Be Mine

by Laura Kasischke

  And what about me?

  Had I ever really wanted a lover?

  Until now, no. I was sure of that. Not even Ferris. I could still remember the relief that washed over me along with the fluorescent light when he told me in a corner of my classroom after the students were gone that he'd taken a job in Missouri, the way my whole life seemed opened up to the possibility then of being the woman I'd wanted to be—the farmhouse, the child, the car that started on the first try—forever.

  But Chad had been a toddler then. I was so much younger. Now, I'd already been that woman. Now, I was free to be someone else if I wanted to be. Now, did I want a lover?

  In the dark, beside Jon, in our bed, I thought about that for a long time, without any idea of what the answer would be. Trying to look for the answer to that question in my own mind was like finding myself suddenly inside an echoing tunnel:

  Do I want a lover? Do I want a lover to want me? Do I want Jon to want me to have a lover? Do I want Jon to want me to want a lover?

  I couldn't even decide on a question long enough to decide on an answer.

  Finally, I fell asleep.

  And woke up like this—blinking in the wan morning light, too hungover to go to work. All these dull aches—the stomach, the thighs, the skin. My lips, parched. My eyes, stinging. Thirsty. A warm throbbing just behind my cheekbones.

  Cheap beer.

  I called in to cancel my office hours.

  I showered, drank three glasses of orange juice, made a grocery list:

  Milk, linguine, bread, cereal, orange juice—and a hundred other little things written out shakily on the back of an empty envelope (spring dress, department store credit card bill opened and paid several days ago) addressed to a Ms. Sherry Seymour—a woman I could not imagine would have woken up on a Wednesday morning with a hangover after dancing all night at Stiver's with two truckers, but a woman who, I realized after staring at that name long enough, I also was.

  AFTER the shopping, I put the groceries away and lay down for a cool, dry, but delicious nap.

  It was a gray morning again—a misty rain on the way to the supermarket, but the sun had been attempting, at least, to burn its way through the clouds.

  This, I thought, opening the car window just an inch to smell the air, will be the last real winter day.

  Spring—I could feel it there, at the edges of the world, or waiting, impatiently now, beneath all the layers and layers of winter that had been so painstakingly laid down. I thought of the bulbs in the garden—how they'd be stretching, pushing, triggered by the change. Soon, they'd writhe to the surface and stab into the world again. And the birds would be back with their songs. The baby bunnies. The frogs trilling in the Henslins' pond.

  On the bed, there was a pool of that cool, new, white light.

  When I lay down for my nap, I didn't bother to close the curtains.

  I lay at the center of that light and fell asleep.

  Dreamless.

  During that brief nap, a century might have ended and begun. Many winters passed, bookended by mild and rainless seasons. I slept through them all. I doubt I even rolled over once. I imagine my eyelids never even fluttered. In that envelope of unconsciousness and time, I was no one. I was nowhere. I was completely free of everything I'd ever been, or done, or thought, or said—and when the phone rang, and I woke up quickly, blinking, I felt completely renewed. Born again. Fresh out of the nest, or out of the ground. Ready for the world. I knew exactly who I was, and what I wanted. I stretched. The pains were gone. I yawned. I let the machine—with its hours and hours of empty memory waiting to be filled, and all its little wheels and pulleys sucking the sounds of the world into it bloodlessly and without judgment—get the phone.

  IT WAS Garrett.

  I sat up in bed so I could hear his message better.

  "Hey, Mrs. Seymour, this is Garrett. We were kind of expecting you to bring the car in today, but you're not here. Are you still planning on it? Can you give us a call? Bram says any time this afternoon is fine. There are plenty of guys here to look her over."

  Did I imagine it, or was there a bit of low, dark laughter in the background as Garrett hung up the phone?

  It could have been just the sound of an engine starting up.

  Or a crow flying over.

  Or, it could have been Bram Smith laughing in the background.

