by Adam Golaski
To which she replied:
“There was a deer in the yard.”
She said, “I was undressed, about to put on pajamas, when I spotted a deer in the yard.”
“A deer.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I almost went out naked.”
I didn’t understand why she almost went out naked, I almost asked but instead at that moment it occurred to me what I should have told my customer when he said he wasn’t going to let my company manage his money. I should have said, “All you don’t know is how good we are.” To that, I smiled, woozy with exhaustion.
Janie said, “I went out into the yard. The deer didn’t run away. It stood, with its head turned so it could look at me over its shoulder. I got really close. The deer moved away from me. I got close again. It led me, slowly, across the yard. And then you came home.”
“Huh,” was all I managed before I vanished into sleep. I felt sleep rise up around me and with it, memory.
Marianne Ferris was great looking and wore short skirts and I steered clear of her for the longest time. I thought, she’s way more sophisticated than I am, and I’ll never know her in any way at all. Next year she and I were in a class together and I found myself in brief, exhilarating, class-related contact. Senior year she often approached me during the free minutes before class to say hello and maybe to ask a question. History class, for instance:
“Hey, Brian.”
“Hi.”
“I can’t remember the name of Otto von Bismarck’s dog.”
She leaned over my desk and her hair fell against my face as I flipped through our history text. I pointed to a caption: “Tyras,” I read. “But, didn’t he have lots of dogs?”
My thick-headed belief that Marianne Ferris could not possibly be romantically interested in me died one afternoon when she and I ran into each other in the city. Dressed in her street clothes, I didn’t recognize her at first. The jeans she wore were not tight like her skirts, and instead of a blouse she wore a man’s plaid shirt. Her hair was down, just straight. She said my name and I stopped. “Marianne Ferris,” I said. With only a few months left of high school, we were still declared class couple, and girls said things to me like, “I can’t even remember what it was like when you weren’t together,” and asked, “What are you buying her for your one-month anniversary?” I bought Marianne nothing. We laughed at our breathy classmates. Guys asked other questions, which, had I not actually cared about Marianne, I would have gladly answered. But I did care about her. And in that way we were mysterious. We were glad when school was over, both of us going to local colleges, me with a summer job at a movie theater. She worked at an ice cream stand. She was seventeen.
That day that we ran into each other in the city she bought the skirt that she would wear fifteen-plus years later, on the day she drove her little red car off a cliff and I followed. I was with her when she bought it; she stepped out of the dressing room, plaid shirt bunched up in her hand to better show the skirt and revealing a slim line of her belly—she turned—a slim line of her back. Of course I liked it, and said so, I was still amazed she’d said my name and further amazed she’d asked me to wait for her while she tried on some skirts. “That’ll make Mrs. Kirk flinch,” she said. “It is short,” I said. Marianne twirled for me.
While with Marianne, my confidence emerged, but was unwieldy, and thus the screw up, at a summer party, the last house party Marianne’s cohorts at the ice cream stand threw (they had the best parties, they knew everyone). I went to the party late, the last show over after midnight, sweeping popcorn well after the ice cream stand was shuttered. I walked over in my theater uniform, bow tie unhooked (a clip-on). The girl who answered the door was Susan, she answered with a drink in hand and said, “I made this just for you,” though it was half gone, obviously her own, and she touched my nose with her pinkie before she gave me the glass, rum and diet Coca-Cola. Susan led me to Marianne, who was sweetly drunk and happy to see me, in the middle of an extra-soft couch with two co-workers, girls like Susan. Marianne tried to get up, failed, she took my hand and I pulled her up and we kissed and danced, and her co-workers teased us and all was good for a while, until Marianne and I were separated, somehow, and I wound up in the backyard on a hammock, very drunk, and Susan climbed into the hammock with me, and Susan and I kissed, my eyes half closed, my hands on Susan’s breasts and down the back of her pants as far as my reach allowed. I blacked out some of the time, distant party noise, glass beer bottles, a television. Marianne found us like that. I was too drunk to apologize or to show remorse or even to take my hand out of Susan’s pants. A week later Marianne and I met for coffee, not a cup drunk. A couple weeks after that we went to college, both broken-hearted (I think she was; I was, and I felt stupid, too. I felt stupid and bad for a long time).
