I took another sip of wine, wondering how it would make me feel—not my head, but my mind. I was conducting an experiment: would I be scolded for each sip, would I get away with it and feel nothing? The wine went down smoothly, cool and buttery, so I took another sip and then another, waiting.
Then I felt something next to my bare arm: cloth—crisp, loose white cloth was what I saw, and I turned to see the young men standing close to me, so close. The one next to me was young, a freshman or sophomore, by his smooth, dewy skin and blinking, insecure blue eyes. His hair was dark, over-gelled, his posture stiff. He held his beer awkwardly, as if for the first time. Next to him was another man, also blue-eyed, fairer, perhaps even younger, drinking a glass of champagne. The two of them were dressed in more conservative attire than the others—ironed white shirts and two-color ties, pleated dress pants left over from the last family wedding or graduation, and shiny black slip-on dress shoes. They didn’t look like art students; they didn’t appear to belong at all, so I gulped down my second glass of wine, turned to them and spoke.
“Are you in the art program?”
The dark one, who swayed a bit, told me the truth. Freshman, he said, looking to his friend for approval. Undeclared freshman. He smiled with bright white teeth, the corners of his eyes wrinkle-free.
We heard there was this party.
Ah, I said, making sure to display my approval. My head felt fuzzy. “I am an art major,” I said. “And I don’t feel like I belong here at all.” I lifted my empty glass. Another, please.
I had thought I would go to this party to expand my mind, to speak to people of my own kind, to escape my little world. But I liked these two young men who spoke simply and didn’t want to stand around and interpret art, who wanted to small talk and be open and natural and free their identities with me.
The dark one lifted his hand to my cheek, fingers brushing. I felt myself flush, tremble, felt the vein in my neck pulsing. My stomach felt empty, convulsing, and as I reached up to take his hand away I couldn’t seem to reach it, didn’t want to reach it as it slid down the back of my neck. He pressed his fingers against my skin, his thumb kneading my tendons like soft dough. I closed my eyes and he spoke.
Want to take a walk through the arboretum?
I followed him and his friend, but at a distance, through acres of apple and pear trees, through the hedge maze, the rose gardens. The sky seemed more open, bluer than ever. The air was crisp and delicious, and feeling good helped me forget.
We dodged around bushes and ran down hills, and it didn’t matter. When we jumped down from four-foot stone walls, tumbled in the thicket of tall grass and milkweed, it didn’t matter. And while I played with those fresh young blue-eyed boys, I made sure not to think about what was growing inside me.
Not until I felt the pain.
When I tumbled down that final hill all was silent—there was nothing but grass around me, green and late-summer brown—tall as corn, it seemed, then the empty blue sky above. I waited for a cloud, a bird, a sun—anything to move into the cold, blue space. I thought about the spiders and ants and other creatures that might burrow into my hair—how for the first time, I welcomed them. And as I lay there I saw the blue-eyed boys again, this time their faces hovering, asking Are you all right? But now they were faces without eyes—only holes to look through to that blue sky beyond. Then the pains came, and I hated them, and prayed Seth wouldn’t think badly of me. For the very first time I prayed for our baby, but I was too late.
An accident, I later told him, a simple trip and tumble.
What I didn’t tell him was that I had frolicked in grass, played and jumped because two strangers had asked me to. They were boys I knew nothing about, except that their eyes were blue and their hands were warm as they guided me through tall, caressing grasses. Their simple touch had consumed me, and I had melted. And they were not beautiful or deep-voiced or perfect—they were not husbands-to-be. They were no one.
Only touches, nothing more. But how destructive a touch can be.
“No baby,” the doctors at the hospital told us, and Seth’s face caved in, eyes melted like wax. But he never had to feel that surge, that vacuum of pain. He never had to lie in that strange, sweating meadow like I did.
Was it the wine that made you fall? he asked as I lay beneath the bright white hospital lights, and I wondered if he was angry, if it was something else he was saying with his eyes. What were you thinking? he must have been saying. But I could only think of my empty soul now, and I didn’t answer.
It wasn’t the wine, I finally told him. And don’t you worry, Seth, I added. We’ll marry anyway, just like I promised.
part eleven
buried things
{renee
thirty-eight
There was one night after Angus came home when he didn’t speak to her at all. There wasn’t the usual Hello and How are you?, the pretending they weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend. On this night, neither of them needed to speak.
As he smiled at her from across the room the music seemed to vibrate and shoot up through her legs to her stomach. And her eyes teased as they moved in his direction, passing over the salmon-colored fake-marble tile, the clusters of folding metal chairs. He smiled just barely, and slowly glided away from his group of greasy boys without being noticed. His black bangs parted away from his face as he approached, as if wind was blowing at him, and suddenly he was standing in front of her, so close that he almost was hovering above.
He rested his hand gently on the back of her bare arm, and his head motioned for them to move on, somewhere—away from the crowd, toward the darkness beyond the glaring red exit sign.
