Be Mine (11 page)

This one smelled plainly of sweat.

He was younger than Nathan.

He didn't want to talk about where he was going, where he was from. When the song ended he moved his hands up and down my back, looked into my face as if he were considering kissing me, then thought better of it and said, "Thanks, beautiful," before leaving me standing on the dance floor, trying to regain my bearings, to find my way back to Jon.

In the parking lot, Jon said nothing.

He unlocked the passenger side of the car for me, and when I got in, he reached down and pushed the hem of my dress up over my knee, leaned over, caressed my calf, looking into my eyes in the vapor light attached to the eaves trough of Stiver's. He slid his hand up, then, to my thigh, and said, "You've been naughty," in a mock-serious tone—then put his hand fully between my legs, and for the first time I realized, myself, how warm and wet I was, and he said, "When we get home, I'm going to fuck you hard for this."

I could hardly catch my breath. When we got home, my knees were so weak he had to help me out of the car.

***

"W
HAT
the hell is going on? Where the hell are you?"

"What's going
on?
I've been waiting by the phone all night. When you get this message call me
right away.
"

"Jesus Christ, I have to get news about my own mother now from
Garrett Thompson?
Should I call
Garrett
to find out where the hell my mother is?"

"You can call me, you know. It's three hours earlier here. I haven't gone to beddy-bye yet. I'm waiting to find out what the hell is going on there."

It wasn't until we were done in bed (Jon hadn't pulled out of me before he started again) that I saw the message light on the answering machine blinking with seven messages from Chad.

I was, I guess, too drunk to remember his phone number. I had to look for it on the caller ID, and then I misdialed and a groggy-sounding woman answered, then hung up on me when I said I thought I had the wrong number.

Chad answered the phone on the first ring, sounding wide awake and furious. I thought his voice was shaking—a tremor he'd always had, even as a two-year-old, when he was angry or upset, and which made him sound as if he were speaking from the caboose of a train rattling across uneven tracks. "Gee, thanks for calling, Mom," he said.

"I'm sorry, Chad. Your dad and I went out—"

"Until two o'clock in the morning? On a school night?"

I couldn't help it. I laughed.

"So, it's funny, Mom? That I've been sitting around my dorm room all night, worried sick?"

"No, I guess. It's just..." I was afraid to go on. I was afraid he'd be able to tell that I was drunk.

"So why don't you tell me what happened."

"What do you mean?" For a crazy second I thought he meant at Stiver's, with the truckers.

"What do I mean? I mean Garrett says you hit a deer on the freeway, Mom. Are you
okay?
"

"Yes, Chad, of course I'm okay. Just the bumper's bent. Everything else is fine." I paused. "Except the deer."

"Jesus," Chad said. "People
die
that way. You guys need to move into the city. This commute is dangerous. Let me talk to Dad."

Jon was in the shower. I could hear the water running. He was singing, too, something operatic and ridiculous. Soon, he'd fall into a deep sleep.

"He's already in bed," I told Chad. "I'll tell him to call you tomorrow."

"Good," Chad said. "Now you'd better go to bed yourself. Did you go to the doctor? Did you make sure—"

"Nothing's wrong," I said.

"You don't know that, Mom. Sometimes people have skeletal or internal injuries without any immediate symptoms. Did you hit your head?"

"No, Chad," I said. "I hit a deer." I couldn't help it. I started to laugh again. I
was
drunk.

"Real funny, Mom," Chad said. "This is all real funny. Just go to bed, and tell Dad to call me in the morning. And thanks for getting back to me in such a timely manner."

He hung up.

A
HANGOVER
this morning. And, from sex, the exertion of it, my stomach muscles ache. I'm sore between my legs. A stinging burn just under the skin of my inner thighs. All these familiar, nearly forgotten, vague pains of passion.

"I want you to find out who this secret admirer is," Jon said last night, turning me over, looking into my face as he entered me, "and fuck him."

"Okay," I whispered.

"I want you to let him do anything he wants to you," he said.

"Okay."

"I want you to fuck another man."

