When We Were Animals (4 page)

To endure suffering.
I wonder how much people really endure. They talk about heartbreak, and they turn their faces away. But heartbreak is really the least of it, a splinter in the skin. Hearts mend. Most tragedy is overcome with prideful righteousness. The tear on the cheek, like a pretty little insect, wending its way over your jaw, down your sensitive neck, under your collar.

I wonder how much suffering my husband has endured. Or Janet Peterson, with her dry, overcooked lamb. They are easily horrified, easily disgusted. They turn their heads away from the simplest and most mundane adversity.

On the other hand, to be bound by your own fate, to feel the eager lashes of a grinning world all up and down your nerve endings. To bleed—to make others bleed. To know there is no end of things. To become something that you can never unbecome. There are in the world sufferings that are not stage pieces but rather whole lives.

Rosebush Lincoln. I was shut to her that day.

Yet those words of hers, even now, recall to me the lovely, hungry smell of autumn leaves.

Just as Rosebush
Lincoln was extolling the virtues of endured suffering, there was a sound in the trees above the quarry, and we all gazed up to find a boy on the verge—as though we had conjured boyness with our witchy voices and manifested a puerile sprite from the morning dew itself.

“It’s Hondy,” said Rosebush. “He must’ve followed me all the way from town.”

Hondy Pilt held the handles of his bicycle and stared down at us in his misty and bloated way. He said nothing. Hondy Pilt rarely spoke, and his eyes never looked at you exactly—instead they looked right over your shoulder, which made you feel that you were just some insufficient forgery of your real self and that your real self was invisible, somewhere behind you.

So Rosebush invited him to join us, and for the next hour she forced him to drink beer and she put wildflowers in his hair and she told him to sit a certain way so that she could use his bulky body to prop up her own and gaze at the clouds above.

I felt bad for Hondy Pilt, but he didn’t seem to mind being used as Rosebush Lincoln’s lounge chair, and I wondered if that was his particular magic—to be still content with the world in all its pretty little injustices.

It wasn’t long before Rosebush got a new idea—which was to send Hondy Pilt adventuring into the abandoned mine. We all looked at the mouth of the mine, weeded and overgrown, a dark void chipped out of the earth, like the hollow well of a giant’s missing tooth. We had heard stories of our older brothers and sisters spelunking the mine with flashlights, discovering networks of underground rooms, rusted mining equipment, bottomless shafts easily stumbled into. Our parents warned us against the mine, because a boy once lost his way in the maze of passages and never came back out—but every time they tried to board up the entrance, the breachers, who did not like to be disinvited from places, would tear it open during the next full moon.

“I don’t know, Rosebush,” said Idabel. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Come on. Hondy wants to do it. Don’t you, Hondy?”

She raised him to his feet and wound her arm in his so that they looked like a bride and groom, and the boy smiled at the sky.

“Ro’bush,” he said in his indistinct way.

So she led him to the mouth of the mine, and we all gathered around, too—because nobody could stop Rosebush from sacrificing Hondy Pilt to the mine.

“Go on, Hondy,” she said. “Go on now.”

He looked into the darkness, then at his own feet, then in the direction of the girl at his side.

She encouraged him with sweeping hand gestures.

“Go on,” she said. “Bring me a treasure. Find me a gold nugget.”

And he went. While we all watched from the mouth of the mine, he moved forward step by step.

“Rosebush,” Idabel admonished.

“Shush,” said Rosebush, her eyes never leaving her knight errant. In fact, the farther he went into the dark, the more intent she became, her fists clenching themselves into tight balls, her breath coming faster, an expression on her face like some excruciating ecstasy. I could hear her breathing.

He stopped once, turned, and looked back at us, as if to be reassured.

“Warrior!” Rosebush called to him in a strange, whispery voice.

Then he moved forward again, slowly, until his form was lost completely to the dark.

We waited. A caught breeze blustered through the quarry, rustling the dried sumac, blowing strands of hair in a ticklish way across our lips. We used our fingers to tuck the hair behind our ears, and we waited.

