Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  They hadn’t gone two stops through thickening traffic when Deborah saw a church she recognized and then a 7-Eleven and then West High, and she knew she should get off, probably should have gotten off at the last stop. She pulled furiously at the bell cord. The driver got on the scratchy loudspeaker and said sternly, “Once is enough, please.” Deborah thought fleetingly of making her way through the people standing in the aisle—under their arms, between their legs, through them if she had to—to tear out the driver’s throat. But she was too tired and it wasn’t worth the effort. Instead she pushed her way down the back steps and out the door, and stood for a minute in the crowd of kids headed for their first-period class at West High.

  She knew about West. All the kids were either wannabes or jocks. They all dressed weird, too; the girls’ hair was all poufed high and shiny with hairspray. She stood in the middle of them and they all either stared at her or ignored her. She hated them. She wished she were in school. She hated school. She didn’t know what she’d do if Armando was in school today. There wasn’t much chance. Becky said he never went to school.

  “Well, look who’s here.” And there he was, Armando, looking fine in his Raiders jacket and his black rag rolled thin and tied around his head just below the hairline. He came over and put his arm around her as if he owned her. “Scarface,” he said, grinning, and when she tried to pull away he held her tighter and cooed, “My pretty little scarface.” The other kids either stared at them as if they were freaks or ignored them as if they weren’t there.

  Deborah stiffened at his touch and thought about pulling away, thought about ripping her nails down the front of his jacket and into his belly, down the front of his pants and into his cock. But when she looked down at her hands, her nails were short again, jagged and bitten past the quick, except the one on the little finger of her left hand, which was long enough to curl on the end and which no matter how much polish she put on it still looked black. She closed her fists.

  Armando pulled her closer. “You here to see me, babe?”

  “Deborah, what are you doing here? Your mother’s been calling my house all night. Did you finally run? Jesus, did you finally do it?” Becky’s eyes were big. Her breath came fast; Deborah could see it, little balls of steam between them.

  “My mother’s a hag,” Deborah managed to say, and it sounded feeble even to her. “My mother’s nothing.” Armando laughed. “Can I stay with you?” Deborah asked, looking at Becky but listening for what Armando would say, waiting to feel the response of his body.

  A bell rang, and Deborah jumped, her nerves leaping. Armando’s arm tightened around her, calming her, trapping her there. She was sure he was stoned, and it excited her to think of doing drugs so early in the morning, or maybe all night long. The crowd start to shift, some people moving toward the doors of the school. Deborah, who hated school, suddenly and acutely wished she could go in with them, wished she went here.

  Becky was backing up toward the school, glancing over her shoulder, shaking her head. “Jesus, no, you can’t stay with me. My old man would call the cops.”

  To her horror, Deborah had started to cry. There were no tears, of course, but she couldn’t stop her breath from coming in jagged sobs, her thoughts scuttling into the den in the middle of her mind where she was always alone and powerless.

  Armando laughed again. His brown eyes were glassy and unfocused, but they were still bedroom eyes. He kissed her openmouthed. Nobody noticed; even Becky had turned and hurried into the school. “Don’t worry about it, babe,” he said to her, and gratefully she collapsed against him. “I got a place you can stay as long as you want.”

  Chapter 3

  Lydia slammed the receiver back into its cradle and backed away, wanting to tear the phone off the wall. A woman was waiting to use the phone, and her smug patience infuriated Lydia. She went and sat down at the break table, leaning her forehead against her clenched fists.

  “Lydia, you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Something wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You sick or something?” An audacious hand on her shoulder.

  She flinched. Her teeth clenched, which made her head pound. She’d have to say something or they’d never leave her alone. She didn’t entirely want them to leave her alone, but if they didn’t she’d hurt somebody, or they’d hurt her. She knew better than to let herself believe anybody was really interested. “I just have a headache,” she tried, and waited for them to say, “Well, I hope you feel better,” and go away.

