“Don’t come back!” he cried, straining his voice to reach us as we got farther from him. “Worm Moon tonight. They’ll get you sure! You don’t stay inside, they’ll hunt you down. They’ll take your eyes, you hear me? An hour from now, this whole town goes warg. They’ll eat your lungs right outta your chest! They’ll pop your lungs like balloons and eat ’em right down! You hear me? Don’t come back!”
When we reached the road, we got on our bikes and pedaled hard all the way back to my house. It wasn’t until we were safely inside that we realized the sun had already set and the streets were quiet. We had lost track of time at the lakeside.
My father said it was too late for Polly to go home. He said she would stay the night, and he called her parents to tell them so.
That night Polly and I huddled under the covers of my bed and speculated about the world of those who were older than we.
We both knew that Hermit Weaper was just trying to scare us back home. But Polly couldn’t let go of his words.
She said, “I don’t want my lungs eaten.” Then she added, “I don’t want to eat them, either. I mean, when we’re older.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. I reveled in her nervousness, because it made me feel more keen than my friend. “I’m sure we’ll acquire a taste for it.”
“Ew,” she said, and we giggled.
“Would you rather—” Polly started, then rephrased her theoretical question. “Let’s say it’s a dark alley. Would you rather meet up with Hermit Weaper or Rosebush Lincoln’s brother on a full moon?”
Rosebush Lincoln’s brother was sixteen.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess the Hermit.”
“I’d rather Rosebush Lincoln’s brother.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. They don’t really hurt people, you know. It’s not true what the Hermit said. They don’t eat your—they don’t hurt anybody. Except maybe themselves. And each other.”
I liked it better when we talked of such things in the fairy-tale terms of lung-eating. It was easier to cope with. If you talked about hurt in the abstract, it was a deeper, more echoey well of a thing.
“They could hurt you,” I insisted.
“Not on purpose. They’re just teenagers. We’ll be like that too one day.”
I didn’t tell Polly that I had already promised my father I wouldn’t be like that. She would have taken it as disloyalty. Much later we tried to sleep, but there were the voices outside. I couldn’t forget what Hermit Weaper had said. In my mind there was a picture of Rosebush Lincoln’s brother, handsome Billy Lincoln, and there was a hollow cavity in my chest, and where my lungs should have been there was nothing at all, and one of my lungs was actually hanging between Billy Lincoln’s teeth, half consumed, deflated and bloody, like a gigantic tongue—and I couldn’t breathe, because all my breath was caught in Billy Lincoln’s grinning mouth.
* * *
My husband drives us home from the Petersons’ party. This is just last night.
It’s 12:15, and we are late in relieving the sitter. Jack is itchy with liquor, and he says to me, “You were—you were the sexiest wife at that party.”
“Jack.”
“No, I’m serious. I’m not kidding around. No one can hold a candle to you.”
“I thought the lamb was overcooked. Did you think so? Everyone complimented it, though. Janet prides herself on her lamb.”
Then Jack pulls the car over to the side of the road and turns off the ignition.
“Do you want to fool around?” he asks.
“Jack, the babysitter.”
“To hell with the babysitter.” It’s his grand, passionate gesture. He must have me, here in the car, and the rest of the world can burn. “I’ll—I’ll give her an extra twenty.”
The silliness of family men. I chuckle.
He takes offense. “Forget it,” he says and goes to start the car. I’ve hurt him by not being sufficiently quailed by the blustery storm of his sex. It’s funny how many ways there are to hurt people. As many ways to hurt as there are species of flower. Whole bouquets of hurt. You do it without even realizing.
“Wait, Jack. I’m sorry.”
“Why did you laugh?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was nervous. What if someone sees us?”
“Let them,” he says.
