by Amy Benson
Denouement: My sister and I haven’t always gotten along as we’ve learned to do over more time, and that weekend we had been waiting for the other to flinch or pout or smile funny, or sigh and say, “Nothing” when the other asks, “What did you say?”—or, in other words, to give each other any excuse to say, essentially, “Everything I’ve thought about you is true. You’re still the same old harpy, the same priss, the same hothead, the same privileged mouse.” We fell into it the next day. Technically, she ambushed me: she got me to ask, “What?” Nothing. “No, really, what?” You think you’re better than everyone; you’re totally conceited, everyone can see that; just look at how you were last night, holding yourself apart from everyone, barely talking. This is how she sees me—covered over in a thin film of ice, my skin blue-streaked, my hair and lashes brittle, my teeth cold against my tongue. Was the sparkling-eyed boy a more generous witness? What self did he sketch into the chair in which I shrank? I’m sure he saw the hair he had known as sandy blond dyed black, the bright toenail polish, the “different clothes.” Did he invent a life to go along with the accessories—a life that bore but little resemblance to my own: I was a lost sheep, hard and hurting. I had probably done things with my body, my mouth, my voice, that had put me beyond his pale. Or did he overlay me with my seventeen-year-old self and see me the way he might remember me? It takes courage to imagine all of someone’s possible selves and to let them rub together uneasily. Was he that brave? I know I wasn’t.
Climax: I can tell you the few things I do remember about that night. I remember watching the sparkling-eyed boy’s every gesture, trying to memorize each one for what I knew would be another long absence. I followed the tips of his eyelashes closing over his eyes and pressing back into his smooth eyelids. I watched his long fingers slipping on the sweat of his beer bottles. I trailed him at a distance as my sister took him into the bedroom where my niece was sleeping, watched him pull the blanket back from her face and say, “She’s a cute little bean, isn’t she?” I remember worrying that I was obvious to everyone there, that after I left his wife would banish me and his friends would laugh about my spilled love, messy, down the front of my shirt. I remember his wife talking to his friend’s wife and only cursorily responding to my questions about her job teaching second grade (did she think I was mocking her?). I remember wearing a shortish skirt and having a shockingly thick clutch of bruises cascading down one thigh to below the knee from carrying buckets of rocks the day before and letting the pail bang against my leg. I was glad to have them. I thought he might find them charming proof that I was still staggering between water and land, an indestructible tomboy. I didn’t foresee at the time that they might add to a general picture of urban disrepair—perhaps I even had an abusive boyfriend in the wings. He asked about them: “What happened there?” I wanted him to kneel in front of me and lightly trace the bruises, starting at my inner thigh and twisting down my outer calf and back again. He could have, maybe, pressed his mouth to them, tasted the lake water on my skin, and, like an animal, recognized me as one of his own.
This is, I realize, where I have gone wrong. I left that self in this place without a sturdy coat or the hope that she would ever see me again. What did I think would happen? Did I think this boy would come look for me and bring me home? I left him before I knew that in a real love, the bruising and healing, the leaving and returning, are constant—they happen hundreds of times a day. But the sparkling-eyed boy and I, all we know is the bruising, all we know is the leaving.
Part II
A Few Fictions About Desire
Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.
—TIM O’BRIEN
Choking on It, Summer 1998
Once, smugly, I held my chubby cat above her just-filled food bowl and watched her four legs circle in the air like a desperate, mechanical baby’s, tiny grunts leaking out of her face. I wish that if we must hunger, we don’t hunger like that.
I used to protect myself from the greedy hands of boys and the fever they might ignite in my own hands. I called it independence. I called it clever and focused. I didn’t call it fear.
Now, on my way home from work I notice a new crevice down my arm. It is deep and chalky—the separation of dry skin from skin, dried blood from blood. I have never before in my life so needed to be touched and yet been so untouched. I will have to take care of my umbrella; the next rain might wash my powdery marrow away.