  “I think I have some aspirin in my purse.” Very loud rustling and rattling. “You want some aspirin if I can find it?”

  Lydia sighed heavily and, before she thought, shook her head. Her head throbbed. “What I want,” she said, “is to be left alone.”

  There was a pause. Then the woman said icily, “Sorry to bother you,” and moved with much indignant commotion to the other end of the table. Lydia’s regret, her anger at being bothered and then abandoned, filled her closed eyes with bloody images, which for her would never be more than frustrating fantasies and unnerving hints.

  Her throat ached and—as always, but now nearly intolerably—her eyes burned. She was ashamed to be so tired, knowing that her mother and, especially, her grandmother had never sickened and trembled like this from fatigue, never stumbled over things and knocked things over and had trouble concentrating. Stress only served to make them more and more physical, more aware of their bodies, while she became disconnected and dizzy.

  Her mother’s occasional confusion and memory loss lately weren’t from stress or exhaustion. Lydia didn’t know what they were from. Maybe just old age. More likely, the cause was something she, Lydia, was responsible for—electrolyte imbalance from improper diet, high blood pressure that she ought to be taking medication for but Lydia couldn’t get her to go to the doctor. Her fault.

  Deborah running, Deborah not being ready for initiation in the first place—that was her fault, too. She didn’t know what she’d done or not done, but it was always something.

  Because there was always the strong possibility that anything she did would make things worse and she would be blamed for it, Lydia tried her best never to take direct action or a firm stand about anything. Then, of course, she was liable to be blamed for inaction, and positions she didn’t take could make things worse, too. Deborah blamed her for that. Deborah blamed her for everything.

  Bitterly, she tried to calculate how many consecutive hours she’d gone without sleep since Deborah had run away. It was at least thirty-six. When her grandmother deprived herself of sleep it was part of the ritual and the transformation; she remembered her mother deliberately staying awake for days. Ruth still sometimes couldn’t sleep, but Lydia didn’t think it was deliberate anymore. Lydia herself just got sick, and even more clumsy than usual.

  The woman on the phone was loudly and interminably discussing dinner plans. Laughing. Lydia raised her head to stare balefully at the back of the woman’s neck. Rage gathered in her shoulder and thigh muscles, the way it was supposed to, but she knew from experience that she wouldn’t be able to do anything useful with it.

  In the past thirty-six hours she’d made probably dozens of phone calls. Nobody had seen Deborah, or nobody was admitting to it. Talking to her daughter’s friends, even to some of their parents, Lydia had wanted to roar at them, had in fact said to one particularly insolent girl through gritted teeth, “Look, I’m her mother, I’m not the enemy. Don’t you understand that she’s in danger?” But it hadn’t made any difference. If any of them knew anything that might help her find her daughter, they weren’t going to tell her.

  Several of the cousins from the mountains had eavesdropped on her end of that conversation, had looked at her, had looked at each other. Three of them had been sitting at her dining-room table playing cards, waiting, she presumed, for dinner. Despite her worry over Deborah, despite her own fatigue and utter lack of appetite, being hospitable was the least she
could do; it was her daughter who’d failed them all, her daughter who’d brought them into the city for nothing, her fault. She’d gone into the kitchen, trying to think about food.

  Two other cousins were already in there, looking for pans in cupboards where the shelf paper was peeling off, cooking at the stove that needed cleaning. One of them said hello to her, said with apparent kindness that they thought they’d make dinner since she had other things to think about, but it was not kindness, Lydia recognized it as a reproof. The other one said without looking up, “Where are the paper towels?” When Lydia said she used rags because it was better for the environment, the rag bag was under the sink, the two cousins looked at each other triumphantly and one of them said, “I don’t know how you can keep house without paper towels.”

  Lydia couldn’t stand it. She’d retreated to her room and hadn’t come to dinner when they’d called her. Now she’d never hear the end of that —her rudeness, her weakness.

