An Act of Love

by Nancy Thayer

  Until they lived on the farm, Emily had thought her body was all one soft and supple piece, like a wide ribbon of flesh, but once she was around the men with their knobby, bony, hairy limbs, her own body had transformed itself into parts, parts that needed to be kept covered, parts that suddenly possessed undertones of meaning. Even her clothes took on different significance. Suddenly she found herself sick with mortification if she left her underpants on the bathroom floor instead of in the clothes hamper, and now Emily remembered a humiliating time when she first moved to the farm when she had gotten all agitated to discover her clothes in the hamper all shoved together with Bruce’s. It had seemed too intimate to bear, yet impossible to explain in words. Her mom had come through that time, though. Her mom had understood. She’d gotten each person a plastic clothes basket for them to keep in their rooms, and she made them help her do their own laundry separately in spite of the fact that Owen complained it was not energy efficient.

  Yet after that first year of getting accustomed to the males, a transformation had occurred. Instead of being suspicious of Bruce, Emily had become his ally. And he hers.

  She remembered one summer morning, opening the bathroom door to see Bruce with his jeans down around his ankles as he bent over with a washcloth in his bloody hands, blotting the blood on both lacerated knees. His white Jockey shorts had bagged around his butt. His hands had been bleeding, too.

  Hey, retard, ever heard of knocking?

  Ever heard of locking the door? And then, Are you all right?

  Sure. I fell out of the loft.

  Wow. You aren’t supposed to be there.

  They looked at each other.

  They connected.

  Don’t tell Dad and Linda.

  I won’t. They were conspirators. I’ll get Bactine from the kitchen cupboard. What was it like?

  It’s cool. I’m trying to rig up a rope swing. An appraising look. I bet if you ask Dad, he’ll let us.

  Now she said to Dr. Bug-Man, “We were friends, for a while.”

  “Buddies?”

  Hurry up, Horse breath!

  “We had good games. Make-believe games, dress-up, making forts and secret hideaways in the woods. One summer we dragged stuff from the attic, blankets, pillows, dishes, a Styrofoam chest for food, and made a hideout near a bunch of big rocks. And we lugged out old bales of hay and covered them with branches and leaves to make a tunnel we had to crawl through to get into it. All summer we sort of, like, acted out different fantasies.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, like rich orphans hiding from kidnappers, scientists hiding from the government, good aliens hiding from bad scientists …” Emily flushed with pleasure at the memory. “That was the best summer. We invented these elaborate signals we could use in front of Owen and Linda and they wouldn’t know what we were saying.”

  “And what were you saying?”

  “Just dumb stuff like Meet in one hour, or Don’t say a word. We created money from Owen’s sacred number two pencils—that’s what he uses to write with.” She laughed. “We were so into it! We kept a record in a notebook of who managed to steal or smuggle a pencil from the house and whoever did got to be the chief that week. Owen used to go apeshit, roaring through the house, ‘Where in the hell have all my pencils gone?’ ” She laughed again. “I can’t believe I can remember all that.” She made a fist, touched her thumb to her nose, then to her mouth. “That means Don’t say a word.”

  “So you took turns being the leader?”

  “Sometimes. Usually Bruce was the leader. It wasn’t a male-female thing, it was that I was younger. He just knew more than I did. Had a better imagination.”

  She was in a pocket of memory now, the memory surrounded her. How often she and Bruce had lain together in their hideaway, plotting. They’d raced through the woods on secret missions. Hidden in trees, spying on Owen and Linda weeding the garden. If Linda finished tying up the tomatoes before Owen had mown the walking paths around the garden plots, that was a message to hide the secret amulet. If Celeste came plodding over on her horse Rock with Bubalu ambling along, they had to run as fast as they could through the woods and over the pasture to her place, where they retrieved the stolen key to the government code, cleverly disguised in the shape of an apple or a berry. Once they’d even braved Celeste’s house—she always left the doors unlocked—and unable to find a pencil, had stolen a ballpoint pen.