So I reach up under my skirt, hook my underpants with my thumbs, and pull them down. He unzips his pants, and I straddle him. While he quakes and gurgles beneath me, I gaze out the windows of the car. The road where we’ve stopped is indistinguishable from any of the others in the area—a quiet residential neighborhood with sidewalks and shade trees. In truth there is no danger of being caught. The residents of this area are good and decent people. Their lives, after midnight, consist of sleep or the late, late show on television, played at a low volume so as not to wake the children. The streets are empty. The mild breeze dapples the sidewalk with the shadows of leaves in lamplight. But there is no one out there in the dark. No one.
Jack moves under me. I hold his face to my bosom, I kiss the top of his head. In a few moments, he is finished.
He wants to kiss me passionately to show that his love for me doesn’t end when his sexual urgency does. He’s a nice kisser after all these years.
He rolls down the windows for the rest of the drive home.
On the way, he points to the sky.
“Look,” he says. “A full moon.”
“I know,” I say without raising my eyes. The car drives along in the quiet, fragile night.
“What do you call that one? Octopus Moon? Spanky Moon?”
“Blowfly Moon.”
“Blowfly. That’s my favorite one!”
I’ve told him very little about my childhood or the town where I grew up. What little I have told him—for example, that we had names for the different full moons—he finds quaint and charming. He pictures me as a prairie girl, maybe. Or a Mennonite.
His stuff is leaking out of me, a funny, unbothersome tickle between my legs.
In another part of the country, in the small town where I grew up, at this moment, there are packs of young people stalking the streets, naked, their pale flesh glowing, their breath coming fast and angry, their limbs filled with the quivering of strength and movement. Many, tomorrow, will wake torn and bruised.
When we get home, Jack apologizes to the babysitter and gives her extra money. Then he drives her home. While he is gone, I go upstairs, where my son is sleeping. He wakes when I come into the room, reaching toward me, wanting to be picked up.
I look down at him for a few moments, all that wee human greed and desire. I refuse to pick him up, but eventually I do kneel beside his bed and recite to him a rhyme I learned when I was a little girl.
Brittle Moon,
Beggar’s Moon,
Worm Moon, more…
Pheasant Moon,
Cordial Moon,
Lacuna’s bore…
Hod Moon,
Blowfly Moon,
Pulse Moon—roar!
Prayer Moon,
Hollow Moon,
Lake Moon’s shore.
First you kiss your mommy,
Then you count your fours.
Till you’re grown and briny,
Better stay indoors.
He waits eagerly for his favorite part—the part about roaring—and then he roars. He wants to do it again, but I tell him no. I turn on his night-light, which the babysitter has forgotten. Then I leave the room and shut the door behind me. In the upstairs hall, there is only the sound of the grandfather clock ticktocking away.
I have become a mother. I have become a wife.
Soon Jack returns home. We prepare for bed without much talk. I check the locks on the doors downstairs. It is a thing he always asks when I slide into bed next to him. “Did you remember to check the locks?” he asks. And I say, “Yes,” and I can see by the expression on his face that he feels safe.
It starts to ra
in outside, the droplets of water sounding little tin bells in the gutters. Jack begins to snore next to me. The grandfather clock chimes one o’clock.
And what if I were to forget a lock one night? What if I were to leave a door wide open, casting angled shadows in the moonlight? Nothing would happen. In our neighborhood, there is no one out there in the rain, not a single person squalling under the stormy black.
All our skins are dry.
* * *
I wonder about it sometimes—what kind of girl I might have been, what kind of woman I would be now, if I had grown up somewhere else. California, for instance, where teenagers have barbecues on the beach and bury bottles of beer halfway in the sand to keep them upright. Or New York, where they kiss in the backseats of taxicabs and lie on blankets in the middle of parks surrounded by buildings taller by far than the tallest tree.
Would I now be one of those women on television who are concerned about what the laundry detergent is doing to their children’s Little League uniforms? Would I love my husband more or less? My son?
As a teenager, would I have been one of those girls who go to the mall and defend themselves, all giggling, against boys—huddled together like a wagon circle in the food court? Would my great concerns have been college and school dances and fashion?
In my town, expensive clothes were not held in high esteem. Girls bought cheap. Dresses, they tended to get torn apart.
