When We Were Animals (22 page)

“Don’t worry,” he says. “It won’t hurt at all. You won’t feel a thing. I promise.”

He pinches my finger tight.

“Ow,” I say.

“Oh, come on,” he says. “That doesn’t hurt.”

He tells me it doesn’t hurt, and I believe him, and so it doesn’t hurt. He instructs my body on what to feel. And I am relieved, because I relish instruction. How does one know what to make of the world if one is not told?

The vise of his legs, crushing with absolute control my wild little body.

He unpinches my fingers. He tells me the splinter is out. It does not hurt.

His legs release me, and I feel suddenly light—too light, as though I might spin off into the sky like a rogue balloon lost to the thinness of ether.

My husband is
a good father. When our son gets hurt, Jack is the person he runs to by instinct. I watch the two of them—the way Jack puts his two big hands on the boy’s shoulders, creating pacts among males.

When Marcus’s teacher calls home to talk about his biting problem, Jack takes the call. He expresses grave concern. He is apologetic and thankful for the opportunity for social correction. When he gets off the phone, he turns to me, reproaching.

“She says she’s spoken with you about Marcus’s problems in school?”

“I guess she did,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember? Ann…”

He shakes his head and walks out. He has a talk with Marcus later, sitting the boy next to him on the couch. They discuss acceptable modes of expression, ways for Marcus to communicate what’s inside of him without hurting others. After it’s over, Jack lifts the boy and hugs him tight. I watch from the dining room.

I am concerned that Jack is making our boy too soft. So later that night, after everyone is asleep, I creep into the boy’s bedroom and speak rhymes from my own childhood over his slumbering form.

My husband would not like it if he heard, so I have no choice but to sing my songs to my boy in his sleep. I see his eyes shifting wildly under his lids, and I wonder what animal dreams he’s having.

When I go back to bed, Jack wakes briefly.

“Everything all right?” he asks, half asleep.

“You’re a good father,” I say.

He throws an arm over me and gives me a squeeze. Soon he is asleep again, and I gaze at the stars through the bedroom window.

I dreamed of
the restless dead. Everyone I knew, walking down the street as if in a trance. I ran among them, trying to get their attention, but their eyes were lost to some unknown distance. I tried to speak to them, but they did not respond. I screamed in their ears—my voice was hoarse. Everything was so quiet. I was even deaf to the shuffle of their feet. The only sound was the trickle of water over stone. I looked around to find the source of the sound, but there was nothing to be seen. I closed my eyes and listened harder, trying to recognize it because it sounded so familiar. And then I knew. It was the rivulet that led into the abandoned mine, miles away in the woods. Standing there among the silent zombies of everyone I knew, I could hear it. I could hear the sound of that tiny waterfall, the baby stream of melted ice. What does it mean for something to be inside your skull and miles distant at the same time? I didn’t like it. I swallowed, and there was dread in my throat.

When I woke, light was flickering against the wall of my bedroom. I rose and went to the window and saw that the street lamp outside was dying. It stuttered on and off, strobing the street with black and shadowed light.

Parked beneath the street lamp was the faded Camaro, and inside it I could see Blackhat Roy staring right at me, as though he had expected me to come to the window at that very moment.

I froze in place.

While I watched, he brought a hand up in front of his face, opened his mouth, and sank his teeth into the meaty heel of his palm. His head lashed back and forth as though he were a coyote trying to tear away a piece of flesh from its fallen prey—and I could see his face go red from the effort. Finally he stopped and held his hand before his tearing eyes. Then he extended his arm out the car window and held it up for me to see. He had bitten through the skin, and blood ran from the wounds down his wrist and dripped onto the street. In the flickering light, the blood looked black as crude leaked from the earth.

There we were, insomniacs on a moonless night, a pestilent little Rapunzel in her cotton nightdress and her barbarous prince, calling to her with his blood.

We were in
the living room watching a Glenn Ford movie,
Blackboard Jungle,
when Margot Simons inadvertently revealed to me a great secret.

She was huddled against my father, and even though there was room for me on the couch with them, I sat cross-legged in the easy chair. The movie is about a rough urban high school, and Margot Simons kept making sly, joking comments to me through the whole thing—about how this school wasn’t nearly as wild as our own. I smiled politely in response.

Then, at the end of the film, when the credits rolled, she said, “Huh, that’s funny.”

“What?” asked my father.

