Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  I have stirred myself to heat, and I need him, I need him to bury me in physical sensations so my mind will shut up. I don’t want to think about where I have heard those arguing techniques before. I don’t want to remember Mother Maurie applying them to Steffie all this spring, how she acts hurt by her daughter’s refusals but politely accepts them, all the while pointing out how logic and reason and good manners are all on her side. Eroding Steffie’s belief in herself until Steffie gives in, and then pampering Steffie to show her how smart she is to obey her mother. It works every time for her. Don’t I know how well it works?

  I clutch at Tom, slipping my hand over his hip and down, cupping his balls, and then gripping his penis firmly. I will it to swell in my hand, to become a sword that will subdue my doubts. But he only mutters, sleep’s grip on him more sure and intimate than mine. He doesn’t need me, not the way I need him. He can quarrel with me, make up, and then turn away, go to sleep, forget our temporary division. He is not frightened when we disagree. My nipples are hard, I press them into his back, feel the contact as agonizingly tantalizing. I rub against his passiveness, driving myself crazy. Turn to me, touch me, I beg him silently. Make me desirable, make me important, make me real.

  “Lyn,” he complains, wriggling out of my embrace, away from the thigh I have thrown over his hip. He’d only have to roll to face me, make himself hard for me, I’d do all the rest. “Honey,” he rebukes me gently, “I’ve got to get up extra early tomorrow.” He takes a deep breath, sighs it out. I lie in the warm place on the sheet that he has just vacated. His scent is on the pillows, and I breathe it in, savoring where his flesh has been like a dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. “Gonna show Teddy a deer,” he mutters to his pillow. “Been watering at the duck pond. Saw his sign this morning. Don’t know how he’s been getting past the electric fence, but there’re hoof marks all over down there. Gotta sleep, baby.”

  He goes away, off into sleep as surely as he will go off to work tomorrow, leaving me aching and alone. Unimportant. Of what value is a woman undesired, a woman who does no task, fulfills no function? The sheets chill around me, become wide plains of glacial whiteness, Tom a distant mountain range I will never scale. I’m alone.

  Not alone.

  His face fills my mind suddenly, and the musk I smell is not Tom’s anymore. The lust that hits me now is sudden and unexpected as a hammer blow, a directed passion that makes my desire for Tom a mere itch, a passing fancy. I know him suddenly, more thoroughly than I have known any man. His tongue, I know, would be raspy like a cat’s tongue, eager to seek out my secrets, and his cock would fill me and swell against me. To him I would be everything, companion, friend, lover. Merely by being me. I imagine the sleek fur of his flanks under my hands, how my fingers would find the rumpled nubs at the base of his horns as I directed his mouth on my flesh.

  I move against the sheets, my nipples rasping against Mother Maurie’s percale, and surrender to my fantasy. But my imagination is not enough to sate me, and I am still too proud to touch myself. Sleep is the only one who takes me this night, and my dreams touch me too softly to ease me.

  SIX

  * * *

  Fairbanks

  Spring 1964

  He is always there for me, in the woods. He is not a god to me, nor an animal. But in one sense he is like a spirit. He is the essence of the forest, of the moss and mushrooms and animals and trees and plants. When he is with me, then the forest is with me as well. And the forest is the only place where I feel whole. My world is divided into three parts: the school, the home, and the forest. Only the forest is peaceful, healing. Only the forest is mine.

  With each passing year, school only gets worse. The pressure is on. Not for grades. I assume As are my right, and I get them, without fail, despite teachers who dislike me and other students who harass me. I batter them out of Mrs Haritsen, drowning her in extra-credit work I don’t really need to do, always flapping my hand frantically with the correct answer, writing a five-page essay when a three-page is asked for, always using complete sentences, punctuating faultlessly, writing large and clearly on all my papers.

  She hates me, of course. But she isn’t allowed to show it. She’s a lay teacher, a volunteer at the Catholic school. She’s not a nun, and to my way of thinking she isn’t a teacher at all. She is from the states and is young and is afraid of Alaska. I can tell. And that makes her hate me.

