by Laura London
Pigsville. Jesse, one of the few people to have researched the subject, had found that the area was named Pigsville either because of a Mr. George Pigg, who was rumored to have lived in the valley a hundred years ago, or because the valley was the site of a farm that had once raised that useful animal.
As Christine was unloading a picnic basket from the backseat and Jesse was pulling a cooler of beer from the trunk, a series of yelled numbers exploded from behind the bungalow, and a six-foot-tall red-and-yellow package of french fries came running around the side of the house into the front yard. In this ingenious costume were housed four of Jesse’s brothers and one sister, ages twelve to sixteen, wearing nodding french fry hats and doing their best to run in synchronization. They were doing pretty well until one of the front french fries saw Jesse and stopped in its tracks to shout “Hi!” The others smacked full into it and the cardboard packaging uptilted, spilling fries every which way on the grass in a wobbling heap that upset the small shrine of Mary by the front porch.
They were more healthy looking than they were beautiful, these youngest Ludans—all long arms and legs and jutting joints, torrents of light dancing hair, flecked hazel and green eyes. All at once they picked themselves up, reproaching one another with husky chuckles and waving at Jesse.
Andy, who was the eldest, straightened his french fry cap, which had come askew, and rescued the little ceramic Madonna from where she’d fallen facedown in a patch of chickweed.
“What d’you think, Jess?” He gestured toward the voluminous costume that lay on its side like a beached ark. “We’re wearing it in the Memorial Day Charity Marathon. Peter helped us silk screen the package.”
They were remarkable distance runners, and the costumes did wonders for swelling their list of sponsors when they ran in charity fund raisers. In the Frigid Five, the grueling midwinter race, they had gone as a can of worms—which their father, Janos, called singularly appropriate—and had gotten their picture on the front page of the morning paper beside a headline about national economic ills.
They surrounded Christine and Jesse, a gaggle of grins and T-shirts talking excitedly. Andy had grown taller than Christine in the relatively short period of her marriage, and he emphasized it by putting his elbows on her shoulders and giving her a greeting kiss on the top of her head. Stepping back, he pulled down the yoke of his T-shirt to show her his neck.
“I’ve got a hickey, see?”
Boy, did he ever. Christine examined it with interest. “It’s very nice. I’ve often wondered how people did those things.”
He gave her an amused look. “Far be it from me to shatter your innocence if lover boy over there hasn’t taught you.” Relieving her of the picnic basket, Andy took her neck in a comfortable stranglehold and began to walk with her toward the front porch. He was a toucher, like the rest of his family, and Christine had been married two years before she had stopped being afraid of and begun envying their easy and frequent body contact.
“Weren’t you just hoping it would storm today so we wouldn’t have to spend the day up north grubbing around in the forest for mushrooms like a bunch of immigrants?” he said.
“Have you no respect for the traditions of the old country?” demanded fourteen-year-old Anna in a bogus Hungarian accent that belonged unmistakably to her grandmother. “Every year when I was a little girl Papa would take us to Stuhlweissenburg and we would have cold game and truffles under a white awning.”
Nicholas, who was twelve, said, “You can bet she never picked them herself. Bet they made some poor serf do it.”
“That’s probably why they all went Communist and turned the land into a state-owned farm,” Anna said. “The Ludan spring tradition—blistered feet, poison ivy, horsefly bites…”
“Stickers on your butt,” Nicky finished.
His older brothers and sister pounced quickly on that lapse of tongue. “What a mouth that kid’s got on him,” Andy moaned. “And in front of a girl who’s never had a hickey…”
Unabashed, Nicky put his wisp-thin five-foot length on Jesse’s back and said, “Can I ride with you guys out to the country, please? Sandy’s taking Beth on the Harley and Indy’s only got room for one in the RX-7 and Andy’s already claimed it. I don’t want to ride with Grandma.”
“What’s wrong with riding with Grandma?” Jesse hitched Nicky’s bottom more securely upward.
