The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  I straightened up and moved into his line of sight. “Cole, I miss Addie something terrible. I’m alone here now, and I want something like what you have with Eloise. And he reminds me of Addie.”

  Surprise flashed across his face. He glanced away at her name.

  I continued, “Trust me, Cole. I was right about you. I’m right about him. He’s a good man. And I’m alone now.”

  His face softened. He nodded, conceding. “The house still smells like Addie. It’s so strange, her going off like that and not even saying good-bye. Like her momma, I guess. But if she found a fella, I guess you should have one too. It’s just that it’s all so fast.” He scuffed his boot in the clay and studied the ground. When he looked up again, a slow smile crept across his lips. “Yeah, it’s been a year for me and Eloise. I’m going to ask her to marry me soon.”

  “Cole! You’re getting married?”

  “Shh! I haven’t officially asked her. Don’t tell anyone.” He nodded, suddenly as bashful as the boy I’d met in the cornfield a couple years before. He brushed away my surprise. Then his face was serious again. “You’ve got to be more careful, okay? What if it’d been your daddy or momma at the back door instead of me? I’ll be back tomorrow to help you with this post.” Then he mounted and rode off.

  I called after him, “Good luck! I hope the answer’s yes!”

  He laughed and waved as he trotted off.

  He did come back. Adam deferred to him in the corral repair. Cole was brusque and to the point while they worked. But as soon as they were done, Adam leaned on the fence, then asked about the white chicken-scared mare Cole and Addie had cured. Cole started slow, but warmed each time we laughed at his flapping imitation of Addie’s apron full of biddies and his chicken-holding duties.

  I fried us some corn bread and sausage for lunch. While I washed up, Cole joined me at the sink. “I see what you mean. He is like her. He’s got the gift with horses. Darling follows him like a puppy. Just like with Addie. Spooky.” He gave me a friendly, quizzical glance, then grinned. “Maybe it’s you. Maybe a body has to be good with horses to hang around with you.”

  “You have no idea.” I laughed.

  Adam was deft at courtship of every kind, and within a short time had won Cole’s respect and friendship. Having been Addie was good preparation for befriending Cole. But there were other times, when our combined experience as women left us unprepared. Neither of us had been a man. I couldn’t offer Adam tutorials, as I had with Addie. A few weeks after Adam’s arrival, Joe and Daddy showed up to help rehinge and rehang one of the barn doors.

  Adam and I were hanging up laundry when they pulled up in the driveway. They got out of the truck and walked up to the flapping laundry.

  I was farther down the clothesline and couldn’t see them but I heard Joe snicker and Daddy make his funny huffing noise of disgust. I peeked over the lines of damp clothes just as Daddy turned away and started for the barn.

  Joe leaned close to Adam. “Look, buddy, you may have it real bad for her, you may be so sweet on her you just gotta help in every way. But you just gotta let her take care of those things.” I dipped under a wet shirt to see what the fuss was. For a heartbeat, Adam stood there looking puzzled, and then he handed me a bundle of my damp, clean panties he’d been hanging up. Joe rolled his eyes at me and dope-slapped Adam as they left the clothesline to join Daddy, who squatted by the barn studying the derelict hinge.

  I asked Adam about it later.

  “There’s a lot of subtle stuff to this manhood,” he said and spread the fingers of one hand over his breastbone—Addie’s gesture. Suddenly, it seemed effeminate. I straightened his wrist and lifted his elbow a little.

  He thumped himself on the chest. “Better?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “So no more hanging up panties for me—at least when anyone else is around,” he continued. “Some other lessons I’ve learned.” He held up his fingers, counting them off. “Limit questions to those about cars, engines, and sports. Do not look another man in the eye for more than a second when you pass on the street, one quick glance and a nod will do. Most men want you to stand beside them and look at something else with them, not face them when you’re talking. Don’t spend much time in the kitchen with the women. Arrange yourself before you leave the bathroom.” He glanced down at his new body. I laughed, remembering Addie’s puzzled survey of her crotch when I had told her about menstruation. I felt his strangeness viscerally, a stirring in my solar plexus.

