Half Wild (16 page)

“I know.”

She sips her coffee and stares out the window toward the barn. “I just wanted you to come back.”

“I know,” I say. “I know.”

“So long as you know. Because life is still all honey. All honey.”

“Okay,” I say. I don't meet her eyes.

I walk across the field and into the woods to the old Stark cemetery. In grade school Kristy and I used to come here to trace the names of women and children etched into the stones: Zipporah, Constance, Faith, Desire—her relatives, distantly, from two hundred years ago. Later, in middle school, we would come to the same spot and pretend we
were making out with boys: lay our bodies on the rotting leaves and wet moss, close our eyes, and imagine doe-eyed, sweet, and handsome boys leaning over our faces, touching our limbs, saying our names out loud.
Kristy. Hannah. Kristy. Hannah.

Today trillium blooms amidst the twisted, toothlike stones that heave out of the leaves and dirt. I lie down like Kristy and I used to do, close my eyes, and feel the sun on my face. Constance, Faith, Desire? Matthew wants me to bring him here, wants to meet my mother, wants to know and draw the shape of these fields. Matthew: a kind-hearted boy from the suburbs of Minneapolis. “You're slippery,” he said before I left, rubbing his thumb down my spine, his eyes cloaked in sadness.

I said,
“
There are two worlds I won't ever belong to. Home or any other.”

He smiled, blinked: utterly confused.

The next day I follow my mother out to the barn to feed Stella, the twenty-year-old goat with phosphorescent green eyes, a long beard, and splayed bottom teeth. “Ugly, huh?” my mother says, grinning.

Blaaat,
Stella replies.

My mother scratches the fur beneath Stella's chin, feeds her raisins from her palm. “I want to leave this world like you,” she half mutters to the goat, so quiet I can barely hear. “Not in a fucking white gown. Not with my tits cut off.
Stella baby,” she says, scratching the goat's chin again, and Stella butts her head into my mother's breast, and I think how this goat has taken the place of love and friendship and family. “You know how to go, don't you,” she whispers into the floppy, mottled ear. “You know how to go.”

She turns to me. “Know what the Kennedy Center's motto is?”

“No.”

“
I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace or beauty
. JFK said that. Isn't that lovely?”

“Yes,” I say, trailing, as always, the roller coaster of her mind. “Yes, it is.” But really what I want to know is how long I am here for, and how to fix her roof, and her body, and her mind.

“What about the roof?” I ask.

My mother turns from me and walks out the door. “Oh, that,” she calls out behind her. “Can wait.”

A man leans against the bar next to me and orders an Otter Creek. His arms are tan below the sleeve of his T-shirt; thinning brown hair dips into his eyes. He pays Kristy for the drink, then turns to me. “Hannah, right?”

“Yes.” I don't recognize this face; his left eye wanders slightly upward.

“Jesse Maise. From the farm down the road.”

Jesse. I haven't seen him in fifteen years or more; I'm surprised how old he looks, how broken, how kind. “Oh,
right. Hi.” A pale, thick scar runs from halfway up his cheekbone to the corner of his eye.

He nods and rubs his beer glass with his thumb. “Bet your mother's happy to have you back.”

“Yes,” I say, thinking of her Saab broken down by the side of the road, of her wet cotton dress, of Jesse, it must have been, in his truck, reluctantly pulling over.

“She doing all right?” he asks.

“Yes. Thanks. She's fine.”

“Not too many goats left, it doesn't look like.”

“No. Just one.”

“I always thought she was cool shit—doing it all herself like that.”

I smile, surprised. I didn't imagine Jesse thought anything of my mother, other than different, or strange. “She is. She is cool shit.”

“Thought all hippies were as pretty and independent as her.” He laughs. “In college I found out they weren't.”

I can't help but laugh too. “Cheers to her, then,” he says, reaching his glass toward mine, and I raise my arm, and the glass clinks, and I follow him with my eyes as he walks back to a table in the corner below that cat's yellow eyes.

Kristy nudges my arm. “Sweet, huh?” I nod. She leans in closer, her voice a near whisper. “His daughter died—drowned—a few years ago. His wife left.”

