An Untamed State (9 page)

“We hope to have this situation resolved soon,” my father said, calmly. “Stay strong.” His ability to remain calm under any circumstance has always surprised me. During my thirteen days of captivity I spoke to my father several times. His voice never wavered.

I wanted to ask for Michael but I did not want to give the Commander the satisfaction of knowing what or who mattered most. I tried to think of something funny I could say, something clever. I couldn’t. I was violently hungry so I said, “Tell my husband to get in the kitchen and make me some damn dinner.”

The Commander gave me a look. In that stifling hot room, I was instantly cold.

My arm was wrenched so tightly the bone seemed to stretch away from my shoulder socket. The pain made all the air in my chest disappear. The room went white and then black and then white again. I ended the phone call and only then did I give voice to my agony.

The Commander released his grip and I fell to the floor clutching my arm. I tried to curl in on myself. The Commander rubbed his chin and stared down at me. He planted his boot on my head. “You will not enjoy the consequences of your petty defiance.”

He sounded like a movie villain. I laughed and the Commander left me there, cackling hysterically.

I often laugh when it is inappropriate. The first time Michael brought me to his parents’ farm, three hundred acres between Lincoln and Grand Island, he took me on a long walk around the property. We saw the corrals and outbuildings and acres and acres of pasture, an abandoned tractor, a couple of small oil derricks. As we walked, we held hands and he told me stories of hot summer days working with his father, early to bed and early to rise. He told me how once, when he was a boy, it was so cold, the cattle froze to the ground right where they stood. I laughed and laughed imagining a herd of cows trapped in shrouds of ice across the pastures. Michael’s face fell. We were silent for the rest of the walk and he began to walk faster. I had to run-walk-step to keep up with him until finally I was tugging at his shirt.

Michael and his parents are proud of their land. His family’s roots, my husband told me on our first date, are so deep, they reach straight through the earth to the other side. My father feels the same about his land in Haiti though the roots on an island are, perhaps, not as strong because they have less to hold on to.

The Jameson family farm is beautiful—everywhere you look, shades of green and gold and brown as far as the eye can see. Day and night, you hear the rustle of corn and soybean stalks as sweet as the ear can hear. And then there’s the stink of the pigs and their filth. Just after they’re fed, the pigs start to squeal. The sound is so high-pitched and heartbreaking, it makes my skin crawl. You can’t hide from the truth of life on the farm. We are animals and we eat animals and in order to eat animals you need to keep and kill animals. It took several visits before I was able to eat a meal at my in-laws’ table without feeling nauseous. I once joked, “This is the circle of life,” as we sat down to dinner and Glen, my father-in-law, informed me we were eating beef from a freshly slaughtered cow. Michael and his parents nodded and said, “Amen.”

My sarcasm doesn’t really work in the country.

The day Michael told me about the frozen cows I grabbed hold of his elbow and pulled until he stopped. “Did I say something wrong?”

Michael shrugged out of my grip and stalked off. Over his shoulder, he shouted, “I need to be away from you right now. You can be so mean.”

I made my way back to the house slowly, trying not to think about the way
mean
sounded coming from Michael, like I had committed a sin for which there could be no forgiveness. I found his mother in the kitchen baking a pie. I stood in the doorway and asked if there was anything I could do to help. She gazed at me curiously as she kneaded a thick mound of dough, said, “We don’t get much of your kind around here.” She paused, slapped the dough hard, sending white puffs of flour everywhere.

My face burned hotly and my chest tightened. “Do you mean law students?”

“Your clever talk won’t do you any favors here.” Lorraine paused, wiping her hands on her apron. “I don’t think you’re going to last. My son is having a little fun. He’s always wanted to go to the islands.”

I didn’t know what to say so I excused myself, went and sat on the porch. The longer I sat there, the angrier I became. When Michael found me, I was crying.

That night we lay next to each other, angrily, in his childhood bed, the detritus of his youthful accomplishments watching over us, me staring into his broad back. Every time one of us shifted, the other shifted in the opposite direction.

