The Melting Season

by Jami Attenberg

  This was when we still lived in town. Before Thomas’s father died and left him all that money and we moved back to the farm he had grown up on. Before he had his surgery. Before everything went sour. Thomas had a hand around my neck and he would tickle it when he laughed. I looked at him with love. He had a glint in his green eyes and his baby-soft hair was sticking up in the back, and he was nice and tan from working in the fields all those years. We both had our legs stretched out on the glass coffee table. Underneath, my magazines were stacked neatly by name and by month, the magazines that would tell me how to be a better woman, lover, and wife. The remote control rested between us. It all felt nice, like we were matching parts that together formed one big piece of something. What something, I do not know, but something. It was special, the two of us together. This was when I felt him most, his insides and outsides next to me.

  Thomas switched channels like he was shooting off a machine gun. They sped by with hardly a second to know what was playing, but I guess he knew what he was looking for. It was not a sports show, he did not like sports. He had never been able to play any in high school. Some people are not meant for athletics. It was not the news. We had both given up on the news. There were too many wars. Once Thomas had threatened to join the army when we had started a new war. That was years before, right after we graduated from high school, a few months before we got married. “I should sign up,” he said. “Serve my country. Do my time.” I did not even want him to go down to the recruiting office. I was worried they would laugh at him when he walked in the door. It is not going to make you taller, I thought. There is nothing you can do to make you a bigger man than you already are.

  I saw flashes of color while he flipped, the peach of a swatch of skin, the turquoise of a gigantic swimming pool, the almost-white of a perfect beach, the green of a stack of twenties (or maybe they were fifties), and on and on, like playing the slots at the casino, only it was in your head. There were little matching blips of sounds: music and conversation and laughter. Screams and moans and yells. The TV rolled onward, and I just sat there with my legs stretched out, and let Thomas barrel on. It went on like this for a while, I can’t say how long. Five minutes? Ten? I looked at Thomas, and he had a grim set to his face. I could tell he was clenching his teeth, and his lips were puckered together. His eyes were holed out, and his eyebrows stuck out in long sprouts near the center. Right then I began to feel separate from him, and I put my hand on his arm and quietly said his name. He did not hear me, he could not hear anything. I said his name louder, and I told him to stop.

  “Huh?” he said. He sounded just like he did when I woke him up in the morning to tell him coffee was ready, just the way he liked it. Milk, with lots of sugar. He drank coffee all day long to keep him going.

  “Just pick a channel and stay there,” I said.

  He looked confused.

  “It’s all the same anyway, right, honey?” I wanted him to know I was not picking a fight.

  “Yeah, of course,” he said, and he sat up straight and pulled his arm from around me and put it in his lap. He stretched. “I don’t know where I went there for a second, Moonie.”

  I wanted him to put his arm back around me but he did not. He had left me, at least for the moment. He was always leaving and then coming back to me. I scooted closer to him and put my head on his shoulder, and hoped my hair felt nice on his neck, and that the scent of it would drift up to his nose.

  I turned my head to the TV. It was one of those make-over shows: extreme, incredible, outrageous. People were always getting new body parts, or moving them around from one end of their body to the other. Injections of flesh, or sometimes there was a giant sucking sound.

  The show host appeared. It was Rio DeCarlo, in a bathing suit. She stretched her hands in the air and her whole body stretched with her, her suctioned stomach, her poked-out ribs, the low tide of flesh on her hips. She welcomed us to the show.

  “I used to have such a boner for Rio DeCarlo,” said Thomas. “Look at her now. Ain’t nothing real on her. I like my woman all natural, thank you very much.”

  That was right, he did not even like it when I wore makeup. “Stay real,” he always said to me.

  “I guess she got old,” he said. He put his head on his hand and puffed his lower lip out under his upper lip.

  “She is not even that old,” I said.

  There was a shot of a man lying in bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, above the covers, arms above his head. He was a little older than Thomas and me, and he looked sad. He had pretty green eyes with long eyelashes, and his hair was cut short, not even an inch above his scalp, like he was ready to go off to war. “I have a lot to offer a woman,” he said. “But I’m still missing the most important thing.” He unfolded his hands and one traveled down to his boxers. He lifted up the waistband and peered down his shorts. “Yup,” he said. The screen froze him. He was captured forever looking down his shorts sadly, and then Rio’s voice came on: “Today Larry Stoneman will be having penile enlargement surgery.”

  Thomas’s jaw dropped. “Moonie—” He pointed at the screen. “Moonie, watch.”

  “I’m watching,” I said. I pulled away from him, just a scootch, but I hoped he noticed.

  “The wonders of modern technology,” he said, and I could tell he was truly amazed. “This is it. This is what I need. This is me.”

  Thomas Madison was a small man in many ways, but still I loved him. He was short, just sixty-five inches high (we said sixty-five inches because it sounded more impressive than five-foot-five), and his arms and legs dangled from his body like a puppet held up by strings.

