread stretches across the floor of the room. That is my idea of sanity. If I can spend my whole life walking through that dark hall, balancing on the white thread, never breaking it, then I will remain normal. Be accepted. But it is such a temptation to just relax, to let go, to fall from the sharp and cutting edge of rationality into the deep warm blackness of my own world.
Pan comes from my blackness. I know that. Pan had to come from the blackness. When I had decided I wanted to be real, all those years ago, I had banished him to that blackness, to the hidden closet of my mind. Traded in a bizarre illusion for a real life, for Tom and later Teddy. I had left the old loneliness behind, and with it I had abandoned the dreams I had fabricated for dealing with it. Pan, my imaginary companion, had been a defense mechanism, a tool for dealing with isolation. And now he is back. What does that mean? Forget it. Just forget it for now. Turn to the matters at hand. Chores to do, a life to lead. I sip at my tea. It’s cold.
The rest of the day slips past me just as elusively. I do housework. That is all there is for me to do. There are no vehicles free for me to drive to town, and one does not drive to town frivolously, not when Mother Maurie is keeping track of the gasoline. The gardens outside the houses belong to Mother Maurie and are faithfully tended by Ellie. One must not walk through the planted fields lest one crush the new plants. There are the woods, of course, beyond the chicken yard. But there is nothing there for me, and no reason to go there.
So I do housework. Generic tasks. Sweeping the same floor I swept yesterday, dusting the same shelves, cleaning the same bathtub. I fix a careful lunch for myself at noon. Tuna-fish sandwiches, cut into triangles, a handful of potato chips, a pot of tea. Tom will not be home for lunch, he is discussing business at the big house. Teddy is with him. I eat my tuna in careful bites, wondering what would happen if I went over there, if I knocked on the door and walked in. Would they all look up from the big table in astonishment, wondering who had come to disturb them at their meal, who had come breaking into a family’s time together? Ridiculous. They’d smile and greet me, make a place for me at the table. But there’d be the question, from Mother Maurie, most likely. “Why, Evvie, how nice! And what brings you over today?” And I would have no answer, would die before I said, “I’m lonely, I want to see my husband, I want to watch my baby eat.” Those reasons are not good enough for practical people like the Potters. I have no real reason to go over there, nor desire to sit through a noon discussion of hydraulic hoses and whether the stock of gaskets is sufficient. It would be pointless to go over there, and silly.
After lunch, I have my lunch dishes to wash, and to dry, and to set carefully away. It is good to be busy. After the dishes, I read a romance. This one is about pirates. Their captain is actually a kidnapped nobleman who has won the respect of the pirates and becomes their captain by his skill with a sword. All he wants is to regain what is rightfully his, and he sets out to recapture one of his own ships, now carrying the loutish cousin who arranged to have him kidnapped so he could inherit the pirate captain’s rightful place. Also aboard is his loutish cousin’s beautiful and willful fiancee, Desiree. She has raven tresses and a bee-stung lower lip. She pouts beautifully, and doesn’t wish to marry the loutish Alfred, but has been forced into it by her father, who thinks only of money. David, of course, captures the ship and takes her prisoner and holds her for ransom, thinking to make his loutish cousin Alfred very unhappy. Desiree hates David at first, thinking he is just a greedy pirate, interested only in money, much like her father. But even as she is hating him, she has to think constantly about his broad shoulders and white teeth, his roguish smile and dancing blue eyes, and the elegant way he put his own cloak around her to cover her after one of his less civilized pirates had ripped her bodice …
“If we’re staying here this winter,” I say, being careful to always say, “if,” not “since,” “then I suppose I should look around for a job. What do you think?”
“Just a sec,” Tom said, not even looking up. Evening has come, greying the windows and leaking shadows into the house. The table is an island awash with yellow light. The rest of the kitchen is a gloomy, huddling place. Tom’s heavy tractor manual has a yellow cover, stained with diesel. Tom’s notes and a schematic take up the rest of the tabletop. There is no room for me to share the table. “I’ll talk to you in just a second, honey. I’m sure the problem is in this section of the hydraulics, and I think I can find it if I’m just left alone for ten minutes straight. Okay?”