Then, from the deep echoey dark of the mine, we heard a hiss, a monstrous, spitting hiss. Then Hondy Pilt’s voice, a low, whining complaint, followed by quick movement—a crash, the sound of feet advancing fast in our direction, his voice again, miserable and high—and behind it all that feral hissing.

Then we saw him disclosed from the dark, his panicked bulk running toward us.

And then we believed in monsters, hissing creatures like aged demons unearthed from the dry crust of the world. We ran. The woods came alive with the sound of our shrieks. Birds fled and crickets hushed, and we turned and ran from the mouth of the mine, squealing, across the floor of the quarry and up the opposite slope, our fingers digging into the loose gravel for desperate purchase.

We were halfway up the side of the quarry when we heard a loud cry of pain below. Hondy Pilt had emerged from the mine at full speed and had tripped over Rosebush Lincoln’s pink backpack. He now lay curled into a ball and howling on the floor of the quarry. It would get him. He was a goner now—food for the beasts of the earth—and we left him and hid behind the trunks of trees.

Except that then, beyond him, we saw emerge from the mine the monster that had chased him out of its den, hissing and spitting the whole way. It was a possum. Assured that its home was no longer in danger, the creature turned and scurried back into the dark depths of the mine.

Sometimes it happens this way. Your greatest fears in the dark turn out to be nothing more than angry rodents and zealous girls with pink backpacks. Or nothing less.

It was all
discovered. Hondy Pilt’s forearm was fractured from his fall in the quarry. He would have to wear a cast for the next three weeks, and Rosebush Lincoln would be the first to sign her name on it in pink marker. We suffered little in comparison. Our palms were covered with tiny abrasions from our quick scramble up the side of the quarry. But it was nothing a coat of stinging Bactine couldn’t fix.

Our parents discovered we had been drinking beer, and they intuited that we had been responsible somehow for Hondy Pilt’s accident.

The orchestration of blame was intricate and devious—it was decided that I would take the blame for everything.

After we delivered Hondy Pilt back to the hospital in town, Rosebush Lincoln took me aside to have a talk.

“You have to say it was you,” she said, her voice casual but uncompromising.

“It was me what?”

“The beer. And Hondy, telling him to go into the mine. It has to be you.”

“Why?”

“They won’t do anything to you. You’re too good.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Look, Lumen. It was an accident. I like Hondy. I didn’t want to hurt him. I’m already in trouble for a million things. My parents’ll kill me. They’re not nice. They’re not like your dad. Please.”

So I did it. While I held my hands palm upward over the sink and my father poured hydrogen peroxide on them, I told him it was all my fault.

“Is that right?” he said.

“Yes. I brought the beer. I told Hondy Pilt to go inside the mine.”

“Really? Where did you get the beer?”

“I stole it.”

“Stole it!” He smiled down at me. “So you’re a thief now, are you?”

“Just that once.”

I looked down at my palms, the hydrogen peroxide foaming in all the cuts.

“And you made Hondy Pilt go into the mine?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

It had never occurred to me that someone would ask why I had done the things I claimed to do—just as I had never thought to ask Rosebush why she was Rosebush. Why ask? People are like characters in books. They are defined by their actions—not the other way around.

“I don’t know,” I said pathetically.

The smile never left his face. He narrowed his eyes at me, trying to puzzle through my gambit.

“So…well, all these moral lapses—I guess you should be punished.”

“I guess so.”

“Let’s see.” He pursed his lips and tapped his chin with his fingertips. “What time is your curfew?”

What he meant was between full moons. Everyone had the same curfew when the moon was full: sundown.

“Ten o’clock.”

“All right, then. Let’s make it nine thirty for the rest of the week.”

He went back to tending my palms, rinsing away the hydrogen peroxide and bandaging the cuts.

But something wasn’t right. The reason he didn’t know what time my curfew was was because I was almost always home for the night by eight o’clock, hunched up on one corner of the couch, reading a book. His punishment was absurd—not a real punishment. And that’s when it occurred to me: he didn’t believe my confession. He was humoring me.

My suspicions were borne out the next day when Rosebush Lincoln confronted me on the street outside the drugstore where they sold colorful ices.

“You were supposed to take the blame,” she said.

