I drew maps in my notebooks during class. Sometimes simple maps showing the spatial relationships of the students in a classroom, maybe with arrows illustrating their various kinds of connections. Or sometimes complex maps of the entire school building, featuring dotted lines that traced my regular routes from class to class.
My father liked my maps. He said they showed a unique mind, the kind of mind that existed above itself and was able to see itself in context. Context, he said, was a very important thing. So I said the word to myself thirteen times that night before I went to bed, and it became one more in my arsenal of magic words.
What I was working on that day, sprawled on the warm wooden floor of the empty stage, was going to be a Christmas present for my father. It was a very large and detailed map of the town and all the places in it that were significant to the two of us. Like the drive-in where we used to see movies but didn’t, for some reason, anymore. Like the tree in the cemetery under which my mother lies buried. Or the exact place on the freeway where we almost got into an accident and he had to pull over on the shoulder and tell me how much he loved me, how much more than anything else in the world I meant to him. I know it was a strange one to include, but it made sense in my unique mind, and I believed he would understand.
I made our house the center of the map. I drew it in pencil first and then in fine black pen to get as much detail as possible. You could even see into the upstairs window of the house if you cared to look. And there, framed in the window, was the teensy-tiny figure of a girl standing before an easel, drawing a map.
It was nice there in the musty auditorium, the sound of my scratching pencil echoey in the large space, the heavy, muffling curtains hanging loose over the hard wood. The moving air from the vents ruffled them slightly, and they rippled like vertical oceans. I liked the rows of unpopulated seats staring at me, their lower halves all folded up except one on the aisle that was broken and remained always open, a poor busted tooth in that grinning mouth. There is nothing to fear in such cavernous and sepulchral spaces. You fill them with the riots of your imagination.
Absorbed as I was in my map, I hadn’t heard Mr. Hunter enter from backstage and leaped up when he spoke to me.
“What’s that you’re doing?”
“Nothing,” I said and quickly gathered my materials, clutching my map to my chest. “Working. There’s no play practice tonight.” I knew the schedule, you see. I liked to know in advance where people would be and where they wouldn’t be.
He stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing at me with a foreign, unreadable expression. Under a tweed jacket, he wore a button-down shirt that had come a little untucked over the course of the day. He looked younger than my father, but I couldn’t tell by how much. He had told us that he grew up in a small town outside Chicago, and I had always wondered why someone from Chicago would come to a town like ours. He had a ragged growth of stubble on his chin, and his eyes always looked like they knew more than he was telling.
“You know,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”
“What about?”
“What do you think about trying out for the play?”
“Me? I can’t act.”
“Everybody can act,” he said, shrugging. “Everybody does act.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“The best kinds of actors are the ones who perform so often—so religiously—that they don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
“I guess,” I said.
He would not take his eyes from mine for a long while, and I found I couldn’t take mine off his, either—as though some unbreakable current connected our brains.
Finally he breathed in deeply, stretched, and looked up into the rafters.
“Anyway,” he said, “think about it. All acting is just lying. You know how to lie, don’t you?”
I said goodbye and rushed out as quickly as I dared. The sun had gone down, and the overhead lamps had buzzed on in the deserted parking lot.
Everybody else believed they could see my very soul. So why did I feel so blind?
* * *
It’s true that I am a Christmas baby—or at least close enough to count as one. I was born on December 23, Christmas Eve Eve, and so I am one of that breed for whom the celebration of existence gets irrevocably tangled up with garlands and lighted trees and window displays. No one likes a Christmas baby. The occasion requires that people purchase two different kinds of wrapping paper. It is too much celebration altogether, and it makes people queasy with indulgence.
Throughout my young life, my father did his best to make my birthday special—so we never put up a Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, the day after my birthday. There was no talk of the holiday at all until that day.
This year was special, because it was my sixteenth birthday, and sixteenth birthdays put you in a different category from the one you were in before. In the morning, my father told me we could do anything my little heart desired. But actually I was feeling a bit unwell, and all I really wanted to do was stay indoors and make pizza and watch movies on television and pretend that the world outside didn’t exist.
“Done and done,” he said and made me waffles.
Then he brought me a little wrapped box and dropped it on the table in front of me.
“I’ve been saving it for you for a long time,” he said.
I undid the wrapping paper at the taped seams (I’m not one of those people who tear through wrapping paper willy-nilly, as though ferocity of consumption equaled appreciation of a gift) and set it aside. It was a jewelry box, and inside sat a little silver locket with floral engravings on the outside.
“It belonged to your mother,” said my father. To look at it seemed to pain him. “I gave it to her when we were sixteen. Now I’m giving it to you.”
Inside there were two pictures that kissed when the locket was closed. One was of my mother and the other was of my father—both when they were my age.
