- décembre 21, 2017
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We teach her the rules. Hold your breath when you pass a graveyard; punch your friend’s shoulder when a VW bug drives by. Pick up a penny when it’s heads up, but not tails up or you’ll have bad luck. And we teach her about making wishes: on maple-tree helicopters, on cottonwood puffs, on dandelion heads, when you see the first star at night. And on eyelashes, held on someone else’s finger, the most sacred of wishes, a tiny curl bearing your most secret hopes. “Can you wish for the same thing twice?” Grace asks one day, and we are surprised. We have never run out of things to wish for. Now we are ashamed to realize that our lives are filled with infinite longings. We pause, then nod. “Of course you can,” we say. “If you want to.” That afternoon, as we roll the dice and push our pewter tokens around the board, we savor Grace—the way her hair falls over her face, the clumsiness of her movements, the artlessness of her hands. We are awed to be in the presence of someone who wants so little. But it doesn’t last. One Friday after school Grace is fidgety, restless. She doesn’t want to play any games; she doesn’t want to go out for milkshakes. Is she mad at us? we wonder. Have we done something wrong? Her T-shirt has pulled askew, and we straighten the seam along her shoulder. “What is it?” we say. “What’s bothering you? Tell us. We’ll fix it.” We are like fairy godmothers, wands out and eager to please. We want to preserve her lovely clumsiness, that artless, awkward smile. But she won’t talk to us. She sits moping, drawing on the sole of her sneaker with a blue Bic pen. Maybe she’s just bored, we think. We suggest a movie and Grace shows a glimmer of interest. “Okay,” she says. “Maybe.” We open the paper and spread it on the floor. “Anything you want,” we tell her. “Closer,” she says, jabbing at the newsprint. We’re shocked at her choice. Under Grace’s finger, a quote over four half-faces reads, “Sex, Lies, and Betrayal!” Another, from Rolling Stone, says, “Vibrates with eroticism.” For a moment we don’t know what to say. “It’s rated R,” we tell her. “You’re too young.” “So are you,” she shoots back. And we know she’s right. We’ve seen R-rated movies dozens of times, and somehow Grace guesses this, and we feel like hypocrites, and we can’t say no. At the theater, there’s no one else in line and we hop over the red velvet ropes. We look at the board, where it says Closer – 4:00 and smile at the pimpled clerk through the ticket-window glass and say, “The 3:50 Polar Express, please.” Then we file into Theater 5 and sit in the back row. “You said we were going to see Closer,” Grace whispers. “I don’t want to see this. It’s for babies.” “Shush,” we say. “Give us a minute. Trust us, honey, please.” The movie starts and CGI snowflakes blow across the screen. We wait five, six, seven minutes. Then we tug Grace’s hand. We slip through the swinging doors one by one, so the light from the hallway doesn’t attract attention, and we run across the hall into Theater 6, where Natalie Portman and Jude Law have just locked eyes. “That’s it?” Grace says afterwards. “So easy. I should have thought of it myself.” She licks butter-flavored oil from her fingers and tosses the empty popcorn bag into the trash. She smiles, not at us but to herself, a little half-smile we’ve never seen before. It troubles us. Later we will look back to this moment and wonder if this was where we went wrong. Was this our first mistake, showing her how easy it is to sidestep her age? The next week we’re in her room playing dress-up. Grace has a box of costumes, capes and wide-brimmed hats and purple fans, and we say, you’re never too old. Though it’s only March, we tell her where the best neighborhoods for trick-or-treating are, who gives out whole candy bars and who just gives out boxes of raisins. Next year, we tell her, tugging clothes over our heads, we’ll take her. Everything is a little small, but if we hold our breath, it still fits. We drape capes and scarves over our braceleted arms. We put on crowns and wigs and bunny ears and mug in the mirror, and it’s then that we see Grace behind us. She’s not wearing a costume. She’s put on our clothes—Angie’s little lace top and Carrie’s denim skirt and Mandy’s platforms—and she’s looking not in the mirror but down at herself. Grace looks up when we stop talking.
But it’s not until we start to take off our costumes that she looks at herself one more time and peels off our things. We snatch them up from the carpet where she’s dropped them and hold them against us. They are warm as skin and they smell like Grace, and we wonder if they will have changed somehow, if they will no longer fit. But they do, and when we emerge from our shirts, Grace has pulled on her own clothing and is tossing the costumes back into the box. When the last piece is in, Grace settles back on the carpet and says, “I look like a big old cow.” She pinches the front of her T-shirt and pulls it away from her, then drops it. We watch the letters settle against the flatness of her chest in silence: POLLUTION IS A DIRTY WORD. “Haven’t you noticed?” she says. “I’m the only girl in school who wears stupid shirts like this.” There’s a little hole in the front, near her shoulder, and she puts her finger in and drags. The fabric rips with a noise like radio static. Through the tear we see the pale white of Grace’s bra. We know that bra. It’s the kind we wore years ago, the kind our mothers bought us from Sears or J. C. Penney, before anyone but us ever saw them, before we began to buy our own. “You’re perfect, sweetheart,” we say finally. “Your shirt is fine. Don’t change a thing.” But Monday Grace comes to school in a little sweater: V-necked, black, stretchy. Soon after that Grace begins to look like a TV with the colors tuned too bright. Her cheeks glow orange, her lips are magenta, her eyes look darkish and bruised. When we press her, she admits that she’s been using the watercolors from her painting kit as makeup. We take her into the bathroom and wash her face, dyeing the washcloth in a face-shaped smudge. Then we take the makeup out of our bags and teach her to put it on. Foundation on your red spots, blush from your cheekbone to your temple. We teach her how to hold the mascara wand steady, to keep her eyes open and apply tiny coat after tiny coat. We watch her in the mirror, her elbow up like a violinist, and feel proud. She finishes one eye, then recaps the tube and passes it back. “My dad will never buy me any of this,” she says. We look at each other, then back at Grace, whose undone eye is startlingly blue and wide, the other dark and plush as fur.