  She can force me to do things. She will be giving the spelling test, strolling between the aisles of desks, giving a word, a sentence with the word, and the word again. “Pneumonia,” she says. “The doctor says the sick child has pneumonia. Pneumonia. Oh, heavens!” The whole class looks up, startled, from their papers. She is standing over my desk. “Evelyn. Look at your hands! I am not going to correct any paper handed in by such a dirty girl. You go and wash them this instant!”

  And I rise and go back to the big sink in the back of the classroom, to wash my clean but badly chapped hands. I use the coarse powdered soap in the barely warm water, and dry them on rough paper towels. She continues the spelling test without me, as if I do not matter at all, and, of course, to her I do not. I store the spelling words in my head, “psychiatrist,” “physician,” “symphony,” as I scrub at the backs of my hands where the constant chapping of cold water and wind has turned the abused skin dark, nearly black. I sand some of it off, leaving my hands raw and sore, and return quietly to my desk. I fill in the words quickly, ignoring the bird-black eyes she turns on me, hoping, hoping that I’ll raise my hand and ask her to repeat them. I must never give her that chance to smash me. I know that tomorrow it will be something else.

  One day I came to class after PE, having changed too quickly, and all the boys laughed as I came in the door. I glanced down, chagrined, to find my shirt buttoned unevenly, the childish lace-necked little-girl T-shirt beneath it showing all my flat ribby chest and small green-raspberry nipples through its soft fabric. Any other teacher might have seen my scarlet face and called the class to order, pulled their attention away from me. Any of the nuns would have. But Mrs Haritsen has none of the softness and kindness the nuns hide behind their flat black exteriors. All Mrs Haritsen’s softness is on the outside, in her curling soft hair and pastel dresses. Within she is colder than black flint. Mrs Haritsen required me to stand at the board and write sentences. “A Catholic girl is a modest girl. A Catholic girl is a modest girl.” Until the board was filled with my handwriting, and my arm ached with holding my hand up and my head ached with pounding blood. But I did it. And she must give me the As I have earned.

  I know what I am like to her. I am a wild and savage little animal. She perceives me as refusing the good civilization she offers me. Like a muddy feral kitten, rescued from a thunderstorm, spitting and sinking its impotent fangs into the hands that seek to smooth its rough fur, scorning the saucer of warmed milk offered it, choosing instead to huddle beneath the sofa and hope that someone will leave the door standing ajar, if only for an instant, so it can risk its draggled tail in a dash for the dark and storm outside. I am neither cute nor likeable.

  So she puts the pressure on me, and it is not for grades, nor for anything else I understand. I don’t know what she wants me to give her. I only know that if I give it, I will no longer be me. Me is all I have, and I cling to me, instinctively, without even knowing how tightly I hold on to my selfness.

  I am not like the other girls, who ask her questions about her clothes and her hair and her nails, who listen giggling in a circle around her desk at recess as Mrs Haritsen tells them something cute her husband said, or something “wild and silly” she did in college. I don’t like it when she talks about how much she misses Idaho, and how much we are all missing by growing up in “this wild place.” She feels so sorry for the other little girls, and her pity makes them vaguely insecure, wondering what wonderful things they are missing that evokes so much condescension from her. I don’t want her pity. If she doesn’t like Alaska, she can leave. Does she really think
the woods will turn into a city because she wants them to, that the roads will widen and be paved, that the winters will become less cold and dangerous because petite Mrs Haritsen thinks they should? She’s stupid. I force her to give me As, and hope she will go back to the states soon. I pray that a nun will teach me next year.

  Home is almost as bad. My sisters fight over boyfriends. Jeffrey met Sissy at a dance, but when he came to visit her at our house, he met Candy, and now he’s asked her to the movies instead of Sissy. My mother is at a loss as to what to do about it. She tells my sisters that they must sort it out for themselves. She asks them, rhetorically, if either of them really wants to date a boy who could be that insensitive. Of course they do. He has a car. My mother folds her lips and irons a mountain of laundry, refusing to listen to any more squabbling. So Sissy cries and calls Candy “that bitch” when I am the only one around to hear it. And Candy primps endlessly in the bathroom mirror, ignoring the pleas of those with bursting bladders, when she isn’t sulking because Sissy won’t lend her blue eye shadow to her.