  Sitting with her head on her fists in the middle of the busy break room, knowing that her break must be about over but having lost track of time, Lydia longed for tears. All her life she’d thought of tears as magic, imagined that the flow of them would wash something out of her or open something up. She used to put eyedrops in her eyes, soap, dust, anything to make them water, but they never did. She didn’t understand why she was still so frustrated; she’d have thought you’d get used to something you’d had to live with all your life.

  Deborah couldn’t cry either. Over the years of her life her mother had watched her anxiously. Sometimes a tear would have meant to Lydia that her child was going to be all right, was more human than wolf, had escaped or diluted the family curse. Sometimes it would have meant banishment, powerlessness. Watching, always watching her daughter’s eyes, even when she wildly resented the responsibility to watch, even when the girl stubbornly or shyly or carelessly turned her eyes away, even when all Lydia could see in her daughter’s eyes was hatred for her or, worse, love for her, need for her. Lydia didn’t dare respond to any of it, hatred or love or need.

  As a baby, Deborah had at first made it very clear when she wanted something, which had seemed to be all the time. She’d yelled when she was wet or hungry or for no reason at all that Lydia could discern. She’d wailed all night for weeks at a time, fussed and carried on and was never satisfied. She’d wrinkled her ugly little face and bared her baby-pink gums, showing the single pointed incisor she’d been born with. She’d flailed her tiny fists so hard and with such purpose that Lydia often had to hold them forcefully enough to hurt in order to clip the nails. But there were no tears.

  Even as far away from the family as she and Jake had been in those days, even without the monitoring of her mother and grandmother, Lydia had known to discipline the baby from the start. It was surprisingly easy for her not to give in, and she’d objected strenuously when Jake did. Finally, she’d spanked the infant and nipped her harder and harder until the willfulness abated, though it never had entirely stopped. It was then that she’d first seen the distaste in Jake’s face and known that before long she would lose him because of this child. But still there were no tears in the silent baby’s eyes.

  As a toddler, as a preschooler, as a gangly young girl, Deborah had never cried. Trying desperately during those years to do whatever Jake wanted, to make herself and Deborah whatever it was so he would not leave, Lydia had sometimes worked to induce tears in them both—had paddled the child too hard and too capriciously, said deliberately cruel things to her, told her that Daddy was going to leave them and it would be her fault. All the time, Lydia resented her daughter for making her do these things, resented a parent’s eternally thankless job. Once in a while —less and less as time went by—the child would scream back at her, would even attack her with teeth and nails. Lately she’d developed a grim and insolent stoicism that could enrage Lydia more than anything else, and a permanent, cultivated attitude of disgust. But still there were no tears.

  Remembering how it was to be an adolescent girl who couldn’t cry, Lydia shuddered with love and pity for her daughter. Such rage—at being so attentive, so vigilant, for so long, and still unable either to cause Deborah’s tears or to teach her how to live without them—that she hoped fervently never to see her again. Such terror for her. Such guilt at having brought a child into this world, this family, knowing what she surely should have known.

  Lydia remembered—against her will, like a spell for shape-changing—how it had been to love Jake. How liberating and how enslaving. How expansive and, ultimately, how limiting. After all these years, despite everything she knew, she still missed him, still knew she should have killed him and devoured him as her mother had instructed, should have made him a part of herself forever rather than let him go.

  She remembered walking with him hand in hand, out of the dark house on the hill. Just walking out. Nobody had followed them or called out. Nobody had said good-bye, wished her well or tried to make her stay. Her grandmother, as far as she could tell, had been asleep. Her mother had sat by the window with her yellow eyes.

