Red Hood

by Elana K. Arnold

  Your eyes scan, your ears listen. You wait.

  Ba-ba-ba-bum, ba-ba-ba-bum.

  It is coming.

  Your feet are hip-wide, right slightly in front of left, branch swung up over your left shoulder, like a baseball bat. Though you have been running, though your heart has been punishing you for bleeding, now it is obedient, its beats steady and controlled.

  Ba-ba-ba-bum.

  Your heartbeat? Footfalls? Both, twined together.

  And then—there—in a glint of moonlight, there, a wide grinning mouth full of teeth, a thick red tongue, a huge pewter-pelted wolf.

  You have three seconds before he is upon you. He will go for your throat.

  Three seconds is less than a breath.

  You have only seen one other wolf in your entire life. At the Zoo de Granby. You were four years old. Mama held your left hand in her right, both ensconced in mittens. First snowflakes floated around you, promises of winter. You wore the rabbit-fur coat and matching cap that Mama had bought for you at the friperie, though she herself still wore a too-thin raincoat belted over her thickest sweater.

  That wolf was honey brown and sleeping, curled like a dog in its enclosure.

  “Un chien!” you called, pleased that you knew the word, in this new tongue you were learning.

  “Non,” Mama answered. “Un loup.” And then, kneeling beside you so she could whisper in your ear, “A wolf.”

  Two seconds. Your toes grip the earth, the path of pins and needles, the best they can. You dig in your heels.

  One second. Your fingers tighten on the branch, your muscles assess the heft of it. Your dress has slipped now beneath your breasts, your nipples tightened against the cold.

  And then he leaps, the pewter wolf, he pushes off his powerful haunches and flies through the air toward your throat.

  There is, in that moment, an instant of silence. The beast’s feet are off the ground and beat no more; in your chest, your heart holds its breath. The owlets in their aerie freeze into stillness; the raccoon corpse says not a word.

  There is nothing but the wolf’s enormous mouth full of teeth—the better to eat you with—and your own self, and the awareness of another hot pulse of blood emerging from your center, dripping down your thigh, and landing, like a premonition of more blood to come, on the pins and needles of the forest floor.

  And then that moment is over, as all moments are, and the next begins, as all moments do.

  The wolf’s eye shines cruelly, his hot breath steams and stinks.

  You swing the branch, the muscles in your arms and shoulders exploding into action as if they have been waiting all their sixteen years for just this moment. It’s a good swing—solid, strong, timed just right—and the branch connects with the wolf’s jaw, twisting his head hard to his left, a spray of spit and blood erupting from his mouth.

  His whole body is knocked off course, away from you, and he falls to the ground and rolls slowly to his feet.

  It was a clean hit, but you can tell by the weight of the branch in your hands, without your eyes ever leaving the wolf, that the blow has compromised your only weapon. It is ruined, the top third disappeared into a shattering of splinters, the shaft sharp-tipped and jagged now, so you change your grip, holding what remains like a spear rather than a bat, and you change your stance, too, from the defensive posture of a batter to the offensive position of a fighter.

  The wolf shakes his shaggy gray head as if to right his brain. He’s gotten all four feet under him now, and he looks up at you from beneath his pewter brow. His near-black eyes assess you.

  Despite the blow you’ve struck, the wolf’s hackles rise and a growl gurgles up from his throat, menacing but unafraid. He does not fear you. He does not respect you. Do not mistake the stance he now takes, the pause in his attack, as proof of either. You are prey to him. You are a consumable object.

  You do not wait for him to attack again. Maybe he is still rattled from the blow to the head. Maybe his feet are still unstable beneath him. Perhaps this advantage will last no more than a moment, and so you take it.

  Breasts bared, teeth bared, you scream. It’s high, your scream, unmistakably female, and it propels you forward, the sharp-spiked stick jabbing as you lunge, and you aim for the eyes—the better to see you with—and the wolf is still slow from the first blow, still off-balance, for though he sees you coming, he doesn’t dodge quickly enough, and you feel the meaty wet squish of his right eyeball skewered on the point of your stick.