Without hesitation she went with him, and as she left through the door she turned back to see Adeline in the corner of the room, her eyes flicking here and there while she talked to some man—perhaps checking for other men, checking to see who was watching her. For a second it seemed Adeline’s eyes had stopped on Renee and Angus, and that her brow had furrowed, lips grown concerned. If she had seen them, Renee wondered, would she have even acknowledged it? Would her ego take over and make her believe she had not?
Renee hoped no one else saw as Angus led her out through the door and down the walkway, toward the grass outside the building. He didn’t speak, and when she began to say something herself—something about the beautiful late-evening light or the air or the moon coming up, he turned and hushed her with his gentle finger, not against his lips but against hers. A thing she saw in movies, the man hushing the woman, telling her to wait; the woman obeying, succumbing, waiting for something. For what? she always had wondered.
For something good, she knew now—to be taken into their powerful arms, into their mouths. This was real, no fairy tale—the fact that her words could stop at his command, that her questions could wait, that her body would obey. What lay ahead didn’t matter, except that it be his wish.
And then she did not think. She only followed, gripping his strong hand now, over the lawn and through the gardens in back of the youth center, through tall bushes to a path beyond the light of the building. There was a different light ahead of them—from the moon, over the water beyond the woods, slivers of light through the trees.
They stepped beyond the trees and into this new light. He stopped, taking her upper arm again with one hand, then reaching for her other arm, turning her toward him.
She could see the silhouette of his hair blowing around his face, and just the bluish edge of skin, the gloss of his eyes. His arms pulled her toward him, and she could feel the ruffle of her blouse touch against his shirt, then her body, her abdomen, all melting together and with the earth below her feet. She heard the ocean, louder and louder, as if they were in it, the water as warm as their blood.
His face moved toward her, and his mouth was there somewhere in the darkness; it came in warm and soft like a flower petal, not to her lips but to her c
heek, pressing in with suction then pulsing to her mouth. His mouth opened and grappled with hers; hers fought back, welcomed back. She thought of the sea and them in it, underwater creatures tangled with each other, mouths open to let in salty water. Through her half-open eyes she saw his in the moonlight, the whites glazed, shiny like eggs, the blue iris paler, icier—a frozen pond, half rolled into his lids, abominable and enticing. She saw the sea creatures, the octopus—all arms and a mouth, tightening, engulfing; her own body wrestled in its grip. And she did not want to get away.
He pulled his face away from her and took a long breath, pointed to the water. She did not want to leave this spot in the moonlight, but she followed. They ran down the path through the woods, her heartbeat frantic, her body a life of its own. At the bottom of the path was the dock across from the jetty, a small boat. They got in it and pushed off, onto the calm water, away from the lights of the dock.
He rowed to a dark spot on the calm ocean, just below the trees where there was a hint of moonlight—just enough to see the edges of skin, the gloss of eyes. The air was cool, but his hands were warm and supple against her skin, and the flat, blanket-covered bottom of the boat was soft as a pillow. The dark, starlit universe was above her, and as his body moved she unexpectedly opened and heaved, as if giving birth. She breathed in the raw, salty air, and was no longer inside her body. She was a ripe, freshly split fruit, opened beneath a sky of pulsating stars, and a moon that occasionally hid behind a thin, milky cloud.
jenna}
thirty-nine
I lie in the master bedroom, in the double bed in which Seth and I once slept, keeping my eyes open to the swirling patterns in the plaster ceiling, because if I close them I see Seth again. I look to the top of the bureau, where the photograph of Angus stands, just next to another dead man. Angus and Seth, both staring out at me, crying for me to save them.
Seth’s picture was taken early last fall from the small balcony of our Cambridge apartment, and in it he looks directly at the camera with steely, shadowed eyes. His face is stark white, overexposed—with a creepy focus that seems to follow me when I move. He appears tired, a bit agitated in his tight, impatient posture, constricted by the white railing surrounding him. The photograph was never one of my favorites while Seth was alive; I always thought he looked cross, impenetrable, as opposed to other photos in which he’s all soft shadows and warm eyes—the sweet, more innocent Seth. After he died, the sweet photos changed to sad, vulnerable ones; suddenly he was a pitifully abandoned man. Now I prefer this photo, this tired, aggravated Seth whose eyes don’t leave me. The eyes staring hard, as if he knew when the picture was taken that I one day would look at it and feel this pain. He seems watchful, fighting back at the world.
At me.
A portrait of Mom and Dad is also on the bureau, and Elisabeth’s glamour shot, in which she looks glossy and strange and ten years older than she really is. Angus doesn’t belong here, but oddly his face seems no more foreign than the others do: a pseudo psychologist mother, a father with his dream world in the basement, and a little sister who—unlike me—is high-powered, confident, and ready for the thrill ride of life ahead of her.
I move into my old bedroom, where the new wallpaper will go up today. I have picked out a lovely paisley print in rust-on-vanilla, so different from what used to be in this room. Different is what I need.