My sinuses are cracked and bleeding: a drop falls by the discount bookstore, a drop on the crushed sidewalk in front of the dry cleaner. My nose is caked and crusted by the time I reach my block.
It’s been six months since my last relationship ended. He was sweet and smart and funny and he never touched me with a voracious hand. He almost never touched me. Sometimes I wanted to shake him or hit him. I still have a few items I bought in desperation then. One is my only negligee, a demure dark blue number worn once.
I am alone, and it seems the whole world has crumbled with drought: my bedroom walls leave smudges on my dark T-shirts; as I walk home, pieces of brick and tile, road sign and marigold, flake away in serious, spiteful chunks. My eyes have become gummy with longing, and I am looking for sympathy in the things around me.
This spring, two children in the neighborhood have attached themselves to me—Sam and Rosie. At the moment I live in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Jersey, where I am conspicuously white. Sam and his sister are Haitian, and Sam tells me about his father, who lives in the next town with some woman and practices witchcraft. Sam is not yet in high school and has a crush on me. I’m flattered—I like it, even though I’m quite sure he’s gay and flirts by coveting my shoes and nice-smelling shampoo. I take him to a local diner for his confirmation and let him order a sundae the size of his head, though the aunt he lives with wouldn’t like it. He pounds on my door one night and tells me, laughing but with a hint of I-don’t-want-to-know-what in his eyes, that someone he didn’t know had just tried to get him into his car. I let him inside until I think the danger has passed. That one danger, at least.
I plant a garden for the first time as an adult, and it gets hotter and never rains—one of the driest summers in many years. Reservoirs are being burned up; the whole state is feverish. The kids come over for Popsicles and to help with the garden, but they do more harm than good and I try not to get annoyed. The fruits of the garden, when they come, are small and impenetrable. Sam comes over and I try to slice a tomato, but the drought has stunted it, thickened its skin and pulled it too tightly around it. I tell Sam it’s still good on the inside, but neither of us can eat it. The metaphor may seem contrived, but this is how things really happen sometimes.
Soon, at the end of the summer, I will take a teaching job in a very small town in Missouri. Again, I will leave one life for another; I will leave Sam to men in cars, leave my collapsing garden, leave any opportunity for sex with or without love. This fever in me is growing septic. Where are the hands that could palm my stomach carefully, hold my head down to the mattress, a bulb watered with sweat? Where is the bewildered stroke of tongue or finger that circles and circles and never lands precisely on satiety? I had been so careful as a girl not to let desire rule me.
Desire is waiting for you in a book that would change your life if only you were ready for it. But you are never ready. It looks good on your shelf, and occasionally you dust the bookcase carefully.
I would touch myself, but that would probably only make me cry. So I return again to the scene I have imagined before: We are eighteen, nineteen, and experiencing sex for the first time in the upstairs room of the cabin the sparkling-eyed boy rebuilt with his own hands. I can’t smell guilt in the air, not even the slightest whiff of sneaking. Rather, tenderness turns in the turning of our limbs. Our muscles and calluses are delicate ribbons and knots to one another. My hands slip on the sweat of his hips. I wish I could cut off the hollows around his hi
p bones and keep them with me forever. Between us are many freckles, many portals to the shyest, most elusive nerves; he is licking the brown flecks on my skin, leaking his DNA into each one of my pores. We stare; we press and gnaw with our eyes. We are not afraid to open our lids to what we haven’t seen before, to accept a new memory for the rest of our lives. I am not afraid of my own folds reaching wetly into the center of my body. Though my hands are clumsy with it, I am not afraid of the blooming head of his cock pressing into me or the things he might say tomorrow to anyone who asks.
