Be Mine (6 page)

Even my firm body, those gym muscles—all the more ludicrous. I should have let myself grow soft, like my grandmother, I thought. I thought of her pillowy waist, pressing my face into it, feeling her warm flesh behind her apron—my grandmother, who had never seen the inside of a gym, let alone climbed onto an elliptical machine, and who, every morning, sat down at the kitchen table with a sweet roll and a cup of tea with heavy cream, relishing every bite and sip.

Instead, with my hard body, I've become like one of those brides in a horror film—lift the veil on what might appear to be a beautiful girl, and the face of an old hag is revealed.

This,
I thought, lifting the veil in the middle of the night at the bathroom mirror,
is who I have become.

Then, looking more closely,
Where have I gone?

***

J
ON WOKE
up this morning with a fire in his belly to "shoot the fucking squirrel" that woke us up in the middle of the night. Six o'clock he's out there patrolling the eaves troughs with his rifle. Chad said, coffee cup in his hands, looking out the kitchen window, "Has the old man finally lost it?"

I could see Jon's boot prints, how deep and dark they were in the snow, as if the Grim Reaper on a March morning were out there circling our house. But Jon himself was a blur in a hunter orange parka in the dull gray sunrise over the line of trees between our property and the neighbors'.

"What do you suppose the neighbors think about this?" Chad asked. He was up so early because he was going to drive Jon into work, then take his car to Kalamazoo to visit the girl he took to prom last year.

"I'm not worried about what they think," I told Chad.

The Henslins, whose property borders ours, are an elderly couple. They still slaughter their own sheep, milk their own cows, burn their own garbage in a ditch behind their barn so they don't have to pay twenty dollars a month to have it hauled away. Plenty of times I've seen Mr. Henslin out there himself with a rifle, hunting down the raccoons that got into his sheep feed, or his own aggravation of squirrels. And every October, he puts on his orange vest and hat and drives off with his grandsons and their spaniel, Kujo, returning with a dead deer strapped over the hood of their truck.

But, I suppose, those aren't the neighbors Chad's talking about.

In the last ten years, there are fewer and fewer neighbors like the Henslins. Instead, our neighbors, whom we've never met, zip by our house in their minivans and BMWs on their way to the freeway to work, and back from the freeway to their subdivisions. French Country Estates. Meadowlark Meadows. The subdivisions have all been built in the corn and soybean fields and razed apple orchards that used to belong to people like the Henslins. They feel like strangers, but are, I know, more like us than the Henslins. Jon and I did not, perhaps, raze the old farmhouse and build a McMansion, but our own motives weren't so different from those new residents of French Country Estates. We all had the same fantasies of wildflowers and meadowlarks, of a slower life in the country, and then ruined it with our desire for it.

Our own house was built by a great-great-uncle of the Henslins when he first came here from Prussia, and on some level I think the Henslins still think of our house as theirs. Twice, when we first moved in and the grass got too long for their taste, Mr. Henslin came over here with a riding mower when we weren't home and cut it for us. In August of our first summer, Mrs. Henslin called and told me I needed to pinch the heads off the hollyhocks or they wouldn't bloom the next year. Her great-aunt, she explained, had planted those hollyhocks from seeds that had been given to her by her great-great-grandmother, who'd brought them with her from Prussia.

I would never have thought of it, but I went out immediately and did as she'd said.

Those heads came off like damp, feminine handfuls of a remote past when I pinched them.

Once, I asked her about this great-aunt, but Mrs. Henslin could tell me, it seemed, nothing more than her name. Ettie Schmidt

Sometimes I tried to imagine this Ettie Schmidt in my house—a small pale woman passing through the halls, rocking a baby by the woodstove. But I could never really see her, never imagine any other wife or mother in this house but me. Beyond the hollyhocks, she'd left no trace of herself when she left.

"Well, it can't look good," Chad said, looking out the kitchen window at his father. Over Chad's shoulder I could see the shadow Jon's rifle cast in the snow. "And won't the school bus be by soon?"

I was about to go to the door, to call out to Jon to forget it, to put the rifle away, come in and drink his coffee and get ready for work, but then he fired—loud, and heart-stopping, and some small animal's final surprise in this world on the roof of our house.