  After a couple of months we were ready to announce our engagement. We decided against him formally asking my daddy for my hand; Adam did not want to leave Momma out. But he did give Daddy a pouch of his favorite pipe tobacco after we finished dinner that Sunday. Momma and I joined Daddy and Adam on the porch after we finished the dishes. Daddy was lighting his pipe when Adam and I announced that we wanted their permission to marry. He dropped the match, stomped it, and took his pipe out of his mouth. They both stopped their rocking and stared at us. Adam had been successful in his courtship of them. They liked him, I was sure of that.

  Momma searched my face and her expression of amazement burst into a smile of satisfaction. I felt a twinge of anxiety when I saw Daddy’s surprised face. He’d never liked surprises and tended to foist them on Momma whenever possible.

  “It’s . . . Uhm, it’s awfully soon, isn’t it?” Daddy directed the question at Momma, not us.

  “It is soon, Robert. But that’s not the question. They’re asking for our approval. If we approve, what does it matter if we approve now or in six months? They’re not asking to get married today.”

  Daddy listened. A second match flared and he sucked on the pipe.

  Momma glared playfully at him, but her voice held serious undertones. “Nobody’s rushing you. We can take our time with the answer. But, Robert Roe, do you remember how many times you had dinner at my daddy’s house before you asked for my hand?”

  Daddy rose to his feet. “As long as I am not being rushed . . .” He held a congratulatory hand out to Adam and nodded to me as he excused himself to go inside. A second later, we heard the bathroom door shut. He hadn’t agreed, but he was letting us have our way.

  Momma sighed. “Mark my word, he’ll soon be saying it was all his idea. Welcome to the family, son.” She beamed up at Adam.

  Adam and I grinned at each other. We were home free.

  That night Adam snuck back out to the farm from Joe’s and woke me in the middle of the night. We went outside and made love near the apple tree. He lay under me on the very spot where I had found him, the smooth undersides of his open arms pale against the dark, red clay. A cloud passed over, dimming the moonlight for a moment, and I had a sudden fear that he might go back into the mud he had come from, that he could vanish, dissolving beneath me as I pressed onto him. But he did not. He pulled me down to his perfect mouth and remained as he was, a man.

  Everyone seemed surprised at the speed of our engagement, but not the engagement itself. After everybody knew about it, Momma and Daddy paid less attention to Adam’s comings and goings on the farm.

  We went at each other like drunken rabbits. Everywhere, anytime we could, working late into the night to make up for chores we had missed during the day. I was as crazy in love with him in his new body as I had been before. Everything I had done with Addie could now spill over into the world. In the fields, in the barn, in the daylight, in every room of the house. What I did with Adam had a name and required simple privacy, not secrecy. I put my fears about children behind me, but they followed me, mobile and unobtrusive as shadows.

  On the Monday after our engagement had been announced, we were making love when Adam surprised me with a question. “I don’t want to pull out. Do you want me? Do you want this?”

  I could not look away from that bright gaze. His whole body was so warm, almost hot. The last of my resistance uncoiled. “Yes,” I said.

  What rose from him was not his normal sound of pleasure. Stronger, his c
ry swept past sweetness into a joy intense and sharp as sorrow or rage. It rose and passed not through, but into. Into me.

  That was it. When my monthly time should have come, four weeks before the wedding, I knew. He was right about his fertility. We’d gotten on the train there is no getting off. Too late for more questions. Only time would bring the answers.

  We had stepped into the public whirlpool of events that comes with a wedding and having a child.

  I was in a state of bliss. Sweet, wide-open joy.

  women usually talked about sex back then only as something to put up with. The physical details were left unstated. If a girl was lucky, her mother might give her a frank private talk about the specifics of what parts were going to go where the night before she married. But most mothers skirted the issue, assuming the barnyard to be education enough. There were no women’s magazines in the grocery store checkout aisle, proclaiming the joys of multiple orgasms. No books or charts for us.