The night of the party, after Marianne found me with Susan, after Susan crept away, I hung in the hammock, struggled with my drunk, and heard an animal knocking trash cans.
When I woke up, next to my wife, the morning after the accident, I felt guilty. I put a tie around my collar, looked at Janie as she slept a little extra, and I went down to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal. I felt guilty. Not for the car, but because Marianne Ferris was on my mind all the time, I couldn’t remember when she wasn’t on my mind, maybe, maybe for a while when I first met Janie, when Janie and I were first married, but ever since, Marianne Ferris. I didn’t want breakfast. I said to myself, I did nothing wrong. That wasn’t quite true, but I knew what I meant. I hadn’t hurt Janie.
Before I left, Janie joined me in the kitchen, bathrobe, hair up, sloppy. She asked, “You totaled the car? Are you sure you’re okay? Shouldn’t you take the day off? Are you okay to drive today? Our car malfunctioned?” I said, “Everything’s fine.”
Janie
From the bedroom window I saw a girl as she walked along the far end of the backyard. She moved along the tree line, in and out of shadow. I knew some of the high school girls in the neighborhood, sometimes they came to me for advice, I wasn’t too old, and I was always around. The girls would walk into my yard when they saw me out on the back steps drinking vodka/pomegranate/soda. There was Kathy, Carrie, and Maureen, and there was Jenny and Darla. They all lived in nearby houses. Once or twice a girl showed up late in the day, shadowing our house, looking in windows to see if I was around. I turned off the lights to better see the yard. Brian was very late coming home from work. The bedroom clock: 9:37. I was undressed, still damp from a bath. I stood at the window, put my forehead to the cool glass and watched. The girl moved slow, her steps herky-jerky, as if her feet were asleep/not her own. She wore a blouse and a short skirt. Heels would explain that walk.
I was downstairs and at the kitchen door before I noticed I was naked. I put on the jeans and sweatshirt that I’d draped over the back of a chair to dry after an afternoon sun shower and went out into the yard. Barefoot, I enjoyed the shock of cold grass. I said, “Kathy,” though I was sure it wasn’t Kathy, and I said, “Jenny,” though sure the girl was not her, either; the names were a comfort to me, real girls I knew and cared for, silly girls.
I stood halfway between the house and the tree line, in a pool of shadow where the yard dipped, and saw no girl at all, and felt lost. The air smelled of gasoline and of something else. Popcorn. A cool breeze caused the trees to shiver, their leaves turning, dark green/black, dark green/black. A deer moved along the tree line. Had I mistaken a deer for a girl?
The deer took a step away from me, stopped, looked to where I stood, and I very nearly pointed to myself, as if to ask, me? I approached the animal. My first feelings were this deer is a beautiful creature, how special this moment is, etc., but all those sentimental, automatic feelings were gradually replaced by lust. Not desire: bloodlust. I wanted to kill the deer, but I did not know how.
Brian touched my shoulder, I started, the deer disappeared among trees. My bloodlust transferred briefly onto Brian, then dissipated, almost wholly, but not completely, and so I was glad
Brian wanted sex, quick and simple.
The next day, Brian at the office, doing the horrible job that sustained us (“I sell asset management plans”), I slept on the couch till noon, ate lunch, felt gross and forced myself to take a walk around the block. I considered walking into the woods behind our house, a little nothing patch of trees that kept the main road from sight, but the overgrown ferns and vines and probably poison ivy put me off. I stood at the end of a deer path and looked but did nothing. The sun filtered through green, lots of green and was pretty, and the green nearly put me to sleep where I stood. Around three I sat on the back steps with a glass of vodka/pomegranate/soda staring out at the yard, which I needed to mow and would later or the next day if I could muster the energy. Darla, sans her gal pal Jenny, stood at the edge of my backyard, with her hand up to shade her eyes and she waved when she saw me.