She pointed at the name of the writer whose book the movie was based upon: Evan Hunter.

“Mr. Hunter from school,” she said. “His first name is Evan, too.”

I thought about all the possible meanings of this connection. I didn’t much believe in coincidence. In my experience, harmonies existed everywhere if you were willing to hear them.

You sometimes want answers, and you sometimes go looking for them.

The next day I went to the auditorium after school, even though I knew it was a play rehearsal day. I sat in the back row and watched.

Peter found me there and tried to get me to leave with him, but I wouldn’t.

“What do you want to stay here for?” he said. “You’re not even in the play. You’ve got nothing to do with it.”

Mr. Hunter could see me talking with Peter, and our eyes met while he directed the students on stage and I shooed Peter away.

“Go on,” I told Peter. “I’ll talk to you later.”

The auditorium emptied out, the students hopping down from the stage, walking past me up the aisles, chatting and ignoring me. I shifted against the hard back of the seat, my skin feeling itchy, as I heard their laughter die out behind the closing doors until all sound had been drained from the auditorium and a great deafness took over. The air was dead still, and I felt flushed. Mr. Hunter stood on the stage at the opposite end of the empty hall, but I didn’t make a move toward him. Instead I waited for him to come to the back row, where I sat. Eventually he did.

“Lumen?” he said.

“Everybody lies,” I said. “That’s what you told me.”

“Lumen, are you all right?”

“I think I found out something,” I said.

“What did you find out?”

“Are you really—your name, is it really Evan Hunter?” I asked.

He looked confused.

“Evan Hunter,” I said. “Born in 1926. He wrote
Blackboard Jungle
. You know what else? He changed his name, too, to write cop books.”

“Lumen, there are lots of people with the name—”

“Liar.” My hand jumped to my mouth. I had surprised myself with my impudence.

Then he laughed, but it was a terminal kind of laugh, a laugh that meant the end of something.

“Okay,” he said and started walking back down the aisle toward the stage. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“Come on if you’re coming.”

He led me behind the stage to the drama office, a little closet of a room with exposed pipes overhead and tall, gray metal cabinets with a fine coating of dust on the tops of them. He sat at the desk and pulled a bottle from a drawer and poured some into a plastic cup. It smelled strong.

“You want?” he said.

I shook my head. Then he downed it in one gulp and poured himself another, then capped the bottle.

“All right,” he said with a heavy breath. “You want to talk about the truth of things? Is that what we’re doing?”

I said nothing. An awful moment passed, and then another. Finally he shifted and took out his wallet, removed something from it, and slapped it on the desk in front of me. It was a faded photograph showing a skinny teenage boy standing outside the doors of a school. The school I recognized—it was my own.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Philip Anderson,” he said. “Me.”

I looked closer at the picture and could see some resemblance in the eyes to the man sitting in front of me. But I realized then that Mr. Hunter must color his hair, because the boy in the picture was blond.

“You’re from here?” I said.

He nodded. “Born and raised. When I left for college, I thought I would never come back. I was ready for the real world, you know?” He shrugged. “I managed to stay away for nine years.”

“Why did you come back?”

“I don’t know,” he said, leaning back, his eyes narrowed in thought at the pipes suspended from the ceiling. “I don’t think I quite know how to be anywhere else.”

“But your name,” I said. “How come you changed it?”

He looked down at me, his eyes weighty with meaning. “Sometimes you don’t like the person you’ve become. Sometimes you’d like to try being someone else for a while. You wouldn’t understand.”

It was quiet then, and he drank and I smelled the spirits.

“Then you breached?”

“I did,” he nodded. “When I was your age, I used to breach. Now I do this instead.” He grinned and raised his cup.

“You knew my father?”

He nodded. “I was nothing to him. A kid. I’ve seen him since I’ve been back. We’ve talked. He has no idea who I am. Your parents, they were ahead of me in school. They were seniors when I was, I don’t know, maybe in seventh grade.”

“Wait,” I said, my breath catching. At the suggestion of my mother, something inside me fell from a shelf and smashed. “You knew her? My mother?”

The springs in his desk chair creaked. His face seemed to change. He rubbed it, then rubbed hard at his eyes.

“We ran together. Sometimes,” he said. “Felicia,” and his eyes were now pink, holding on to tears.

“You’re lying,” I said. “She never breached. You’re still lying.”

He was sick, this man. And me, I was young and foolish and unkind.