It’s impossible for me to make the connection between who I am now and who I was then—as if I died long ago in that town and resurrected somewhere else, with a brain full of another girl’s memories.
Except that I miss my father.
They said I had his mind.
Polly admired him as well. She always told me it was okay that I didn’t have a mother—that I didn’t really need a mother because I had the best father in town. He made Polly and me grilled cheese sandwiches with ham and the tomatoes from the garden that he and I had cultivated with our own hands. Polly liked hers with cocktail toothpicks sticking out of each quarter. He called her Sweet Polly and said that when the time came she would have so many boyfriends she would never be able to choose just one and would have to marry a whole passel of them.
He stood smiling, tall and skinny at the kitchen island. She glowed for him.
* * *
Summertimes, Polly came to my house, and my father would greet her at the door.
“Sweet Polly!” he would say. “Lumen’s upstairs.”
The long, hot days of July, he would turn on the sprinkler in the backyard, and we would put on our swimsuits and play in the dancing water. The sprinkler was on the end of a hose, and it shot a Chinese fan of water in a slow back-and-forth arc that we liked to jump through. The only rule was that every fifteen minutes we had to move the sprinkler to a different part of the lawn to assure balanced coverage. Polly never remembered, but I always did.
We were the same age, but at thirteen it was clear that Polly was developing before I was. Her swimsuit swelled at the chest where mine was loose and puckered. She stood almost a full head taller than I did, and she did cartwheels through the shimmering water, her long limbs a dazzle of strength and nimbleness. When I tried to cartwheel, my body didn’t move the way I wanted it to, and I came toppling down into an awkward crouch.
After a while we were tired and simply lay on our stomachs in the grass, liking the feel of the fan of water as it intermittently showered us with cool needles. We lay in single file, our faces just inches from each other, our chins supported on our fists.
“Shell didn’t look so good when she came home this morning,” Polly said.
Shell was Michelle, Polly’s sister, who was fifteen and a half. She’d begun breaching just two months before. The previous night had been the last night of Hod Moon.
“My parents found her sleeping on the lawn this morning,” Polly went on.
“With no clothes on?”
“Yeah.”
This was something I still could not fathom—the exposure. For as long as I could remember, my father was very careful about knocking on my bedroom door before he entered so that I would not be walked in upon as I was dressing. How did one nude oneself before another person—before the world?
“And also,” Polly said, crinkling up her face, “she was beat up pretty bad.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. There were bruises and cuts all over her. Plus—”
Polly went silent for a moment. She pulled up some blades of grass and opened her fist to let them fall, but they were wet and stuck to her fingers.
“Plus,” she went on, “she was bleeding. You know?”
I said nothing. I was paralyzed—as though I were standing on a precipice, stricken with vertigo, unable even to pull myself back from the edge. This was large, multitudinous. My mind was a color, and the color was red. The needling water on my back felt like it was falling on a version of me that was a long, long way away.
“They put her in the bathtub,” Polly said. “I stayed with her when they went downstairs. The water, it turned pink. She says she doesn’t remember anything, but I can tell she does. I think she remembers all of it.”
For a time, we were both silent. She picked the wet blades of grass off her hand, and I watched her. It was time to move the sprinkler, but I had to know more, and I couldn’t break the spell the conversation had put me under.
Finally I mustered the courage to ask a question:
“Did she get pregnant?”
“No,” Polly said. “She told me they put her on the pill before she went breach. She said all the parents do it.”
I thought about my father. It was difficult for me to imagine him giving me that kind of pill. How would he do it? He could make a joke out of it, bringing it to me on a burgundy pillow, as though I were a princess—and we could pretend it meant nothing. We could pretend my secret and shameful body had nothing to do with it. Or maybe it wouldn’t be necessary. I was determined to skip breaching altogether.
“And she said something else,” Polly went on.
“What else?”
“See, I was sitting on the toilet next to the tub, and she closed her eyes for a long time, and I thought she was asleep. I was just looking at the pink water and all the dirt that was in it. There were little leaves, and I picked them off the surface. She was so dirty. She came back so dirty.”