“Hey Jane,” she said, as if she’d bumped into me. She lit a cigarette, a recently developed habit, some stupid boy’s fault, so I gathered from Jenny, who would surely be carrying her own cigarettes soon enough. Darla didn’t ask if it was okay to smoke, nor did she offer me a cigarette; she was low on etiquette. I vaguely wanted one, but mostly didn’t.
“Darla,” I said. “Where’s Jenny?”
“David, I think.” Darla touched her lip and asked, “What’re you drinking?”
I held my glass up to my eyes: “This has a stupid name I won’t say. It’s vodka, pomegranate, and soda.” I tipped the glass to my lips.
She wanted some; I would give her none. She’d never ask but she added:
“I like vodka.” She paused for my reaction. I sipped. She sat down beside me.
“So,” she said.
She pulled and puffed at her cigarette, then bent over and rubbed out her cigarette on the last of the steps where I sat. She didn’t know what to do with the butt or with the black smudge she’d left on my step. She rubbed at the smudge with her foot and slipped the butt into a little coin pocket on the front of her jeans. There was hope.
“Don’t worry about it, Darla.”
She folded her arms.
“What’s on your mind?”
Her lips moved, a little. I looked out across the backyard and decided I wouldn’t have the energy to mow the lawn. I squeezed my eyes a little and the trees bent together. Or: did an animal move behind the trees?
“Darla, did you see something?”
“Where?”
I pointed with my glass.
Darla leaned forward, squinted, put her hand up to her forehead as she’d done from the street: was it really so sunny? Darla’s lipstick was too orange. I asked, “What’s on your mind?”
“David.”
She touched her pack of cigarettes but I guess she decided not to smoke. I was a little sorry because I would’ve had a puff, but I didn’t want to ask for a cigarette because that seemed too much like encouraging her, and I felt some vague urge, as an adult, I guess, to promote not smoking, or something to that effect. Perhaps, I thought for an instant, I didn’t care at all, and I should pour Darla some vodka, and the two of us should get really drunk together, and watch television until her parents sent the police out looking for her, if her parents cared, and if they didn’t then I don’t know what.
She said, “David and Jenny are going out. They’ve been going out for two weeks. Last night the three of us went out to see a movie. Before the movie started Jenny went out to the lobby to talk to Sarah, who had some news she wanted to tell Jenny, and while she was gone I put my hand on David’s leg.”
“You did?”
“Yeah. I put my hand on his leg and, you know, I felt it get hard.”
I finished my drink and said, “On his leg?”
“You know.”
“Sure.”
“So?”
“Um?”
“What should I do?”
I took Darla’s cigarettes and put one in my mouth. Lighting my bummed cigarette did not occur to her, so I put it to my mouth and tapped the filter with the tip of my tongue, waited a second, took the cigarette from my mouth and said, “Maybe, don’t touch David’s penis?” I tucked the cigarette behind my ear.
“I know that.”
“Why did you?”
“I like David.”
“Trust me. You don’t like David more than you like Jenny. She’s your friend. Come on. I need to get a refill.” In the kitchen, Darla watched me make another vodka/pomegranate/soda. Not offering her a drink, of any kind, was my revenge for her not offering a light. I lit my cigarette off a stove burner, smoked for the first time in… I couldn’t remember, I wondered if I’d smoked with Darla before, felt woozy, then calm, then guilty: in Brian’s kitchen, I thought. From the back step I saw movement in the woods. “Darla, do you see something?” I pointed.
“Yeah, a deer,” she said. “How sweet,” she added.
“Yeah.”
Then Darla said, “I know Jenny’s my friend, but I don’t think you realize.”
“Maybe not, Darla.” I saw the next few months of Darla’s life play out: summer would come, she’d be at a party with Jenny, and David, no doubt Jenny’s ex by then, would be there, and late at night, in the backyard of whomever was throwing the party, Darla would make out with David. And Jenny would be pissed off and Jenny and Darla wouldn’t return to school as friends, and David, stupid, stupid David, well what could it possibly matter?