“All right,” we say. “Come on.” We take her to the drugstore. We circle the store once, poking packages of diapers, rattling bags of cough drops. Then we enter the makeup aisle and pull a package of mascara from its hook. Put it somewhere it won’t show, we explain. Not in your purse; if they catch you, they always look there. Put it on your body. Put it somewhere they’re afraid to touch. Each of us steals something, to show her how. Angie slides a deep red lipstick into her jeans pocket. Carrie tucks a pack of Twizzlers up the sleeve of her shirt. Mandy pops a bottle of nail polish under the tongue of her sneaker. Then finally Grace pulls the pink-and-green tube of mascara from its package and tucks it down the neckline of her sweater. We’re nervous now. We never were before, when we’d lifted perfume and fancy glitter lotion and condoms, even that time when we stole an entire bag of potato chips and a can of dip to eat in the park behind Angie’s house. But this time is different somehow. Our fingers shake and our palms get damp and we wipe them on our jeans and look over at Grace, who doesn’t look at us but touches the tube under her shirt with the tips of her fingers. The clerk at the counter doesn’t even look at us. He leans against the counter, turning the pages of a glossy celebrity magazine and eating M&Ms from the pocket of his smock. In the black-and-white monitor screens behind him, an old woman shakes a bottle of vitamins. A housewife pulls her toddler’s hands away from the aspirin. And we stride out the automatic door, single file, Angie Carrie Mandy Grace, and walk slowly all the way across the parking lot wanting to scream, before we begin to run. We don’t stop until we reach the corner and realize that Grace isn’t with us. When we look back she’s walking steadily towards us, looking straight ahead with a face of perfect serenity. We never take Grace shoplifting again, but she comes to school with pinkened cheeks and reddened lips. We wonder if she’s gotten an allowance now, or if her father buys it for her, or if she’s just practicing what we’ve taught her. Sometimes we look at her, at this new creature with darkened eyes and sleek clothing, who keeps her head up in the hallways, who sees people look at her and bats her eyes and smiles. At first she looks like a stranger. But there’s something familiar about her, like she’s someone we saw once in a movie, or someone we knew as a child but haven’t seen in years. We stare hard and screw our eyes up, trying to keep that something in focus. She’s still Grace, we remind ourselves. We cling to the simple things, to Candyland, to milkshakes, to eyelash wishes. She’s still our Grace. Then one day Grace says, “Carol Ann in my English class told me you used to play some kind of game at recess.” She says it matter-of-fact but we know it’s a question, a heavy one. It sinks slowly and settles on us like soot. We are unsure. Should we bluster it out? Should we lie, deny everything? We can’t imagine telling her. This is something we can’t bear for her to know. But when we turn back to Grace we know we’ve made a mistake. She’s seen us exchange glances and her face closes up. “It’s nothing,” we say. “Just a way to kill time.
Just something stupid we did before we met you.” “All right,” she says. “Don’t tell me. Carol Ann said you wouldn’t.” Don’t listen to Carol Ann, we want to say. Forget Carol Ann. Forget about the game. Let’s pretend it never happened. Let’s never talk about it again. But of course it doesn’t turn out that way. Grace doesn’t talk to us for eight days. During recess we sit at the picnic table, fiddling with our bracelets, watching her giggle with the other girls across the blacktop, waiting to see if she’ll come back. We trace the initials there with our fingers. T.G. + A.B. J.T. + D.H 4-EVER. Generations of ancient, chaste, hand-holding love. Finally, on Friday, Grace arrives. Her face is pale and the fingers of one hand clutch at the other. She walks slowly, like a doll might walk, legs stiff and in perfect parallel, untouching. “I think I’m sick,” she says. She doesn’t sit down. “I think I might be dying.” The look on her face frightens us. How big her eyes are, how still her closed lips, as if she’s been turned to wax. We forget that we were angry. “We’ll take you to the nurse,” we say, stroking her shoulders, her hair. “The hospital. The emergency room.” We feel her forehead for a fever. “What is it? Where do you hurt?” “I don’t hurt,” she says. “I don’t hurt. I just—” She touches her hand to her belly, just below the navel. We take her to the girls’ bathroom on the third floor, the one no one uses. The nurse is not needed now. Didn’t you know, we keep asking her. Didn’t someone explain? An aunt, the health teacher, someone? We see now the faint dark stain on Grace’s skirt. We press tampons into her palm and turn her towards the handicapped stall at the end of the row. Grace looks down into her hands as if we’ve given her a weapon. Then she backs into the stall and shuts the door. She stays in a long time, and when she comes out she’s changed into her gym pants, and she wads up the skirt and tucks it into her bookbag. That afternoon we take her back to the drugstore. We take her into the ladies’ aisle, as the sign calls it, telling her what we know. The wrapper of this kind rustles—everyone in the bathroom will hear. This kind is small enough to fit in your front pocket. She nods and listens and we’re happy again, to walk her, sure-footed, through unfamiliar territory. Then, as we head to the register, Grace stops. “Look,” she says. “Is this where you always get them?” In her hand she’s got a little plastic package. Without realizing it we’ve led her up the toy aisle, and through the cellophane window on the package we can see the bright bracelets inside.
“Put those back,” we say. We snatch the bag from Grace’s hand and throw it back onto the shelf. “These aren’t your style. Save your money.” “But you wear them,” Grace says, and we tuck our arms behind our backs. “Why can’t I?” She puts out her hand again and this time we slap it. “Leave them alone,” we say. “Forget about them.” “I’m not a baby, you know,” Grace says. The pride in her voice is obvious and bleating. She pushes past us and darts out the door, and we let her go. Then we pick up the box of tampons she’s dropped and pay for them ourselves, and we leave them on her doorstep, swaddled in their plastic bag. On Monday we don’t see Grace before school, or in the hallways. At recess, we find her across the schoolyard, standing alone. After a minute she comes over to us, but she doesn’t sit down. Her eyes look sideways, at the row of pines planted between the table and the brick wall of the school. “I don’t think we should hang out anymore,” she says. “This is about the bracelets, isn’t it,” we say. “About the game.” “No,” she says, “no, it isn’t.” We hear everything she doesn’t say. She touches her forearm with her fingers and frowns. Then she looks up at us with a scowl, like we’re keeping something from her, like we’re evil stepmothers keeping her rightful crown under lock and key. We know, now, that we can keep nothing from her, that we will have to teach her everything we know. The girl in front of us doesn’t even look like our Grace anymore. She looks like a Trissy doll: tiny clothes, perfect makeup, everything but the cartoon bubble drawn from her mouth. She looks just like us except for her bare wrists. We want to slap her, to tell her she’s ungrateful. Instead we look at look at her, hard. “What do you want,” we say. “Do you want to play the game?” “Yes,” she says at last. “Yes. I want to play the game.” We grab her by the shoulders and force her down. First onto her knees, then into the grass. Her shoulder hits the ground and she winces as we roll her onto her back. Then we push up our sleeves and pull off our bracelets in handfuls. They don’t want to go on. They catch on the bumps of her knuckles, then the knob of her wrist, and we push harder, forcing them onto her thin arms. The rubber leaves red brush-burns against her skin, and Grace whimpers and twists. We hold her down, pressing her shoulders flat against the damp ground, pinning her legs in place with our knees. We don’t look at her face.
