The Melting Season

by Jami Attenberg

  There were the other girls from town—I guess I could have talked to them about sex. It seemed like that was all they wanted to talk about when I was growing up. There was a slumber party I went to in high school, a few months after Thomas and I did it for the first time. We played a game of “I never” that I ended up losing, or winning, depending on how you looked at it. (Rim jobs? Oh dear Lord, I almost passed out.) Then Margaret kept talking about how big her boyfriend’s penis was, calling it practically every name in the world but that. I think she had even made a few up. “I love sex,” she said. “Call me a slut, but I love his big ol’ ding-dong.” She made all the other girls spread their index fingers apart to show how big their boyfriends’ penises were, then offered her opinion. “Five inches, that’s average, that’s what they say,” she would say and nod. I froze, then lied and said I was still a virgin. Everything they were talking about, the way it felt inside of them, the length, the girth, none of that was familiar to me. I was hoping some of them were lying, too. I locked myself in the bathroom later and cried and then pretended I had puked when they started knocking on the door. I never went to another slumber party again.

  And then there was my mother, who told me too little, except sometimes when she told me too much. There were the bedtime stories that scared me. And once, when I was fourteen years old, she took me for a walk around the block at sunset to talk about sex.

  She was being as honest as she could, I know that now, but she was being something else, too. This was a few months before I started high school, before I met the boy who would become my husband. I was just a little sprite of a thing, but I had long blond hair that fell down to my waist in long waves. It was almost like she could see it coming before it happened and she wanted to get her digs in there first, before she lost me for good.

  Our block was noisy on summer nights. There were kids all around, hollering, tweeting, screeching, and they played stickball till sunset and then raced after fireflies with nets and mason jars until their mothers called them home. Jenny was doing cartwheels for our father on the front lawn. Off in the distance, past the bowling alley and down the back roads, the cornfields washed back and forth quietly in the wind. Not that I could see them, but still I knew they were there. I had an ice cream cone in one hand and it was a sticky mess. My mother had bribed me out the door with it. Her breath was thick with cigarettes and the smell of that wine she drank out of a giant box near the kitchen sink. This was before she started drinking beer. She said she switched because she never knew how much she was drinking from that box until it was gone already. I think she just liked to crush the empty cans with her fist.

  “I’m going to tell you a story, Miss Catherine,” said my mother. Her hair was up high on her head still from her day at work, her lipstick long gone, dark moons of eye makeup pooled under her eyes. She was smoking one of her Virginia Slims. I still thought she was beautiful and classy. “And I just want you to listen close. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”

  I had heard parts of the story before in my life. There were always bits and pieces of it floating around my brain but it was hard to put it all together. It hurt to put it all together. Her mother dying when she was still little, her father dying when she was in high school. Cancer everywhere, but still my mother smoked. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said, and then she took another drag from her cigarette. How she met my father at an ice cream social when they were in college, but she had put their relationship on hold. She had majored in international studies, and was supposed to move to France for a few months. That immersion program that was a disaster. She got lost on the streets of Paris. Or was it the trains? She got off the plane and turned right around and came back. She never even saw the Eiffel Tower, not even from a distance. Sometimes when she told the story she said she came back for love. (Depending on how she felt about my father that day. Or how much she had had to drink.) He had loved her, she said. Someone had wanted to take her on, take care of her. Her lonely orphan self. My mom could make us feel sorry for her any time of day or night. Maybe we did not like her very much, but we knew she had her pain.

  “And now I am going to tell you my one regret in life. I held on for so long. My virginity was a precious thing. Now I know girls these days don’t see it that way anymore, but I am telling you it is important. I waited for your father forever. And then, two weeks before we got married, we just could not wait a minute longer.” She stopped walking and I stopped with her. There was a ripple in her voice. “Well, he couldn’t wait. I could have waited.”

  I did not say a word. I was scared all of a sudden.

  “Let me tell you what it’s like, Catherine.” She moved her face in closer to mine and leered at me. I held my breath and waited for the truth. “Imagine a wall. And imagine something pressing up against that wall as hard as possible. It’s like this brick wall, and something’s trying to break through it.” She flattened one hand in the air and punched it with her other hand. I could feel the punch deep in me. “You are that wall, Catherine. You’re the wall.”

  I dropped my ice cream cone on the ground and did not stoop to pick it up. The ants were all over it in seconds.

  I heard those words again in my head, for days and days, for weeks, for months, for the last ten years, forever, in my head, my mother, her fist, the struggle, the wall, and me.

  I did not have sex for a few years. I was in no hurry after that. But it did not matter how long I waited. I was already ruined. Maybe I had been ruined before that. I remembered that, though. Other things she had said about sex in the past floated faintly in the back of my mind. But I remembered that walk around the block.

  “YOUR MOTHER SOUNDS like a real piece of work,” said Valka.

  “It does not matter what she is,” I said. “You can’t go blaming your parents for your problems forever. What happened was between me and Thomas. Between a man and his wife.”

  “True, that,” said Valka. “You have to own your issues. They are yours and no one else’s. But, my dear, darling friend, I am just trying to understand here. Why you can’t feel.”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. But that was a lie. I had more secrets to tell. It is just that they were not my own.