  Bram Smith—still an imaginary character with muscular arms, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, maybe even smoking a cigarette like a man straight out of my adolescent summer dreams—which, until that moment I'd almost forgotten completely but now came rushing back to me with all the sexual intensity of a summer afternoon—lying on my back on my bed in my childhood home, a cacophony of birdsong outside the open window, and my whole life ahead of me, made, still, of fantasy, of television light, silk, as if millions of worms somewhere were busily at work spinning that future for me.

  I WORE sheer gray hose, my taupe suede skirt, a pink blouse, a strand of pearls, and a fingerprint of Chanel No. 5 on each wrist, and drove my car straight to him.

  Two

  Suddenly, spring.

  I knew it had come the morning I drove past that doe, as I always did, on the freeway, and a shining black turkey vulture was hunched over her.

  At first, driving by, seeing that vulture on top of her, it appeared to me, horribly, as if she'd somehow grown huge dark wings and was trying to fly. But then I saw its red face and knew it for a buzzard, and that spring had finally come. They're the first, surest sign of spring, those buzzards. Their return means that the roadkill has thawed, that there's enough soft death around, again, to keep them alive.

  First, the buzzards, then the other birds came back, all of them at once. Robins hopping across the muddy grass like windup birds, toy birds. Then, wide Vs of geese honking across the sky every evening at dusk. Then sandhill cranes, looking prehistoric and awkward in the fields, nodding slowly, seeming to be searching the ground for something they'd lost. And the others—I had no idea what they were called, where they'd gone, only that they had traveled thousands of miles to leave us here all winter, and now they were back.

  And there were shadows again!

  The telephone poles had them—long crosses laid down on the road. Then, trees, still leafless, cast gnarled shadows against the sides of the house. Even I cast a shadow—a long gray dress before me in the morning, and then a darkness dragged behind me at twilight—as if my body had been ironed down to this featureless impression, this afterthought.

  For a hundred and twenty dollars a week, I found an efficiency apartment in a complex called the Rose Gardens, right across from the college, where I could sleep on Monday and Wednesday nights. I brought a coffeemaker and two cups, two dishes, two bowls, two spoons, two forks, two knives, and a couple of towels. It was already furnished with a small, round kitchen table and two chairs. Jon hauled a futon in for me—just a mattress, I didn't need a platform, it was firm enough on the floor—and struggled to get it into place.

  It was as comfortable, really, as the two-thousand-dollar state-of-the-art Posturepedic Jon and I slept on at home.

  BRAM Smith looked only vaguely as I'd imagined him. He was a fantasy, certainly, but a slightly altered version of the one I'd had. When I pulled my car into the garage at the Automotive Instructional Building, I knew right away which of the men (milling around with tools in their hands, bright pieces of painted metal, crowbars, chrome) was Bram. I'd seen him hundreds of times, as it happened—at faculty meetings, in the cafeteria, in the library, in the bookstore.

  He was dark-eyed and muscular, with black hair, but he was smaller and smarter-looking than I'd imagined, a kind of studious version of my adolescent fantasy. Instead of six feet tall, he was only a couple of inches taller than I was, and despite being solid with muscle, he was too slender—elegant, even—to be physically imposing.

  When I'd glimpsed him, before, around campus, I'd mistaken him for a mechanical-drawing instructor, or a computer programmer.
Handsome, certainly, but not the kind of man I'd imagined with his hands deep at work inside an engine all day, or writing passionate secret love notes to English teachers.

  Still, when I saw him there—then, I knew:

  Of course.

  You are my lover.

  And as if he'd been expecting me, he smiled when I drove in. "You're here," he said when I unrolled my window. "Our deer slayer."

  I parted my lips to speak, but said nothing. All I could do was stare.

  He had perfectly straight, white teeth, and eyes so deep that it was startling, almost too much, to look into them. You could slip, looking into those eyes. The strong jaw, the neatly trimmed beard and mustache—that was what I'd invented for him in my imagination—but the graceful hands, long-fingered and clean, were entirely his own.

  He was wearing a gold watch. At the collar of his black T-shirt I thought I saw a glint of gold chain. There was one insistent dimple to the right of his smile.