“She’ll make me say a Rosary with her. She says I’m the last chance to get one of us into the priesthood, and she won’t listen when I tell her I’ve got no vocation. And I ought to know by now, after getting up at daybreak for six months to be an altar boy for early Mass. You know what, Jess? When I grow up I’m going to be just like you and marry a Protestant and never go to church again!”
That drew whoops from his family. Under Jesse’s laughing gaze, Christine tried in a flustered way to contradict Nicky’s understanding of Protestant churchgoing and explain her own conduct as they walked across the porch, which creaked under their weight.
The living room was filled twice beyond capacity with Ludan relatives, children of relatives, and girl friends and boyfriends of relatives. Dodging affectionate slaps and exchanging warm embraces, she made her way with Jesse to the kitchen, where Jesse’s parents were holding court around the gray Formica table. There was a coffee cup on every flat surface, and a denim-and-tennis-shoe-clad leg dangled from the scarred arm of every chair. The air was filled with talk of sports, politics, religion, weather, children, and more sports. The worn furniture was draped in jackets and sweaters. Boots, picnic baskets and coolers, baseball bats, Frisbees, and soccer balls made the floor treacherous.
The kitchen hummed with last-minute preparations of everything that was needed to feed the army of people. Grandma Ludan stood in the middle of the fray, ironing. Beth was supervising half a dozen people who were packing food. Several infants toddled blithely underfoot. Christine watched Indy scoop up Sandor’s daughter, Krystal, as she padded by sucking on a teething biscuit. He peered doubtfully into the back of her pants and then felt cautiously around with his finger.
“Beth, your kid’s soaked.”
Beth was trying to wrap a cake without destroying the frosting. She gave Indiana a harassed look. “There’s a diaper in the blue bag by Papa.”
Jesse’s brother Peter was near enough to the blue bag to lean sideways and fish out a diaper and because there was no room to move, he tossed it to Indiana. The highbrow aesthete and bachelor ballet superstar sat on the counter with his little niece on his lap and changed her diaper with long-practiced expertise.
Jesse’s father had been tickling a baby in a sunbonnet with his broad white mustache, but he surrendered her to one of Jesse’s aunts when he saw Jesse and Christine. He threw open his arms, offering an embrace. He appeared frail beside his strong, well-made children, his face marked by the years of suffering from the little-understood disease that had attacked and weakened his spine. But the orthopedic harness around his neck was bright with gold paper stars, Pac-Man emblems, and a sticker of a big green pickle with rolling eyes—all gifts from his adoring grandchildren. Grandpa’s neck, he called it, and Christine had become so accustomed to it that there were times when she forgot that he couldn’t hold his head upright without it.
Christine watched him take Jesse’s chin in his hand and turn his son’s head this way and that. “You look better, Jesse,” he said in his soft Hungarian accent. “There’s more color in your face.”
Jesse helped his father sit back down and hitched himself on the table, with his father’s gnarled brown hand on his knee. Patting his own cheek, Jesse said, “It’s the prison pallor, Papa.”
His father nodded, his hazel eyes full of understanding. “It will be better for you. Trust. Three years I was in the Communist labor camps when Sanyi was a baby. It never leaves you, but you get over it. I promise you. Why, look what came of it.” Jesse’s father extended his arms, indicating his large family.
“We know what came of it,” Sand
or said, holding a picnic basket. “Mama didn’t have a kid for four years.”
Jesse’s mother, Mari, put down the celery she was slicing to pinch her eldest son’s nose. “So something good comes from everything.”
* * *
Christine walked quietly beside Jesse in the cathedral hush of the forest, her hands in her pockets, Jesse’s in his. Filtered sunlight broke in dusty streaks through the pale-green crowns of red oak and hickory, making shifting patterns of light and shadow on the fawn-colored carpet of nutritious decay beneath. Soft ferns brushed their ankles. Mayapple and white trillium bloomed in delicate corners. Jack-in-the-pulpits stood upright in the gentle air. She listened to the hum of the bees and breathed in the cool silk scent of freshly thawed earth.
