Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay

  When the darkness came the world changed. It had to. Hiram Hightower flew his bright red air machine into the sun and the sun disappeared and the only light left was that of the moon. The only warmth to be found came from a good fire or a heavy sweater or the skin of another body pressed against yours. I was not yet a woman. I was a girl of eleven wearing a yellow dress. My hair was a long, crazy mess, reaching well past my shoulders. I was a crazy mess, too. I ran in our backyard, barefoot, my face streaked with dirt while my mother hung laundry to dry, wooden clothespins tucked between her lips. She hummed, the same song she always hummed, the first song she and my father ever danced to. She shuffled from side to side, her toes curling in the warm earth. It was a good day in a short life of good days.

  We heard Hiram Hightower before we looked up and saw the sun grow brighter than we thought possible. It was a joyful noise, long and wide and full. Then that joyful noise disappeared and the sun grew smaller and smaller and smaller as it filled Hiram Hightower up with the light he craved for so many years working in the cold, lonely mines. When the sun disappeared, a bright red crease appeared in the sky. The air chilled and slowly the world grew cold, not unbearably so, but cold enough that we saw our breath more often than we did not. There was no more light of day. There never would be again.

  In the early days of darkness, we thought it might end. We thought we might once again see the sun, feel its golden shine holding our skin. The bright red crease in the sky pulsed, and like the sun, that crease grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared. Scientists tried to make sense of what happened to the sun. It was nearly impossible for them to believe a man could be so full of darkness he needed to swallow all the light of the sun. The mines closed after that. The mine owners were not so greedy as to chance what another miner might do, what he might take from the world, to fill himself up. Their money could buy lots of fine things but it couldn’t bring back the sun. Only teenagers and scrappers looking for trouble, looking for a little something to line their pockets, go down in the mines now. They sell what they find on the black market, mostly in towns far away. No one in this town will have anything to do with that lucre.

  It didn’t take long for the mayor to order gas lamps throughout the town, to provide enough light during the day for life to go on, perhaps a little warmth. That’s what I remember most from my childhood—the pale light of those lamps, and how during the day, the chilled air was thick with the sweet smell of burning gas, how even at night when the air grew colder, that sweet smell lingered, clung to our clothes and our hair and the skin of our fingers.

  My husband was a year ahead of me in school and after his father flew his bright red air machine into the sun, no one would talk to that boy. Joshua Hightower wasn’t teased or taunted much. He was ignored. That was worse. Silence is the cruelest of cruelties. Each afternoon, his mother stood at the foot of the steps leading into and out of the brick building where we studied and when he ran to meet her, his hair wild and curly like mine, she took his hand and she held her head high and she nodded to him and he held his head high, too. She wrapped her arm around him like she could shield her boy from the anger and the darkness and the cold. They walked home alone, always alone. The only people who ever talked to Mara and Joshua Hightower in those days were the other miners Hiram worked with because they knew what could drive a man to swallow all the light in the world and because when Hiram flew his bright red air machine into the sun, for a moment they too felt filled up with warmth and light. They too felt whole. That moment, however brief and impossible to hold on to, for the men who knew only the world beneath the world, was enough.

  My mother is a kind woman, always has been. My father often says she holds on to the kindness most people can’t or won’t be bothered with. When Hiram Hightower flew his air machine into the sun my mother said, “Bless his soul, may he always be filled with light.” When I told her about how Joshua Hightower didn’t have anyone to talk to at school, she frowned, her lips falling into a tight line. She put her hands on her hips and said, “We certainly cannot have that. You invite that boy home to play with you after school. You be a sweet soul to him.”

  I wasn’t much popular, either. I was too smart and that made people uncomfortable—most folks where we’ve lived our whole lives don’t trust too much intelligence in a woman. There is also the problem of my eyes—they don’t hide anything. If I don’t care for a person, my eyes make it plain. I don’t care for most. Folks are generally comfortable with the small lies they tell each other. They don’t know what to do with someone like me, who mostly doesn’t bother with small lies.

  The day after my mother told me to bring Joshua Hightower home, I studied him, in math class, from three rows back. I had always loved his hair and that day I looked at the shades of brown from dark to auburn, marveled at how those colors formed a lovely pattern along each thick curl. The back of his neck was tanned and slender, though not as tan as it once had been. Soon it would not be tan at all. We would all lose any brown in our skin. Joshua had a strong jaw, even then, and kind eyes. I was flushed with shame as I tried to make sense of why I had ignored him. My cheeks were still hot with my weakness when I sat next to him in the schoolyard, later that day. He sat, quietly, staring up into the dark sky, rubbing his hands together to keep them warm. He flinched as I sat down so I rested my hand on his thigh. I looked up, trying to see what it was he was seeing.

  “My father is up there somewhere,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “He didn’t mean to do a bad thing.”

  I nodded. “I know that, too.”