“I did,” I assured her. “I did. I told my dad I did it.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I swear.”

“Then how come I’m the one being punished for everything? How come Idabel’s mom told my mom I was a bad influence?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re a liar.” She pointed one long finger at my chest.

“I’m not. I told my dad it was me.” I paused. “It’s just—I don’t think he believed me.”

Rosebush Lincoln looked disgusted.

“Oh, that’s just great. You can’t even convince people you’ve done something wrong when you
try
. Just stay away from me from now on.”

At that ag
e
we didn’t know what we did. Or, rather, we understood that it was impossible for things to go any differently. We were too young to change the course of bodies in motion.

My husband, Jack, he’s a schoolteacher, but a new kind of schoolteacher, a kind we didn’t have when I was a child. He works with kids who are At Risk—as though safety were such a common commodity that you could easily hang a tag from all those young people who didn’t possess it. He has one girl—Natalie, who prefers to be called Nat—who sneers and curses and spits sunflower seeds at his shoes while he’s trying to have regular, humane conversations with her. She has been sent to the principal’s office many times for fighting with boys and other girls. She, too, knows about tearing out hair.

Trying to get her to rationalize her behavior, Jack asks her why she does the things she does.

“I don’t know” is her reply. She says it as though the question is an absurd one and has no true answer.

I am curious how she would respond if I had my hands squeezed around her throat. (Would her muscles grow taut, wild?) But I also understand the authenticity of what she says. People like to talk to teenagers about consequences. They like to explain how certain actions may lead to reactions that are undesired. But this is the wrong conversation to have. Teenagers understand inherently how one thing leads to another—but to them the point is moot, because the action that initiates its consequence is just as inscrutable as the consequence itself. The mouth that spits at my husband might as well not be her mouth at all. His shoes might as well be anyone’s shoes, the room a room far away in some other nondescript American suburb.

That is the way of the young. They see something we don’t: the great machines that turn us, indifferent to our will, this way and that.

So I wasn’t angry at Rosebush Lincoln for asking me to lie to my father. And I wasn’t angry at her when she shunned me for not having lied well enough. And I wasn’t even angry about the things she did to Hondy Pilt. All she did was play her part in a tableau that, as far as I was concerned, couldn’t have gone any other way.

Sometimes, when I was a girl, I climbed onto the roof through the gabled window of my second-story bedroom. From the chimney peak, I could see all the way up and down the street. It was as tall as my world got, and it was wonderful. Those summer evenings, I would lie on the sloping shake, securing myself with the soles of my sneakers, watching the stars come out. From my meager height, I beheld the whole entire world as I knew it. And what could be bad about all this?

M
y name is Lumen. My father says my mother gave me the name because it means light. I am a light, and I light the way. That’s what the North Star and guardian angels do. But my name also means this:

is me, Lumen. Lumen as a unit.
is how many candelas. Candela is another beautiful name. I wish I knew someone named Candela so we could be Lumen and Candela, and we would define each other in measurements of light. The mathematics of illumination.
is another unit, steradians, but that is an angular measurement—it defines the direction in which a light is shining. If the light is democratic, if it is loving and gentle and good, if it doesn’t prefer one angle over another, then the equation becomes even more beautiful:

Because there are four pi steradians in a perfect, all-encompassing sphere.

Here I am, now matured to fifteen years of age, and my grades are excellent, the best in school, and I am also smaller than all the other girls in my class, delayed in my growth—stunted, even—and I stay in the library after the final bell rings to look up my name in the large, dusty encyclopedias.

Who could know me? Not my mother, who was dead before I remember. Not my friends, who seem to have found their way into an idea of adulthood. Maybe not even my father, who is generous to a fault and believes so heartily in the errorlessness of me that I wear myself out with being his good daughter. So maybe these books know for certain who I am. They seem so absolute about what they know. They etch my name in perfect symbols. They draw lines to define me, they show how Lumen equates to other delicious little glyphs. I want to be the precision of these equations. Then I could justify who I am.