- décembre 19, 2017
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This is how we play the game: pink means kissing; red means tongue.
Green means up your shirt; blue means down his pants. Purple means in your mouth. Black means all the way. We play the game at recess, and the teachers don’t notice. We stand on the playground by the flagpole, arms ringed with colored bracelets from the drugstore, waiting. The boys come past us, in a bunch, all elbows, laughing. They pretend not to look. We pretend not to see them. One of them reaches out and snaps a bracelet off one of us, breaking it like a rubber band, fast and sharp as plucking a guitar string. He won’t look back. He’ll walk back the way he came, along the edge of the football field. And whoever he picked, Angie or Carrie or Mandy, will watch him go. After a minute she’ll follow him and meet him under the bleachers, far down the field, where the teachers can’t see. We play the game every day. In eighth grade we’re too old for four-square and tetherball and kickball. It doesn’t have a name, this game, and we don’t talk about it even when we’re by ourselves, after school, the boys gone off to football or paper routes or hockey and no teachers around. But the game has rules. You go with the boy who snaps your bracelet. You don’t pick the boy; he picks you; they’re all the same to you. You do exactly what the color prescribes, even if you hate him, like we hate Travis Coleman whose fingernails are always grubby. No talking other than hello. Don’t tell anyone if you hate it, if his tongue feels like a dead fish in your mouth, if his hands leave snail-trails of sweat down your sides. No talking with the boys outside of the game. No talking about it afterwards, no laughing, no anything, even if it’s just the three of us. Pretend it never happened.
Rub the dent on your arm, the red welt where the bracelet snapped and split, until it goes away. Ask anyone in Cleveland and they’ll tell you that girls in Lakeview Heights don’t play this kind of game. Maybe down in Cleveland Heights they play it, or across town on the west side. Maybe there are a few naughty girls at the high school, reapplying lipstick in the rear view mirror before they slide out of their cars and tug their miniskirts down over their thighs. But certainly not at the junior high school, where the kids still get recess, where parents still pack lunches sometimes, where Mr. Petroski the principal still comes on the P.A. every morning to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. Not in this tidy little world where there are still four-square courts and hopscotch grids painted on the blacktop. Certainly no one plays games like that here. The other girls pretend not to know us. Their worlds are full of wholesome extracurriculars: riding lessons, field hockey practice, violin, ballet. They crowd like cattle on the playground, whispering and looking our way. Some of them say we’re stupid, or high. Some of them say we don’t know any better. Some call us sluts. We are the fallen women of Lakeview Heights Middle. We aren’t stupid, or high. We don’t do it because we don’t know better. And it isn’t hormones either. If you asked us, we couldn’t explain, but it has something to do with their stares. They’ve always stared. Because we live south of Scottsdale Avenue, where the houses are smaller and mostly rentals. Because we carry our lunches in plastic grocery bags instead of paper sacks, since crisp little paper sacks cost money and we get plastic bags free from the Sav-Mart. Because Carrie’s dad works nights at the liquor store, and Mandy’s mom wraps gifts at the mall customer service desk, because Angie lives with her grandmother and her parents are off in Vegas maybe, or is it L.A.? We hate the stares and we love them too and maybe that’s why we play the game. After school nobody says, “Should we stop by the drugstore today?” We just walk single-file, the automatic door half shutting between each of us, like it’s saying, “All right, Angie, but not you, Carrie—all right, Carrie too, but not you, Mandy—all right all right.” We walk through the candy aisle to the back of the store, and Carrie maybe picks up a Baby Ruth to eat on the way home. Then we stroll down the toy aisle, with its neon-plastic cars and its fake Barbie dolls, the ones with fake Barbie names like Trissy, whose skin is a little too orange, whose hair is a little too blond and you can see the roots of it set in little holes. We hate them because when we were younger our moms bought us Trissy, as if we couldn’t tell the difference between the real thing and the cheap imitation. Sometimes we turn their boxes around so the dolls face the chipped paint on the back of the rack. Once Angie stole a black Sharpie from Mr. Hanson the gym teacher and we drew on the cellophane window of every doll, big handlebar mustaches and goatee-beards and devil-horns. On the last one, a Trissy in a frosting-pink tutu with ribbons up her legs, Angie X’d out the eyes and drew a balloon squeezing out of her mouth. It said, “I’m an ugly whore.” Today we don’t mess with the dolls. We go straight to the fake jewelry and pick a pack of bracelets each. These aren’t the hard plastic kind spray-painted fake gold. Those are for little girls, girls that still want to play princess.