  Joshua turned to look at me. “Why are you talking to me?”

  For once, I decided to be comfortable with a small lie. “Because you look like someone I can talk to.”

  The corners of his mouth tensed like he was fighting something. He shrugged.

  “Would you like to come to my house after school?”

  He bit his lower lip and looked like he was making the most difficult decision he had ever made. His forehead wrinkled. The longer he took, the angrier I got. Finally I shoved him and stalked off, filled with a different, angrier heat.

  Joshua wasn’t at school the next day or the day after that. When I saw him again, he had a long, narrow box in his hand. He handed the box to me and looked to the ground.

  “I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I would like to visit your home.”

  “What if I don’t want you to come over anymore?”

  He nodded toward the box. “That’s for you.”

  I carefully lifted the lid. Inside was a long, silky pink ribbon sitting on a bed of red velvet. It was the most beautiful thing. I was afraid to touch that ribbon but I couldn’t resist. It was so soft, like nothing I ever felt. It made me feel perfect and beautiful. I closed the box and tucked it in my skirt pocket.

  “We can walk home together,” I said.

  I could feel the stares as we walked home, bundled in our wool coats. The gas lamps weren’t the same as the sun, but they did not hide us. We passed by the Hightower house and I noticed a new iron fence, real high, built all the way around the house. Hiram Hightower would hate to have his house closed in like that, I thought.

  I pointed at the fence. “Why is your house caged in like that?”

  Joshua shrugged. “My ma wanted to make it harder for people to get in our yard, throw things at the house. My dad made a lot of folks angry.”

  I was quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t seem fair that you should have to live in a cage. It does not seem fair at all.”

  He grabbed my arm at the elbow. I looked at his fingers, wrapped in thin leather gloves. He loosened his grip but didn’t let go. “It’s not fair,” Joshua said. “I hate it.”

  “There’s no cage at my house,” I said.

  After that, I wouldn’t say we were friends but we spent all our time together. We sat next to each other during class and shared our lunches beneath the skeleton of what once was a tree in the schoolyard. E
ach afternoon, we walked home beneath the flickering light of the gas lamps, tapping our feet against the wooden sidewalks, making music with our bodies. When people stared or whispered unkind things or when other kids at school tried to warn me off Joshua Hightower, I held my head high the way Joshua and his mother always did. We mostly went to my house, though once in a while, we went to his. Joshua’s mother was quiet, her hair always combed into a neat bun. She mostly sat in the front room of their house, staring up into the sky like she was waiting for Hiram Hightower to come back to her. Whenever she looked at me, her eyes were pale blue and watery like a slow-dying body of water. She stared right through me. She made me sad. She made everyone who saw her sad because we could see that the hole Hiram Hightower couldn’t fill inside himself found a new body in which to grow.

  The kids we went to school with hated Joshua because their parents hated Joshua’s father and none of those kids knew how to be any better than the people who brought them into the world. When Joshua walked to the front of the classroom, they hissed. The ones who thought they were clever called him a Son of a Sun Stealer. He kept on holding his head high, always, just like his mother, because he came from good people worth minding. Joshua never turned in to himself or tried to make himself smaller. Instead, he grew and grew and grew. He studied hard. He watched over me and smiled every time I wore my beautiful pink ribbon, which was often. He told me he didn’t mind the silence of others so long as I was there to fill it. The older I got, the closer we became, the more I wanted to fill everything hollow inside him.

  When Joshua was sixteen and I was fifteen, a council was convened to consider ways to bring back the sun. The members called themselves the Corona, mostly wealthy men, the kind who had created the emptiness in Hiram Hightower in the first place. They made it seem like they wanted to bring back the sun for everyone, so we could bathe in it and stare into it until our eyes burned, so we could remember natural warmth, but such was not the case. Most of us guessed the Corona were mostly interested in finding a way to reopen the mines, to make themselves even more wealthy. It was a dark, ugly thing to see such greed cloaked in false good.

  Joshua and his mother were brought before the Corona to answer for Hiram Hightower’s crime, which was not a crime. I sat in the gallery with my parents. Every so often, leaning against the wooden railing in front of me, Joshua looked up at me. I held my hand open and he held his hand over his heart. The Corona suggested that perhaps someone from the Hightower bloodline should be sacrificed: if not Joshua, then his firstborn child. Mara Hightower, normally serene and composed, paled. When she spoke, her voice was strong, colored with fury. She said no more Hightower blood would be spilled in service of the sun. She said the spilling of blood could not possibly force the sun to rise. Many people in the gallery started shouting angry slurs. It terrified me to look at them, their faces drawn tightly into hateful masks, their lips shiny with spittle, their hands clawing forward like they wanted to tear Joshua and Mara Hightower apart, pull their skin from their bones, right then and there. The thought of them touching Joshua made my heart seize and twist itself into a bitter knot. That was when I understood love. While the gallery raged, my parents and I sat in a circle of miners who stood, quietly, pointing up as if there were no roof above them.