  "Pull it up, Mrs. Seymour. Let's straighten 'er out."

  Later that afternoon—after the fender had been removed, remolded, replaced, and the last blond bristles cleaned from it, after there'd been jokes from the guys about venison sausage and whether I'd had to speed up to hit it, or slow down, and about waiting until the season started before I went out hunting again—I went to my mailbox and found what I'd fully expected there, this time from someone whose reality I believed in, could have reached out and touched, whose arms I could have found myself in simply by turning around, by walking directly into them.

  You are so beautiful Td do anything to make you mine.

  I had to lean against the mailbox, a weakness beginning in my ankles, traveling up my spine.

  I slipped the note in my bag.

  I went to my office, picked up the phone, asked the college operator to connect me with Bram Smith's voice mail, on which I left a message of my own:

  "Thank you—" I had to inhale, out of breath, and my voice was shaking. "I'd like to buy you a cup of coffee. Whenever you're available. To thank you."

  A desperate afterthought, I left my office phone number for him to call.

  THEN, it was the weekend. Sue came over with the twins on Saturday. I hadn't seen her since the afternoon in my office when I'd told her that Bram Smith was the author of those notes. She hadn't even called, and I'd been too preoccupied to remember to call her. But, over our years of friendship, we'd passed many weeks like that, even a few months. Our lives got busy, or there was some vague conflict neither of us wanted to confront, some unspoken disagreement that only a little time apart could resolve. A few calls, a couple of cups of coffee later, everything was back to the way it had been.

  The twins seemed taller and wilder than they had when I'd last seen them two months before at Chuck E. Cheese's for their ninth birthday. "Hi, Aunt Sherry," they said in unison, and then went straight from Sue's car to the scrubbrush out back. One of them picked up a stick and charged after the other one, hooting.

  Sue was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt that said MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY on it, a college with which Sue had no affiliation. Like Chad, she'd gone to Berkeley. The entirety of the Midwest had been completely unknown to her when she'd been in college. ("I couldn't have found this place on the map when I was twenty years old," she said whenever the subject of her origins came up, "and now I've been here longer than I've ever been anywhere. Life is strange.")

  Jon came to the door to say hello, patting Sue lightly on the back in greeting, and then he said he was going to the hardware store. "I'll get out so you ladies can bitch about your husbands."

  "Thank you," I said, joking.

  Sue smiled vaguely and headed toward the kitchen.

  "Good lord," he said when we were out of Sue's hearing range. "She looks terrible. I mean, terrible."

  "The kids are tiring," I said. We could hear genuine screaming out back now—a high jarring war whoop. Kujo had wandered over from the Henslins', and one of the twins had his face buried in the mangy dog's neck.

  "See," I said, pointing at the other one, who was whacking his long stick against the trunk of a tree. He was the one doing the screaming. "You'd look tired, too."

  But, cruelly, and shallowly, I was happy he'd noticed. Another woman, my age, falling apart physically was like a bitter little compliment to me for having managed to keep myself from doing the same. When we were younger, I had always considered Sue to be the beautiful one. California blond. Those high cheekbones. When we were out in the world together, men seemed equally drawn to both of us, but she was always the one who got their attention in the first place. That long blond hair.

  "Well, how does having rambunctious twins pack on sixty pounds?" Jon asked. "Jesus."

  "I don't know, Jon. It's hard to stay thin. And it's not sixty pounds."

  "Okay, fifty pounds. Well thank god my woman stayed slim," he said, and stepped out the door, patting my butt as he went.

  I cleared my throat and said, loudly enough for Sue to hear so she wouldn't know we'd been whispering about her, "Get some C batteries for the flashlight, will you? I'll need it for the efficiency, okay?"

  "Scared of the dark without me?"

  "Well, that, and something's stuck in the garbage disposal, and I wanted to get a closer look."

  We kissed over the threshold. Jon put his hand affectionately on my neck and looked into my eyes.

  "I love you," I said.

  He said, "I love you, too."