But I was afraid, and this never happened. The boy who should have been my first lover wasn’t nearly finished with the cabin he rebuilt with his own hands. That last summer I helped him pound tarpaper and shingles into sloping roofs. We touched each other in our sweat, and traced the path of its rivulets only as far as the snaps on our jeans. Then I went away and couldn’t find any other sparkling-eyed boys who looked as if most of the world was delightful and I was most of all. So I held my T-shirt, my bra, my hands, my mouth, my neck, my hair, my eyes, and certainly the snaps on my jeans away from the world in which no one found delight. Rightly, wrongly, I saw danger everywhere. In men, yes, but in me, too, where desire could grow and grow and grow, making me ugly from the inside out. What have I done?
Desire is a lie told to yourself again and again about the texture of a boy and the amount of his skin you have felt against your skin, until the lie comes more easily than the truth, until the lie falls apart.
The City Mouse and the Country Mouse
You don’t care what they say, it’s hard to be the city mouse, always having to learn a lesson: Put away your extraneous baubles, city mouse, strip down to the bare necessities of mousehood—a pair of overalls, a straw hat and a stray weed in your mouth. The country mouse finds moral clarity in baling hay, shooting deer, and riding four-wheelers. Everyone sympathizes with the country mouse: Look at the city mouse, they say, struggling through the muddy path in her elaborate bonnet and her silver platforms. Shame on her horror at the outhouses, at the gas station-slash-video-slash-bait-and-tackle store. Isn’t it unforgivable that when she visits, the city mouse makes the country mouse defensive and awkward for the first time? He mocks her university degrees even as he hides his grimy paws. What valiant dirt under each tiny claw. Don’t let her push you around, country mouse.
But here’s an odd thing: Is the city mouse lingering over the planes of his burnished face, over his paws, restless and dancing as he talks, his sure fingers, his clicks and grins, his sparkling, fresh-air eyes? What is that in her inscrutable city face? She fiddles with the ribbons at her throat; a tremor rolls through her whiskers. He is giving a treatise on fertilizer, another on bow hunting—there’s more tension at the beginning of the pull and less when your thumb brushes your ear; just try holding steady on a distant speck; it’s a difficult, difficult sport.
Look—the city mouse is nodding agreeably, making pleasant clucking sounds; she’s curling her toe claws under to hide their blue polish; she’s imagining sewing burlap dresses, standing over a fry pan brimming with venison. The country mouse is winning. He winks at her and her knees are weak. He spits his hay out the side of his mouth and beads of sweat appear around her muzzle. They have hours and hours until his country mouse wife comes home.
Look at her shimmy out of her Betsey Johnson sundress, out of her strappy sandals, out of her convictions about cultural imperialism, out of the corner of her bookshelf dedicated to lesbian feminist philosophy, her Modigliani prints—particularly the portentous nude whose nipple matches perfectly her orange vinyl chair, out of fists upon fists full of strange city mice she must brush up against every day, the perpetual clench of her jaw, her ability to change, her silver lipstick, her entire wardrobe, out of the nearness of others’ stories, whole other mouse lives a wall away in every direction, that tattoo she never got, out of her love for all things in between, out of perpetual uncertainty until she stands perfectly naked, the touch of the world nowhere upon her, her tender under-fur quaking. She pretends that she has never had sex before and he is gratified.
Afterward, she reaches around on the floor for her sundress, her books, the clench of her jaw, her silver lipstick, but all she finds is a Penzoil T-shirt and a pair of jeans. She pulls these over her furred torso before he hustles her out of his house and to the end of his long gravel driveway.
He waves briefly and turns back to his field, the whole of the sky over his head. Haven’t you learned your lesson, city mouse, in your Penzoil T-shirt, no place to go, no sparkly shoes on your feet?
A Fictional Journey in the Deep Midwest
Somebody’s going to tell.
First there were miles and miles of corn, menacing field after field of wind’s reflection. In wheat, hay, soybean, one is a fleshy beacon, one rises above. In corn, one is nothing.
But somebody’s going to tell.