Jon's eyes were narrowed, and the look on his face was more intense than any expression I'd seen there for years. My heart sped up, seeing it, as if I'd caught a glimpse of an animal at the zoo, outside its cage, or a man sauntering into the bank with a gun.
Anything could happen here, now,
I thought, and I was as excited as I was afraid to find myself in this ordinary place suddenly lit up with so much extraordinary potential.

"Do you understand?" he asked, putting his hands on my shoulders, his face on my neck, slamming into me.

Yes,
I said, arching my back to meet him.

It wasn't until after we were done, after I'd gone downstairs, called Chad, hung up the phone, and gone back upstairs to find Jon out of the shower and already asleep, naked, on his back in our bed, that I wondered how serious he had been—or, if he was serious at all.

That expression on his face—it had
seemed
serious.

But that was sex.

That was the moment, that was the fantasy. Surely, he wasn't serious. We'd never even come close, in the past, to acting out any of our fantasies—even when we were young, and childless, and only marginally employed, with so much less to lose, and so much more time on our hands. And that one time—with Ferris—when it had seemed that I might stray, Jon had reacted, in the end, with anything but pleasure. Those many years ago, when I'd told him about Ferris's profession of love, and the kiss (how innocent now, it seemed, that furtive parking lot kiss) and my own confusion, before Jon's tearful pleading
(You can't ruin our family, Sherry. You can't do it, to me, to Chad. Please, tell me you won't do it, that you'll just turn around now and come back),
he'd been furious. He'd picked up a bedside lamp and, holding it by the neck, had shaken it at me.

I'd been in bed, in a nightgown, holding a book
(Mrs. Dal-loway)
so tightly in my hands that the pages held the indentations of my fingers forever. He was standing over me, and I suddenly realized how vulnerable I was—how easily my bones would break, my skull, if he wanted them to, or even (maybe especially) if he
didn't
want them to, but lost all control of himself, all notion of what it was he wanted.

What was my body made of, anyway, after all, I thought then, but so much tissue, and blood? I would rip open, like a pillow. I would crack to pieces, like an egg—and, still, stubbornly, absurdly, I was thinking about Ferris, the pencil behind his ear, pushing an overhead projector through the hallway, looking tired and intelligent and overwarm in his button-down shirt, telling me he was in love, for the first time in his life, and too late (two kids, a pregnant wife) with me.

Go ahead and kill me,
I'd thought, looking at Jon with the lamp in his hand over me, raging.

But he put it back down on the nightstand and walked away.

No, I thought.

My husband did not really want me to fuck another man.

Even if he thought he did, holding my shoulders as he said it—
I want you to fuck another man
—he was wrong.

Surely, if my secret admirer revealed himself, Jon would feel jealous, threatened. The titillation was in the possibility, not the act itself, I felt sure.

And what about me?

Had I ever really wanted a lover?

Until now, no. I was sure of that. Not even Ferris. I could still remember the relief that washed over me along with the fluorescent light when he told me in a corner of my classroom after the students were gone that he'd taken a job in Missouri, the way my whole life seemed opened up to the possibility then of being the woman I'd wanted to be—the farmhouse, the child, the car that started on the first try—forever.

But Chad had been a toddler then. I was so much younger. Now, I'd already been that woman. Now, I was free to be someone else if I wanted to be. Now, did I want a lover?

In the dark, beside Jon, in our bed, I thought about that for a long time, without any idea of what the answer would be. Trying to look for the answer to that question in my own mind was like finding myself suddenly inside an echoing tunnel:

Do I want a lover? Do I want a lover to want me? Do I want Jon to want me to have a lover? Do I want Jon to want me to want a lover?

I couldn't even decide on a question long enough to decide on an answer.

Finally, I fell asleep.

And woke up like this—blinking in the wan morning light, too hungover to go to work. All these dull aches—the stomach, the thighs, the skin. My lips, parched. My eyes, stinging. Thirsty. A warm throbbing just behind my cheekbones.

Cheap beer.

I called in to cancel my office hours.