  AT THE kitchen table, Sue had spread out something olive green and in many pieces on the place mat. "LEGO tank," she said when I looked over her shoulder. "I promised them I'd get it put together if they'd play outside without arguing for an hour."

  But it looked impossible—like something so far from being, from ever having been, a tank that no amount of time could put it together. And Sue's hands—the fingernails vaguely blue, the fingers looking swollen—did not appear up to the job at all. Looking at the pieces on my table, it seemed long ago, another lifetime, that I'd last assembled anything made of plastic, or stepped on those fragments in my bare feet in the middle of the night in Chad's room—sneaking in to pull a blanket over his shoulders or to turn off the tape recorder in his room, playing lullabies or Mozart. What came to me, thinking of that, was the sad physical sense of something having been removed from my body, a whiff in the air of Chad's little-boy hair, and also—and this was new—a sense of relief, as if a cool breeze had come through a window and blown the clutter neatly into the drawers and closets where it belonged.

  I poured tea for Sue, put a plate of cookies between us—Pepperidge Farm, chocolate chip. She took one right away, held it in front of her, but didn't bring it to her lips until she'd rolled her eyes and said, "I wasn't going to eat cookies this year. Thanks, Sherry." And then she bit into it.

  For just a second, I considered putting the cookies away.

  Would a better friend have done that? Would a better friend have acknowledged that, yes, there had been some weight gain, that it wasn't healthy, that the cookies, anyway, had just been placed there for the twins, or out of politeness? Should I have offered her an apple, instead? Or was it right to say, as I did, "Oh, you deserve it, Sue. You look great." What would Sue have done?

  She would have been, I thought, honest with me.

  When I got my first real adult haircut—when the long wild layers had begun to look outdated, and ill-suited, or so I thought, to a thirty-two-year-old mother from the suburbs—Sue had taken a step back, in shock (and horror?), when she saw me step into Starbucks.

  "Oh my god," she'd said. "Sherry, that's so awful."

  "Great. Thanks," I'd said, my eyes filling with tears so that Sue looked, to me, as if she were on the other side of a shower door rather than only a few feet away from me, holding a huge cup of cappuccino in her hand.

  "Oh," she said, "I'm so sorry I said that."

  But she never took it back. She never told me that it was flattering, my new haircut, or that her first impre
ssion of it had been wrong. That was never Sue's style. When she said a thing, she meant it.

  And, it had been a favor, really, hadn't it? Even Jon had admitted, finally, after I badgered him about it for two solid weeks, that, yes, the hairstyle aged me a bit. It was more conservative, maybe, than it needed to be. That, yes, if he had his choice, I'd grow it out. And when I finally did, and passed myself in a plate glass window one afternoon and admired the hair of the woman in that glass, I realized that the new style had been a terrible mistake, that Sue had been telling the truth, and I felt thankful that she'd been willing to do it.

  I knew, watching her eat the cookie and reach out for another, that if I had gained as much weight as she had, she would pull the plate away from me and tell me I was fat—something I could never have done.

  We talked about the usual stuff. School. Robert Z. The weather. Jon. (Sue has never taken a stance on Jon. When I complain, she listens. When I praise him, she does the same.) We talked about Mack, her husband, on whom my stance has always been amused defense. They'd come within a few heartbeats of divorcing over and over, and when Sue had been the most serious (rented an apartment, consulted a lawyer), I couldn't bear the idea. "No, Sue," I'd said. "You just can't let this happen. You'll be lonely. You'll miss him more than you can imagine. And the boys. And Mack—"

  In truth, Mack was always the one whose loneliness I couldn't bear to consider.

  Big, dumb Mack—the world's most peaceful and passive man.

  Once, I saw him shed actual tears when he had to chop down a tree, the roots of which had worked their way under the foundation of their house and were cracking it to pieces down there, in the dark. He was already forty years old when he married Sue, who was six months pregnant with the twins. At their wedding, he'd sung, himself, in the echoing baritone of a former high school musical theater star (a little too loudly, and slightly off-key—"Sunrise, Sunset") and his mother had set to wailing in the front row of the church.