I
KISSED
them both good-bye after breakfast. "Be careful driving to Kalamazoo," I said to Chad, and he nodded. He knew I'd taken the day off again to be with him, but this girl, this girl in Kalamazoo, had been expecting him, he said.

I don't remember much about this particular prom date except that I didn't think she was beautiful enough to keep Chad's attention very long. Pretty hair, straight and brown, and green eyes—but in her short prom dress standing on our front lawn, wearing her wristband corsage (which I'd paid for and picked up from the florist only an hour before), her legs looked like the trunks of two fruit trees. Thin enough, but shapeless. Her panty hose were too dark for the bridal white she was wearing, and her makeup was of the orangey too-thick variety. Her name was Ophelia. (Ophelia!) And her stepfather was a cop, her mother was a dental hygienist. And Chad had told me they were just friends, which I felt certain was all they'd ever been, and all they were now, despite this trip to Kalamazoo to see her.

"So, what will you do all day with Ophelia?" I asked.

"Lunch," he said. "She's going to show me her campus."

"Drive carefully," I said. "I'll pick Dad up from work."

"Good job, Mom," he said, and winked.

***

M
IDAFTERNOON
, I decided to take a nap. A deep exhaustion had begun to settle on my eyelids as I folded Chad's laundry—the T-shirts, the boxer shorts, warm from the dryer, all that soft cotton smelling, now, of powdered flowers and well water, as if, rather than washing and drying my son's laundry in a machine, I'd left it in the rain and sun in a garden for many summers, gone back to find it softened, sweetened. I put what I was folding—a plain gray T-shirt I'd never seen before—back in the basket.

Outside, the sun was straining through the snow clouds, so I pulled the shades. I lay down on the bed and pulled the quilt at the foot of it over me. I closed my eyes, waiting to drift into sleep on the scent of laundry, winter dust, the furnace, the silence of a house with no one but a wife and mother in it, when I thought of it.

The note.

Be Mine.

I opened my eyes.

Sherry (Cherie!).

I rolled onto my side. I rolled onto my stomach, and then, again, onto my back—the thrill of it starting behind my knees, traveling like a man's hands straight up my thighs, between my legs.

How long had it been since I'd masturbated?

Years?

Before Jon and I were married, it was something I did every day. Twice a day! Sometimes in the bath or the shower. Always before I went to sleep. Once on a plane. I'd been on my way to New York to visit a friend. I had three seats to myself. I pulled my down jacket over my lap, and as the plane was hurtling itself down the runway, and then heading nose-first into the sky, rumbling and vibrating and shaking in that disconcerting plastic manner of planes as they leave the earth, I slid my whole hand down the front of my jeans and brought myself to such a fast and shattering climax that I worried, afterward, that I might have moaned and not known it. But I looked around. No one seemed to know.

In those days, everything filled me with longing. The sight of a man loosening his tie. A couple walking down the street with their arms around one another. The tip of my own pinky between my own teeth.

Mostly, then, I think, it was my own body that I wanted. Even the ugly men—the ones I felt afraid of, or repulsed by—when they looked at me, passing me on the street or lingering at the counter when I was ringing up their books and magazines, made my heart race.

Sometimes, even, being looked at, my nipples would stiffen. I would get wet.

I was wild, I think, for
myself.
Sometimes I would take a hand mirror, put it between my legs, watch myself touch myself. I could come in seconds, or I could draw it out for an hour, force my fingers away from my clitoris and lie on my bed with my legs spread—naked, panting, bringing myself so close that I became a girl at the edge of an abyss of pleasure, touching my own breasts, licking my fingers, and then finally allowing myself to plunge into it, torso soaked with sweat, and letting myself thrash myself to orgasm.

This afternoon, it was slower, and my hands between my legs, with some imagination, became the hands of a stranger. But I brought myself to a climax that surprised me. A rocking wildness that brought tears to my eyes, as if, making love to myself, I had been returned to a lover for whom I'd been violently pining for a long time.

When I woke—slowly, languidly, a pleasurable rising from the depths of something to its surface—I went to the bathroom and looked, again, at myself in the mirror.