“Oh,” I say. I can picture Jesse and his older brother, Clem, standing at the edge of a pond with BB guns, aim
ing at frogs. I can see Jesse—blond, scrawny, quiet—at the back of the bus, picking at scabs. I hadn't thought of him in a long time.

But I think about him that night back in my room. I think of that wandering blue eye and that mysterious scar and that loss; I think about letting him touch me like he touches the other things that belong to this place: tractors, fences, barn doors, cows. I think about my mother and death and fear and abandon. And I think of Matthew, sweet Matthew, who has left two messages on my phone, checking in. I leave a message when I know he's at work, promising I'll call soon. I pick a book off my old bookshelf and flip through the pages: Milan Kundera's
The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
It was my favorite. Sabina and her brazen solitude.

I drive my mother to her appointment: forty minutes by interstate. Her twenty-year-old Saab smells like mildew and cigarettes and the lemon air freshener that hangs from the rearview mirror. We listen to tapes she has kicking around on the floor of the car: Al Green, the Sex Pistols, Dolly Parton. The Saab shimmies as soon as we hit sixty, so I drive fifty-nine, the windows rolled down, my mother's seat tilted back and her gray hair whipping this way and that in the wind.

The oncologist with the bleached-tooth grin tells us he has scheduled radiation to start two weeks from now, but that nothing is cut-and-dried here. He looks at my
mother, then at me. “A mastectomy is possible,” he says nervously. Then adds, “Likely.” He tells us that the key to success is lifestyle and attitude. He says it twice, looking again into my mother's eyes, then mine. His eyes betray his words, spill faithlessness. I think of her overflowing ashtrays and overgrown fields and dripping roof and dying goat and drying-up inheritance. My mother blinks and smiles and says, “Of course,” and heads for the door. On the way home she leans back on the headrest and closes her eyes. After a while she reaches across the seat and touches my thigh. “You happy doing what you're doing, baby?”

I look in the rearview mirror. “I don't know.”

“Why not?”

“Too ornery.” She opens her eyes then and we both smile. But I feel something rise in my throat that is salty and bitter, reeking of fear.

My mother roots around on the floor, then pulls up a tape and pops it in. The Flying Burrito Brothers start to sing “Hickory Wind.” She pulls the visor down and closes her eyes.

I drive home thinking about Gram Parsons' body in an outrageous embroidered suit burning up in the desert of Southern California, about the strange ways we choose to die. I think about the reckless beauty of my mother's life compared with my small rooms and the art I haven't made. At the next exit I pull off the blacktop
and take the back roads—gravel that follows Silver Creek and meanders past houses I've slept in, fields I've gotten drunk in, swimming holes where I've skinny-dipped or gotten stoned. These places that flicker with memory and strange grief and misrememberings.

They make me lose track of time; the days slip into one another. I've been here a week and a half, or two. My office has told me to take my time, but I still haven't bought a return ticket. How long is too long?

I drive to Indian Love Call to meet Kristy. It's on Silver Creek, over the bridge and a pull-off to the right. Seventeen years ago Kristy's dad died two miles downstream; now she sits on a log with a six-pack of wine coolers by her side. We roll our pants up, dip our toes into the cold water, open two bottles, and lean our faces and shoulders back to catch the sun.

“What do you think it feels like to be in love?” Kristy asks.

I feel the pores of my face expand, my skin open like a flower.

“I mean do you think you're in love with that guy in Seattle?” Kristy makes circles in the sand with her middle finger. I don't respond.

“I think I'm in love with Dylan Pial. He's in love with me,” she says. I'm quiet. I remember Dylan from high school. Part Abenaki, part French, I think. Kind eyes.

“I think that men either idealize you or need you,” I
say with my eyes closed, thinking of my mother's long string of boyfriends: the guitar player, an English teacher who grew pot in the basement, a motorcycle mechanic with a wife in New Hampshire. “It's one or the other.”

Kristy nods. “I think he needs me.” She has been in love many times; it's a knack she has.

“Infatuation,” I say. “You need some of that. Keep them at a good arm's length.”

“And make offhand comments about penis size,” Kristy says, her chipped front tooth flashing in the sun. “To keep them guessing.”

We laugh and sip our coolers and tip our shoulders back. Upstream, kids wade in the shallow pools, and below us the creek widens out over smooth rock. I dig my bare toes and heels into the sand.