Ours are thin as spaghetti and stretchy, all different colors and a dollar for five. We take them up to the register and pay for them and while we walk home we open the bags and slide the new stack of bracelets onto our right arms and toss the empty bags onto someone’s lawn. The next day we hold our arms across our bodies like we’re pinning towels to our waists and wait for the boys to come by. We are ready to play the game. We are stores of iniquity with a wide, wide selection. This is how we are when Grace moves to town. From all the way across the blacktop we can see that everything about her is wrong. Her shirt is too big: she’s tiny and it’s huge and hangs down past her butt. The cuffs of her pants stop at her ankle and a band of black cotton sock shows between hem and sneaker-top. Her shoes are too new, too stiff, too blindingly white in the lunchtime sun. Even the way she stands is wrong, hands clasped behind her back, index fingers linked, like she’s been told not to touch. The other girls don’t tease her, or call her names, or throw things at her. They just stand in a knot looking at her and talking loudly about other things, fingering the silver O charms around their necks that are in this year. We’ve never seen her before but something about her looks familiar: the way she stands, heels at right angles, left toe pointing towards the girls, right toe towards the football fields where the boys are shuffling our way. Then she turns her head towards us, and we remember exactly what it’s like to be her, alone and awkward on the open prairie of the playground. We know how those stares feel like blinding sunbeams, how you find yourself squinting when they hit your face. One shoulder comes up towards her ear, as if she’s half shrugging, and her ridiculous T-shirt puffs in the wind and we feel tenderness welling up inside us. We cross the asphalt and cluster around her, like mother elephants circling a calf. We shield her from the stares with our bodies. The boys drift toward the abandoned flagpole, their eyes longing after us. Without us they seem lost. One of them puts out his hand to the cold steel of the pole. Olly-olly-oxen-free. “What’s your name?” we say, and her face goes pink with surprise. Up close we can read her T-shirt. Under a picture of animals in the jungle it says, “If the Macaw saw what the Leopard spotted, then the Toucan can, and you can, too! SAVE THE RAINFOREST!” “Grace,” she says. “Grace,” we repeat. “Grace.” We like the sound of it, the round single syllable, like a polished metal bead. A simple name, a sweet name. A name not yet corrupted into a diminutive. We wonder, for a moment, if with Grace we can be Angela, Caroline, Amanda. “I like your bracelets,” she says. We push them under our coat sleeves. “They’re nothing,” we say. “Just old junk. Come sit with us. Tell us about you.” We lead her over to one of the picnic tables by the pine trees where no one ever eats, because we eat in the shiny cafeteria where the tiles are painted with vegetables and fruits and the food pyramid. She’s twelve, a year younger than us, and her birthday is in July and she’s in the seventh grade, Mrs. Derrick’s class. She came from Ketchikan, and before that she lived in Montana, and Louisiana, and Del Norte, Colorado, and Eureka, South Dakota. “My dad works for the army,” she says. “We move a lot.” She’s an only child. She had a dog once, a brown-and-white spaniel mutt named Goober, but he died three years ago. Her favorite food is lemon cake with chocolate icing. Her favorite color is blue. We drink in the minutiae of her life until the bell rings and it’s time to go in. Grace stands and looks around, as if she’s forgotten the way back into the building. “Meet us after school,” we say, and tuck a stray lock of blond behind her earlobe. Then she smiles and runs off.
That afternoon we don’t go to the drugstore. We take Grace over to the Tasty-Q and buy her a chocolate-dipped cone. She’s never had one before. She licks the melting ice cream from her fingers and the way she sits with her arms wrapped around her knees, trying to take up as little space as possible, you’d think she was ten. Grace tells us that she’s never lived in one place for more than six months. She’s never finished a school year in the same place she started. Her father does some kind of engineering work. We know engineers build bridges, and we picture him in a trim navy worksuit with blueprints in his hand. Her mother died of cancer when she was three. “Most days,” Grace says, “I’m a latch-key kid.” She doesn’t say so, but we know we’re the first real friends she’s ever had. At her house Grace pulls out toys—real toys, toys we had long ago, when we were still kids. We play Monopoly through the afternoons, Operation, even Candyland. We flub the Funny Bone and Charley Horse and Broken Heart operations just to feel the buzzer tingle our fingers. Weeks pass and we don’t go near the flagpole. At recess we see the boys out of the corner of our eyes. Some of them move on to other things, football, kickball, skateboarding. But some keep on, as if out of habit, moving towards the flagpole like a fog and then dissipating, disappointed. After a while we forget to even watch them. We’re busy, with Grace, because she hardly knows anything at all. We teach her important things, like how to find the best seats in the movie theater. Asking for butter in the middle of your popcorn, not just on top. How to snap your gum. How to tell the future with straws: Tie the paper wrapper in a knot. If it breaks the thing you’re thinking of will happen; if it stays knotted it won’t. Grace doesn’t know any of this. We give her things she’s never had before: cherry Cokes, Pixy Stix, curly fries. Things we can afford on our allowances, things we forgot the joy of.
- décembre 19, 2017
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She was kneeling on the floor, ice in her hair, lost in some kind of hypothermic torpor. With his last dregs of energy he constructed a fire and poured a mug of hot water down her throat. As he fell into sleep, he watched himself as from a distance, weeping and clutching his near-frozen wife.
They had only flour and a few crackers in the cupboards. When she could speak, her voice was quiet and far away. "I have dreamt the most amazing things," she murmured. "I have seen the places where coyotes go when they are gone. I know where spiders go, and geese ... "
Snow fell incessantly. Night was abiding; daylight passed in a breath. The hunter was beyond hungry. Whenever he stood up, his eyesight fled in slow, nauseating streaks of color. He went out with lanterns to fish, shoveled down to the river ice, chopped through it with a maul, and shivered over the hole jigging a ball of dough on a hook. Sometimes he brought back a trout; other times they ate a squirrel, a hare, once a famished deer whose bones he cracked and boiled, or only a few handfuls of rose hips. In the worst parts of March he dug out cattails to peel and steam the tubers.
She hardly ate, sleeping eighteen, twenty hours a day. When she woke, it was to scribble on notebook paper before plummeting back into sleep, clutching at the blankets as if they gave her sustenance. There was, she was learning, strength hidden at the center of weakness, ground at the bottom of the deepest pit. With her stomach empty and her body quieted, without the daily demands of living, she felt she was making important discoveries. She was only nineteen and had lost twenty pounds since marrying him. Naked, she was all rib cage and pelvis.
- décembre 19, 2017
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In a wind-polished bend they came upon a dead heron, frozen by its ankles into the ice. It had tried to hack itself out, hammering with its beak first at the ice entombing its feet and then at its own thin and scaly legs. When it finally died, it died upright, wings folded back, beak parted in some final, desperate cry, legs like twin reeds rooted in the ice.
She fell to her knees beside the bird. In its eye she saw her face flatly reflected. "It's dead," the hunter said. "Come on. You'll freeze too."