The horror of the night before had slipped away. In the afternoon light, I looked younger, softer. I could see it, still, my younger face. My hair, still long and dark, was mussed, but shiny. I was, again, a woman you might glimpse in a hallway and remember.

T
OMORROW
Chad goes back. He couldn't stay the whole week, he said, because he needed to get back to study for a calculus exam he had on Monday. "You can't study here?" I asked. "No," he said. "I can't study here."

We're having Garrett to dinner tonight When I told Chad I'd seen him up at the college, he just shrugged. When I told him I'd invited Garrett to dinner, he said, "Great," but didn't seem particularly interested. "Aren't you friends anymore with Garrett?" I asked, and he said, "I haven't been friends with Garrett since seventh grade, Mom." I asked him if he wanted to call Garrett, to tell him what time we'd be eating, and Chad said, "Why don't you?"

Garrett answered the phone in the middle of the first ring, as if he'd been there, waiting. It was a local number. Did he still live in his childhood house, now that his parents were dead? Did he live alone? "Garrett," I said, "this is Sherry Seymour. Chad's mother."

"Yeah!" he said. "How's Chad?"

"Chad's fine. He's great. He's here. He's excited to see you. Can you still come to dinner?"

"Sure, yes. I'd love that What time, Mrs. Seymour?"

"Seven o'clock?"

"Okay. Yeah. Great!"

After we hung up, I listened to the emptiness on the line for a moment. There was another voice, there, in the air—a man's voice. I recognized the word "already," but the rest was just mumbling, the implication of sentence structure, of meaning. When we were in fifth grade, sixth grade, we used to believe these voices that could sometimes be heard on the line between phone calls, or under phone calls, were the voices of the dead. At slumber parties, we'd listen for them through a dead receiver.

And why not? Couldn't there be some remnant of them in the air, still speaking? Couldn't an instrument capable of transporting voices across oceans, across time zones, manage somehow to pick up the voices of the dead?

No.

Of course not.

I hung up.

Tacos.

I'll make tacos. A guy's dinner. Jon will like it, too. Chips and guacamole, and lots of shredded cheese, chopped onion, tomatoes.

G
ARRETT
came to the door in a starched white shirt, carrying a massive red rose wrapped in cellophane with the price, $1.99, still stuck on it with a green tag.

He politely pulled his boots off on the porch and spent the evening in his socks, one of which had a hole at the big toe. His hair was even shorter than it had been when I saw him in the hallway last week—a buzz cut so close to his scalp I could see the pale skin there—and he smelled of Dial soap. As Garrett stood beside Chad with his shaggy hair down over his collar and falling into his eyes and his Berkeley sweatshirt with its ragged sleeves, they looked like boys from entirely different worlds.

I put the rose in a vase and put the vase on the table. I gave both of the boys a beer. It was Jon's idea, but I'd agreed. No reason to pretend that the legal drinking age had anything to do with their drinking beer, which they've certainly been doing for years now. But after each of them had a second one, I didn't offer them any more.

I had, myself, three big cold glasses of white wine—Sue's drink, a bottle of Sauterne she gave me for my birthday last year, trying to convert me from my Merlot—and relaxed.

I put a candle beside the vase, and the flickering light on the rose made it look like a beating heart at the center of the table.

After the second glass of wine, the men around me became beautiful, ravenous strangers. Seconds, thirds, they ate as I sipped and nibbled and passed dishes to them.

Beautiful, ravenous strangers:

Jon in his flannel shirt, telling jokes, "A woman sits down next to a man on an airplane..."

And Chad, with his hair grown out like that, the bristly half beard that's grown since he's been here, having not shaved his face once despite that razor beside his father's on the bathroom sink.

And Garrett—whose ten-year-old face I could no longer find in this new one.

Where, I wondered, had he gone, that little boy ramming Matchbox cars against the legs of my coffee table?
Garrett, honey, can you take those toys to Chad's room? I don't want the furniture to get scratched up.
I could still recall the expression of deep apologetic despair on his face when he looked up at me. I remember I took it back when I saw that despair.