  11.

  I did not marry Thomas for his money or his looks. I married him for his heart and his sense of humor, and the way he looked at me and made me feel like I was more precious than gold. But I will say this: it was nice to be rich. First thing Thomas did was hire someone else to run the farm. Thomas would still go out on his tractor because what man doesn’t love a tractor? There he was whooping it up all over the farm, cowboy hat on his head, straw in his mouth, little legs dangling over the sides. But the day-to-day stuff he handed off to someone else. “I’ve got more important things to be thinking about,” he said. “Like making my bride happy.”

  Then Thomas set to fixing us a brand-new home on the land. He tore down the farmhouse he had lived in practically his entire life and brought all of his friends into our home. (“They’re the biggest construction company in town,” he told me. “They’re the only construction company in town,” I said.) He bought a satellite dish, and a gigantic plasma flat-screen TV, and a five-piece leather couch, and he put a hot tub in the backyard though we hardly used it. I quit my job. We hung out all day watching television and eating bacon. The construction guys were in and out and around the house every goddamn day banging their tools and blaring the country station and smoking out back in the spot where we would someday have a sundeck. I suspected they sneered at our laziness, but I did not say a thing. I did not mind all of the dust and noise so much, only I wished it were just me and Thomas all the time.

  At sunset we would take a walk through the field. He would ask me if there was anything he could do for me.

  “What can I buy you? What do you need? What would make my bride’s life complete?” he would say.

  “Just you,” I would say, and then he would hold me and kiss me and then we would go home and watch
soft porn on cable and do it on the living room couch.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER the construction started I went to my mother’s house for a visit, and when I came back everything had changed all at once.

  My mother and I had eaten an entire bag of microwave popcorn and had two cans of beer each. We were both bored. Not working is boring. My dad had gotten a job as the general manager of the Walmart off the interstate in York. There was a picture of him, bald with a gray rise of hair around the base of his head like rings around Saturn, which was framed and posted in the front of the store, next to the picture of the employee of the month. My dad had asked my mom to quit her sales job in Lincoln years back, and even though she loved that job for some reason she had said yes. And I never had to work again if I did not want to, and my husband was busy turning the farm into his playland. So some of us were busy, and some of us were bored.

  We had taken to drinking a few times a week in the afternoons, me and my mother. Just a can or two to take the edge off of nothing in particular. Beer just made everything a little funnier. My sister’s hickeys racing like a forest fire down her neck. My father’s hazy greetings when he came home from work. The way my husband would whimper late at night, sometimes for his father, sometimes for his nub, sometimes just because he was fragile and needed to cry. The fact that I could not feel my husband between my legs. Not that I cared.

  It was all so hilarious after two Coors Lights. Even funnier for Mom, because she drank an entire six-pack.

  “Oh God, I don’t know what I’m going to do with that girl,” said my mother.

  “I think Jenny’s just having fun,” I said. “She is a smart girl.”

  “Smart or not, she’s wilder than you ever were. You just wanted to settle in right away with Thomas, and that had its own set of problems, but at least I knew who you were with at night. That girl has a new boyfriend every week.” My mother shook her head, tilted her head back, and drained the last of her beer. “I don’t know where I went wrong. I gave her the same sex talk I gave you. Nothing can slow her down though.”

  All of a sudden, I shivered. I wrapped my arms around myself. I felt myself fall down deep inside. There was nothing to stop me, nothing to hold onto. I just kept falling. I was empty in there.

  “I have to go home to my husband,” I said. I stood up and bumped the table. “He will be waiting for dinner.” I pushed the chair back and it fell over. I did not pick it up.

  I drove slowly and took the back roads on the way home, the dust from the gravel rising in thick clouds behind me in my rearview mirror. Me and my wake. By the time I pulled into our drive, I had sobered up enough that he would never know a thing. Plus I had chewed some gum. Not that he would care if I was drinking, just that he might worry. I hated it when he worried.

  When I walked inside the house, the screen door banged behind me loudly and I felt the split of a headache start in my head. The TV was blaring from the living room, and I was not in the mood, so I headed for the bedroom instead to take a nap. If only I had joined my husband on the couch like usual, instead of leaving him alone with his devices, those goddamn remote controls. There were at least a dozen of them, one for the stereo, one for the satellite, three for the TV, one for the video game, one for the DVD, one for the VCR, one for the DVR—and then a bunch more that I did not recognize. There he was, playing with his toy. I could hear the whirl of him channel surfing, and I put a pillow over my head, until I heard “Honey,” loud, and then louder. Then he was standing at the bedroom door, and he said, “Honey, are you sleeping?” He pulled the pillow up from my head and said, “Baby, are you asleep?”

  “I was trying,” I said.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, and he looked so bashful and silly that I forgave him right away. “Anyway, you should come watch this show with me. That Rio DeCarlo show. Do you remember, we watched it a while back? It’s that guy who had the surgery I want to get. They’re showing what happened to him after the surgery.”