"No," she said. She slipped off her mitten and closed the heron's beak in her fist. Almost immediately her eyes rolled back in her head. "Oh, wow," she moaned. "I can feel her." She stayed like that for whole minutes, the hunter standing over her, feeling the cold come up his legs, afraid to touch her as she knelt before the bird. Her hand turned white and then blue in the wind. Finally she stood. "We have to bury it," she said.
That night she lay stiff and would not sleep. "It was just a bird," he said, unsure of what was bothering her but bothered by it himself. "We can't do anything for a dead bird. It was good that we buried it, but tomorrow something will find it and dig it out."
She turned to him. Her eyes were wide. He remembered how they had looked when she put her hands on the bear. "When I touched her," she said, "I saw where she went."
"What?"
I saw where she went when she died. She was on the shore of a lake with other herons, a hundred others, all facing the same direction, and they were wading among stones. It was dawn, and they watched the sun come up over the trees on the other side of the lake. I saw it as clearly as if I were there."
He rolled onto his back and watched shadows shift across the ceiling. "Winter is getting to you," he said. He resolved to make sure she went out every day. It was something he'd long believed: go out every day in winter, or your mind will slip. Every winter the paper was full of stories about ranchers' wives, snowed in and crazed with cabin fever, who had dispatched their husbands with cleavers or awls.
Winter threw itself at the cabin. He took her out every day. He showed her a thousand ladybugs hibernating in an orange ball hung in a riverbank hollow; a pair of dormant frogs buried in frozen mud, their blood crystallized until spring. He pried a globe of honeybees from its hive, slow-buzzing, stunned from the sudden exposure, tightly packed around the queen, each bee shimmying for warmth. When he placed the globe in her hands, she fainted, her eyes rolled back. Lying there, she saw all their dreams at once, the winter reveries of scores of worker bees, each one fiercely vivid: bright trails through thorns to a clutch of wild roses, honey tidily brimming a hundred combs.
With each day she learned more about what she could do. She felt a foreign and keen sensitivity bubbling in her blood, as if a seed planted long ago were just now sprouting. The larger the animal, the more powerfully it could shake her. The recently dead were virtual mines of visions, casting them off with a slow-fading strength as if cutting a long series of tethers one by one. She pulled off her mittens and touched everything she could: bats, salamanders, a cardinal chick tumbled from its nest, still warm. Ten hibernating garter snakes coiled beneath a rock, eyelids sealed, tongues stilled. Each time she touched a frozen insect, a slumbering amphibian, anything just dead, her eyes rolled back and its visions, its heaven, went shivering through her body.
Their first winter passed like that. When he looked out the cabin window, he saw wolf tracks crossing the river, owls hunting from the trees, six feet of snow like a quilt ready to be thrown off. She saw burrowed dreamers nestled under roots against the long twilight, their dreams rippling into the sky like auroras.
With love still lodged in his heart like a splinter, he married her in the first muds of spring.
Bruce Maples gasped when the hunter's wife finally arrived. She moved through the door like a show horse, demure in the way she kept her eyes down, but assured in her step; she brought each tapered heel down and struck it against the granite. The hunter had not seen his wife for twenty years, and she had changed—become refined, less wild, and somehow, to the hunter, worse for it. Her face had wrinkled around the eyes, and she moved as if avoiding contact with anything near her, as if the hall table or the closet door might suddenly lunge forward to snatch at her lapels. She wore no jewelry, no wedding ring, only a plain black suit, double-breasted.
She found her nametag on the table and pinned it to her lapel. Everyone in the reception room looked at her and then looked away. The hunter realized that she, not President O'Brien, was the guest of honor. In a sense they were courting her. This was their way, the chancellor's way—a silent bartender, tuxedoed coat girls, big icy drinks. Give her pie, the hunter thought. Rhubarb pie. Show her a sleeping grizzly.
They sat for dinner at a narrow and very long table, fifteen or so high-backed chairs down each side and one at each end. The hunter was seated several places away from his wife. She looked over at him finally, a look of recognition, of warmth, and then looked away again. He must have seemed old to her—he must always have seemed old to her. She did not look at him again.
The kitchen staff, in starched whites, brought onion soup, scampi, poached salmon. Around the hunter guests spoke in half whispers about people he did not know. He kept his eyes on the windows and the blowing snow beyond.
The river thawed and drove huge saucers of ice toward the Missouri. The hunter felt that old stirring, that quickening in his soul, and would rise in the wide pink dawns, grab his fly rod, and hurry down to the river. Already trout were rising through the chill brown water to take the first insects of spring. Soon the telephone in the cabin was ringing with calls from clients, and his guiding season was on.
In April an occasional client wanted a mountain lion or a trip with dogs for birds, but late spring and summer were for trout. He was out every morning before dawn, driving with a thermos of coffee to pick up a lawyer, a widower, a politician with a penchant for wild cutthroat. He came home stinking of fish guts and woke her with eager stories—native trout leaping fifteen-foot cataracts, a stubborn rainbow wedged under a snag.
By June she was bored and lonely. She wandered through the forest, but never very far. The summer woods were dense and busy, not like the quiet graveyard feel of winter. Nothing slept for very long; everything was emerging from cocoons, winging about, buzzing, multiplying, having litters, gaining weight. Bear cubs splashed in the river. Chicks screamed for worms. She longed for the stillness of winter, the long slumber, the bare sky, the bone-on-bone sound of bull elk knocking their antlers against trees.
In September the big-game hunters came. Each client wanted something different: elk, antelope, a bull moose, a doe. They wanted to see grizzlies, track a wolverine, shoot sandhill cranes. They wanted the heads of seven-by-seven royal bulls for their dens. Every few days he came home smelling of blood, with stories of stupid clients, of the Texan who sat, wheezing, too out of shape to get to the top of a hill for his shot. A bloodthirsty New Yorker claimed he wanted only to photograph black bears; then he pulled a pistol from his boot and fired wildly at two cubs and their mother. Nightly she scrubbed blood out of the hunter's coveralls, watched it fade from rust to red to rose in a basin filled with river water.
She began to sleep, taking long afternoon naps, three hours or more. Sleep, she learned, was a skill like any other, like getting sawed in half and reassembled, or like divining visions from a dead robin. She taught herself to sleep despite heat, despite noise. Insects flung themselves at the screens, hornets sped down the chimney, the sun angled hot and urgent through the southern windows; still she slept. When he came home each autumn night, exhausted, forearms stained with blood, she was hours into sleep. Outside, the wind was already stripping leaves from the cottonwoods—too soon, he thought. He'd take her sleeping hand. Both of them lived in the grip of forces they had no control over—the October wind, the revolutions of the earth.
