When We Were Animals (2 page)

I had brains, but I was plain-looking compared to Polly, who had powder-blue eyes and pretty blond hair she wore in a ponytail. Me, I had mud-colored eyes and common brown hair, which was never the right length. Right then it was just below my jawline, and it flipped up on the ends—not in a cute symmetrical way but rather with both sides pointing to the right, so that I looked like a cartoon character in a soft wind. Plus I was puny for my age, the smallest girl in my grade, and freckled, and I wore glasses that were too big and round for my face. The only way I was going to win Petey Meechum from Polly was through magic.

But my magic had no time to work, because just then there was a voice behind us.

“You girls!”

We leaped to our feet and saw, emerging from the brush, the large shape of Hermit Weaper, whose cabin was on the other side of the lake past where the road lost its tarmac and became two rutted rows of bare earth in the weeds.

“You girls!” he said again and pointed his finger at us.

We ran for our bikes and began tugging them through the thick underbrush toward the road. He followed us, finger pointing, his craggy face twisted into a furious jack-o’-lantern, spittle launching from between his dried lips, hanging in strings from his chin.

“You get on out of here!” he called after us as we struggled toward the road. We moved as fast as we could, but he followed us still, lurching his way below low-hanging branches. His left leg was crippled by some ancient injury, but to us that simply made his pursuit all the more monstrous—his lumbering sideways lope through the trees.

Then there was a crash behind us, and we looked back to see Hermit Weaper fallen against the base of a tree, pulling himself up to a sitting position. He had stopped pursuing, but we continued to break our way through the trees as though he were right behind us.

“Don’t come back!” he cried, straining his voice to reach us as we got farther from him. “Worm Moon tonight. They’ll get you sure! You don’t stay inside, they’ll hunt you down. They’ll take your eyes, you hear me? An hour from now, this whole town goes warg. They’ll eat your lungs right outta your chest! They’ll pop your lungs like balloons and eat ’em right down! You hear me? Don’t come back!”

When we reached the road, we got on our bikes and pedaled hard all the way back to my house. It wasn’t until we were safely inside that we realized the sun had already set and the streets were quiet. We had lost track of time at the lakeside.

My father said it was too late for Polly to go home. He said she would stay the night, and he called her parents to tell them so.

That night Polly and I huddled under the covers of my bed and speculated about the world of those who were older than we.

We both knew that Hermit Weaper was just trying to scare us back home. But Polly couldn’t let go of his words.

She said, “I don’t want my lungs eaten.” Then she added, “I don’t want to eat them, either. I mean, when we’re older.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. I reveled in her nervousness, because it made me feel more keen than my friend. “I’m sure we’ll acquire a taste for it.”

“Ew,” she said, and we giggled.

“Would you rather—” Polly started, then rephrased her theoretical question. “Let’s say it’s a dark alley. Would you rather meet up with Hermit Weaper or Rosebush Lincoln’s brother on a full moon?”

Rosebush Lincoln’s brother was sixteen.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess the Hermit.”

“I’d rather Rosebush Lincoln’s brother.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. They don’t really hurt people, you know. It’s not true what the Hermit said. They don’t eat your—they don’t hurt anybody. Except maybe themselves. And each other.”

I liked it better when we talked of such things in the fairy-tale terms of lung-eating. It was easier to cope with. If you talked about hurt in the abstract, it was a deeper, more echoey well of a thing.

“They could hurt you,” I insisted.

“Not on purpose. They’re just teenagers. We’ll be like that too one day.”

I didn’t tell Polly that I had already promised my father I wouldn’t be like that. She would have taken it as disloyalty. Much later we tried to sleep, but there were the voices outside. I couldn’t forget what Hermit Weaper had said. In my mind there was a picture of Rosebush Lincoln’s brother, handsome Billy Lincoln, and there was a hollow cavity in my chest, and where my lungs should have been there was nothing at all, and one of my lungs was actually hanging between Billy Lincoln’s teeth, half consumed, deflated and bloody, like a gigantic tongue—and I couldn’t breathe, because all my breath was caught in Billy Lincoln’s grinning mouth.