  And he was short between his legs, too. His penis was just a little nub, three inches, if that. Thomas had measured it before but I ignored him when he did it, which was usually when we were in bed together. He stalked into the bedroom, ruler in hand, shutting the door behind him noisily, and then he would jump into bed. This was after he had gone on some sort of quick-growth plan, usually some new vitamin system he picked up at the health food store in Lincoln. After thirty days, it was time to measure. All I knew was I did not want to be there when it happened, so it was: I have to go to the bathroom, I have to call my mother, Did you close the windows on the back balcony because it sure looks like rain out there. I would wait it out for a few minutes out back until I would hear something, usually a sigh of disappointment.

  I remember once waiting outside another minute after that sigh, instead of rushing to my gloomy husband. I heard the back door open at the diner down below, and saw that it was Timber. Depending on the day of the week, it was either Timber or the man he switched off shifts with, an older Mexican man everyone called Papi. He and Timber got along great. They went to the movie theater across the street together on Sunday nights after the restaurant closed early. They saw the same movie over and over again, they did not care. It was their one night they could hang out.

  I leaned over the balcony and said, “Evening, sir.”

  “Mrs. Madison,” he said, and tipped his hand at me.

  “What’s looking good today?” I said.

  “Why, everything, ma’am,” he said.

  And then we both laughed, even though I did not know what was so funny about it, maybe just that I was up so high, and he was down below, and we used to sit right next to each other in algebra class, not too long ago. We were playing at our grown-up lives, even though there was not much difference between now and then. We were still there, in the same town, just different locations.

  Timber’s folks owned the restaurant, and one day he would take it over. He had done his time in the military and then gone to school in Iowa for a year but had been drinking too much, so he came back. Now he was taking night courses in business over in Lincoln and starting from the ground up, back in the kitchen.

  I appreciated that small exchange between Timber and myself while my husband measured his tiny penis in the bedroom. I forgot for a moment what was going on in there, that the man I loved wa
s so dissatisfied with himself. I had been numbing myself for years against his pain. It was something I was good at. I had been doing it for so long, what with my mother always squawking like a wounded bird herself. I numbed myself on everyone else’s behalf.

  I had even tried to get him off the Internet, all those terrible e-mails in his spam folder talking about things he could do to make himself a bigger man. Every time he got online, he ended up in tears afterward. I said, What do you need a computer for? You’re a farmer. He said, “You’re right, Moonpie, the Internet rots your brain anyway.” And then I bought him an Xbox for Christmas.

  I did not care about size! I told him that a million times. I loved our sex. I loved the way he kissed me, the way he would lick and bite my lips, turning a million nerve endings into molten gold. He would pinch my nipples and the flesh around my hips and press his hands on my belly. The sticky sweet would start to churn inside me and then spread down and around me. I could even smell it, and so could Thomas, and he would get excited by the smell, his little nub would press up against my leg, like a skipping stone in a pocket. He would kiss all the parts of me he had just pinched and then he would keep on kissing, on the bones that stuck out of me, on the insides of my thighs. “Oh, I can smell you, you smell so good,” he would say, and he was frenzied then, and warm. The temperature on his hands shot up and I would wonder if he would leave behind burn marks on my skin, an imprint of his fingertips on my flesh forever. I would not mind that, as long as they were his.

  “Moonie, my moon,” he would say, and then he would dive into the wetness with his tongue, and it was electric. It did, it felt that way, like he had just plugged me into something. And then there were ripples of everything, every area he had pinched and licked on the outside came alive, like he had left a trail of dynamite behind my body, and with one lick, he could set it on fire. Me and Thomas, parts fitting together, moon and stars in one big sky. And by the time he was ready to slide his penis inside me, him letting out a long, satisfied sigh, the breath coming out blowing back my hair from my face, I did not care that I could not feel a thing. A slight pressure around the thighs, but that was just from the weight of him on top of me. But nothing else. I clenched, and then I was numb. And he knew it, too, that it was just numb in there. And I did not care, but he did.

  “Night, Timber,” I said.

  Timber slammed the lid shut on the garbage can. “You take care,” he said.

  Up above I could see the Milky Way. Inside, my husband rubbed his fingers against the lids of his eyes until he saw stars.

  DURING THE COMMERCIAL BREAK we watched an advertisement for the Helping Hand Centers, a chain of plastic surgery hospitals expanding that very moment to a city near you. Rio DeCarlo was their national spokesperson. I did not like the way the name made it sound like a charity. I was sure there was nothing free about it.

  “That Rio DeCarlo will do anything for a quick buck,” I said.

  At the end of the commercial a list of new branches flashed on the screen. “Please don’t let it be Omaha, please don’t let it be Omaha,” I silently prayed.

  “Moonie, look! Omaha!”