  With A., I never needed a chart or a manual. The act itself could vary so. Some nights I felt myself unfurl. Other nights our lovemaking tightened down as if to single points of skin and nerve. At times, all the energy came from me, other times it came at me, A. all heat and need in my arms. Our simple, closed-mouthed good-night kiss might erupt into passion, leaving us exhausted and wet. There were nights of skin, surfaces rubbing and rolling into each other. Or we were just our mouths, drinking each other in. Frenzied nights when I wanted to devour him. Nights when our lovemaking was a single breath on an ordinary day: short, barely noticeable, and completely necessary. Complex or simple and common as pounding rain, the texture of it could be anywhere. Tender, sweet, hard, predatory, silly, muddy, clear, cathartic—whatever a face or a glance or a word could be the whole act could be—in a single night. Adam was like Addie in one other way: the same exquisite sound burst from him when he climaxed and then immediately afterward, a beautiful, contagious belly laugh.

  Usually, we went straight from climax into the state that precedes dreams, when thoughts are unmoored and drift heedlessly on their own. Other times, it was as if we had been revived and we’d have to read to calm ourselves before we could sleep. There were times when gratitude, awe, or tenderness would take me so that afterward, when we lay beside each other, I would reach for him again. Later, I would bring one of the children back into the bed with us, and we would sleep all a tangle of arms and legs, of sweet, young breath and thicker, older breath. And each of our daughters at one point as infants interrupted our lovemaking with her cries and I brought her to our bed, where she suckled and slept again while I lay on my side, Adam, spooned behind me, entered me again, and we continued gently, slowly, bodily bridging the child and the act that made the child. We called it “rocking the baby.”

  I have often thought of what my old grandfather said about the beauty of sex. I think not just of what he said, but why he needed to say it. The act is a vessel that can hold a continuum of human intentions—a sweet, holy song of flesh and love, the simple, mindless rut of youth, or the darkest violation. It encompasses what we bring to it. Too often people fill it with shame.

  The association of shame with sex was alien to A. Sex with him seemed a thing unto itself, neither wholly of nor from either of us, but some perfect distillation of the two of us. Making love to him felt like a form of worship. Not a worship of him or of me, but Life worshiping Itself through our bodies. Life praying to Itself and to all that is not Life, asking for more Life and thanking Itself. The holy stuff of life springing through us as it springs through every living thing.

  It lasted decades with A. I never got over it.

  Never.

  The wedding was not going to be very fancy. Momma would make my wedding dress. We went together to pick out the cloth. She led me toward the whites at the back of Ina’s shop, but I wasn’t sure. I showed her a pale blue. She rubbed it between her fingers and said, “So, you, of all brides, should not wear white?”

  “Someone might step on this.” I bent over and picked a straight pin up off the wood floor.

  “Only one reason I can think of for a girl not to wear white at her wedding,” she continued. I walked away to consider a bolt of rosy-pink satin.

  Momma brought over a bolt of white she favored and plopped it down on top of the cloth I looked at. She lowered her voice. “Evelyn Roe, if every woman who had been with her man before she married him wore a colored wedding dress, white wedding dresses would be as rare as a milk bag on a bull. If I wore white, you can, too.”

  “Momma? You . . . ?”

  She nodded.

  “But I always thought you were . . . I . . .” I couldn’t have been more surprised.

  “Everybody thinks that of their momma. And everyone is human, even mothers. No need to proclaim in public what’s done in private. You pick the white you want. I’ll do the stitching.”

  “It won’t be so private soon, Momma,” I whispered.

  She glanced up quickly, the shock and disappointment I had expected in her eyes. Then she searched my face, wide-eyed, as she had the day I wandered away when I was a little girl, but she did not seem to see me. Suddenly, her whole face broke into a smile and she said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.” She never cursed, but she said it again. For a second, her mouth hung open in shock, then her eyes brightened.

  She looked around the store. I thought she was checking to see if anyone had heard her curse, but she seemed to be seeing something else. She pushed out a sigh. “Evelyn, I don’t think I can make it home without a cold, sweet drink.”