“What else did she say?”
“So I thought she was asleep, and there was this little twig in her hair and I wanted to take it out for her. So I went to take it out, but when I tried she grabbed my wrist all of a sudden and gave me a look.”
“What kind of look?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t like it.”
“Was it angry?”
“No. Not exactly. More just…I don’t know. Like a jungle look, you know? But it was only for a second, and then she let go of my wrist and smiled at me. That’s when she said it. She said it’s all right. She said it’s nothing to be afraid of. She said it hurts, but it’s the good kind of hurt.”
“The good kind of hurt?”
“That’s what she said.”
I didn’t want Polly to see that I was confounded by this notion, because she herself seemed to have accepted it as an obvious and universal truth, the potential goodness of hurt. It was important to Polly that she be in the know about all things adult, and she lived by the rule that performance eventually leads to authenticity. So it was difficult to tell what she actually understood and what she was only pretending to understand.
For my part, I squirmed uncomfortably in my ill-fitting swimsuit. These things seemed entirely detached from the books I read, from the math and science I was so adept in the mastery of. I sometimes wondered (as I sometimes still do) if I had gotten off track somehow, if maybe I wasn’t as natural as those around me, if perhaps my life were unjoined from the common lives of others.
The way my teachers looked at me, I suspected they could tell I didn’t belong. Especially Mr. Hu
nter, the drama teacher for the high school kids, whose curious and fearsome gaze I was sure followed me wherever I went.
The sprinkler splashed us with its rainy metronome, and there we lay in the growing shadow of my big house, the two of us, blasted through with the abject discomfiture of our tiny places in the world.
We were fourteen by the following summer, and Polly had developed even further, her hips having shaped themselves into curves—which I thought must have been in some way responsible for the new saunter in her walk. There was still no shape to me at all. I wore colorful dresses and put ribbons in my hair as evidence that I was, in fact, a girl. I stood naked before my bedroom mirror and, with the intention of luring out my stubborn and elusive womanhood, recited Edna St. Vincent Millay poetry I had learned by heart. I smeared honey on my chest, believing it might help me grow breasts. Honeybees are industrious—they can build anything. But the poetry seemed not to possess any magic, and my father found the sticky honey-bear bottle on my nightstand one morning and explained that it was bad for my teeth to snack on it in the middle of the night.
Over the previous year, Polly had begun spending more time with Rosebush Lincoln and the other girls from school. She never excluded me, and I made a concerted effort to join together with all the girls when they sunbathed by the lake or got a ride into the next town to go shopping at the thrift stores. But Rosebush always made it clear that I was only to be tolerated because I was allied with Polly, that my visa into the world of Rosebush Lincoln was temporary and most definitely revocable. I was put on notice.
When there’s nothing else to do, you can always watch the birds. The finches, their twitchy and mechanical little bodies—they go where they want to go, driven by impulse and instinct. The finch does not dwell in consideration of its nature or the nature of the world. It is brazen and unapologetic. It hammers its little bird heart against the blustering wind, and its death is as beautiful as its life.
* * *
It was that year, that summer, that I followed the other girls to the abandoned mine. What did they used to mine there? I want to say gypsum, because gypsum is a lovely word and a gypsum mine is a pretty thought to have. It was on a different end of the woods from the lake, and the entrance to it was at the base of a small overgrown quarry. The parents of our town instructed us to stay away from the quarry because of lurking dangers, but it was always beautiful and peaceful to me. In certain seasons there was rivulet of melted snow that came out of the mountains and trickled irregularly down the stony sides of the quarry and ran finally into the mouth of the mine. If you went there alone, you could just listen to that plink-plonk of water and be tranquil. You could lie in nests of leaves, all those dying oranges and reds, all those deep browns that come from what green used to be, shaded by the old-growth trees that leaned over the lip of the quarry, and you could be nothing at all.
When We Were Animals Page 2