Darla stayed longer than she usually did. Eventually, we shared things: Darla, my drink, me, her cigarettes and her lighter. When Brian came home Darla said, “Hi,” and then wandered off, coin pocket full of cigarette butts, hers and mine. She wandered across our backyard, to a spot where the trees were parted, a little doorway in the woods.
“What’s wrong with her?” Brian asked.
“A boy,” I said. And I said, “Let’s order Chinese, shall we? I was too tired to go to the grocery store today and besides I don’t feel like cooking.”
Oh, Brian, the way you sighed. If only you knew how I exhausted I was all of the time. Pour me another! But I didn’t ask for another. I nibbled at the steamed vegetables. Later, I thought, I’d eat all the fried rice. I would sit on the back steps with a tablespoon and shovel rice into my mouth. Soon after dinner, Brian went to bed. I sat in the living room, television on but the sound down—occasionally a glimmer of laughter. The book on my knee was spent, damp, pages dropped out onto the floor. When the television screen went dark between programs, I saw reflected the living room. And beside the television, the window, blinds up, it also reflected the living room, and me, but in that reflection was the dark grassy backyard. A deer put its face to the window and I screamed.
The deer’s oval-shaped face emerged, like something floating up from the bottom of a murky pool. A white, ragged stripe from the deer’s nose to its forehead. No horns, a female, the same, I knew, as I’d seen the night before. And possibly that afternoon.
Brian did not come down the stairs. My scream had not been enough to rouse him after an exhausting, dreadful day calling potential investors, most smart enough to know that the firm Brian worked for was worthless.
The deer’s face disappeared from the window. I carried my drink, less pomegranate, less soda, and went out into the backyard. The grass, black. Faint light only exaggerated the darkness of the woods where I was sure I saw movement, the deer or the girl. I rushed across the lawn, my drink sloshed onto my hand, cold; it dried and that felt good. I stumbled, that dip in the yard, and very nearly dropped my glass. A sip. I walked on, into the woods, I crashed into branches, and my drink slipped from my hand and the glass shattered. Brian, you idiot, I thought, you wrecked our car. I stepped into a stream. The water was cold and polluted, and soon my bare feet were sticky. Again, I’d rushed from the house without shoes. At least I was dressed, I thought, and I laughed, a kind of a snort. I walked without caution and soon my feet stopped hurting, didn’t hurt when I stepped on sharp rocks or sticks, when my foot went sideways into a hole, some animal’s burrow.
The trees were luminescent with a mossy light. I waked through a shallow pond, felt slime coated stones and living things, they swam up the cuffs of my pants, attached themselves to my legs. My heart beat hard and steady. Ahead of me the trees fell away
a backyard.
Jenny’s.
Jenny and Darla and I had walked in Jenny’s backyard once before, on a calm afternoon. A cool afternoon. Even night, now, was warm. My body was hot and prickled.
The yard was a dark plane, the house ahead was white. A single window on the ground floor was lit, the blinds up, a hot square. Jenny’s bedroom. From the dark yard my view was perfect, Jenny on her bed, sitting up on her knees, and a boy—surely, David—in Jenny’s bedroom. Her parents out or asleep. From where I stood, beneath her window, they moved without sound, but I put two fingers to the window and felt the glass vibrate and so I knew, they talked, there was sound. The yard was endlessly silent, no clicking crickets and frogs, only black grass growing up around my bare feet.
David wasn’t naked—why was that?—her shirt, off, her bra, unclasped (it unhooked in the front), her belt undone and he pulled at her jeans, tugged while she sat up and wriggled her little hips, helped him to undress her. She reached for the buttons of his shirt. He dipped forward and kissed her clavicle, her breasts. Jenny’s head back, she sighed; her excitement breathy and sick, my terror for her huge:
I slapped the glass and shouted,
I shouted, “Jenny! Don’t!”
Jenny and David turned to the window, frightened, blind. With the light so brilliant in Jenny’s room, they surely couldn’t see me, or saw only a shape, an animal tapping its head on the glass. I slapped the glass again, with both hands, “Jenny! Don’t ruin everything!”