That winter was the worst he could remember: from Thanksgiving on they were snowed in, the truck buried under six-foot drifts. The phone line went down in December and stayed down until April. January began with a chinook followed by a terrible freeze. The next morning a three-inch crust of ice covered the snow. On the ranches to the south cattle crashed through and bled to death kicking their way out. Deer punched through with their tiny hooves and suffocated in the deep snow beneath. Trails of blood veined the hills.
In the mornings he would find coyote tracks written in the snow around the door to the crawl space, two inches of hardwood between them and all his winter hoard hanging frozen beneath the floorboards. He reinforced the door with baking sheets, nailing them up against the wood and over the hinges. Twice he woke to the sound of claws scrabbling against the metal and charged outside to shout the coyotes away.
Everywhere he looked something was dying: an elk keeling over, an emaciated doe clattering onto ice like a drunken skeleton. The radio reported huge cattle losses on the southern ranches. Each night he dreamt of wolves, of running with them, soaring over fences and tearing into the steaming carcasses of cattle.
In February he woke to coyotes under the cabin. He grabbed his bow and knife and dashed out into the snow barefoot, his feet going numb. They had gone in under the door, chewing and digging the frozen earth under the foundation. He unbolted what was left of the door and swung it free.
- décembre 19, 2017
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It was the hunter's first time outside Montana. He woke, stricken still with the hours-old vision of ascending through rose-lit cumulus, of houses and barns like specks deep in the snowed-in valleys, all the scrolling country below looking December—brown and black hills streaked with snow, flashes of iced-over lakes, the long braids of a river gleaming at the bottom of a canyon. Above the wing the sky had deepened to a blue so pure he knew it would bring tears to his eyes if he looked long enough.
Now it was dark. The airplane descended over Chicago, its galaxy of electric lights, the vast neighborhoods coming clearer as the plane glided toward the airport—streetlights, headlights, stacks of buildings, ice rinks, a truck turning at a stoplight, scraps of snow atop a warehouse and winking antennae on faraway hills, finally the long converging parallels of blue runway lights, and they were down.
He walked into the airport, past the banks of monitors. Already he felt as if he'd lost something, some beautiful perspective, some lovely dream fallen away. He had come to Chicago to see his wife, whom he had not seen in twenty years. She was there to perform her magic for a higher-up at the state university. Even universities, apparently, were interested in what she could do. Outside the terminal the sky was thick and gray and hurried by wind. Snow was coming. A woman from the university met him and escorted him to her Jeep. He kept his gaze out the window.
They were in the car for forty-five minutes, passing first the tall, lighted architecture of downtown, then naked suburban oaks, heaps of ploughed snow, gas stations, power towers, and telephone wires. The woman said, "So you regularly attend your wife's performances?"
"No," he said. "Never before."
She parked in the driveway of an elaborate modern mansion, with square balconies suspended over two garages, huge triangular windows in the façade, sleek columns, domed lights, a steep shale roof.
Inside the front door about thirty nametags were laid out on a table. His wife was not there yet. No one, apparently, was there yet. He found his tag and pinned it to his sweater. A silent girl in a tuxedo appeared and disappeared with his coat.
The granite foyer was backed with a grand staircase, which spread wide at the bottom and tapered at the top. A woman came down. She stopped four or five steps from the bottom and said, "Hello, Anne" to the woman who had driven him there and "You must be Mr. Dumas" to him. He took her hand, a pale, bony thing, weightless, like a featherless bird.
Her husband, the university's chancellor, was just knotting his bow tie, she said, and she laughed sadly to herself, as if bow ties were something she disapproved of. The hunter moved to a window, shifted aside the curtain, and peered out.
In the poor light he could see a wooden deck the length of the house, angled and stepped, its width ever changing, with a low rail. Beyond it, in the blue shadows, a small pond lay encircled by hedges, with a marble birdbath at its center. Behind the pond stood leafless trees—oaks, maples, a sycamore as white as bone. A helicopter shuttled past, its green light winking.
"It's snowing," he said.
"Is it?" the hostess asked, with an air of concern, perhaps false. It was impossible to tell what was sincere and what was not. The woman who had driven him there had moved to the bar, where she cradled a drink and stared into the carpet.
He let the curtain fall back. The chancellor came down the staircase. Other guests fluttered in. A man in gray corduroy, with "Bruce Maples" on his nametag, approached him. "Mr. Dumas," he said, "your wife isn't here yet?"
"You know her?" the hunter asked. "Oh, no," Maples said, and shook his head. "No, I don't." He spread his legs and swiveled his hips as if stretching before a footrace. "But I've read about her."
The hunter watched as a tall, remarkably thin man stepped through the front door. Hollows behind his jaw and beneath his eyes made him appear ancient and skeletal—as if he were visiting from some other, leaner world. The chancellor approached the thin man, embraced him, and held him for a moment.
"That's President O'Brien," Maples said. "A famous man, actually, to people who follow those sorts of things. So terrible, what happened to his family." Maples stabbed the ice in his drink with his straw.
For the first time the hunter began to think he should not have come.
"Have you read your wife's books?" Maples asked.
The hunter nodded.
"In her poems her husband is a hunter."
"I guide hunters." He was looking out the window to where snow was settling on the hedges.
"Does that ever bother you?"
"What?"
"Killing animals. For a living, I mean."
The hunter watched snowflakes disappear as they touched the window. Was that what hunting meant to people? Killing animals? He put his fingers to the glass. "No," he said. "It doesn't bother me."
The hunter met his wife in Great Falls, Montana, in the winter of 1972. That winter arrived all at once—you could watch it come. Twin curtains of white appeared in the north, white all the way to the sky, driving south like the end of all things. Cattle galloped the fencelines, bawling. Trees toppled; a barn roof tumbled over the highway. The river changed directions. The wind flung thrushes screaming into the gorse and impaled them on the thorns in grotesque attitudes.
