We Contain Multitudes

by Sarah Henstra

  You said someday we should take a workshop together, a class in glassblowing.

  “When?” I said. It was hard to picture a class like that with both of us in it.

  “Someday,” you said. “After high school? I don’t know.”

  For the space of maybe fifteen seconds, I was completely and perfectly happy. I mean imagine if you and I still knew each other someday and it wouldn’t be a big deal to sign up for a glassblowing class. Imagine if there was even such a class.

  Sincerely,

  AK

  PS: I just read your last letter, which you handed me this morning in the hall but I forgot to open until just now. On the back of the envelope you wrote the phone number of your grandma’s house up in Moorhead, since that’s where you’ll be staying over Christmas. I’m going to drop this letter off at your house tomorrow and see if you have another one for me by then too. I have to say I’m not really looking forward to the holidays this year. Two weeks seems like kind of a long time without any mail.

  Yes, you can write about it. Actually I want you to write about it. I mean it’s something I wish wasn’t part of our universe at all. But it’s in there. Maybe if you write about it I will quit feeling like it crowds everything else out.

  Saturday, December 19, 6 p.m.

  Dear Kurl,

  I’m going to go ahead and write about Thursday night in hopes you’ll give me permission, but I’ll wait to give you this letter until I hear back. Here goes. We were standing there in your bedroom, kissing, and I noticed that you suddenly weren’t quite kissing me back. You weren’t even really quite breathing. Somehow my clothes had come off but yours hadn’t. Your jeans were open but still on, and when I lifted the hem of your shirt, you pulled away.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Nothing,” you said, but you looked everywhere except at me. You leaned in to kiss me again, and I could sense the awful change as you tried to do it but didn’t really want to do it.

  I pulled back. “We don’t have to do anything. I just came over to see you, not to—”

  “No, I want to,” you said, but I spotted that panicky look in your eyes, the lockdown look.

  “Oh, no,” I said. I stepped away from you. “I swear I didn’t assume anything in particular would happen, when you asked me over here. It’s not a big deal.”

  In retrospect I will admit I was a little hurt—well, it was a little humiliating to be naked and not wanted—but I truly was resigned to the idea of getting dressed and going back downstairs to hang out, playing some mandolin tunes for you, talking more, maybe ordering pizza. I kicked my boxers free of my trousers and picked them up.

  “Don’t.” You snatched them from my hand. “I don’t want you to get dressed.”

  “What do you want me to do, then?”

  You paced a little circle on the rug, looking wildly around the bedroom. Then you opened a dresser drawer and took out my paisley scarf. “I want you to wear this,” you said.

  “Oh good, you found it.” I slung it around my neck. “You want me to wear it? Really?”

  “No, I mean over your eyes.”

  “You want me blindfolded?”

  “Yes. I mean, not like that—it’s not some kinky thing. It’s just… if you wear it, we can do anything you say, anything you want.”

  It’s possible I was curious what you had in mind, but mostly, I think, I just wanted to put you out of your misery. And maybe already then, at some subconscious level, I knew it without really knowing I knew—I knew what you were so worried I might see.

  Whatever the case, I held the scarf to my eyes and turned around for you to tie it behind my head. When it was done I said, “Now will you please take off your clothes?”

  I didn’t touch you, just listened for the sound of things hitting the floor. When I felt you closing in, I stepped back. “Now get on the bed.”

  And then I exercised my right to do whatever I wanted, which involved, first, jabbing you clumsily with my knees and elbows and apologizing repeatedly, until we were both laughing and cracking jokes about the not-sexiness of being blindfolded. Second, slowing down and telling you to lie still so I could figure out where my limbs ended and your body began. Third, sensing instead of seeing how you were responding to my touch, my kiss. Allowing my fingers and tongue to speak directly to your skin, to make you gasp and arch.

  Then we lay side by side. I let you take me into your hands, Kurl, and the blindfold made everything a surprise. I was never sure where I’d feel you next. You laughed at the way I quivered—“like an amoeba,” you said, “only louder.”