  It was a good thing we did not have any money, I thought. I worked part-time afternoons as a bookkeeper at a welding company with a sinking business supplying various parts to farms across the states. A lot of bigger farms had gobbled up the littler ones, so there was less need for the small-time parts companies. There was almost no point in the job—I made just enough to pay our rent—except I needed the benefits and could keep Thomas on my plan while he figured out what he wanted to do next. He had been working with his father on his farm but they had fallen out the previous year. Thomas’s father was a difficult man, neither a saint nor a sinner, just a crank who was never satisfied with anything his son did. Thomas worked the fields and worked them just as he was raised, but somehow it was never fast enough. Farmers were always rushing in the spring when it was time to plant, to make sure they got the crops in before the rain. And rushing in the fall during harvest, bringing in their crops to make their money for the year. I always laughed when I saw how fast Thomas drove during those seasons, and how he slowed down to a crawl during summer and winter. It was like he was two different men during the year, or two different drivers anyway. You could tell what time of year it was by how fast the cars moved on the road. I swear Thomas dropped forty miles an hour off his internal speed limit come November.

  That past September, something happened in the field between them. Thomas never gave me the full details. He just brushed me away when I asked him, like I was a mosquito dive-bombing him at dusk, and then stalked off to the balcony to have a chew. “Same bullshit as usual, Moonie!” is all he said later on in bed—but I think it had something to do with what time he got to work. And I was in charge of the wake-up calls in our household. I had been sliding lately when it happened. I had my own seasons, too, as a farmer’s wife, and it was always like that at the end of summer with me. I wanted to sleep in, snuggle up next to my husband. Thomas said he did not mind, he never blamed me for a thing, he liked being close to me in the mornings, too. Still, I was afraid to push him as to the whys and what-fors of the fight. We squeezed as much as we could out of his savings and I let my mother slip me some cash here and there, until he figured out his next move. “All’s I know is, I never want to work another farm again,” he said. But what else do you know how to do? I thought. His unemployment killed any notion of having a baby, but Thomas was in no rush to have kids anyway. He saw all our high school classmates getting married and stacking up babies like pancakes in the morning. Filling themselves up with these new lives, is what I thought. Thomas said they were giving up their free time, giving up their peace and quiet. “I don’t want to share you with anyone,” is what he would tell me. I would not have minded a little one running around the house, but I could not argue when we did not have much money anyway. There were a few months in there I was hoping he would start college, like Timber, but I was not going to push. For now, we lived our unconventional life, me supporting my man.

  So I had no fear as we watched the commercial for the Helping Hand Center, only a low-grade buzz of annoyance. It was like his pill diets, or that time he ordered a box of ginseng online and he sipped it in tea for six weeks straight, or when he hung that weight off it for an hour every night (that he learned about from some show on ancient African tribes on the National Geographic channel). It was an idea that would flit and float around his brain like a bird until the season changed, and it was time to head somewhere new. I was the only thing that had ever stuck with him, and that was the way I liked it.

  And then a week later his father died on the front porch of his house, sitting and watching the sun set with his dog sitting next to him. Alone in death, just him and his dog. (He had chased Thomas’s mother away years before; she lived in Iowa City with a new husband and a Guatemalan baby girl they had adopted our senior year of high school.) His father had an aneurysm. The doctor said there had been all this pressure building up in his brain for a while, maybe even for a year, and that could have been why he had been more difficult than usual. It was one of those things you can’t track or test, it just swells up like a balloon. Then it is like someone took a little pin and stuck it in your head and it explodes.

  Three days after the funeral there was a call from the lawyer. Thomas’s dad had left him everything, the entire farm, and all of the money he had been stashing away for years. He had not been spending it on anything but building a bigger farm, a bigger legacy for his son. Here Thomas was thinking he could escape it, but there it was, more money than we could have ever dreamed of, and land, acres and acres for the taking. It was like we had won the lottery or something, only someone died. It was more money than we should have had. It was more money than we deserved. It was where our problems began.

  “AND NOW,” I said to Valka, as she cradled my head in her lap, “I want it to end.”

  We were curled up on the bed. My eyelids wer
e swollen tight and I could only see a sliver of the room. My voice was raw. I had screamed too much. I had not stopped talking for an hour straight. Valka stroked my hair, all the way to the end, all the way down me, head to waist.

  “We can make it end,” she said. “We can make anything happen.”

  I almost believed her.

  10.

  What did I know about sex anyway? What does anyone know about it? I was only ever with the same person my entire life, so what we made together was what I knew as right. I read the magazines. There was too much detail in some of them, outright lies in others. Be aggressive toward your man. Be a pleaser. Nibble. Grip tight. Tickle. Or: wait for him. Let him lead the way. But I ask you, what did he know either?

  I watched the movies, too. Movies made just for girls who lived nowhere near Nebraska. Saucy language, bold women. Inside jokes I got only half the time, two minutes later than I was supposed to. Those girls had a different life than mine. They were busy looking in the mirror, changing into another outfit. They were waiting for their man to say something witty, or trying to beat him to the punch. They did not know about being turned on by the smell of earth and hard work on their husband at the end of the day.

  I watched the movies Thomas liked, too, the dirty ones. From standing to screwing in no time flat. I hated the high-pitched squeals from those girls with the ginormous fake breasts, bouncing up so high I wanted to yell, “Duck!” at the screen. Thomas loved those movies. Thomas, who never wanted me to wear makeup. Thomas, who said I should keep my hair long, and never change the color. “Keep it real,” he would tell me. Thomas watched those movies sometimes when I was not around. All I could wonder was, why am I not enough for him?