  Now it is one he wants to get? Oh boy. I roused myself and he held out his hand and pulled me up from bed and then he led me—dragged me, more like it—to the living room, where the tail end of a diet pill commercial was playing. The “after” version of the woman was beaming on the screen in her old pair of blue jeans, the front of which she stretched out in front of her as if she could not get that part of her past away from her fast and far enough.

  Thomas pulled me onto the couch next to him and threw his arm around me. He happily threw his legs up on our coffee table, the new one, bigger and shinier than the last one, though in all other ways, exactly the same. It was as if we had taken our old life and inflated it.

  He patted me on the leg and pointed at the screen. “Now watch.”

  There was our old friend Rio DeCarlo, lips puffed out like a million bees had stung her. I bet she did not feel a thing, though, not one little prick. Those lips had to be numb already. She was wearing a ball gown that shimmered with glittery red stones and a diamond necklace with a giant heart-shaped stone at the end. She moved her hands up in the air again, then swung around for no reason. I thought about the first movie of hers I saw when I was a kid. She played the spunky teenage daughter of the president of the United States, though she was probably in her twenties by that point. She ran away from home and backpacked across America while the FBI and Secret Service chased after her, and we all rooted for her in the theater to keep on running. It made no sense, we were all happy to go home to our parents at night, but in that theater that day, we could see how there was another way that was possible. There was the chance of freedom. She had freckles then. Now she had a nose sculpted like a pencil, two nostrils sticking out like tiny peanuts.

  “One year ago, Larry Stoneman had penile enlargement surgery, adding a grand total of three inches to his penis. . . .” Rio DeCarlo hesitated for a moment, and I thought I saw her crack a smile, but maybe I was just imagining things. And then she added, “When erect.”

  There was a shot of Larry holding a ruler and grinning.

  “Let’s check in with Larry to see how his surgery has changed his life!”

  “For a while I played the field,” Larry said.

  There were a few scenes of Larry sitting in a bar that had flashing disco lights in the background. There were women surrounding him, girls with their hair blown out straight. They were all smiling and laughing—they were having the best time ever—and then they all clinked glasses. I looked at my husband’s face and I could see he was impatient. Playing the field was never his thing.

  “But finally, I’ve found the girl of my dreams.” There was Larry, with a pretty brunette in a low-cut sweater. Her breasts looked suspiciously like Rio DeCarlo’s breasts, carved out and propped high on her chest. They were holding hands in a café. The sun struck down between them and around them and they both laughed. I reached for Thomas’s hand and squeezed it. It was nice to see Larry happy.

  “I can satisfy her needs,” he said. Larry’s girlfriend gave a little thumbs-up sign to the camera, and then winked. “And, boy, does she satisfy mine.” They were on a beach, in bathing suits, embracing and kissing. Larry’s hands were on his girlfriend’s ass, which was clad in a thong. So it was basically Larry’s hands, cupping her bare ass, on national television.

  “That could be us, honey,” said Thomas.

  “That is us,” I said. “We’re already happy.”

  “I know you’re not. You’re lying. You never feel a thing and you know it.”

  I was quiet for a second. I should never hesitate during an argument with him because then he thought he had won. But I did not want him to say what we both thought sometimes, our shared fear. Maybe I just couldn’t feel him.

  12.

  I was always that way,” I said to Valka. “Like from the very first time.” I had showered and was wrapped in one of the gigantic bathrobes. It was so big my hands had disappeared in the sleeves. “Like first base, second base, when we were kids, that I felt just fine. We went out for
a long time before we did it so I guess we did not know it was going to be a problem.”

  “First base?” said Valka. She poked at me. “That’s adorable.”

  I blushed. “You know what I mean. Anyway, when we finally decided to lose our virginity, it was such a big deal. Huge.” I stretched my arms out wide. “We talked about it for months, planning and plotting it. Then I lied to my parents about where I was going to be. Thomas got us a hotel room in Lincoln, downtown at the Cornhusker Hotel, which is super fancy. It has this big spiral staircase and chandeliers in the lobby. I do not know how he did it to this day. I am sure the people who worked there must have been wondering what these kids were doing checking in together but nobody said a thing. Thomas checked us in as Mr. and Mrs. Madison. I was acting like I was a grown woman with my luggage, but I was only sixteen years old. We lit candles and drank beer and I put on a special bra and underpants set I bought at the Victoria’s Secret. It was pink with little appliquéd baby roses on it. Really sweet.”

  “Sometimes they do cute stuff,” said Valka. “But I think they’re way overpriced.”

  “I did not really want to do it. I will say that right now. I could have waited forever and a day. But he wanted it. He had wanted it since the day we met. It was like we were husband and wife already, that was what he kept saying. ‘We’re lucky,’ he always told me. ‘We skipped all the hard parts and found each other.’ I believed him.”

  “Kids,” said Valka. “Always wanting to grow up too fast.”

  “So there I was, lying in bed in my fancy underpants. I remember him putting the condom on. He was calling me Mrs. Madison. That was all I could hear. He moved around on top of me. And then it was over just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “I did not even know it had started.”

  “Boys go quick when they’re young,” said Valka.