“You look just like her, you know. She had skin like yours. And your eyes.”

“She didn’t breach,” I said again, shaking my head. “Stop lying.”

“The moonlight. Sometimes it makes it so you can see right through people’s skin. Your mother, her veins are something I remember. Nobody was ever as beautiful. I miss her. We all do.”

“Stop it.”

“You look just like her,” he repeated, and his hand reached out to touch my face.

I recoiled, standing quickly and knocking my chair over.

“You’re a liar,” I said, my eyes burning. “You fucking liar.”

He shook his head.

“Darling,” he said, kindly, as I rushed out.

Because there was
nothing to be done, because there was nowhere to go, because there was no one to interrogate or confess to, I ran to the mine. I allowed myself to cry.

People were never what you thought they were. I was ugly and alone, and the world was ugly, too, uglier every day, and there was death in everything, because it didn’t matter how many maps you drew, because everywhere was the same place, and you could be fanciful about it but what was the point, especially right there interred in the earth, where it was quiet and where there was nothing to keep your mind from burning itself with running, with hating itself and loving itself, too, because that’s what it is to be a teenager, after all, when your little sluglike body aches for things it doesn’t understand, glows in its very pores from the effort to explode itself over the world…

So I cried because I could not explode myself, because we are too tiny altogether, too weak and malleable, because our bodies are not even the fingernails on God’s hands.

I cried until I howled, my voice a tinny echo in an empty cave. I howled like a beast—I howled like a dying thing—I howled like a little girl. I howled until my throat was dry, and then I blubbered, and it was nothing magical at all. I cried until my tears were useless, until I was numb to all my little tragedies.

A
s a result of that tumorous instinct that grows in some boys, Blackhat Roy treated many of his defeated enemies with the basest kind of contempt in school. In math class, to the mocking delight of a group of jackal boys, he bit Rose Lincoln’s pencils in half so that she had to write with one half and erase with the other. He targeted, especially, anyone associated with Peter Meechum. He would have his revenge.

His new girl, Poppy Bishop, continued to trail behind him, because sometimes she liked the way he, upon her request, would attack those she didn’t like. But his attentions to her were capricious at best, and sometimes he would turn on her. She took tap dancing lessons, and once, he told her to get up on top of the table during lunch in the cafeteria and dance.

“I don’t think I should,” she said.

“Do it,” he said.

She climbed slowly to the top of the table and shuffled her feet a little. Everyone watched her quietly. Her face went empty.

“That’s not dancing,” said Blackhat Roy. “Faster. Here, you need more space?” And he used his arm to clear a wide space on the tabletop, sending people’s lunch trays to the floor. “Faster!”

She danced faster, trying to make taps with her sneakers.

“It doesn’t sound right,” he said. He looked around to the others. “It’s usually better. She’s not at her best today. You might not know it, but she’s got a good body under there. Cute little oval birthmark on her left tit. Poppy, show ’em your birthmark.”

She stopped dancing and stood frozen. She crossed her arms over her chest.

Since nobody else would do it, I crossed the cafeteria and made myself as tall as I could in front of Blackhat Roy.

“Stop it,” I said. “Leave her alone.”

“We’re just having some fun. What’ve you got against fun?”

“Stop torturing people.”

“What do you care? You don’t even like these people.”

It was not the response I was expecting, and I wondered if what he said was true.

One of his friends, Gary Tupper, took me by the arm, saying, “Come on, pocket size, I’ll give you a ride to class. Hop on my shoulder.”

“Don’t touch her,” Roy said to him.

“How come?”

In response, Roy punched him in the solar plexus.

It took a minute for Gary to catch his breath and get himself upright again.

“Jesus,” he said. “I was just…”

But by then it was over. Poppy Bishop had climbed down from the table, everyone in the cafeteria had resumed eating, and Blackhat Roy was long gone.

And still he came to my house sometimes at night. I spotted his old Camaro in different places on my block—not always just in front of my house. One night, approaching a full moon, I went outside to talk to him. I walked down the street to the place where his car was parked—at the corner, under a street lamp. I’d tried before, and he had just driven off when I approached—but not this time. He was waiting for me. I wondered what he would do when I accused him of stalking me. He was rough and humorless, but there was also a fragility in him that fascinated me. Many times in school he looked away from my gaze, and I wondered if he might be ashamed. I was not another Poppy Bishop to him. He did not make me dance or call me names. I wondered what I amounted to in his world.