  It makes my life miserable. First, Kimmy tells on me when, in agonized desperation, I go into the woods across the lane from the house and pee. Never mind that Candy was the one hogging the bathroom. I am “uncivilized” and my mother scolds me for it, not privately but in the kitchen where my little brothers hear and giggle endlessly about it. “What did you use for toilet paper,” they demand, interrupting the scolding. “Leaves? Moss? Birch bark?” They giggle wildly, uncontrollably, even when my mother turns her scolding on them. They are unremorseful, and I am able to escape her, leaving her to tell them “It’s not funny” as I tiptoe down the stairs.

  But the room I share with Candy and Sissy is a sulfurous and brooding place. Candy is pulling her hair out of curlers, and Sissy is lying on her bed, reading, and not watching her. She is not watching her so intensely it is like the sharp edge of a knife blade pressed into the silence, and I am tempted to beg her to watch Candy, to stop ignoring her. One glance would be all it would take to ignite the storm, and then they could shriek and wail and slam hairbrushes down. The tension would be broken, and I could relax then, could read a book while they quarrel as imperturbably as I can sit out a storm under a spruce tree.

  But Sissy won’t look, and Candy is so miffed that she turns from the mirror and attacks me instead. “Did Mom tell you to stay in the basement when Jeffrey comes to pick me up?” she demands.

  “No,” I say, trying to make it withering, but not succeeding. I am too surprised, and I am not able to hide it.

  “Well, she said she was going to, so make sure you do.” Candy turns back to the mirror.

  This may be the opening Sissy has been waiting for. She slams her book and sits up ramrod straight, her face going rocky with righteous indignation. “She did not. She said you could ask Evvie nicely, and that sure wasn’t nicely. I’m telling.”

  “Go ahead. Who cares? Not you, for sure. You don’t care what people think of our family. Look at Evvie, for crying out loud. Look how she runs around. Susan Adams told me that Kerry Pierce asked her if Evvie was a girl or a boy. He couldn’t tell by looking at her. No one could! Look at her! Last time Jeffrey was here, she was running around in that same shirt, and I swear the same dirt on it. He’s going to think that’s the only clothes she owns!”

  “She’s just a little kid!” Sissy jumps to my defense. “Leave her alone. She can’t help how she looks!”

  “Maybe not, but she could at least be clean. Look at her! Mud on her knees, God knows what on her chin, her hair full of twigs, probably from shitting in the bushes somewhere. Like a little animal.”

  “Whose fault is it that she couldn’t use the bathroom?” Sissy demands.

  I don’t say a word. I am looking at myself in the mirror, over Candy’s shoulder. It is a large dresser mirror, and I can see nearly my entire body. I stare at myself. I cannot remember the last time I studied myself in the mirror. I suddenly see what it is about, why Mrs Haritsen hates me, why I eat my lunch alone. I suddenly see the raggedy dirty jeans and the shirt with the elbows out. I think of what I wore to school on Friday, the green pleated skirt with half the hem dragging out, the yellow blouse with the little flowers on it that has a coffee stain on the stomach. I wonder why I have never thought about it before, why I have seen everything else so keenly and never myself. I wonder why my mother lets me run around this way, and then I know. She doesn’t have the time to worry about it. Squeaking wheels get oiled. If I don’t demand new clothes, a trip downtown to get my hair cut and styled, money for hand lotion and nail polish and new socks, new shoelaces, jeans that aren’t hand-me-downs, I will never get them. The money is already stretched as tight as it will go. Thank God for one child who doesn’t nag and whine and beg. I think of Sissy’s new nail polish, Candy’s white mohair sweater, Kimmy’s new Barbie doll camper, and I know that it should have been mine, my new dress, my new jeans. But what I don’t demand I don’t seem to need, and if I am content, no one will jar me from it.

  I come back to the room and they are still fighting, my sisters, screaming at each other, ostensibly over me, but actually over Jeffrey. “You don’t care about anyone’s feelings, not Evvie’s, not mine, no one’s, as long as you get what you want!” Sissy is saying, and tears are running down her face.

  “That’s not true. You know that’s not true. It’s not my fault that Jeffrey liked me better, and it sure isn’t my fault that Evvie looks like a pile of barfy rags!”