She was a magician's assistant, beautiful, fifteen years old, an orphan. It was not a new story: a glittery red dress, long legs, a traveling magic show performing in the meeting hall at the Central Christian Church. The hunter had been walking past with an armful of groceries when the wind stopped him in his tracks and drove him into the alley behind the church. He had never felt such wind; it had him pinned. His face was pressed against a low window, and through it he could see the show. The magician was a small man in a dirty blue cape. Above him a sagging banner read THE GREAT VESPUCCI. But the hunter watched only the girl; she was graceful, young, smiling. Like a wrestler, the wind held him against the window.
The magician was buckling the girl into a plywood coffin, which was painted garishly with red and blue bolts of lightning. Her neck and head stuck out at one end, her ankles and feet at the other. She beamed; no one had ever before smiled so broadly at being locked into a coffin. The magician started up an electric saw and brought it noisily down through the center of the box, sawing her in half. Then he wheeled her apart, her legs going one way, her torso another. Her neck fell back, her smile faded, her eyes showed only white. The lights dimmed. A child screamed. Wiggle your toes, the magician ordered, flourishing his magic wand, and she did; her disembodied toes wiggled in glittery high-heeled pumps. The audience squealed with delight.
The hunter watched her pink, fine-boned face, her hanging hair, her outstretched throat. Her eyes caught the spotlight. Was she looking at him? Did she see his face pressed against the window, the wind slashing at his neck, the groceries—onions, a sack of flour—tumbled to the ground around his feet?
She was beautiful to him in a way that nothing else had ever been beautiful. Snow blew down his collar and drifted around his boots. After some time the magician rejoined the severed box halves, unfastened the buckles, and fluttered his wand, and she was whole again. She climbed out of the box and curtsied in her glittering dress. She smiled as if it were the Resurrection itself.
Then the storm brought down a pine tree in front of the courthouse, and the power winked out, streetlight by streetlight. Before she could move, before the ushers could begin escorting the crowd out with flashlights, the hunter was slinking into the hall, making for the stage, calling for her.
He was thirty years old, twice her age. She smiled at him, leaned over from the dais in the red glow of the emergency exit lights, and shook her head. "Show's over," she said. In his pickup he trailed the magician's van through the blizzard to her next show, a library fundraiser in Butte. The next night he followed her to Missoula. He rushed to the stage after each performance. "Just eat dinner with me," he'd plead. "Just tell me your name." It was hunting by persistence. She said yes in Bozeman. Her name was plain, Mary Roberts. They had rhubarb pie in a hotel restaurant.
"I know how you do it," he said. "The feet in the box are dummies. You hold your legs against your chest and wiggle the dummy feet with a string."
She laughed. "Is that what you do? Follow a girl from town to town to tell her her magic isn't real?"
"No," he said. "I hunt."
"And when you're not hunting?"
"I dream about hunting."
She laughed again. "It's not funny," he said.
"You're right," she said, and smiled. "It's not funny. I'm that way with magic. I dream about it. Even when I'm not asleep."
He looked into his plate, thrilled. He searched for something he might say. They ate.
"But I dream bigger dreams, you know," she said afterward, after she had eaten two pieces of pie, carefully, with a spoon. Her voice was quiet and serious. "I have magic inside of me. I'm not going to get sawed in half by Tony Vespucci all my life."
"I don't doubt it," the hunter said.
"I knew you'd believe me," she said.
But the next winter Vespucci brought her back to Great Falls and sawed her in half in the same plywood coffin. And the winter after that. Both times, after the performance, the hunter took her to the Bitterroot Diner, where he watched her eat two pieces of pie. The watching was his favorite part: a hitch in her throat as she swallowed, the way the spoon slid cleanly out from her lips, the way her hair fell over her ear.
Then she was eighteen, and after pie she let him drive her to his cabin, forty miles from Great Falls, up the Missouri and then east into the Smith River valley. She brought only a small vinyl purse. The truck skidded and sheered as he steered it over the unploughed roads, fishtailing in the deep snow, but she didn't seem afraid or worried about where he might be taking her, about the possibility that the truck might sink in a drift, that she might freeze to death in her pea coat and glittery magician's-assistant dress. Her breath plumed out in front of her. It was twenty degrees below zero. Soon the roads would be snowed over, impassable until spring.
At his one-room cabin, with furs and old rifles on the walls, he unbolted the door to the crawl space and showed her his winter hoard: a hundred smoked trout, plucked pheasants and venison quarters hanging frozen from hooks. "Enough for two of me," he said. She scanned his books over the fireplace—a monograph on grouse habits, a series of journals on upland game birds, a thick tome titled simply Bear. "Are you tired?" he asked. "Would you like to see something?" He gave her a snowsuit, strapped her boots into a pair of leather snowshoes, and took her to hear the grizzly. She wasn't bad on snowshoes, a little clumsy. They went creaking over wind-scalloped snow in the nearly unbearable cold.
The bear denned every winter in the same hollow cedar, the top of which had been shorn off by a storm. Black, three-fingered, and huge, in the starlight it resembled a skeletal hand thrust up from the ground, a ghoulish visitor scrabbling its way out of the underworld. They knelt. Above them the stars were knife points, hard and white. "Put your ear here," he whispered. The breath that carried his words crystallized and blew away. They listened, face-to-face, their ears over woodpecker holes in the trunk. She heard it after a minute, tuning her ears in to something like a drowsy sigh, a long exhalation of slumber. Her eyes widened. A full minute passed. She heard it again.
"We can see him," he whispered, "but we have to be dead quiet. Grizzlies are light hibernators. Sometimes all you do is step on twigs outside their dens and they're up."
He began to dig at the snow. She stood back, her mouth open, eyes wide. Bent at the waist, the hunter bailed the snow back through his legs. He dug down three feet and then encountered a smooth, icy crust covering a large hole in the base of the tree. Gently he dislodged plates of ice and lifted them aside. From the hole the smell of bear came to her, like wet dog, like wild mushrooms. The hunter removed some leaves. Beneath was a shaggy flank, a patch of brown fur.
"He's on his back," the hunter whispered. "This is his belly. His forelegs must be up here somewhere." He pointed to a place higher on the trunk.