“Her name was Felicia Ann Steptoe,” he said, reciting the bedtime catechism from my childhood, “and she wore long orchid gloves at our wedding.”
It occurred to me on that day that my mother was actually closer to me than if I had been old enough to remember her when she died. She existed entirely in my own brain—she was that close. She was lovely inside there, always posing, always beautiful. She was happy as could be.
I thanked my father for the present, throwing my arms around him and hugging him so tightly he pretended to choke.
“Now you just relax while I do the breakfast dishes,” he said.
“Wait,” I said. “I need to know something.”
“What’s that?”
“What time was I born? I mean, exactly.”
“It was in the morning some time. I don’t remember.”
“Is it on my birth certificate?”
“I’m sure it probably is.”
“Can we check?”
“On this day, we seek to indulge,” he said, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel.
He went to the closet in his office and thumbed through the file cabinets to find what he was looking for. I followed him and sat in his desk chair, watching.
Eventually he found the manila folder he was looking for.
“Ta-da,” he said.
Then he took a pale green document out of the folder and scanned it quickly with his eyes.
“Let’s see,” he said. “Here it is. Eight thirty-two, ante meridian.”
I looked at my watch. It was half past nine.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re officially sixteen years old.”
So it was true. I was a year older but still periodless.
I was officially a lot of things. Sixteen was only one of them.
* * *
The day after my birthday was Christmas Eve, and it also happened to be the first night of Lake Moon. There would be no carolers this Christmas, no midnight masses at the church. This would be a Christmas to stay indoors.
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My father and I had much to do, since our preparations for the holiday only began that morning. We got up early and picked out a tree from the Christmas tree farm by the freeway. It was my job to stand back and determine its straightness while he secured it in the metal stand in our living room. We decorated and drank eggnog. We sang along to “Good King Wenceslas,” which was our favorite Christmas song—and, as far as I have been able to tell, nobody else’s favorite Christmas song in the world.
Good King Wenceslas looked out
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about
Deep and crisp and even.
Brightly shone the moon that night,
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight
Gathering winter fuel.
We sat together across our small dining room table, and we drank cinnamon-scented mulled wine that had been heated in a saucepan on the stove. My father put a stick of raw cinnamon in each one—and even though the wine did not taste good to me, I liked to be drinking it with him, watching the steam rise from the crystal goblets set on the red tablecloth I insisted on using for the occasion.
After dinner my father put on a Motown Christmas album, and we danced together to “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” and then we lit a candle for Felicia Ann Steptoe and put it in the window, without somberness, to invite her ghost to visit.
There were very few presents under the tree, but they were all labeled carefully nonetheless. We made sure that some of them—both for him and for me—were labeled “From Santa,” because Santa Claus was the invisible third guest at our miniature holiday. The truth is, we made our aloneness into a gift and gave that gift to each other, and it was our true and main present to unwrap.
I ate fewer frosted sleigh-shaped Christmas cookies than I normally did, because my stomach was still bothering me. So I went to bed early and turned on the radio to be lulled to sleep by “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”—and also to drown out before I even heard them the sounds that might be coming from outside. This was a holy night, a peaceful night, and I would not indulge those wild creatures in the street—not even for a second.
* * *
It was well after midnight when I woke up. At first I thought it was the cramping in my gut that had woken me—I thought for sure my period had finally come. But then, surfacing into consciousness, I realized that the voice I was hearing in my ears was actually coming from outside, that it was the voice of Polly. She called to me from the pitchy night.
“Lumen! Lumen, help me!”
I got out of bed, drew the curtains aside, and opened the window.
The first thing I noticed was the quality of the air that blew into the house. It was frigid in my lungs, but it made me feel much better than I had been feeling over the past couple days, and I made a resolution to get more fresh air than I had been getting.
Polly was there, standing just below my window in the front yard. Strange, I thought, that the last time Polly came and stood under my window Peter was sleeping in the den two doors down and knew nothing of it at all. Now he was somewhere out there among them.
Polly looked roughed up. There were bruises on her face, little abrasions all over the pale skin of her chest.
She was naked, her legs lost to midcalf in the snowbank. As part of my research, I had been made to understand that breachers did not feel the cold the way other people did. I was told that their blood ran hotter during those nights. A girl of science, a daughter of facts, I hadn’t entirely believed it until now. Like a beech tree, Polly’s frail white body was planted, unshivering, in the snow, her breath coming in visible puffs between her bleeding lips, her skin varicolored by the string of blinking Christmas lights hung on the eaves of the house. While she may have been hurting from her injuries, it seemed the cold was nothing to her.
“Lumen,” she said from the pool of lamplight in the street, “please.”
“What do you want?” I called down in a quiet voice. The night below was utterly silent.
“Lumen, I miss you,” she said. “Remember how we used to be?”
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s Christmas Eve, Lumen. I’m hungry. My mother used to make me pancakes in the shape of elephants on Christmas morning.”