  The wolf yips in surprised pain, and he bats away your weapon with a sharp-clawed paw, and though you’re gripping it as best you can, it’s torn from your fingers and gone.

  The wolf’s right eye is swelling closed around the mean sharp splinter that pierces it. It’s not nothing, the blow to the head and the splinter to the eye, but it’s not enough, not by far.

  You are alone in the woods, seen only by the unblinking yellow moon. Your hands are empty. You are nearly naked. And the wolf is angry.

  Hackles up, the wolf advances. If he underestimated you, if that was an advantage, it is gone now. Each step brings him closer, brings the potential of your death closer.

  But that is true, wolf or no, of each moment.

  There is a tree at your back. It rises behind you like all of history—your history, the history of girls in forests, the history of wolves and fangs and blood.

  Another gush of blood flows from you, and you see the wolf’s nose twitch as he smells the iron in the air. You are made of blood and your blood is made of iron.

  You bleed, but are not injured. Not yet.

  “Not today,” you promise—yourself? the moon?—as the wolf attacks again. But it is as though you know what his moves will be before he makes them, and you can adjust according to this knowledge—he will go for your throat, because that is what wolves do, and you will step toward him, not away, because you are not his prey.

  Your hands shoot out, empty but not powerless, and as his jaw snaps at you, so close you feel the skim of his teeth on your flesh, the slice of his claw at your breast, you find his neck, your fingers plunge deep into his lush fur and you lunge past him, using his power to propel him, head first, into the enormous trunk of the tree behind you.

  There’s the sound of his head on the tree, and the sound of the snap of his neck, and the thud of his body as it falls upon the pins and needles.

  And then there is just the ragged sound of your own breath.

  He is beautiful, the pewter wolf, dead at your feet, except for the splinter protruding from his once-shiny eye, and the way his head angles too far to one side, connected to its body by flesh but no longer by bone.

  You find the bodice of your dress way down by your waist, and you pull it up, back into place, as you turn away from the wolf and toward home.

  i

  you don’t know why mothers leave

  you don’t even know that they do leave

  but they do

  N’Oublie Pas d’Oublier

  You were always cold in Quebec. When you and Mama first arrived, it was on the edge of winter. Dead grasses and gray skies and a mean, biting wind. It was a different color, the landscape, lavender-gray in a cold, cruel way, too cold to be green like back home in Washington State. It was another country of coldness. It was another world.

  But you weren’t to talk about home. You learned that quickly. “N’oublie pas d’oublier,” Mama said over and over again, as if it were a line from a storybook, from a song. She said it as the two of you walked through the trees that rimmed the property; she said it as you bent to collect smooth, round stones; she said it as you skipped the stones across the small pond behind the barn; she said it as she kissed you good night, loosing a cupped stone from your palm. Don’t forget to forget.

  Then the snow came, the hush and rush of winter. It fell with the dense weight of sleep, covering all your tracks. Tree branches curtsied with the white weight upon them. Shhh, said the winter, the quiet, shining winter. When the sun b
roke through the overcast sky, its brilliance on the snow was blindingly bright, but it couldn’t ever stay out for long, the snow-heavy clouds gathering thick and gray in the sky. With each snowfall, Mama’s bruises lightened. The air grew colder and colder, and the pond grew a crust of ice, so that stones thrown slipped across it and skidded atop its surface. As the ice hardened, Mama’s face softened. She looked more like before, but not quite the same. Her nose was different, raised in the center with a hard, ugly bump that you didn’t like, that she stroked with her left index finger when she was thinking about something, staring out the window into the blank snow.

  The windows—they did not help. They were thin, made of old glass, Mama said, and frigid air crept in around the old wooden frames, rattling them like chattering teeth.