  Her skin had been a mosaic of scratches, bruises, and scabs that summer. When she ran, her breath, Bruce’s breath, filled the air around them, became one breath filling her ears, her mouth, her chest. One time she tore apart one of his shirts to make into a pretend tourniquet, which she wrapped around his arm after some imaginary injury. His chest had been like hers, ribs and bones, knobby, his skin as warm and familiar as Maud’s fur. When they lay together in their fort, she couldn’t distinguish between his smell, her smell, and the smell of the hay and leaves and mildewing old blankets. He didn’t smile much but when he did it was like a comet blazing through the night.

  Dr. Brinton broke into her reverie. “You and Bruce didn’t fight?”

  She switched gears. “Of course we fought. All the time. Bruce could be way mean.” Another grin possessed her. “But I could be mean, too.”

  “Did he ever hit you?”

  “Sure. I hit him, too. When we were kids. Sometimes we fought just for something to do when we were really bored, like in the car. But when we were kids, we were, like, really close.” The good walls of memory were beginning to dissolve. “I thought we’d always be close.”

  “When did it change?”

  “You know once,” Emily continued, not hearing him, “once Bruce did the coolest thing. When I was eleven, I was dying to see Bon Jovi when they played at the Centrum but Mom and Owen didn’t want to take me. They said it was too much trouble, and none of my friends could go and they didn’t want me going alone, and I was, like, suicidal. And Bruce told Owen and Mom that he wanted to see them, too, even though he thought Bon Jovi was gruesome. So they drove us there and he went with me. That was really cool.”

  “Tell me what happened when Bruce went away to Hedden.”

  Now the easy memories totally vanished. “I missed him,” she confessed. “A lot. The house was so empty. Mom drove me everywhere after school to see friends, but it was a drag; it all had to be arranged, everyone lived so far apart.”

  “Did you two write? Talk on the phone?”

  “I guess maybe I wrote him a letter. He never wrote me. He was, like, totally into his new world. I mean, when he came home that first Thanksgiving, he was like a million years older. Then in the summer he started having guys come visit, and it was like they all thought I was just a baby.”

  “And when you went to Hedden?”

  Emily looked away. “What about it?”

  “How did you feel about Bruce then?”

  Shame beat against her chest and fluttered in her throat. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  “Why not? What do you have to hide?”

  Emily hugged herself tight. No matter how clever the shrink was, she would not tell him that. Not him. Not anyone. It was too confusing. Too humiliating.

  “Emily, Dr. Travis tells me that your stepbrother raped you.”

  She stared at the floor, mouth locked.

  “Could we discuss this?”

  She did not answer but began picking at a bandage around her thumb. She could slide her thumbnail under the rubbery covering and find the raw, opened cut. She could dig her nail into that open, angry flesh, hard.

  “You know, if you felt physically attracted to Bruce, that doesn’t mean you caused the rape.”

  She shook her head. She whispered, “I’m guilty.”

  And no matter what he said to her, she did not reply but sat staring at the floor, letting Dr. Bug-Man’s words blur into buzzes and drones until at last he sighed and rose and said, “Okay, Emily. Let’s call it a day.”

  Chapter Fifteen
/>
  After breakfast Saturday Owen grabbed his jacket and leather work gloves and headed outdoors. The fence around the perimeter of his land needed checking before winter set in; he would do it today while his thoughts were clotted and frayed. Often when he was blocked on a book, a day spent in strenuous physical labor provided him with a new twist, the necessary scene, right down to the dialogue, as if all along the material had been tucked away in his muscles, and had needed only a sufficient amount of outdoor exertion to free it.

  Perhaps, if he worked hard enough, by the end of this day his mind would find some ordering principle to guide his thoughts about Emily and Bruce.