Finally, I sighed loudly. “Maybe we are trying too hard to make this work. You let your mother believe we are casual and that’s fine if we are casual but you say one thing to me and let her believe another and so you can see, I hope, why that makes me doubt you.”

He turned on his side, propping himself on one elbow. He put his hand on my stomach. “Is that what you think?”

I turned away. “Yes, Michael. That is exactly what I think.”

“Sometimes,” Michael said, “you say the stupidest fucking things.”

I sat up so quickly I felt dizzy. “Excuse me? Did you just call me stupid?”

Michael got up on his knees, pushed me onto my back, and straddled my waist. “No, I did not.” The whites of his eyes glowed. Frustration pulsed from his skin. He looked very different, dangerous. It excited me. He grabbed my arms and pushed them over my head.

I tried to extract myself from his grasp, my heart beating faster than I thought a heart could beat. “Have you lost your mind?”

He shoved my wrists deeper into the old mattress. The bed creaked. I wondered what his mother might say if she could see her son the way I have seen him. We fucked hard and angry, his hand sweaty, covering my mouth to keep me quiet. I didn’t know him until that night. I did not truly love him until that night.

Later, after he fell asleep, I found one of his old T-shirts and a pair of shorts. My sneakers were waiting neatly by the front door. In the driveway, I looked up into his bedroom window for a long while. There’s a gravel road that circles his parents’ farm. In the deep of night, I started running, enjoying the sound of the gravel spreading away from me with each footfall. When I finally stopped running, it was still dark but the air felt cooler, thinner. I was covered in sweat and the threadbare T-shirt clung to my body. Michael was waiting on the front porch. He looked exhausted and his hair stood on end. He jumped down the porch steps and pulled me into a long embrace, burying his face in my damp neck. When I tried to push him away, he only held on to me more tightly. I have always appreciated how he never lets me go. I need that. My natural instinct is for flight and the safety of solitude.

“I thought you left,” he whispered.

I shook my head. I could feel sweat and him on my inner thighs. “Where would I go?”

We sat on the porch stairs. I said, “I’m tired.” In the distance, we heard the echoing call of a rooster and then another. I shivered. “Your mother hates me.”

“No she doesn’t. She’s slow to warm. There’s a difference.”

His answer bothered me. I slid out of his embrace and stood. “It’s not that simple and if you don’t understand why this bothers me, we have a problem.”

Back in his bed, we lay side by side, pretending to sleep.

When it became clear I was, indeed, more than a fling, Michael’s mother sat me down on her sunporch for
a serious conversation
. She brought out a pot of tea, pound cake. She sat uncomfortably close, our knees touching. She said, “I’m sure you’re a nice young woman,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I am,” and she said, “I’m sure your parents are very proud of you,” and I said, “Yes, ma’am,” and she said, “You’d be opening yourself up to a whole lot of trouble if you took things any further with my son.”

I shifted in my seat. “I don’t mind trouble.”

Lorraine took a bite of pound cake. She set her fork down and it made a soft, unexpected sound. A small constellation of crumbs dotted her lower lip. “Marriage is hard. Life is long.”

“Michael and I are not talking marriage.”

She ignored me. “His father wants him to take over the farm someday. Could you be happy out here? Could you be a farmer’s wife? There aren’t a lot of people who look like you. We don’t have a problem with it the way you think we do but you and my boy would be making things a lot harder for yourselves if you took things any further.”

I did not know what to say. I pretended to not understand the exact nature of her objections to our relationship. We finished our tea and cake. When I offered to wash the dishes, she groused, “I can handle washing a couple plates and mugs. I don’t need any damn help.”

On the drive home, Michael turned to look at me. “I’d love for us to live out there, someday. We could help my folks out, have a real nice life.”