  Ah, but they were beautiful. Each morning, though the bed you shared with Mama in the sleeping room was a cocoon of shared warmth, you’d wrap your special blanket around your shoulders like a cape and you’d run to the window to see what the night had done.

  Each morning was different, but always beautiful—frost ferns, Mama called them, the pictures sketched in ice on the glass. Feathery leaves and trees and flowers bloomed across the window, magical gifts from nature, Mama said.

  Or fairies, you imagined.

  You would travel down the stairs and into each room, to see each miracle—the twin tall rectangles of glass in the dining room; the squat, square window above the kitchen sink; the wide, paned windows of the sitting room, each squared-off panel its own little work of art.

  Landscapes in white unfolded all around, sparkling and impossibly detailed.

  You loved them, and the cold seemed a small price for such beauty. But Mama frowned in the mornings, shivering as she worked to build the fire.

  You remembered the house Mama had taken you from, the house with Papa in it. That house had been warm—sometimes suffocatingly so. Hot and stuffy and full of Papa in a way you did not miss.

  You could bear this cold.

  Still, Mama shuttered the windows, going down to the basement to retrieve sets of green-painted wooden panels and trudging with them around the perimeter of the house, affixing a set to each window. You watched from inside as one by one the windows went dark, as the house grew dimmer and dimmer.

  But she left bare the sitting room window, the one that faced the driveway, and though she didn’t say why, you knew the reason. So she could watch.

  For though she urged you to remember to forget, she did not forget, not for a moment, as she sat by that window, looking out, one finger tracing the uneven ridge of her nose.

  You wake but do not open your eyes. The sheets are tangled. Your hair, tangled too. Eyes squeezed shut, you make a wish that it was a dream, last night, all of it—that today is yesterday and that tonight is the dance, that James has not yet come for you, that you have not yet come for James, that there is no blood on his chin, that there has been no run through pins and needles, that you have not seen the wolf.

  But you know that today is today and not yesterday. You know time flows only in one direction—onward—and that you flow, too, that the stickiness between your thighs is proof that all of it happened.

  When you got home last night, you put on your biggest underwear and you lined the crotch of them with one of the pads that have been waiting for you in the back of your bathroom cabinet for four years now. But you know even before looking that the pad was an insufficient barrier between your blood and your bed. You’ll have to deal with the blood. You’ll have to open your eyes.

  And so you do, though they are dry and painful to peel open. You blink, you rub your palms against them, you sit up.

  There it is, the press of the pad in your underwear. You throw back your cover and swing your legs over the edge of the bed. You stand.

  The bottom sheet is marked with an uneven red-brown stain. It’s dry, and you throw the duvet back up to conceal it. Later, you’ll deal with that. First, you must deal with your body.

  In the bathroom, on the toilet, you watch with fascination as the stream of your urine mixes with the thick rivulet of blood that emerges from you. Viscous, it moves slowly; your urine shoots and sprays, but the blood languishes, takes its time. Unhurried. On its own schedule, as you suppose it always has been.

  Every girl you know has had her period for years. You must be the unluckiest girl in the history of girls to begin menstruating at the absolute worst moment, the most mortifying, terrible instant.

  But thinking of that instant brings with it the memory of the press of James’s tongue, the brush of his dense, dark hair against your thigh, the blinding, confusing pleasure that washed over you, that made you tremble. The memory is a mix of pleasure and shame, and you wonder: For the rest of your life, every time you experience that pleasure, will shame be its shadow?

  The loud pulse of water from the shower separates you from this thought and you step beneath the cascade of warmth, closing your eyes and resting your forehead against the cold, hard tile wall. You give yourself a long moment to just stand there, your hair straightening under the weight of water, falling into curtains around your face.

  Then you do all the things one does—washing and rinsing and conditioning and shaving. You would give anything for it to not be a school day, but alas, it is, and as you prepare your body for the day, you try to heed your mother’s imperative from so long ago: don’t forget to forget. If you could forget the last twelve hours, oh, you would.