  He started up the sputtering old tractor, drove it out of the barn, then hauled the flatbed wagon out and hooked it on. From the shed he took a roll of barbed wire, a dozen metal fence posts, his sledgehammer, the box of metal brackets, the wire cutters. He threw them all on the flatbed, climbed onto the tractor, and headed out to the far pasture.

  The grass all around was tall and silvered with frost, the air clean and crisp. Owen felt in his element here, clear-minded, able. Beneath him his tractor rumbled and chugged, an ancient but reliable machine, which he loved as if it were human.

  He arrived at the far corner of his land. Here the fence sagged in several places and from the barbs, tufts of cinnamon or tan hair hung; his horses and Celeste’s liked to rendezvous here, standing nose to nose like gossipy neighbors, leaning toward each other, the barbed wire not really making much of a statement against their tough hides. Owen took off the old wire, cut new wire and strung it, then walked the rest of the fence line, checking the tension of the wires, the steadiness of each post.

  He liked the way the ground kept its hold on the posts: this is mine, and I will not let go. This fiercely, this firmly, had Owen’s grandfather and Owen’s father possessed the farm. It was McFarland land. The farm now belonged to Owen; someday it would be Bruce’s. Every acre, every rock and tree that someday would be his son’s had once been fenced in by Owen’s grandfather, years ago, decades ago. They had never sold any of the land, and if Owen had anything to do with it, they never would. It was like a living thing to him. He was its guardian. It was his responsibility and his refuge.

  Thank God Linda understood this. Thank God she was happy here.

  Michelle had hated the farm. Hated it. He’d known that from the start, and it had been pigheaded of him to insist that they live here, although at the time, when his parents died and he and Michelle were both starving young artists, it had seemed the solution to all their financial problems.

  But Michelle thrived in cities, among people, anywhere she could be seen and admired. Even her artistic creations, brittle, witty, colorful dioramas, were all urban scenes: elaborately detailed miniatures of public sites and buildings—the Boston Public Gardens, Harvard Square—with real faces cut from magazines and painstakingly affixed next to mythological creatures dressed in human garb. Centaurs. Griffins. Gargoyles. She hadn’t enjoyed the company of real animals; she’d hated dogs, cats, horses.

  While he generally preferred animals to people.

  Their marriage had been doomed from the start. They should have known that. Perhaps they did, and if they did, they reveled in even that. They both were proud, ambitious, rebellious. No one was going to tell them how to live their lives.

  They’d been young. They hadn’t known a thing. When Michelle got pregnant, they’d thought it was all some kind of lark, one more clever thing they could do, something new to celebrate. Perhaps if they’d stayed in Boston it would have worked out. They could have hired a nanny; Michelle could have rented a studio space so she could escape the cries and demands of an infant. But they’d been on the farm, and isolated. Owen had known Michelle was miserable. He hadn’t been surprised when she’d left.

  He’d been surprised at the happiness he felt after their divorce. All at once life had seemed reasonable, orderly in a way it hadn’t been for years. He’d hired a local woman, Elaine Cumbie, to help with the cleaning, the cooking, and caring for Bruce. She was a genial woman, plump in the grandmotherly way that most grandmothers no longer were, and she adored Bruce and infused a real warmth into their home. Her death three years ago had been a great loss, but Owen knew, and Elaine knew, that she’d made all the difference during those early years when Owen was bumbling through his life, trying to be both parents to a boy of three while at the same time keeping up with the farm work and writing his novels in order to keep everything going, to buy food for him and Bruce, oats for the horses, to pay the doctor and the vet, to buy clothes and toys for Bruce and gas and oil for the tractor. The farm no longer provided any kind of income, only fields of sweet alfalfa and grasses for the horses in the summer and hay in the winter. Firewood for the house. Rocky hills crowded with glorious old maples waiting for Riley Ryan to tap every spring for the syrup he boiled down and sold in his store. He gave Owen thirty percent of the profit, a whopping five hundred dollars a year.