I don’t answer, but he doesn’t notice. He is already submerged in valves and lines, filters and clamps. It doesn’t bother me. There are other things for me to do. Teddy is ready for bed, has been tubbed and scrubbed, and now waits, red-cheeked, for a bedtime story. He is a little pinto himself now, my boy, his innocent butt white still, but the rest of him baked brown right down to the top of his sneaker lines. His fair hair has turned ashy white, his face tanned so dark that his blue eyes are a shock. I sit on the floor by the wicker sofa that has been spread up as a narrow bed.
“What shall we read?” I ask, but it is really a rhetorical question. Where the Wild Things Are is already set out by his bed. We have read it every night for the past three months, and he shows no sign of tiring of it. I do not mind, even though I can now recite it. There is something in this book for Teddy, and once he has digested it, he will be ready to go on.
“This one,” he says, and presents me with a Little Golden Book about Scooby-Do. With some reluctance I accept it, leaf through its stiff newness.
“Auntie Steffie gave it to me. He’s our favorite. When I go over Saturday mornings, we watch Scooby-Do together, with Pop-Tarts.”
The ultimate cultural experience. We read the new book slowly, with Teddy taking great care to examine every picture. It is the same story that they use for all the cartoons, and Teddy seems pleased with its familiarity. When we are finished, I cannot resist saying, “Well, I think I like Where the Wild Things Are better.”
“It’s okay,” Teddy concedes. “But it’s not real.”
“And a talking dog that hunts for ghosts is real?”
He frowns. “It’s real in the story. Not a dream. Auntie Steffie says that Max falls asleep in his bed and just dreams the Wild Things. She says that he had a bad dream because he went to bed with no dinner, and that’s what the story is really about.”
“Oh,” I say. I try to find the right words. “I don’t think it’s a dream in the story. It never says he falls asleep and then wakes up again.”
“But then how did he get to where the Wild Things are?”
“In the boat. His bed turned into a boat.”
“No. ’Cause that can’t really happen. He just fell asleep and dreamed it. It’s a dumb story, just about a dream someone had.”
He stuffs the Scooby-Do book into the place of honor under his pillow. I pick up Where the Wild Things Are as I stand and take it with me. I think it is my book now, a thing Teddy has outgrown and cast aside. Perhaps I am a thing Teddy has outgrown and cast aside. I feel gutted, hollow. Why did she have to take that away from him? I wonder. Did she even know what she was doing? Is it a malicious cruelty, or only ignorance? And why is it so important to me? Am I worrying about Teddy, really, or am I worrying about me and what she has taken from me, the thing Teddy and I shared? I feel Teddy’s eyes on me and turn back to him.
“Can we get some new books next time we go to town? I had lots of books at our old house and here I don’t have hardly any. Can we get some new ones?”
“What do you mean, our old house? Your books at home still belong to you, and they’ll still be there when we go back. If we stay here much longer, maybe I’ll send for some of them. But not too many, because we’d just have to pack them up again when we go home.”
“Can’t we just get new ones?”
“Maybe. A few. We’ll see.” I tug back the covers that are sliding off his feet, snug them around him. “Don’t worry about it. Daddy and I are going to talk tonight and decide all about when we’re going home. Then I’ll tell you in the morning, and things won’t seem so confusing. We can plan better.”
“Auntie Steffie says she saw a Sylvester and Tweety book in the drugstore.” His eyes are already closing. I don’t reply but reach to turn off the lamp by his head. As I rise once more, he asks from behind closed eyes, “What if we never go back? What if we live here forever and ever? Then would we send for all my stuff?”
“Don’t be silly,” I tell him. “We’ll be going home, and all your stuff will be there and just fine. Now go to sleep.”