What had begun as a crowd, walking up the sloping sand lane into the forest shade, had thinned as small groups split off to hunt in their own way and under their own theories for the elusive morel mushrooms, the wilderness delicacy. There was a certain friendly rivalry about it because morels were so hard to find and so prized. Some years she and Jess had hunted them with humorous and notoriously unsuccessful zeal. In others they had wandered hand in hand on the fragrant paths, listening for the mewl of baby squirrels in their sheltered nests, viewing the dew-jeweled tidiness of a spiderweb, kissing against wide tree trunks. But today Jesse stood apart.
He could feel himself sliding back into the sedative numbness that his family had temporarily interrupted. Their boisterous exuberance had irritated him, jangling the grayness of his mood. Grayness was a good word. He could see his moods in colors now: deep purple, almost black anger; the flaxen sweetness of his intimacy with Christine; gray depression. Looking backward, he had begun to be surprised that in prison he had learned to accept the grayness as positive, a dulling of the painful processes of his environment. Now that he no longer needed it, it clung to him anyway with a whiplash tenacity. Funny, no matter how much sensitivity you thought you had to what someone might feel in a situation, you never really understood it until you experienced it yourself.
Jesse suddenly became aware that Christine was not beside him. He turned and saw her standing off the path beside the ragged upthrust rootwork of a fallen elm, her eyes closed, her hands forward, holding a Y-shaped stick out horizontally by its top ends. Clowning again, he thought lovingly.
“What are you doing?”
“Witching!” she said, walking blindly. “You know how people witch for underground water with willow branches? Maybe it works for morel mushrooms too.”
He watched her, enjoying her outdoor prettiness, the way her body moved under the pink sweater and unzipped pink and gray down vest. Coral button earrings accented her earlobes with dainty sensuality. From the back pocket of her light corduroy jeans, four pussy willow branches she’d picked earlier protruded gaily, waving like kittens’ tails. But the toe of her sand-colored suede walking shoe became suddenly entangled with a straggling root and she fell on her stomach onto the soft spongy ground. “Ooof!” she said, and played possum.
He knew she was all right. With a little warning, dancers could land like a pound of loose feathers. He hesitated briefly and then flopped down beside her full length and rested his chin on his hands. After a moment she looked up at him, blinking.
“Find anything?” he asked, lifting the furry softness of a plump pussy willow catkin from her hair. The sun warmed their backs, but the air was pleasantly cool, tipping her nose and cheeks in cameo-pink. Her lips were slightly parted and wind-stroked from the long slow climb up the hill, and her chest was moving softly from the exertion, her breasts touching the ground. She copied his position, putting her chin into her hands in exactly the same way he did, and when she moved that way her breasts lifted so that he could see their small perfect outline through her sweater.
“There are things I’d much rather look for,” she said suddenly, her mouth shaping itself into a sultry little grin.
“Pinecones?” he suggested, drawing her vest gently back to reveal more of her body. “Another witching stick?”
“No.”
“Eye of newt? Tongue of bat?”
She leaned so close to him that he could feel her breath bathe his lips.
“Tongue of Jesse,” she whispered, and leaned closer, closer, until she was almost touching him, and he felt the burning caress of his desire rising within, knowing the taste of her, needing to feel it again.
Then she changed her mind, frisking away like a whisper of fox fire.
“No, no,” she said, “what I’m really interested in is mushrooms.” She rolled off on the amber leaves, her back turned. After a half second she looked over her shoulder at him, and her eyebrow lifted in a teasing, expectant curve that matched the sexy quirk on the corner of her lips.
The grayness inside him seemed to thaw in a sharply intensive rush of colors and he reached for her, barely touching the delicious curve of her waist before she twisted away again and grabbed a handful of leaves from the forest floor to toss at him.
“Cut it out!” She laughed. “You’re trying to invade my personal space.”
This time when he reached for her, adrenaline and overwhelming need made him quick and agile enough to catch her by the ankle. He pulled her beneath him, letting the soft movements of her wriggling body spire through his senses, twisting and altering the path of his swiftly warming blood.
With his eyes closed, and his mouth hovering over a lovely cheekful of freckles, he murmured, “There’s one personal space of yours that I’d give heaven and earth to be able to invade right now.”