My husband drives
us home from the Petersons’ party. This is just last night.

It’s 12:15, and we are late in relieving the sitter. Jack is itchy with liquor, and he says to me, “You were—you were the sexiest wife at that party.”

“Jack.”

“No, I’m serious. I’m not kidding around. No one can hold a candle to you.”

“I thought the lamb was overcooked. Did you think so? Everyone complimented it, though. Janet prides herself on her lamb.”

Then Jack pulls the car over to the side of the road and turns off the ignition.

“Do you want to fool around?” he asks.

“Jack, the babysitter.”

“To hell with the babysitter.” It’s his grand, passionate gesture. He must have me, here in the car, and the rest of the world can burn. “I’ll—I’ll give her an extra twenty.”

The silliness of family men. I chuckle.

He takes offense. “Forget it,” he says and goes to start the car. I’ve hurt him by not being sufficiently quailed by the blustery storm of his sex. It’s funny how many ways there are to hurt people. As many ways to hurt as there are species of flower. Whole bouquets of hurt. You do it without even realizing.

“Wait, Jack. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you laugh?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was nervous. What if someone sees us?”

“Let them,” he says.

So I reach up under my skirt, hook my underpants with my thumbs, and pull them down. He unzips his pants, and I straddle him. While he quakes and gurgles beneath me, I gaze out the windows of the car. The road where we’ve stopped is indistinguishable from any of the others in the area—a quiet residential neighborhood with sidewalks and shade trees. In truth there is no danger of being caught. The residents of this area are good and decent people. Their lives, after midnight, consist of sleep or the late, late show on television, played at a low volume so as not to wake the children. The streets are empty. The mild breeze dapples the sidewalk with the shadows of leaves in lamplight. But there is no one out there in the dark. No one.

Jack moves under me. I hold his face to my bosom, I kiss the top of his head. In a few moments, he is finished.

He wants to kiss me passionately to show that his love for me doesn’t end when his sexual urgency does. He’s a nice kisser after all these years.

He rolls down the windows for the rest of the drive home.

On the way, he points to the sky.

“Look,” he says. “A full moon.”

“I know,” I say without raising my eyes. The car drives along in the quiet, fragile night.

“What do you call that one? Octopus Moon? Spanky Moon?”

“Blowfly Moon.”

“Blowfly. That’s my favorite one!”

I’ve told him very little about my childhood or the town where I grew up. What little I have told him—for example, that we had names for the different full moons—he finds quaint and charming. He pictures me as a prairie girl, maybe. Or a Mennonite.

His stuff is leaking out of me, a funny, unbothersome tickle between my legs.

In another part of the country, in the small town where I grew up, at this moment, there are packs of young people stalking the streets, naked, their pale flesh glowing, their breath coming fast and angry, their limbs filled with the quivering of strength and movement. Many, tomorrow, will wake torn and bruised.

When we get home, Jack apologizes to the babysitter and gives her extra money. Then he drives her home. While he is gone, I go upstairs, where my son is sleeping. He wakes when I come into the room, reaching toward me, wanting to be picked up.

I look down at him for a few moments, all that wee human greed and desire. I refuse to pick him up, but eventually I do kneel beside his bed and recite to him a rhyme I learned when I was a little girl.

He waits eagerly for his favorite part—the part about roaring—and then he roars. He wants to do it again, but I tell him no. I turn on his night-light, which the babysitter has forgotten. Then I leave the room and shut the door behind me. In the upstairs hall, there is only the sound of the grandfather clock ticktocking away.

I have become a mother. I have become a wife.