I approached his car from behind and noticed that the driver’s-side window was down. I would demand that he leave me alone, and if he attacked, I prepared myself to fight. Blood could be spilled—we needed no moon to give us permission.

My heart beat hard in my chest, and I leaned down into his window to confront him—but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the car at all. He had just left his scent behind—dry leather and cigarettes and sweat.

I stood suddenly and looked around me. The street was quiet. The night breeze rustled the leaves of the trees. A dog barked in the distance.

He could have been anywhere—hidden behind the trunk of any tree, around the corner of any of these peaceful houses.

I shivered, and I could feel his eyes—as though they had gotten under my clothes somehow and were skittering around on my skin.

I was being hunted.

I got a
D on my geometry test. Mr. Ludlow took me aside. He was a little round man with dandruff on the shoulders of his jacket. His voice was high and gentle, and he frequently spoke of trips he took with his wife to quaint towns with antique stores and tours of houses that belonged to historical figures. Even though he orbited my life only at a great distance, I liked him.

When he spoke to me, he was kindly and solicitous, saying he didn’t believe that this grade reflected who I really was as a student. He knew I was better than a D. He asked me whether I was having any problems at home. I wondered if he knew his colleague Miss Simons was eating dinner at my house twice a week. I said no, that I was just tired. I explained that I deserved the grade and didn’t blame him for it—because he seemed sad that he had had to write the letter D on my exam. I told him he was a very good teacher and that I would try to do better next time.

He said, “I’ll make you a deal. You don’t tell anyone, and I’ll let you take a makeup next week. I don’t want your grade to suffer because of some aberrant exam. What do you say?”

I told him thank you.

“Trust me,” he said. “I know exactly the kind of kid you are. You’re the kind of kid who doesn’t get Ds on exams.”

They wouldn’t allow me to fall. I plunged downward hard and fast, and they swooped down and fetched me back up before I hit the ground.

Mr. Ludlow said he knew who I was. He would not let me be anyone else.

It was later
that same day that Mr. Hunter wanted to talk to me as well. He let class out twenty minutes early and asked me to stay behind. I did not move from my desk, and when the room was empty he came and stood over me.

He had been distracted since our last conversation. I could smell his breath again. He was just a drunk with odd notions—that was all.

“Lumen,” he said, “I want to apologize.”

I was stubborn and did not meet his eyes.

“My father’s not a liar,” I said.

“No, he’s not.”

“She never went breach.”

“No, she didn’t.”

I accused him with my eyes.

“Then why did you say it?”

At that moment, he looked away again, which made me not trust him. And instead of answering my question, he said this:

“You know something? I knew you a long time ago. When you were just born. I mean, I didn’t know you—I knew
of
you. When your mother—when she died, everybody in town brought your father gifts for you. I did, too. I remember I brought you a giraffe. It was purple.”

He smiled in memory.

“I have to go,” I said and stood.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said as I moved toward the door. “I would never—”

But I didn’t want to hear it. None of it made any sense to me, and I trusted no one. But here was one thing: I still had that purple giraffe, its fur pale and ratted, its plastic eyes scuffed dull, packed away in a box in my closet because I had thought that I was finished with my childhood.

That afternoon, on
my bedroom floor, Peter wanted to move me to the bed so we could have sex.

I shook my head.

“We can stay here if you want,” I said.

“Here? On the floor?”

And during, I said, “Make me hush.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Put your hand here,” and I gestured at my neck.

He caressed my neck with his hand. But he didn’t get it. He was too gentle.

“Harder,” I said. But he was embarrassed, and the whole thing became awkward.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “You’re nice.”

And that night, after I had said good night to my father and climbed the stairs and opened the door to my bedroom, I found Blackhat Roy standing there.

I came close to screaming, but I stopped myself, doubling over and swaying instinctively back from the doorway. But my father was shutting off the lights downstairs, so I lurched into the room and shut myself in there with Roy.

My stomach felt like I had swallowed needles. What was he there for? To kill me, maybe, or rape me, or cut me with a knife? He was an atrocity in this place, where all the safest parts of my identity were hidden.

But he didn’t even turn when I came in. He leaned against one of my bookcases, a book open in his hands.

“How did you get in here?”

“Window,” he said casually.

“It’s the second floor.”

He just shrugged.

I saw the book in his hand was my old paperback copy of
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
“Did you read all these?” he asked.