The seriousness in his voice frightened me. The bucolic scenery frightened me. I stared out my window at the passing cornfields. Every few moments some terrible insect made a new, wet mess of itself on the windshield. After a while, I said, “You do know we could never live out here, don’t you?”

He laughed. “You’re kidding, right? The farm is my home. It’s the one place where I’m the most me.”

We didn’t talk for a few miles, just listened to the rumble of the highway. “How would you feel if I asked you to move to Haiti? That’s my home, at least in some ways.”

Michael cleared his throat. I closed my eyes and hoped we wouldn’t say things that couldn’t be unsaid.

“That’s different,” Michael said.

My fingers numbed. “Different how?”

“The farm has running water and reliable electricity. The farm is not a hellhole. The place isn’t run by criminals. Come on, babe. It’s not the same thing.”

I had not known Michael capable of saying unnecessarily cruel things. Normally I was the one who said unforgivable things and he was the one who forgave. This shift intrigued me.

I shoved my hands beneath my thighs. “I see.”

We were quiet for the rest of the drive. When he dropped me off, he tried to kiss me. I turned my cheek, didn’t let him touch me. He didn’t ask if he could come in, knew he had crossed some kind of line. He sat in the driveway for hours. I watched from behind the curtain, waited for him to muster the manhood to apologize. He didn’t. I turned off the lights and still I watched him. He went home eventually. Before I went to sleep, I sent him an e-mail—“You, sir, are an asshole.”

Days would pass before we spoke again, days during which I stared at my phone and willed him to call, willed him to apologize, willed him to plead for my forgiveness and make whatever was wrong between us right. I willed myself to make a similar gesture but I couldn’t. I hold grudges. When he didn’t call, I focused on my studies, on being excellent. I should have never let him distract me with his pretty shoulders and talk of swooning. The law made sense. Michael did not. Days turned into weeks. I vowed to never speak to him again. I wrote irate e-mail drafts I did not dare send where I called him terrible names and detailed his failings in increasingly petty ways. I sent him an e-mail asking, “What the hell are you doing?” He wrote back, “I’m thinking, trying to decide if we can make this work. We come from different worlds.” I replied, “Don’t bother coming back to my world.”

We had not spoken in twenty-seven days. I was very unpleasant to everyone I encountered. I didn’t answer my parents’ phone calls. When I spoke with Mona I answered her questions in terse one-word answers. She said, “Should I come visit you, kid, and beat this guy up?” I told her not to bother. I told her I was done with him. I wrote even angrier e-mails that went unsent. I was done with American men as a dating species.

And then Michael found me in the law library. I didn’t need to look up to know he was standing over me. The warmth of his body was too familiar. “I am so sorry,” he said. “It’s been way too long since I’ve seen you.” His voice cracked. I was not interested in his acts of contrition.

I stood knowing I was going to speak without thinking. I couldn’t stop myself. I refused to look him in the eyes. He tried to reach for me but I slapped his hand away. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t you dare.”

“I have behaved very badly. Let me try to explain; I needed some time to think. I’m not good with disagreement or complications and I . . . I needed time.”

I stabbed my finger into his chest, hard. “You could have fooled me. Let’s be perfectly clear here. You pursued me.” I punctuated each word with my finger. He winced. I didn’t care. “You’re the one who told me to take the chance and then I did and you say something cruel and, even worse, ignorant about the place my family is from. You think you know anything about Haiti because you’ve watched some shitty news reports? You don’t call me for nearly a month, don’t even bother to explain that you need time. Where do you get off?”

People were staring. My voice was loud and tight. I did not care that I was in a library or that my peers were staring or that Michael seemed genuinely apologetic or that I was probably overreacting. I have a temper. I do not handle being scorned with any kind of grace. I stuffed my heavy laptop into my bag and grabbed a handful of books. He grabbed my arm and I narrowed my eyes, looked down at his hand. “Don’t touch me.” He refused to let go. I arched an eyebrow and looked him right in the eye. “If you do not unhand me, I will scream. You know me well enough to know I am not afraid to make a scene.”