  But afterward, when I could think clearly again, I decided it was time to face up to reality. I’d received a few clues already, by then—I’d felt you wince once or twice when I was touching you, and I’d found a raised line of skin at the small of your back when you lifted your hips.

  I slipped the scarf off my eyes and blinked in the glare of the side-table light. Your chest was broad and smooth, scattered with a handful of freckles matching the one under your ear. I rested my cheek against it.

  “Roll over, Kurl,” I said.

  You noticed I’d taken off the scarf, and you stiffened. “What for?”

  “I need to see,” I said. I tried to keep my voice very gentle. “Blindfolding me isn’t going to be a long-term solution.”

  For a minute I thought you would shove me away and bolt from the bed. Your ribs leaped against mine with the force of your heartbeat, and you were staring at me with your lockdown look again.

  I was just about to retract. I was thinking, Jonathan, you moron, you are ruining, ruining everything!

  But then, abruptly, you rolled over onto your belly, your face turned away and hidden against your pillow.

  “What…?” I got my voice under control as soon as I could. I knew I needed to say something, and I knew it mattered to you what I said. “What… did this?” I finally managed.

  “Belt,” you said. Your voice was muffled by the pillow.

  I touched a scab under your shoulder blade. “What about this?”

  “Belt buckle.”

  There were red and blue marks, a few awful, scabbed-over gouges, but there were scars, too. Older wounds.

  “Fists, sometimes,” you said. “Occasionally a steel-toed boot.”

  I remembered something and lost my breath for a second. Then I said, “You weren’t in a fight, were you.”

  A whuff of sound into the pillow—amusement, almost. “No.”

  “I mean your face. That time in your car, the first time you touched me, when you were drunk.”

  A pause, as you realized what I was asking. “No,” you admitted.

  “Ever,” I said. “You don’t ever get in fights, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And that time your back was sore, and you missed school. It wasn’t sore muscles you were referring to, was it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  You half lifted your head from the pillow. “Okay?”

  “Not okay, okay. Just—” I stroked your hair. I splayed my hand at the top of your spine, my middle fingertip just touching the line of bristle on your neck where your hair stopped—“Okay, Kurl, I’m seeing this. I’m seeing you.”

  I touched some of the scars. I felt you getting more and more tense, trying to not react to my touch, trying to tough it out. I could tell you’d made a pact with yourself not to pull away, not to try to hide. I kissed the scar on your shoulder. I was crying, but it wasn’t pity, Kurl, I swear it.

  “Stop, now,” you said. “I can’t stand it anymore.”

  “You’re beautiful,” I said.

  “No. This does not make me beautiful.”

  “It’s part of you, though.” I traced an older, nearly healed bruise on your ribs, curving down to your hip bone.

  “It isn’t like laugh lines, for God’s sake. It’s ugly.”

  “It’s ugly what he does to you,” I agreed. “It’s hideous what he does.
But you, you are beautiful.”

  “Stop,” you begged. “Jo, just stop. Stop.”

  So I stopped, and I climbed on top of you and pressed my chest to your ravaged back. I tugged your wrists out to each side and pressed my arms along yours, pressed my temple to your cheek, pressed my knees into the backs of your thighs. We lay together like that a long time, until it felt as if there was no longer any skin between us, just bones twining like vines around each other’s bones.

  Yours,

  Jo

  Monday, December 21, 4 p.m.

  Dear Kurl,

  Your brother Mark is almost exactly how I’d pictured him from your description, except his curly hair is cut short now, and he is extremely, shockingly thin. Did you even know Mark dropped by your house the morning after I slept over? He said he was waiting on a VA check and hoped it had been delivered there by mistake. You didn’t wake up until after he’d left, Kurl, and I don’t think I remembered to tell you about his visit. Mark was surprised to see me playing the mando at your kitchen table, of course—fear not, I was fully dressed except for my socks—but I simply told him I’d been over the night before helping you prep for the SAT, and you’d fallen asleep midway through the session. I think he was more taken aback by the notion of you planning to take the SAT than by the notion of me helping you, although he did ask how old I am.