  I snatch up Sissy’s book from her bed and I let it fly. It’s only a paperback, it shouldn’t matter, but when it hits Candy in the face she screams, and even before the book is all the way to the floor, I can see the blood rushing out of her nose. She screams again, air bubbling past the blood from her nose, the blood that is falling on her white mohair sweater, and then I am gone, up the stairs, eeling past my mother as she comes down, making my escape before she knows I am the culprit. I grab a knife and a small bucket from the kitchen as I dash through it, trusting they will help me buy my way back into her good graces when I return. Rinky picks up on me as I race out the door and attaches himself to me like a sidecar. We careen down the lane and across Davis Road. And into my woods.

  The path under my feet is hard, bare earth, beaten out by my own feet, and I fly along it, jumping fallen logs, veering around boggy spots. I could run this in the dark, I know it so well, and frequently do. It is fairly clear at first, as my path follows an old grown-over survey cut, but then it gets to the slough, still full of water this time of year, and I veer off, paralleling it, crouched over to run down an old rabbit trail, ignoring the branches that snatch at my hair and clothing, going to earth like an animal, fleeing into deeper forest. I run until I am sure I won’t be able to hear them call me, even if they send one of the boys up to stand by the mailbox on Davis Road and yell for me. Then I stop and drop, panting, onto the deep moss. Rinky gives me one sniff, to be sure I am all right, pushing his cold black olive nose against my cheek and into my ear, and then goes off on his own business, whatever that is. I am alone with my images of Candy’s blood bubbling over her mouth and onto her sweater. Dark red blood, clashing with her nearly auburn hair. I can’t remember that she has ever had a bloody nose before, at least not one from getting hit with something. I know she will blubber for at least an hour, and Jeffrey is due to pick her up in only half an hour. I am betting the blood won’t come out of the mohair sweater, even if they soak it in cold water and put meat tenderizer on it. Well, I reflect savagely, at least I won’t be around to humiliate her when Jeffrey does come.

  My small bucket is beside me on the moss, the short kitchen knife inside it. I pull my knees up, start to rest my chin atop them. Then I stop and look at them. Muddy, where I knelt down earlier today when I was roughhousing with Rinky. And torn, so that my knee, too, is dirty, and showing through the rent denim.

  So? So.

  I cannot forget the grubby, unkempt kid I saw in the mirror earlier. That is not how I’ve be
en imagining myself, all this time. I think of myself as me, as looking like me. I’ve been seeing myself in terms of what I can do rather than how I look. Runner. Stalker. Tree climber, ditch jumper, mushroom hunter, game spotter. I had no clear physical image of myself. I’ve only seen the view from my windows. I never thought to wonder how I really looked, to others.

  It was bad.

  And yet a stubborn part of me doesn’t want to yield, refuses to rush home and wash up, brush my hair, put on clean clothes, and nag my mother for new clothes and new shoes. A part of me says, tough for them. Maybe I’ve only discovered this today, but I suspect they’ve known it all along. All along. They haven’t done right by me, and even if I never knew it until now, they knew it all along. So let them live with it. If they’re embarrassed by my looks, too bad. That’s how I am. And if they’ve never cared enough to come to me kindly, to gently help me change, then screw them. I’ll look this way. Always. Forever and ever and ever. And let them be ashamed. I won’t ask for new clothes, for new shoes. And if they offer them, I won’t want them. Not ever.

  I close my eyes, imagining how horrible it would be if I went home and my mother and sisters had gone out and bought all new clothes for me, new shiny shoes, a coat with no teethmarks on the sleeve, jeans with knees in them. And if they gathered around me and brushed my hair and cut it and curled it. And then I went to school. And everyone would see the big change in me, and they’d gather around me and ask me questions. “Where’d ya get the new dress?” “Are those new shoes?” “I like your hair that way a lot better.” “You really look nice.” And I would have to smile and let them sniff me over. It would be admitting that I had been wrong, had been unkempt and shaggy. It would be admitting that they had been right to feel sorry for me all this time, to be disgusted by me all this time, to ostracize me all this time. It would be surrender. It’s too late. It’s gone too far, I can’t even surrender now. Not if I want to survive as me.