“Really, Sir Toby!” she exclaimed in an enchantingly prim tone. “How can I continue as your governess if you persist in using me so disgracefully?” Taking in a staccato breath as his knee worked its way between her thighs, she added, “That does it, sir! I’m reporting this to the duchess!”
His mouth moved softly over the cool surface of her cheek. “Christine. Kiss me.”
She almost let him reach her mouth before she turned her head away, smiling wickedly, biting her lower lip. “That wasn’t your line. You were supposed to say, ‘You’re going to want this as much as I do, baby.’ ”
“Was that my line?” He nuzzled coaxingly into her hair, running his tongue lightly along the edge of her earlobe. “I assumed it was impossible.” Pressing a body that was beginning to ache voluptuously into her, remembering the empty months without her, his voice came with petal softness against her skin. “I assume no one in the world has ever wanted this as much as I do at this moment.”
“Assume nothing when dealing with members of the mysterious sex.”
His light, exquisite kisses ravished the edge of her jaw and flickered over her throat. “Mysterious,” he breathed. “Soft inside, warm.… Turn your face back to me, Christine.”
Here she was, finding herself doing that despicable thing she had promised herself she would never do—using his desire for her as a weapon. But it was in a good cause. In a playful movement she lifted her face, kissed him quickly, and turned away again. “Was that enough?”
His fingers slid softly under her cheek where it pressed the ground and began to stroke her there, trying gently to make her turn toward him. “Kiss me, love,” he whispered.
That note in his voice was very difficult for her to resist. And yet.… She looked up into the tender green eyes above her. “First will you tell me something?”
His hand formed itself to the side of her face, his thumb trembling over her lips. “Yes. What is it?”
“I only want to know—how do you feel today?”
His heart clenched at her words because she was having to learn how to beg him to open his thoughts for her. The backwash of trying to spare her his dark emotions and memories was that his silence had also become its own burden. He was beginning to realize how frozen he must have been to understand all of this so slowly, and he wondered how he would be able to share it without overwhelming her in it. All there was left in the world to need was she. And to
heal.
“I feel glad to be with you,” he said.
She smiled up at him, and before she closed her eyes he felt the love he saw there penetrate his deepest pain. Her lips parted and she waited for his kiss, floss-soft at first, then heady and powerful, with their bodies moving together in heavy strokes, their hands sliding into each other’s hair to hold the kiss, and hold it.…
A gust of wind scented of moss and sunlight parted the misty leaves far overhead, and with a papery crackle blew over the empty mushroom sacks. The sound startled her in the open, peaceful setting and she looked up, the heavy sunlight streaming into her eyes. She saw the paper bags where they had curled on their sides beside the elm, and then, as though magic had summoned them forth in some uncanny way from the fertile pile of leafage, she saw the spongy cones of many, many morel mushrooms scattered like an elfin village on the humid ground. A soft, surprised laugh burst from her.
“Jesse! Our morels!”
More interested in losing himself in her than in analyzing what seemed like some sudden obscure scruple, he said, in a vague effort to reassure her, “Don’t worry about morals, Chrissie. We’re married.”
She had to roll him over, straddling him, and retrieve his hand from under her sweater to drop a mushroom into his palm before he cooled down enough to understand.
Their harvest filled four old-fashioned milk cans. It was the talk of the camp fire that night, breaking all family records for a mushroom mother lode. In Jesse’s family, where one had barely to draw breath to get loving approval, Christine found herself all but carried around the clearing on their shoulders. Her heavily edited version of “How I Found the Mushrooms” had an attentive audience that Homer would have envied.
Her parents arrived as the thickets darkened with purple dusk and the spring peepers began to call from secret lagoons. The Ludans scrupulously invited them to all family gatherings, and her parents scrupulously attended.
From the shelter of Jesse’s arm, she watched her father dock the silver Mercedes by a stand of sumac. He climbed out of the driver’s seat, a small freckled man in a Pierre Cardin leather jacket—Dr. Bell. She had never known he loved her until the day they had put Jesse in prison and he had said, “I’m here if you need me, Christine,” and she had found that she did.