She put one hand on his shoulder and knelt in the snow beside the den. Her eyes were wide and unblinking. Her jaw hung open. Above her shoulder a star separated itself from a galaxy and melted through the sky. "I want to touch him," she said. Her voice sounded loud and out of place in that wood, under the naked cedars.
"Hush," he whispered. He shook his head no.
"Just for a minute."
"No," he hissed. "You're crazy." He tugged at her arm. She removed the mitten from her other hand with her teeth and reached down. He pulled at her again but lost his footing and fell back, clutching an empty mitten. As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the tree. She felt the soft silver tips of fur brush her cheeks. Against her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard blood slug through veins.
- décembre 19, 2017
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Okay, here’s the sequel. It’s called Heart to Heart, link in the comments!
Thank you all so much for reading Strings, you guys rock!
- décembre 19, 2017
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Love is No Simple Thing
I walk into the room everyone is getting ready in. It’s just Riley, her mom, and me getting dressed. Her mom is dressing up but she’s not a bridesmaid, Riley only picked me. I had figured she would have someone else but she didn’t.
“You excited?” I ask, grinning.
“Butterflies.” She says, smiling like it’s our own little inside joke.
Her curly hair hangs loose but it’s not long, and it looks extra red against the navy of the dress.
“You look beautiful.” I say, smiling.
“You do too, Charlotte.” She says.
I like the forest green dress, and my soon-to-be grandmother is pinning my long hair up.
“You seem much calmer today.” My grandmother says.
Riley and I share a look and I shrug.
“Yeah, mom that was all an act, Charlotte is actually amazingly nice.” She says.
“What?”
“I pretended to be horrible so the wedding wouldn’t be really white and full of tulle.” I explain.
She sighs, “that was a very good act, you should consider acting as a profession.”
Riley and I burst into peels of laughter and my grandmother shakes her head. “Hold still.” She says to me, and I try, stifling my giggles.
I felt so happy, my heart so light, the weight of secrets off my shoulders, that for just a little while I forgot about Leo and August and the strings. And it was a nice little break.
“Come on, Charlotte.” Riley says, beckoning me over. “It’s time.”
I hear the music start and the doors open. The flower girl first, a little cousin of Riley’s, then me, then Riley. Everyone stands up and I scan the crowd as I walk. A lot of people I don’t recognize, but then I spot, Ruby, Liam, and Leo in the crowd. Liam and Ruby both smile and wave and Leo smiles. Maybe he’s not as mad as I thought. Nothing is without fault. I remember his words, his kiss. I’m getting distracted don’t trip, Charlotte. Do. Not. Trip.
Thankfully I make it down the aisle without tripping. I stop and watch Riley, half way down the aisle, grinning. She looks amazing, radiant as the sun, beautiful and happy, so so happy. Her smile is contagious, and I feel myself start to grin.
Their vows were pretty, Riley’s were funny and dad’s were heartfelt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile like this. But the way he looks at Riley . . . It makes me realize how real their love is. My mom looks at Sam the same way. Liam looks at Ruby that way. I wonder if I look at Leo that way. I wonder if August looks at me that way. I shake my head, I don’t want to think like that. Sure, ignoring ones feelings and thoughts has never gone too well for anyone but I’ve never been one to follow the trend, maybe I’ll beat the whole going crazy and letting everyone know how I feel by shouting it at the person in public thing.
“Do you, Flynn Eugene Cassidy take Riley Maria Fairbanks to by your lawfully wedded wife?” The man asked my father.
“I do.” He said, smiling.
“And do you, Riley Maria Fairbanks take Flynn Eugene Cassidy as your lawfully wedded husband?”
“I do.”
“Then by the power vested in my by the state of California, I pronounce you husband and wife. You may kiss the bride.”
They kissed and the church erupted in applause. I can see a few people crying like some just cut an onion and I feel tears well up in my eyes as well, but I blink them back, I’ve got a thing about crying in public.
“Oh my gosh I love this song!” Someone said, and they grabbed their dates arm and dragged them onto the dance floor.
Ruby and I giggled. “I dare you to do that to Liam when he and Leo get back.” I say.
“Whats in it for me?” Ruby asks, grinning.
“I’ll give you five bucks.” I say, laughing, I knew she’d go for it. “But you really have to play it up.” I say.
“Deal.” She says, and we shake hands.
A moment later Leo and Liam come back, both with glasses of punch in their hands. A new song came on and I looked at Ruby who nodded.
Liam set the glasses of punch down on the table and she grabbed his arm.
“I love this song!” She said, a big emphasis on ‘love’. “Come on, lets dance!”
“Uh, Ruby, you know I can’t dance.” He said, but she dragged him onto the dance floor.
I laugh and so does Leo who gives me a tentative look, like I might be mad at him. I wonder briefly if I am. Maybe I am, despite the fact that I’m the one at fault.
“Can we talk?” He asks.
“Outside.” I say, not letting myself say anything more. Because I know once I say another word I’ll say everything swimming around in my head.
We walk outside onto the empty balcony, a wall of glass separating us and the party.
“Char I . . . I’m mad, I’ll admit it, I’m really mad. I mean you two are friends, that’s what you said and you hang out and I don’t think you’d cheat but I can’t help but think it, I know you wouldn’t I really do it’s just . . . “ He trails off.
“I’ve been thinking about how I might’ve lost you over all this. I mean Grace was one thing but August was another. And I’ve been wondering what my life would be like, if I didn’t talk to you every day. If every day was like how these past four have been. The rain still pours without you. The world still turns without. The stars still shine without you. But I swear, the rain is just a little too heavy, the world is spinning just a little slower, and the stars are just a little dimmer. Because, Leo Knox, that is the world without you.”
“I- I want to fix this. Nothing is without fault, everyone fights, couples especially, but . . . “
“But regular couples rarely include one person with the ability to see soul mates.” I say, and Leo smiles despite the situation.
“The strings kinda ruin a lot.” He says.
“So true.” I say.
“I love you, Charlotte Cassidy.” He says. And I can see it in his eyes. I can see that it’s real. Oh how silly we were before. That hopeless thing we felt? That was never love. This is. And it’s real. So real.
“I love you too.” I say, smiling wider than I ever have before.
And then I gaze back into the ball room, and in a mixture of horror and astonishment I watch as all together, as one, the strings break.
- décembre 19, 2017
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