  For though you have done your best not to think about it, there is, alongside your blood and shame, the question of the wolf.

  You killed it. That, you know. It must have been rabid. That is the only reason it would have attacked you. Or maybe it was starving.

  It didn’t look rabid or starving. It looked . . . smart.

  But you were smarter. Or luckier. You don’t know.

  You crank off the shower. You grab your towel and rub it over your hair, across your shoulders, between your legs, just as you always do, but this time there is a streak of bright red blood. You close your eyes against it. It’s okay. You’ll just wash the towel along with your sheets, and you’ll have to remember, next time, that this is your body now. It bleeds.

  You will have to relearn your morning routine. You wrap the towel, bloody side out, around your waist, and you go to the cabinet under your sink, where you found the pad last night. You kneel in front of the cabinet and poke around, the sink drain in the middle of everything, push aside the extra bottle of shampoo and the mouthwash and the pink plastic bag of pads you tore open last night, and then you find it—a small box of tampons, pushed way in the back by time and disuse, and you take it out, sit back on your heels, open it.

  They are lined up like white plastic-wrapped bullets. No applicators. Why your grandmother chose this brand for you, you have no idea, but this is what you have.

  You find the edge of the plastic wrapping and twist it off. The box contains a little page of directions, which you glance at but don’t read; after all, how hard could it be? There is really only one thing to do with a tampon.

  You hold it, one hand on the cotton shaft and the other on the long blue string, and you pull the string in a circle to widen the cotton fibers at the base. Then you balance it on your left pointer finger, sit back on your bath mat, and open your legs, the towel falling wide.

  There is the pelt of your pubic hair. You keep it trimmed close and neat around the edges, but you like the way it looks and have bucked the fashion magazines that advise you to shear it completely. There is the nub of your clitoris, and again you push away the memory of what James did last night with his tongue. With your right hand, you pull apart the lips of your vagina, and with your left, you angle the tampon toward its opening. You are slick with blood, and so the tampon slips in easily. You push until you’re knuckle-deep in your own body, the first time you’ve touched yourself like this—though you have rubbed your clitoris and touched the outside, you’ve never put your fingers inside, some
how feeling like it was not right, like it would be trespassing.

  It’s warm in there, almost hot. It feels like what it is—a muscular tube, made of flesh.

  The tampon’s tip pushes against the wall of your vagina, and you straighten it out, and then it feels like nothing is there at all. You stand, rinse the blood from your index finger, and survey yourself in the mirror. The towel has fallen, and you are naked. The slope of your shoulders, the wet brown curls that drip onto your chest. The thrust of your small breasts. Nipples that seem darker than you imagine they should be, the right one smaller than the left. Round hips, thick thighs. The light blue string emerging from your center. You tuck it up, and it disappears.

  There. Now no one could guess, by looking at you, how different you are this morning from yesterday’s morning. Now you look just the same. Identical to that girl, the girl you were.

  N’oublie pas d’oublier.

  Mémé is at the kitchen table with her cup of tea. Always tea, never coffee. She is reading poetry, you can tell from the way the words scatter across the page. You stand in the kitchen doorway, watching her read.

  She is the only grandmother you know who keeps her hair long—longer than yours, even, nearly to her waist, steel gray and white with a few last sweeps of brown, and clear white around her temples, braided.

  Right now, she is wearing the bathrobe you gave her for her last birthday, her sixty-first. It is thin, silk, not quite pink but not quite gray, and is knotted firmly at her waist by a scarlet sash rather than the matching belt it came with.

  This is Mémé—that scarlet sash.

  “You got home late,” she says, eyes still on the poem. “How was the dance?”

  She looks up then, and you love that face so much. You love the thickness of her eyebrows, still dark. You love that her eyes are hazel-flecked, like yours, like your mother’s between you. You love the soft skin of her cheeks, the deep lines in her brow and around her mouth, the lips that have kissed and comforted you nearly all your life.