I leave his bedside like an actor leaving a darkened area of a stage, stepping into the yellow light of the kitchen and Tom’s set. The light spills in a circle on the table from the pull-down fixture, illuminating Tom’s manual. His hand moves, scratching pencil notes on a yellow tablet. He looks tired, older. His hands are graven dark with diesel and oil, the nails cracked, the downy hair on the backs of his wrists and forearms eaten away by harsh cleansers. The lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, between his eyes and on his brow, are pale against his tan. He glances up from his manuals, gives me a smile, and goes back to tracing a diagram. As I walk behind his chair he reaches back with his free hand, hooks it around me for a moment, and pulls me up against his back. I hug him suddenly, impulsively, putting my face against his hair, smelling his true scent despite the diesel. He goes, “Mmmm,” and is still for a second. Then he leans forward again, his fingers wander slowly across his diagram, his hand drops away from me. I stand clear of him.
I settle in another chair, across the table from him. I rest my pirate romance on the edge of the table, stealing a bit of light from him, hovering at the edge of his glow, and try to submerse myself in David and Desiree and Alfred. They are all idiots. Boring, stupid people, trapped in a trite plot, who will inevitably do what is expected of them. Alfred will be unmasked as the kidnapper and swindler he is. David will regain his wealth and marry Desiree. How can they be so blind to the other possibilities? And who could have put such an idea in Teddy’s head? Live here forever and ever. The three of us in this cramped little house, forever under the sway of Mother Maurie. I can see me now, a junior wife in the Potter tribe. I smile at the idea and go back to my pirates. But after a while I find myself rubbing my jaw, where the knotted muscles ache.
“Tom? Tom?”
“Yeah, just a sec, Lyn … Okay. What is it?”
He closes his manual on his pencil and looks up at me, sighing. I am seven years old and I’ve been talking during the spelling test. I grope for excuses. “I just wanted to talk to you for a second, honey. Have you given any more thought to staying here for the winter?”
“Sure.” He stretches, rolling his shoulders under his T-shirt. “I told the folks today that it was all settled. Dad was really relieved.” He pauses at the look on my face. “Isn’t that what we agreed on?” He looks genuinely puzzled. Frantically I dig through my memories of the conversation. When had I agreed, when had I told him, sure, go ahead, we’ll stay the winter?
“No, Tom, I don’t think so. I thought we said we’d stay till the end of summer, and talk about the winter. I mean, we need to discuss it more. For one thing, I’d need to find a job, and I can’t think what there is in town. And we’d have to have all our stuff shipped down, which means asking someone to pack it up for us. And we’d have to spend the whole winter here, in this tiny place, and try to find decent tenants for our place and hope they don’t tear it to ribbons …”
My voice runs down. The world tilts around me. Déjà vu. I know what comes next. Control becomes very shaky, things seem to have fuzzy edges. I cannot feel the book I hold. It’s like being washed down a chute. First Tom will be puzzled at my resistance, then irritated. I will surrender rather than anger him. We will stay the whole winter in this wretched little place. Despair washes over me, almost a physical thing. No way to escape this, no way at all. The play is written, I must say my lines.
“Lyn, I can’t go to Dad now, when he’s counting on us, and say that … are you all right?”
I nod, swallowing the nauseous lump in my throat. A great wind of stillness is blowing past me, drowning Tom’s voice. Talk to him, I urge myself, watching his mouth move, his head tilt as he coaxes me to be reasonable. I know what he must be saying, but my ears cannot seem to make out the words. Tell him you’re afraid. Tell him they’re going to take him and Teddy away from you, and you will be left alone in the darkness. Tell him. Tell him now.