I showered, drank three glasses of orange juice, made a grocery list:

Milk, linguine, bread, cereal, orange juice
—and a hundred other little things written out shakily on the back of an empty envelope (spring dress, department store credit card bill opened and paid several days ago) addressed to a Ms. Sherry Seymour—a woman I could not imagine would have woken up on a Wednesday morning with a hangover after dancing all night at Stiver's with two truckers, but a woman who, I realized after staring at that name long enough, I also was.

A
FTER
the shopping, I put the groceries away and lay down for a cool, dry, but delicious nap.

It was a gray morning again—a misty rain on the way to the supermarket, but the sun had been attempting, at least, to burn its way through the clouds.

This,
I thought, opening the car window just an inch to smell the air,
will be the last real winter day.

Spring—I could feel it there, at the edges of the world, or waiting, impatiently now, beneath all the layers and layers of winter that had been so painstakingly laid down. I thought of the bulbs in the garden—how they'd be stretching, pushing, triggered by the change. Soon, they'd writhe to the surface and stab into the world again. And the birds would be back with their songs. The baby bunnies. The frogs trilling in the Henslins' pond.

On the bed, there was a pool of that cool, new, white light.

When I lay down for my nap, I didn't bother to close the curtains.

I lay at the center of that light and fell asleep.

Dreamless.

During that brief nap, a century might have ended and begun. Many winters passed, bookended by mild and rainless seasons. I slept through them all. I doubt I even rolled over once. I imagine my eyelids never even fluttered. In that envelope of unconsciousness and time, I was no one. I was nowhere. I was completely free of everything I'd ever been, or done, or thought, or said—and when the phone rang, and I woke up quickly, blinking, I felt completely renewed. Born again. Fresh out of the nest, or out of the ground. Ready for the world. I knew exactly who I was, and what I wanted. I stretched. The pains were gone. I yawned. I let the machine—with its hours and hours of empty memory waiting to be filled, and all its little wheels and pulleys sucking the sounds of the world into it bloodlessly and without judgment—get the phone.

I
T WAS
Garrett.

I sat up in bed so I could hear his message better.

"Hey, Mrs. Seymour, this is Garrett. We were kind of expecting you to bring the car in today, but you're not here. Are you still planning on it? Can you give us a call? Bram says any time this afternoon is fine. There are plenty of guys here to look her over."

Did I imagine it, or was there a bit of low, dark laughter in the background as Garrett hung up the phone?

It could have been just the sound of an engine starting up.

Or a crow flying over.

Or, it could have been Bram Smith laughing in the background.

Bram Smith—still an imaginary character with muscular arms, wearing a T-shirt, jeans, maybe even smoking a cigarette like a man straight out of my adolescent summer dreams—which, until that moment I'd almost forgotten completely but now came rushing back to me with all the sexual intensity of a summer afternoon—lying on my back on my bed in my childhood home, a cacophony of birdsong outside the open window, and my whole life ahead of me, made, still, of fantasy, of television light, silk, as if millions of worms somewhere were busily at work spinning that future for me.

I
WORE
sheer gray hose, my taupe suede skirt, a pink blouse, a strand of pearls, and a fingerprint of Chanel No. 5 on each wrist, and drove my car straight to him.

Suddenly, spring.

I knew it had come the morning I drove past that doe, as I always did, on the freeway, and a shining black turkey vulture was hunched over her.

At first, driving by, seeing that vulture on top of her, it appeared to me, horribly, as if she'd somehow grown huge dark wings and was trying to fly. But then I saw its red face and knew it for a buzzard, and that spring had finally come. They're the first, surest sign of spring, those buzzards. Their return means that the roadkill has thawed, that there's enough soft death around, again, to keep them alive.

First, the buzzards, then the other birds came back, all of them at once. Robins hopping across the muddy grass like windup birds, toy birds. Then, wide
Vs
of geese honking across the sky every evening at dusk. Then sandhill cranes, looking prehistoric and awkward in the fields, nodding slowly, seeming to be searching the ground for something they'd lost. And the others—I had no idea what they were called, where they'd gone, only that they had traveled thousands of miles to leave us here all winter, and now they were back.