  She remembered driving across country with him, singing along to radio stations whose call letters changed from K to W at the Mississippi. Sleeping at rest stops to save money; hearing small creatures stir in the night—squirrels on the pavement, raccoons in the garbage cans—and not getting out of the car to chase them down, not giving in to the urge because Jake was asleep beside her, she was starting a new life with Jake. Marveling at the Nebraska cornfields, the flatlands, and then the rolling hills, the gradual incursion of green, so much green and so much rain. Realizing only after they’d lived a few years in Pennsylvania—after Deborah was born and Lydia realized that one day Jake would leave her because of this difficult changeling child—realizing only then that she had come back almost exactly to the place where her grandmother Mary had grown up. She never had known whether that was important or not.

  Yearning to have Jake’s child, she’d persuaded herself that one way or another it would be safe to do so. The women of her family were so fertile when the time was right that she doubted she could have avoided pregnancy anyway except through celibacy, which at the time—in the throes of young love, and at her most passionate —had been unthinkable. Since Jake she hadn’t been with a man, and the very thought of sex now made her skin tingle unpleasantly.

  Frantic about Deborah now, she clearly remembered what she’d said to herself then, heard the arguments again as though it were someone else debating with her. She had so few symptoms, it must be that somehow she didn’t carry the gene —tearlessness notwithstanding, frequent delirious rages notwithstanding, not once in her life had she ever transformed into anything other than what she was.

  Or: she could control it. If she was were, she was also human, and through the power of love, she would renounce the power, control the curse, and keep her husband and child—her family now —safe.

  Or: Jake would dominate. His solid decency and humanity would dilute whatever corrupt genetic material she passed on to their offspring, and the child would be not only fully human but protected from her.

  The baby was a girl. Deborah. At first Lydia was crazy with relief. They won’t take her. They’ll have no use for her blood to drink, or for her new flesh, or for tallow and unguent from the melting of her body. Naively, defiantly, she’d even called long distance to share the happy news with her mother: “You have a beautiful granddaughter. Her name is Deborah.” But her grandmother Mary had come on the line, and Lydia had heard the awful interest, the claiming. She’d been frightened, and jealous; it had been a long time since the old woman had been interested in her.

  “No news?” Pam Sandahl sat down beside her, and Lydia let herself look up. Pam’s round face was almost puffy with concern, and her brown eyes—always soft and direct—were even softer now, and looked right at her.

  Lydia shrugged. Her shoulder muscles were so tense that they scarcely moved, and familiar pain radiated down her arms. Pam not
iced, reached to lay her hand lightly on Lydia’s shoulder. Lydia winced, stiffened. Then Pam stood, moved around behind Lydia, and—incredibly—began to massage.

  After a moment Lydia answered, “No. Nothing. She hasn’t called, and nobody has any idea where she is. Or they’re not telling me.”

  “The conspiracy of the children against the parents,” Pam said sadly, as though she knew what she was talking about.

  “Maybe she didn’t run away after all,” Lydia said unwillingly, and her voice roughened. “Maybe something—happened to her.”

  Pam didn’t try to pretend that the worst wasn’t possible. The strong rhythm of her fingers was so soothing and intimate that Lydia was afraid of it. “What will you do now?”

  “I’ll look for her. I’ll find her and I’ll make her come home.” Lydia hadn’t known that was what she would do until she said it, but now it had all the force and reality of a plan.

  The hands on her shoulders shifted a little as Pam nodded. “Want some company?”

  Surprised, Lydia tilted her head back against the other woman’s stomach to look up at her. The contact made her wince, made her angry with Pam for causing it. “Why would you want to do that?”

  The muscles across the top of Lydia’s shoulders, up her neck into the base of her skull, around and under her shoulder blades were so tense that they hurt to the slightest touch. But she sat still under Pam’s hands. She didn’t know why she didn’t pull away. Nobody had ever massaged her back before, not even Jake. “My daughter had a rough time when she was a teenager, too,” Pam said quietly. “I think emancipation is especially hard for mothers and daughters.”

  It occurred to Lydia to be vaguely curious about the daughter, about Pam. But she didn’t ask.

  After a moment Pam said, “She and I had a rough time together.”

  This time Lydia managed to say, “Oh.”