“Get out!” I hissed, trying to keep my voice low. I had backed myself up against the wall, and I was feeling vulnerable there in my pajamas with cats on them. “Get out now!”

That’s when he finally deigned to look at me, and his eyes went up and down my whole body.

“Cute outfit,” he said.

“Get out.”

“I’m going,” he said, tossing the book on the desk instead of putting it back on the shelf. “Don’t worry. I ain’t here to buy. Today I’m just looking.”

He moved toward the window to leave, then he turned around once more.

“Nice room,” he said. “You could sleep good in here. Cozy. Forget all your worries.”

Before he left, I found myself saying, “You can take it if you want.”

“Take what?”

“The book. The Carson McCullers. You can take it.”

And that’s when he flinched as though I had struck him. He crossed the room in two long strides and slammed me against the wall, grabbing my head and holding it in the vise of his two palms. He looked like he wanted to kill me and spoke through gritted teeth.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Intellectual clusterfucking bullshit. People cleaning their glasses and discussing themes. Don’t fucking mistake me. I ain’t here for your classroom handouts.”

I stood all hot, unable to breathe, until his anger subsided. Then he let go of me and left. But on his way out the window I saw him look once more at the bookshelves, and I recognized in his expression the ardent pining of a grown man banished from a religion that as a young boy he thought he might be able to truly love.

I thought if
I remembered what it was like to be a good girl, these things would stop happening to me.

The next night, at dinner with my father and Margot Simons, I ate two servings of everything. With great politesse, I passed the dishes to and fro, across the table. I said please and thank you, and I complimented Margot Simons on the corn casserole she had brought in a foil-covered dish.

“Somebody’s in a good mood,” said my father, and I simply smiled blankly in response. They were pleased, I could tell, though I also caught them giving me suspicious gazes when I wasn’t looking.

I helped clean up after the meal. As my father washed the dishes, I dried them and put them in the cupboards where they belonged, arranging them neatly in stacks, making cheerful conversation and chuckling at the stories they told that were supposed to be funny—as if nothing in the world mattered outside these walls, as if there were not grown men speaking drunkenly of my dead mother, as if no pestilent boys were breaking into my bedroom, as if things were not about to change for good.

Afterward I went to the mine. I found my way to the cistern and confessed myself to the inky black of the chasm. I spoke to my mother, because I thought her soul might be down there somewhere in the airy echo of the night, floating free and buoyed on the drafts. I could hear my voice being carried somewhere, and I thought it might be to her.

I told her of many things. Of my two boyfriends, the dark one and the light one, and how they hated each other but both coveted me for some reason. Of my wee body and how I knew it contained some force larger than itself, and how it hadn’t yet bled, though maybe that was because it needed that blood for the strange and frightening power it possessed. Of the man who said he knew her, who had gone away and changed his name and then come back just to gaze at me with endlessly suffering eyes. Of my father and his goodness, though not of Margot Simons.

I spoke of many things, and it relieved me. And then I fell asleep, cuddled against a stone outcropping over that depthless shaft.

I guess I knew then why some people speak to God.

And this, too,
is chattering down a well—telling stories to myself in the dark.

My husband and child are upstairs, and they are dreaming of colorful things. But I don’t sleep well. I rise from the marriage bed like the ghost of a wife. I creep downstairs, haunted. I pour myself a glass of milk and squeeze chocolate syrup into it. I stir it with a spoon that goes tink, tink, tink on the insides of the glass.

And then I fetch my pages from their hiding place on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the stacked boxes of spaghetti that are no longer used since my husband has become fearful of carbohydrates. I set the stack of pages on the kitchen table, and I add to it, one page at a time. I never knew I had so many words in me. I dust them up, the words, like a good housewife, collect them where they gray the white paper.

But who am I writing to? To Jack? To myself? Who are you? You are not my mother, who wore orchid gloves on her wedding day. You are not my son, to whom one day, as an acknowledgment of his blossomed manhood, I might bequeath his mother’s lineage. No, not that. You are not the world at large, from whom I seek forgiveness or solace. Never that. You are not even some version of Lumen herself, not future or former or alternative or lost.

You are no one. And you expect nothing. And your eyes fail you, your head nods in drowsiness. I hope you are happy there in whatever empty, lightless caverns you roam and call home.

Earlier today, this afternoon, there was a commotion at the park. My son runs to the monkey bars, and I notice all the neighborhood mothers constellated in excited chatter at the edge of the playground.