  I giggled with puzzled relief as we walked down the street to the soda fountain.

  We each had a float—an unusual extravagance for my mother. She sat opposite me in the booth, sipping from a straw like a girl while I tried to imagine her so in love with my daddy that she, like me, could not wait. High school girls tittered and whispered behind me in the next booth.

  “Are you happy, Evelyn?” Her voice was low and serious.

  “Yes, Momma. He makes me very happy.”

  “And you’re sure about this. All of it?” She waved her hand at my waist. “This is what you wanted?”

  I could only nod and blink my tears away.

  “Well, that’s all I need to know.” She patted my hand.

  I had stepped over into motherhood. I had joined the club.

  We bought the white cloth, a cotton eyelet. For that afternoon it did not matter that there were other things I could not tell my mother. At last, there was one important thing I could tell her. Standing in line at the cash register, waiting for Ina to ring us up, we were like all the other women, ready to make out of patterns and whole cloth something new.

  Days later, I stood on a footstool in Momma’s bedroom, turning slowly while she pinned the hem of my dress. Rita and Bertie joined us. My life had suddenly become interesting to them. They both had a crush on Adam, particularly Rita. Bertie would finish high school soon and had a beau who, though steady, did not seem like the marrying kind. My dress was too simple to truly sustain their interest, but they seemed reluctant to leave, as if afraid they might miss some secret bridal ritual. They began a primping marathon, brushing and grooming each other, considering their profiles and the fashion magazines they had bought for me.

  Rita and Bertie wanted me to wear my hair in a style they had seen in a movie and were determined to demonstrate. Rita sat on the low bench of Momma’s dressing table while Bertie fumed at her fine, light hair. She winced each time Bertie swept her hair up. The more Rita whined, the harder Bertie brushed and pinned. I’d seen their tiffs countless times and knew the progress of them as if they were scripted.

  I’d never been as close to them as they were to each other, but suddenly I realized that I never would be. My inner life had spun away from their world. I looked down at the top of Momma’s head. The three of them thought they knew what this marriage was to me, but they did not. They thought they knew Adam, but they did not.

  “Hold your head still,�
� Bertie admonished.

  Rita pressed her lips together, tears of frustration in her eyes.

  I gazed at my flushed face in the mirror. Momma knelt before me, pulling the hem of my dress even on both sides and sliding the last straight pin through the cloth. I caught Rita’s reflection and tried to smile my encouragement, but she saw the tears in my eyes and took them as confirmation of the outrage she suffered at Bertie’s hands. Her face crumpled. Crying, she shoved Bertie away and dashed out of the room.

  Momma glanced up at my face.

  I blinked and tried not to cry.

  Momma glared at Bertie. “You, too. Out and take those magazines with you. Apologize to your sister.”

  “What’d I do?” Bertie sulked.

  Momma shut the door behind her, then turned to me and smoothed my dress sleeves down over my arms. She handed me a handkerchief. “Evelyn, this is a big step, a big change. It’s normal to be a little rocky. But Adam has a good heart. I think you’re doing the right thing.”

  In a gush of gratitude, I tried to laugh, but managed only a strangled snicker.

  “Are you feeling bad in your stomach? You might try some soda crackers if you are.”

  I wanted to tell her so badly, but how could I explain that I was afraid to have the babies of such an obviously robust and normal man? The truth seemed like a heavy weight then, and the lies were a gulf between Momma and me. Instead, I blew my nose, wiped my eyes, and took the dress off.

  “Evelyn, it’s just the baby coming making you feel this way. Everything’ll be fine.” I laid my head on her shoulder and cried.

  Even before we were actually married, the benefits of marriage were evident: gifts and help. Once we announced we were getting married and were going to live on the farm, everybody—particularly the men—began to take the farm seriously as a place to live.

  First, Daddy had to be convinced that Adam really wanted to live on the farm. Daddy saw the mill as security, a place where a man could work his way up and get a good retirement, a life less dependent on local rainfall.