  So Owen had to work hard. What else was new? His son had to learn the realities of life. Owen had built a miniature desk for Bruce and put it in the kitchen with a child’s chair, next to the kitchen table where he wrote. He’d stocked the bottom of the kitchen cupboard with paper and crayons and coloring books and stickers, and while Owen worked, Bruce “worked,” too. Every day they went out for walks, or clambered up over Babe’s bare back for a ride. They planted a vegetable garden and weeded it. They swam in the pond and fished in it. They made snowmen and skated on the pond. They watched television together and every night Owen read to his son before bed. They subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches and spaghetti and fruit and an occasional full-course meal at Celeste’s or the Ryans or the Burtons. And Elaine had always been around.

  A child could have a much worse life. Owen loved his son past telling; Bruce always knew that. Owen had always endeavored to be a good father, and to this moment he believed he had succeeded.

  Still, he couldn’t kid himself. He loved solitude. Silence. For a little boy it must have seemed bleak much of the time. He was aware that he could lose himself in fugues of pensiveness. Linda often accused him of enjoying his melancholy and Owen knew that Bruce would not have known how to interpret that.

  There had been many winter days when Bruce as a little boy was stuck with his father in the kitchen while cold wind rattled the windows and the ancient furnace in the dank basement clanked and moaned away to itself like a beleaguered phantom. Owen would have been lost in his work, deep in thought. Bruce would have been dutifully sitting at his little desk, being quiet, being good. He was always free to go to his room to play but it would have been a lonely time for a little boy and in the winter the halls and all the rooms of the house were layered in shadows. Bruce seldom stayed upstairs by himself when he was young.

  Linda always said that if any two females were ever meant to enter the lives of any two males, Emily and she were destined for Owen and Bruce. “We were like The Sound of Music bursting in on a Strindburg play,” she’d say, laughing. And it was true that the females brought laughter and color and movement and life into the males’ lives.

  In return, he had made Linda and Emily happy.

  At least Linda, that much he knew with complete certainty. He had changed her life as much as she had his, perhaps more, and more significantly. He was in his deepest heart profoundly proud of what he had brought to her life as her lover, her husband.

  When he first met Linda, he had been attracted to her immediately by her ease and pleasure in the world, by her full, rich, musical laugh, her sumptuous beauty, so different from Michelle’s gaunt frame and cool poise.

  Yet when finally he took her to bed, he’d been surprised by her reserve. She hadn’t wanted the lights on, and she’d been so passive he’d been puzzled. It was a conundrum, how she could cuddle her daughter and carelessly wrap her arm around Bruce’s shoulders, hugging him against her, yet come into their bed with a shyness that was almost a dread.

  He’d been in lo
ve with her from the start, but her sexual reticence concerned him. He didn’t know if a long-term relationship would last with what was unspoken between them, and so he broached the subject one night as they lay together after an especially unsuccessful moment of lovemaking. She had come to bed with him eagerly, then turned into a different creature, something spiritless, and he could not bear it.

  “Did you enjoy that?”

  They were lying in the dark, spoon-style, and he felt her shrink in his arms.

  “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No. No, not at all. I, well obviously I enjoyed myself. But you seem …”

  Her voice was very small when she said, “Perhaps I’m frigid.”

  He considered this in silence. He must be careful. He didn’t want to insult her. “Have you been with many men?”

  “Only Simon.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, why should I kid about that?”

  “It’s just that … you’re so lovely. Men must have wanted to take you to bed.”

  “I married Simon when I was twenty. Divorced him when I was twenty-seven. Emily was only two. I was teaching freshman English at community colleges, and tutoring foreign language students, and trying to write my second novel at night. I didn’t have a lot of time or energy for men.”

  “But still …” He went quiet as he realized that she was weeping. He felt her ribcage shudder beneath his arm.

  He tried to turn her to face him, but she pulled away.

  “Linda, I’m sure you’re not frigid. Let me show you.”