Her mind was gone wild, her panicked eyes darting from one thing to another.
“Are you all right?” I said.
She sat down in the snowbank and pulled her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth slightly. She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.
“What? What did you say?”
“My turn,” she said. “They said it was my turn. Sometimes you bleed others, and sometimes you get bled. That’s the way. It hurts, Lumen. Apples and cheese—I used to eat them when they were cut up for me. I used to be pretty.”
“Who did it? Who hurt you?”
She looked up at me, confused.
“They did,” she said simply. “All of them.”
It made me feel sick to see her that way, but also angry. I found myself hating her a little also, despising her for being so frail outside my window. She made life—our lives—seem meager.
I could feel the spite bubbling up in me. It felt strange but good.
And then it was gone as quickly as it came, because below me Polly seemed to hear something that startled her. She stood suddenly and looked around.
“What is it?” I called down to her.
But she was no longer listening to me. Tensed like a threatened cat, she ran a few steps one way, stopped, listened some more, then ran a few steps in another direction and stopped again.
“What’s happening?” I said. “Polly.”
Her breath was coming faster now, and she ran toward the sidewalk and the street beyond.
“Polly, wait!”
I hurried out of my room and down the stairs as quietly as I could, so as not to wake my father, down the hall.
I opened the front door, and it occurred to me again that the blast of bitter night air was a relief. I was overheated, my heart going like crazy, my pulse driving in my ears, and the air seemed blissful and calming. I wondered, in some still part of my frenzied brain, if this was the same beatified air Jesus was born into so many years ago in his little desert manger.
Polly was no longer in the front yard. Now she stood in the middle of the street, her legs bent in a half crouch, poised to run for her life at any moment. But the street was empty. I leaned out the door and looked, and I saw nothing. She was spooked.
I felt bad about the little flare of intolerance I’d had for her just a few minutes before. She was damaged. She needed help.
“Polly,” I called in a whisper, which was as loud as I dared.
She seemed to hear me, because she turned her gaze in my direction for one little moment—a crisis moment of longing and sorrow, regret and fear—then she turned again and ran as fast she could down the street.
“Polly,” I called again, louder this time, but she didn’t come back.
I took a few steps outside, and then a few more. It’s a funny thing, sometimes, what we find ourselves doing. I observed myself as I walked, as though watching the actions of a character on television. Oh, isn’t it interesting what she’s doing. I wouldn’t have expected that of her. When I came again into my own mind, I realized I was standing in the middle of the snowy street in my pajamas and my bare feet.
I couldn’t see Polly anywhere. It was just me under the hazy, big Lake Moon. I turned this way and that, and the only sound I heard was that of my bare feet shifting against the icy surface of the road.
I wondered about that—my feet—and why they didn’t seem to sting from the frozen pavement. I looked back at my house, and it seemed smaller from the outside than it was from the inside—like a puzzle that strained your mind to think about.
In the sudden quiet of the empty night, I thought what a curiously wide place the world was—that you could stand in your nig
htclothes in the middle of a street and be quite, quite alone.
And then something else happened. It started to snow. They were gentle, quiet little flakes, like the dust or pollen of another season. I raised my arm and saw the snow collect on my skin, glistening along all the fine, light hairs.
You find glory in the strangest places.
I guess I wasn’t entirely surprised by what happened next. I guess I wasn’t. My body told me I had already known.
They came out from behind the trees in the woods across the street from my house. They had been watching me, you see. They had been there the whole time—that was what had Polly so spooked. They came out slowly, their pale bodies steaming in the cold, their skin taut and waxy against the wooded void.
I did not retreat to the house. I watched myself not retreating to the house. It was a wonder.
They came and stood in a circle around me. Rose Lincoln was there, and she approached and stood so close that I could feel her steaming breath on my cheeks.
“You’re lost,” she said.
The others smiled. They seemed to have difficulty standing still for long. It was all girls. It was the first time I realized they traveled like that sometimes, separated by sex. It was a coven, a brace, a klatch. Marina Donald stood right beyond Rose, and I could see her fists clenching and releasing, eager for something to throttle. Sue Foxworth was there, too, looking distracted. She scratched at herself and gazed off into the woods as though she were already running through them in her mind.
Rose Lincoln took one long, languorous look up and down my body.
“Is this what you wear to bed?” she asked. My pajamas had pink and purple hearts on them. They were cotton. The bottoms had an elastic waistband. The top had buttons down the front. She reached out with her painted nails and undid the top button, then she undid the next.
She seemed to lose interest before the third. She sighed heavily and looked at the sky, the snow falling lightly through the air.
“You keep yourself separate,” she said. “Away from us. How come? Is it because you think you’re better?”
I tried to respond. I licked the coldness from my lips.
When We Were Animals Page 10