  None of us knew what their gesture meant.

  We did know no Hightower blood would be spilled as long as they drew breath.

  By the time we matriculated at secondary school, Joshua was tall enough to fill any doorway, just like his father. He was bone and beating blood, organs and sinewy muscle. His hair was as wild and curly as ever. I was not tall but I grew into myself. I became beautiful—this is what I am told. I am not so vain as to claim beauty for myself. Joshua never told me I was beautiful but he didn’t need to. I could see what he saw in me by how he looked at me, how he looked into me, how he touched me, how he wanted me, openly, hungrily.

  As the years passed we became the closest of friends and then we became something more. Joshua made me laugh and I made him laugh, too. We talked and talked and talked. We ran together, dark mile after dark mile, our legs growing strong and lean, to stay warm, to sweat even though our damp skin quickly chilled into a thin layer of ice when we stopped to catch our breath. We remembered the sun, the shine of it, how on a clear day, especially out on the lake, it was like the gods themselves were breathing into us. In the days of darkness, something different was breathing into us, something less kind.

  The Corona continued to try to salvage the sun. They sent fire into the sky using a massive trebuchet but the higher that fire rose into the sky, the faster it burned out. They tried to capture light with lunar panels and then somehow convert that lunar energy into solar energy that could then be flung into the sky. The more ambitious members of the Corona suggested sending air machines to other planets, finding ways to steal the suns or moons or stars from other systems, willing to create a terrible imbalance in another world to set ours right. There were, eventually, sacrifices of Hightowers from other lands, but those slayings never accomplished anything more than filling the earth with more innocent blood. Splinter councils formed—each group more rabid than the next, more hell-bent on bringing back the sun, more obsessed with the cold and the darkness, choosing to see ruin where a different kind of life was possible.

  Mara Hightower and her only child chose to live that different kind of life. They did their best to be good citizens. Mara volunteered all her time to those who needed any help at all, tried to find some kind of redemption where, though she was faultless, there could be none. She never knew the touch of another man, no one would have her, not even the miners who felt a certain kindness toward her.

  When Mara and Joshua were summoned before the various councils, they appeared willingly. At one such appearance, Joshua, weary from the weight of his father’s burden, offered his life to the Corona, held his wrist forward, the blade of a knife piercing the thick green edge of a vein. As the Corona watched, he began to draw his blade along that vein, a thin line of blood beading in the blade’s wake. The council chamber was terrible and silent and still. I could not stay silent. I stood. I shouted, “Don’t you do this!” The chief councillor glared up at me, said I had no right to speak in the chamber, said I had been warned. I was not speaking to him. “Stop this,” I said, quieter now. One by one, the miners in the gallery stood and looked down at the members of the Corona until the chief councillor raised his hand. Joshua stopped, his blood slowly falling to the floor in bright red drops. Few people understood why the Corona spared Joshua, but I was in the gallery that day, surrounded by the silent, standing miners. I saw how the faces of the Corona darkened, how they tried to fold their bodies together to shield themselves from such quiet anger. It was plain to see they were terrified of what else they could lose to another man who was pushed too far, who got a wild need in him to do something that could not be undone.

  Many nights, after his mother fell asleep alone, her eyes wet, Joshua would steal over to my house. We sat on the sloping roof and stared at the moon, which, in the absence of the sun, swelled into a fragile beauty from which it was difficult to look away. We often saw people in the houses on either side of us doing the same thing, sitting on their roofs, their faces beaming upward. It was so very nice to see moonlight, and how we could see beneath its glow the memories of who we used to be. Somehow, staring at the moon made the days less dark, less cold.

  III.

  My husband asked me to marry him in the observatory where we worked. Night after night, we pored over ancient astronomical texts, hoping that if we studied the stars, if we understood their long, unfathomable history, we might find a way to bring back the sun. We used powerful telescopes and long-abandoned instruments from the past to stare into the sky, to find some slow-burning memory of the sun. Even though our days and nights were dark and cold, I felt bright and warm everywhere. Joshua was my sun. I was his.

  The night Joshua made his claim on me, I was staring at the moo
n, my eye pressed to the telescope. I marveled at how it made the heavens seem so near. The moon cast a blue glow over everything. I smelled Joshua as he neared, clean, so clean. He slid his arm around my waist and I covered his hand with mine, traced his knuckles. My heart pounded and there was a stirring between my thighs. I moaned softly. I wanted him as I always do, hungered for him deep inside me, my desire trying to claw its way out. Joshua pressed his lips against the back of my neck and I shivered, pulled away from the telescope and swiveled around in my seat, spread my thighs and pulled him against me, squeezed my thighs against his as I pulled his hand down my body, lower, lower.

  I grabbed his chin, pulling him closer so I could look into his eyes. “Why are your hands shaking? You have certainly put your hands upon me before.”