So yes, there I am in the library, turning the pages of encyclopedias. My ankles itch under my socks. Many of the other boys and girls in my class, Polly included, have gone down to the lake to swim. The boys have tied a rope to a tree branch that overhangs the lake. They swing out over the water and drop in, like dumplings. Once in, they make a game of submarining their way to the girls and grabbing their legs to startle them. Some boys flip the girls head over tail. When this is done, the mandate of the flipped girls seems to be initial outrage followed by affable censure. I have gone to the lake, too, on occasion, but mostly I sit on the shore and watch. When I do go into the water, I wait patiently to be pinched or tumbled by the underwater boys—but perhaps I am prey too meager for their tastes. My hair stays dry.

I love the smell of the encyclopedia. When no one is looking, I bury my nose deep into the crease of the binding and breathe in the book. No one else does this. I do not witness any of the other students sniffing the pages of
Great Expectations
when the paperbacks are handed out in our English class. Me, rather than putting my nose to it, I casually fan the pages with my thumb, which sends into the air the pleasant aroma of wood pulp and ink.

In the library I sit at a carrel, the farthest one in the back corner, and I search through piles of books looking to understand my name. The dictionary does me little good, but I have no hard feelings toward it—I love the way the pages are thumb-notched to make the finding of particular letters easier. If you look at each page individually, it has a unique half-moon cutout at the edge.

In another book I find this, which is the equation for luminance, which I take to mean the quality of luminousness, the quality of me:

 

I recognize again my symbol, the superimposed I and O together. One and zero. Something and nothing. On and off at the same time. I look up the Greek alphabet to discover what my symbol is called. It is phi, and it can be pronounced either fee or fye—which are the first two syllables of the giant’s song as he is threatening to eat Jack, who went up the bean stalk: Fe-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Blood. It always comes back to blood. You start with light, and you end with blood. But not mine. I am fifteen, I sit in the library with my itchy ankles, and I have not gotten my period yet. I am the last of anyone I know. I am afraid of blood, disgusted by it, and maybe my own fear has suppressed my bleeding.

I go back to the equations, which are black-and-white, pure and lovely.

I find another equation. The best one yet:

It’s the equation for luminous intensity. That’s how much calculation is required to measure the intensity of me. You see how my symbol, the phi, is gone? The candela is still there, but the lumen is nowhere to be seen. Maybe that means you can’t measure the intensity of a thing in relation to itself. You have to put it against others and measure the difference between the light given off by each one.

You have to put Lumen in the lake and see how still she stands, skimming the surface with her pale palms, embarrassed at the flatness of her own chest, noiseless and inert amid the raucous clamor of other boys and girls.

Many of the
people in my grade went breach that year. I stayed home and studied. Many of the girls acquired and lost a series of boyfriends. I listened to old records my father told me he listened to when he was my age. Many of the bodies around me in school seemed to be undergoing some torturous flux—people coming to school not just with red pimples on their faces but also with rips and tears in the overused skin of their arms and necks. They were savaged. My skin remained smooth and unscored.

Polly came to my house one day, the second day of Worm Moon, and showed me a large purplish bruise on her arm.

“How did you get that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“How could you not know? Does it hurt?”

“It happened, Lumen,” she said. “Last night it happened. I went breach.”

“You did?”

“Look.”

She showed me again her bruise.

“What was it like?”

“I don’t remember very much.”

They said you remembered the breaches better after you had been through a few of them. Very few people could remember their first.

I looked at the bruise, and she displayed her arm proudly.

“It looks like a hand,” I said.

She tried to twist her head around to see it better.

“See?” I said, pointing at the pattern. “One, two, three, four. Like fingers.”

“Someone probably grabbed me?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll ask around. Maybe somebody else remembers.”

“Do you have anything else?”

She blushed. She knew what I was asking.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t know.”

Then I told her something that was a lie.

I said, “I wish I could have been there with you.”

I had no desire to go breach. The thought of running wild, that mortification, made me clammy and sick. But I was trying to be a good and decent friend.

She believed what I told her. Most people my age looked forward to the breach. It meant you had become something else. You were no longer a child. You were a true and natural person.

Clutching my shoulder with her hand, she reassured me.

“It’ll happen for you soon,” she said.

I looked down at my diminutive frame, my bony, nondeveloped chest.