You drove north through Iowa moments ahead of a storm, the rain covering your scent, your heat, even the slight press of your tires on asphalt. You would have made a very clever fox. You chose the twistingest road through the tallest corn which rose and shivered and closed around your passing—a wall of dying green.
If you have an ally, let it be foliage.
Because somebody’s going to tell. Somebody always tells when someone else makes a story. And then there is almost always triumph or scorn or outrage or cynicism or shame or condescension or anger or guilt.
…
Because with a whispered phone call the sparkling-eyed boy told you where he would be, you drove hours to the hunting camp where he, your now married childhood love, was holed up with men, his friends, fragrant and loud, bound by a constant, unswerving patter, as tender as lambs in their rough chins, as coiled as snakes in their silent, deadly rib cages. Here is their tobacco spit in cups; here is their pride at leaving their wives and driving across three states to kill birds. The sparkling-eyed boy sneaked out for one night because you were waiting in a ten-room motel, twenty miles down the highway.
You waited for hours in Room 8 without the comfort of individually wrapped cups or free soap. How many times did you brush your teeth and retouch your lipstick until the brownish red began to cake around the edges? How many times did you lift up your sweater and hold your breasts in front of the mirror? How many times did you pat your calves for the first breath of stubble, run your hands up your thighs to see how you would feel to him? And still you waited. You wrote little notes and placed them around the room: one under the right-side pillow, one wedged between the chrome mirror and the cinder-block wall, one in Gideon’s Bible under Song of Solomon, one behind the toilet. They were witty, wry, sexy. They gave the whole thing away, so you gathered them up and burned them on the gravel outside the door.
And then there he was, and you with ashes on your hands.
But somebody’s going to tell, because drunk men always pee in the middle of the night. The sparkling-eyed boy’s best friend, his cousin, his uncle, the boy with the terrible stutter they take along for amusement, drifted awake one by one to the great pressure of their bladders and shuffled out to piss off the front porch. The first time out they may not have consciously noticed the troubling flatness, the absolute stillness of the wool blanket over the sparkling-eyed boy’s bunk. On the second or third trip, surely a vague awareness stumbled in, a hazy question: Where is he? Certainly his best friend was puzzled. But it’s not like these boys to worry, to wake each other in a flurry of urgent speculations, to need to know anything immediately. Just a simple question followed his friend down as he returned to sleep: Where could he be?
He sat down beside you on the curb and you looked at each other until you forgot to speak or blink. You kept looking at each other because you couldn’t stop. But don’t mistake this for love or longing. It was truly animal—that is, blank, uncomprehending. What is this thing before my eyes? your faces seemed to say. A nose, the collar of a shirt? They mean nothing to me. That ice machine, that clump of weeds, have mo
re goodness and purpose than any two trapped in this particular deadlock. There is a reason why people blink, you realized, why they talk and nod and smile. You looked at this shape in front of you and you thought, Why speak, why fuck, why drive, why eat, why work, why read, why have a list of things you need to decorate your house, why move, why breathe, why write? Then he touched your cheek and said your name and you accidentally smeared ashes on his hands and gave him all the meaning and reason in the world.
Then there were eyelid kisses, yards of delighted skin, embarrassed laughter, breath in your hair, hair in your fingers, fingers covering your wrists, stories of the past, tongues running dry, and not one word about the future. You made a nest and lined it with ten years’ worth of feathers in five hours.
But somebody’s going to tell because people can be very grabby, yes, very greedy, indeed. And if you leave your nest for even a moment, as everyone must, someone is bound to discover it. And though it is still warm and fragrant, they will move in and immediately set to rearranging the feathers. They will see your nest as a mess you have made and will carefully label the exhibits of godlessness, of desperation, and really, if you think about it, of sheer pathos. They will grind the small bits of down and straw under their indignant heels. They might even douse the whole thing with gasoline and set it ablaze, regretting only that you are not trapped inside. They will most certainly talk and poke and bother until you are no longer able to pick your little story out of a lineup. Until you hate it.