I lie on my back, look up to this ceiling. There’s a whole world in here; I could get lost in all this pine, in its knots and crevices. There’s an eye in the wood, a mouth even. I think the mouth may be moving now, speaking to me. It tells me how Mom would lie terrified in her bed in this very room, perhaps praying there was no baby growing inside. Baby Jenna—developing in this very room, feeding off of her insides, and off any residue from these walls, these floors, any breeze that might have blown through the window. Maybe Mom was thinking what I sometimes think—that suffering is enough to make it better. Suffering, the thing that makes one a martyr.
These are the same knots of pine Mom looked at as her belly grew, as she thought of love and death, as she thought of her destiny. What was it like for Mom as she lay in this room? Did she have doubts and fears at the tender age of fifteen? Did she ever hear from Angus again? And when Angus died, what was that like? Was something new born inside her, as guilt was born when Seth passed on?
There are things I want to ask her, things I want to tell her. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m confused and seek answers, if I want to shock her and shake her, or if it’s simply because my head is swimming. I just know I can’t remember ever feeling this way before.
I’m drifting; I’m not focused. I keep straying from the memory, trying so hard to forget how all the ethics I knew and firmly stood by could be tested, slaughtered in a heartbeat. Trying to forget what weakness I am capable of, what horrors. I had thought that suffering would do the trick—that guilt plus suffering equaled redemption.
But this one won’t go away.
I need to tell someone—not just the conscience inside of me, but someone who might understand this level of pain. I need to talk to my mother.
I lift my head and see the telephone back across the hall on the nightstand. I imagine myself dialing, Elisabeth answering in her not-a-care-in-the-world tone, my nerves getting the best of me. “Just wanted to say hello,” I end up saying to her. Can I do this or not?
I feel dazed, hot. I don’t know what time it is. My fingers feel numb, and my hands are smothering, as if in rubber gloves. There is a fuzzy sensation within the bones of my arms, my legs, a buzzing in my skull. I sit up and see the scraps and glue surrounding me, hear the breath of a quick laugh, my own.
I pick up the brush. It is the only brush I can handle now, one to coat heavily, to make things stick. I slather today’s canvas—my once-peach, once-green wall, with my fresh can of glue. But there are no flies to land on it, no mosquitoes even—anything I would feel indifference about killing, adapting into my artwork. So I simply slather it on—light here, a bit heavier there; I’ll spread it around. The smell of glue is sickening as I press the paper flat to the wall.
I feel faint. Outside the window there is sun, a blue, rippling heat—or is it just the curvy old glass? It is only spring, I tell myself. Can there be such heat in spring? Sweat pours down my forehead, down the back of my neck, between my breasts, and my hands are full so I cannot wipe. I need to open a window.
I open the one next to me, move across the hall to the master bedroom, to the other one, to get some air flow. I moved too fast, because my vision is black around the edges, my head throbbing with pain. There is the window in front of me, the nightstand phone in front of it. My hand lands on the receiver, but it doesn’t feel like my hand because I can barely feel anything, but it is on the receiver, as if acting on its own, without my brain commanding it. I pick it up and dial the first number I have pre-set, the one that comes well before 911 on the list, and the voice that answers isn’t Elisabeth at all but is that soft, motherly voice I sometimes confused with Aunt Adeline’s, asking over and over, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”
part twelve
the umbilical
{renee
forty
In his next letter Angus wrote that it must not happen again, not for a long, long time. He could be arrested, he told her, thrown in jail. But she had known this already. They both had known. Why, she wondered, had they not been so practical before?
They would still meet, he promised, when he came home. The same places, the same times, as if nothing had changed. He would be back in two and a half weeks, and he would be with her. In the meantime he would keep writing. He would give her the address of the new farm at which he could be reached. It wasn’t at all like Adeline had said, that they leave afterwards—that they take advantage and move on. Angus would stay.
Perhaps he loved her.
***
At the beginning o
f July, Renee’s period didn’t come like it should have. Never before had she wanted so badly to see a little bloodstain, a little tinge of color on white. But her panties stared back at her with their whiteness. For nights she panicked, lying in bed staring at the pine ceiling in her bedroom. So all she could do was wait for his next letter, wait for this new address, and for her period to come.
She wondered what she would say to him if it never came. He would be as terrified as she was. And he would be in trouble. So while she prayed for a stain on her clean white panties, she waited for her letters. And suddenly, Adeline also was interested in the mail.
Each day as Renee left for her kitchen job at Sable Oaks, Adeline sat down on the front doorstep, waiting for it. She would make sure to say what she was doing—just sitting there waiting, each day while Renee left for work. And Renee would always miss the mail truck because she didn’t arrive home until three in the afternoon. Anything for me? she would ask as she walked in the front door, and Adeline would chuckle and just say no. She would just sit there with her smirk and a chuckle, just so Renee would wonder.
So she never would know for sure.
The letters from Angus had stopped coming. Letters that had arrived twice a week, sometimes three times a week no longer were coming, and Renee could feel a heavy weight in her stomach pulling her down.
The world was caving in on her; so she prayed it was a mistake—that her period would come and her letters would come, while she waited for Angus to come home again. But after eight more days the panties still were clean. She was fifteen years old, her whole life ahead of her. All alone and in need of help.
The One True Ocean Page 21