But his words are flowing like a river, washing past me, barely touching my ears as they carry us inexorably on. “… that we were staying. It didn’t seem fair to leave them wondering. Mom’s got it all planned out. You can use her washer and dryer on Tuesdays, that fits in with everyone else’s schedule. Steffie was really excited. She’s really a sucker for her little nephew, and she gets so lonely around here in winter. She thought it was great that you and she would get some time together. She’s just full of plans for canning and berry picking this fall, and sewing and cooking together this winter. She really wants to pull you into the family, make you feel like part of the gang. She thought maybe you’d want to go shopping, get some clothes more appropriate for this part of the country …”
The white noise comes up again, washing over me like a wave. I stare through it, trying to see Tom, my Tom. They would pull him into the family machine and absorb him. Then Teddy. Then me. First it would be helping out with the big family meals and sewing and washing in the big house. Maybe by next spring I’d be taking care of the chickens, helping plan the kitchen garden. By the year after it would be as if I’d never existed as a separate person at all. We would all live happily ever after. All I had to do was let go. Surrender. Admit they were right in feeling sorry for me. Admit I needed to be fixed. Stop being me and become Tom Potter’s wife.
“Don’t pull at your face like that, honey. You’ll get wrinkles. So, what do you say?”
Fuck you, Tom Potter, you traitor, traitor, traitor. And fuck me, too, because I am saying, “Well, we’ll have to work out the details as we go along, I guess. It’s just for this winter, right?”
“Of course, honey. You don’t think we’re going to live here forever, do you?”
You bet your ass I do. Why do you smile so warmly and go right back to your manual? I look down at my own book, study the shapes of the words on the page. I read a few, they make no sense. So I try counting them. I used to be able to soothe myself by doing this, counting all the words on a page, but tonight it fails me.
“I’m going to bed,” Tom announces, flopping the old manual shut. He stands and stretches, towering over me in the cramped room. “I want to hit the job early tomorrow, get this tractor back on line. So I’ll get a late breakfast with Dad in town. If you want, I’ll take Teddy with me, you can sleep in.” He pauses. I count words, not looking up from the page. “You’re coming to bed now,” he asks, but it isn’t really a question.
“Yeah, in a second. Yeah.” I turn a page, count some more.
He stands over me a few seconds longer. I can feel his contentment, he has it all. He’s come home to his family, to his old familiar world, his wife is tractable, his son is smart, he has it all. He waits for me a few seconds, then shrugs and trudges off down the hall. As soon as he is gone, I feel my shoulders drop. I can breathe, as if the air has flowed back into the space he occupied. I lean back in my chair, setting my book carelessly atop his scribbled notes, listening to the sounds of Tom going to bed. Water runs in the bathroom. Light switch clicks off in the bathroom, then on in the bedroom. Clump of falling shoes, a rustling of clothing. I hear his belt buckle ring against the floor. More rustling and the bed creaks. Silence. The silence grows longer, becomes indignant.
I know just how he is lying in there. His head is almost under the covers, he is curled on his side. He has left the light burning for me. His eyes are closed but he is far from sleeping. Duty calls me.
I arise and click off the kitchen light. Night flows into the room from the uncurtained windows. There was part of a moon, and stars peeping through the partial overcast. Rain tomorrow, maybe. Rain. Rain for the new crops rising in green rows. Good. Rain for the fields.
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Megan Lindholm
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A magical, classic tale of the transformative power of love from Megan Lindholm, who also writes as Robin Hobb. Evelyn is a solitary child, preferring to wander in the woods in all weathers rather than socialise. Her secret is a fantastic companion: a faun with whom she plays in the woods. Years later Evelyn finds happiness as a wife and mother, but life turns sour when the family move to Tacoma where her husband is asked to fill in at hisfather’s business. Evelyn’s husband’s wish for them to stay permanently with his family causes a rift between them and then a terrible tragedy makes the situation even more impossible. Miraculously, when she needs a friend, Evelyn’s childhood companion reappears in Tacoma. Pan, now an adult satyr and a secret friend to both her and her son, eventually becomes her lover. He leads Evelyn on an odyssey out of her failed marriage to fulfilment in the woods of Alaska.