“No, but for real,” Kristy says. “I think he might be the one.” She stares off at those kids, laughing and splashing.

“I have no idea about love, Kristy,” I say. A racket of sparrows takes flight in my chest. They open their mouths, but no sound comes out. “I have no fucking clue about love.”

My mother and I eat dinner on the porch: tuna and greens from the garden. She's missed all her scheduled appointments. Her answering machine fills with calls from doctors.

“Tell me something cool,” she says.

“A starfish can turn itself inside out.”

My mother grins. “Really? That's magnificent. But I was actually thinking something more personal.”

I look at the woods, at the field, at my hands. “It's good to be here.”

“Oh.” She glances at me from under her furrowed brow. “I thought you might hate it here.”

“How could I?” I look across the fields at the barns and the gardens and the ochre shadows of the trees. At the bottom of the hill I can see the roof of Kristy's double-wide, the tin roof glaring white with sun. Inside, her mom, I know, is drinking coffee and watching reruns of
Twin Peaks.
I don't hate it here; I hate what happens to me when I am here. I hate the way it draws me in. The way it leads to nowhere but itself. The way everyone and everything is connected and a person cannot be free. “It's too beautiful to hate it here,” I say.

My mother laughs. “Yes,” she says. “Yes it is. Why do you think I've stuck around all these years?” She sets her jar down and closes her eyes. After a while she drifts into sleep. Her body trembles once, her lips open. I take a moth-eaten wool blanket off my chair and lay it over her thin legs. I want to leave. I want to go home. I want to undress in front of Matthew to a slow song, a glass of cool bourbon in my hand.
Here,
I want to say.
Have me.

My mother tells me she has something to show me. She leads me out the door and through the overgrown north pasture. From halfway across the field we can see a view
of the Maise farm below us, its roof lines and gray hollows. “I saw Jesse the other day,” I tell my mother.

She looks at me and grins. “Cute, no?”

“Cute as pie,” I say.

She nods and looks in that direction. “You hear about his daughter?”

“A little.”

“Three years old.”

I feel my heart dive toward the grass, then deeper into the substrata of glacial till and bedrock.

“But let's not think about that now,” she says, continuing uphill.

At the top of the pasture she stops and closes her eyes and tips her head back.

The field is quiet and still, the woods insulating the spot from the sounds of the trucks on Route 100.

“I like to come here,” she says, “and pretend the world is going on without me. Like I'm a bit of nothing, nowhere.”

“That's bullshit, Joan,” I say quietly. “You're not nothing, nowhere.” I want to be nothing like her. I want to be part of the world. And yet I think about the time I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge at midnight, drunk. I think of some of the ways I have slept with men: in search of obliteration as much as love.

She continues on toward the woods, and I follow. At the edge of the field she trails a stone wall into the trees
and up a slope to a spot of revealed ledge. “Look,” she says, pointing to a shallow cave in the rock face. She gets down on her hands and knees and roots around. “I found this a few days ago,” she says, rubbing something between her fingers. I go to where she kneels and peer down at what she's holding: some fur, the color of coyote, or bobcat, or fox—I can't tell. It's the color of the twelve-point buck that hangs above the bar at the Stonewall. I look into the empty cave, and my skin breaks out with fear. It smells like piss and dank stone. “You think?” she asks.

“Think what?”

“Oh, come on. It's catamount. Cougar. Panther. I'm sure.”

“Maybe. Or fox.”

“Oh, Hannah.”

“What?”

“When are you going to become a believer?” My mother's eyes are glistening.

“What do you mean?” There's unkindness in my voice. And hers.

“When are you going to believe in anything? In life or love or fucking wild cats?”

I don't respond.

“I'm sorry,” she says, standing up and reaching her arms around my shoulders. Her face is flushed.

“Forgiven,” I say, turning.

We walk back to the house in silence. When I get to
my room I find there is a new message on my phone from Matthew asking if I am okay, if Joan is all right, if he can come out to join me. I don't call him back. I tell myself I'll call later tonight. But instead I lie in bed and think about catamounts and cows and fireflies in fields and girls drowning. I think about what happens to a heart once it's known something like that, and where Jesse finds his company, and whether he believes in big cats, or love, or belonging.