Soon Jack returns home. We prepare for bed without much talk. I check the locks on the doors downstairs. It is a thing he always asks when I slide into bed next to him. “Did you remember to check the locks?” he asks. And I say, “Yes,” and I can see by the expression on his face that he feels safe.

It starts to rain outside, the droplets of water sounding little tin bells in the gutters. Jack begins to snore next to me. The grandfather clock chimes one o’clock.

And what if I were to forget a lock one night? What if I were to leave a door wide open, casting angled shadows in the moonlight? Nothing would happen. In our neighborhood, there is no one out there in the rain, not a single person squalling under the stormy black.

All our skins are dry.

I wonder about
it sometimes—what kind of girl I might have been, what kind of woman I would be now, if I had grown up somewhere else. California, for instance, where teenagers have barbecues on the beach and bury bottles of beer halfway in the sand to keep them upright. Or New York, where they kiss in the backseats of taxicabs and lie on blankets in the middle of parks surrounded by buildings taller by far than the tallest tree.

Would I now be one of those women on television who are concerned about what the laundry detergent is doing to their children’s Little League uniforms? Would I love my husband more or less? My son?

As a teenager, would I have been one of those girls who go to the mall and defend themselves, all giggling, against boys—huddled together like a wagon circle in the food court? Would my great concerns have been college and school dances and fashion?

In my town, expensive clothes were not held in high esteem. Girls bought cheap. Dresses, they tended to get torn apart.

It’s impossible for me to make the connection between who I am now and who I was then—as if I died long ago in that town and resurrected somewhere else, with a brain full of another girl’s memories.

Except that I miss my father.

They said I had his mind.

Polly admired him as well. She always told me it was okay that I didn’t have a mother—that I didn’t really need a mother because I had the best father in town. He made Polly and me grilled cheese sandwiches with ham and the tomatoes from the garden that he and I had cultivated with our own hands. Polly liked hers with cocktail toothpicks sticking out of each quarter. He called her Sweet Polly and said that when the time came she would have so many boyfriends she would never be able to choose just one and would have to marry a whole passel of them.

He stood smiling, tall and skinny at the kitchen island. She glowed for him.

Summertimes, Polly came
to my house, and my father would greet her at the door.

“Sweet Polly!” he would say. “Lumen’s upstairs.”

The long, hot days of July, he would turn on the sprinkler in the backyard, and we would put on our swimsuits and play in the dancing water. The sprinkler was on the end of a hose, and it shot a Chinese fan of water in a slow back-and-forth arc that we liked to jump through. The only rule was that every fifteen minutes we had to move the sprinkler to a different part of the lawn to assure balanced coverage. Polly never remembered, but I always did.

We were the same age, but at thirteen it was clear that Polly was developing before I was. Her swimsuit swelled at the chest where mine was loose and puckered. She stood almost a full head taller than I did, and she did cartwheels through the shimmering water, her long limbs a dazzle of strength and nimbleness. When I tried to cartwheel, my body didn’t move the way I wanted it to, and I came toppling down into an awkward crouch.

After a while we were tired and simply lay on our stomachs in the grass, liking the feel of the fan of water as it intermittently showered us with cool needles. We lay in single file, our faces just inches from each other, our chins supported on our fists.

“Shell didn’t look so good when she came home this morning,” Polly said.

Shell was Michelle, Polly’s sister, who was fifteen and a half. She’d begun breaching just two months before. The previous night had been the last night of Hod Moon.

“My parents found her sleeping on the lawn this morning,” Polly went on.

“With no clothes on?”

“Yeah.”

This was something I still could not fathom—the exposure. For as long as I could remember, my father was very careful about knocking on my bedroom door before he entered so that I would not be walked in upon as I was dressing. How did one nude oneself before another person—before the world?

“And also,” Polly said, crinkling up her face, “she was beat up pretty bad.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. There were bruises and cuts all over her. Plus—”

Polly went silent for a moment. She pulled up some blades of grass and opened her fist to let them fall, but they were wet and stuck to her fingers.