  I will admit I was a little nervous, talking to your brother. Thanks to the mandolin, though, the conversation moved swiftly to music. Mark told me about this banjo player named Davey at one of the bases in Afghanistan who taught everyone to sing “I’ll Fly Away” in four-part harmony. Kurl, did you know that your brother learned to play harmonica over there? “I did a mean little solo on that song,” he said. Sometimes they were ordered to patrol on amber status, and everyone would be so nervous they’d beg Mark to take out his harmonica just to break the tension. “Can you picture us idiots? Strolling around a combat zone playing the harmonica?”

  I asked him what amber status meant.

  “Cold weapons,” he said. “The magazine is loaded, but the safety is on and there’s no round chambered.”

  I thought of your letters about ambushes, surprise attacks, suicide bombers, and I found myself wondering whether guns would have been any help to Mark and his friends at all, in an explosive attack.

  “So did you do it?” I said. “Play the harmonica on patrol?”

  “Yep.” He didn’t smile, exactly, but I thought he sounded proud.

  I better go walk this down to the mailbox, since the pickup time posted on it is 5 p.m. I looked up your zip code online, and I think Lyle has stamps somewhere in the basket above the fridge. I wonder if you’ll even receive this letter before Christmas, given the holiday postal crunch. We really are authentic pen pals now, aren’t we, Kurl?

  Yours,

  Jo

  Thursday, December 24, 10 p.m.

  Dear Little Jo,

  Merry Christmas. Do you know about Polish Christmas? I mean I don’t see us as all that traditional or ethnic in other ways. But Christmas at the Kurlansky house is very, very Polish.

  First is the fish. The morning of Christmas Eve I go with my mom to the deli and line up with twenty other people to choose a fish from the tank. Mom has had the bathtub filled with water since the night before so the chlorine will evaporate out of it. None of us can shower Christmas Eve morning. One of those things that would be weird and irritating except it’s been true since I was born.

  So our fish swims around in its new home for six or seven hours, and then Uncle Viktor chops its head off and filets it. With the fish, we eat this beet soup. Borscht. And pierogi, of course, and this syrupy drink with fruit soaked in booze called kompot.

  Aunt Agata gets dropped off on Christmas Eve by a wheelchair van from her nursing home. She’s actually Uncle Viktor’s aunt, my dad’s aunt. My great-aunt. Aunt Agata is bent over so far in her wheelchair that she has to lift her brows and open her eyes wide to look up at you. She always seems surprised and sort of skeptical. She just sits there and has to wait for people to move her around.

  Sylvan and Julia, his girlfriend, and Mark came for Christmas dinner too. Sylvan announced that he and Julia are getting married next September, so there were lots of toasts and we all drank a bit more kompot than usual. Dessert is noodles with this sweet caraway sauce. It sounds disgusting but it’s delicious. I’ll have to make it for you sometime, Jo.

  After supper was cleaned up and gifts were done, we all sort of sat around wondering what to talk about. Aunt Agata’s arms looked more blue than before the meal, so I went up and got my quilt for her.

  Sylvan says, “You shouldn’t let her have contact with your bedding. Those nursing homes are crawling with bedbugs.” And Julia shushes him.

  Meanwhile I’m not really listening to the conversation because I’m thinking about that quilt on my bed and you with your scarf tied over your eyes. That quilt with you lying across it.

  “I know you,” Aunt Agata suddenly says to me, out of nowhere. Staring straight up at me suddenly with those peeled-back eyes. My heart pretty much stops for a second because I’m thinking what she means is that she knows about you—about me and you, Jo. Which is an important lesson in not letting myself drift off like that into thinking about you.

  But of course that’s not what Aunt Agata means. She says, “You’re Zladko’s boy.”

  And now it’s not just me tensing up. For a second everyone’s dead quiet. We’re all holding our breath because nobody has mentioned my father’s name all through dinner, all through this whole Christmas. No one has said his name aloud like that, in front of other people, in ages. Especially not in front of Uncle Viktor.

  “You’re the smart one, aren’t you?” Aunt Agata says, and she turns to my mom. “Isn’t this the smart one, Ewa?”

  And now everyone sort of chuckles, heh heh, crazy old lady et cetera, because Ewa was my dad’s and Uncle Viktor’s older sister, who died before my parents even met. Aunt Agata says to me, “Such a smart little boy you were. So tall, now!” And then she looks down at the quilt in her lap, and a few minutes later she’s asleep, and that’s it.

  Uncle Vik falls asleep for a while too, until Mark stands up and turns off the TV. You never turn off the TV like that when Uncle Vik is asleep in case it wakes him up. And sure enough, he wakes up and stomps out to the garage, which is where he keeps his vodka. Mark doesn’t know about any of this, of course, about any of Uncle Vik’s habits or the rules for how to handle him.

  We go to midnight mass every year, but this time Mark says he has to bow out, because believe it or not Christmas Eve is one of their busiest nights at the Texas Border. And then Sylvan and Julia do some whispering and say they can’t come to mass either. My mom is upset by this, tears in her eyes and sniffling as they start gathering their stuff. Saying, “No, no, I’m just so glad you were here for dinner, thank you, merry Christmas.”

  Looking back I realize it was her being upset that got him upset, probably. Uncle Vik. I mean she was already upset by Uncle Vik being out in the garage on Christmas Eve, and then he came back in and saw her crying and it pissed him off I guess.

  The van was coming for Aunt Agata soon, so I started steering her chair around the coffee table. And Uncle Viktor starts in on me. “Look at him; can’t you just see his future? Some kinda nursemaid. A nurse, right? But the kind that don’t gotta go to school for it.” He’s laughing and laughing. “Little blue uniform, and them paper slippers. I can just see it; it’s perfect.”

  I’m almost to the hall with Aunt Agata. “Surgeons wear those slippers, actually,” I say. “In the operating room. Because they’re sterile.”

  Uncle Vik is up like a shot and follows me down the hall. “Don’t be smart,” he says, and then he surprises me with a punch to the ear that sends my skull into the hall mirror. The impact makes a long crack in the glass.

  Aunt Agata tries to see what’s going on, but she can’t turn that far in her chair. She’s just stari
ng sideways at the wall beside her, and suddenly it is the most awful thing I’ve ever seen. That frightened craning neck. Those wild eyes. I mean she can’t even turn around to face what might be coming.

  My mom follows us out from the living room to see what the noise was and then backs up again fast. Backs up and veers into the kitchen.

  I turn around and run. Well, I sort of stumble because my head is exploding with pain. Straight up the stairs to my room.

  There’s something that happens to me in these situations, Jo.

  I mean you know. I’m writing this story differently because you know, now. I’m aware that just because you know about Uncle Viktor and me doesn’t mean you want to hear all the gory details from now on. But being able to write the story unedited, writing it straight like it happened, like it’s happening, feels different. Faster. Not easier but faster.

  Something happens to me when I’m alone and hurt. I can’t sit down or lie down. I stand there in my room without moving for hours sometimes. Sometimes all night. Sometimes I go for a run instead because even though it hurts more, it’s movement at least. That’s what I did that day I ended up at your house when you weren’t home, that time Lyle noticed I was acting squirrelly and gave me weed to calm me down. What happens is a belief that if I rest I’ll die. If I sleep I won’t wake up. In words like this it sounds ridiculous but there aren’t words when it happens. There’s only the belief.

  Sylvan knocks and then opens the bedroom door before I can say anything. “What the hell happened to the hall mirror?” he says.

  “It was an accident,” I say, “when I brought the chairs up.” We hadn’t needed any extra chairs from the basement but I figured Sylvan wouldn’t have bothered to count.

  He says, “If Mom’s Christmas wasn’t ruined before, it is now. I told her I’d take it with me, get it fixed, but you’re paying for it.”