Wilding

by Melanie Tem

  Stopping the suckling hadn’t meant her mother’s body was a secret, though, or anything at all private. Deborah often saw (and so, she supposed, did the whole neighborhood, the whole world; her mother was anything but modest) the hairy small of her mother’s back, the nipples red as if the tips of the breasts had been bitten off, the mats of pubic and underarm hair that extended even farther than her own did down the insides of arms and thighs.

  But tonight Lydia was wearing a fur cape that Deborah had never seen before, and nothing else. Her legs, belly, face, arms, shoulders, thighs, buttocks were smeared with a sticky whitish ointment that turned her skin gray. Her eyes glittered, more yellowish than their normal brown and more heavily lidded.

  When she laid her left arm on Deborah’s forearm, it was recognizably her hand, capable of hurting and of giving comfort, sometimes in the same gesture. Deborah had always been fascinated by her mother’s hands; her own, she thought, were square and graceless, and she bit her nails and the skin around them till they hurt constantly and seldom stopped bleeding, but it was never enough. When she was little she’d played with her mother’s hands as if they’d been toys or parts of her own body, twisting the fingers over and under each other, tracing the lines on the palms. Now the palm was covered by a thick fleshy pad, and all the nails, not just the one on the little finger, were black and curved under; they drew Deborah’s blood.

  Lydia spoke. Her words were only slightly garbled. She was telling Deborah to do something, to “come here.”

  As she had planned to do when this moment came, Deborah said stubbornly, “No,” and pulled away. She had been well prepared, knew precisely when rebellion would call the most attention. Somewhat to her disappointment, her mother didn’t try to hold her.

  Mary was on them before Deborah even realized she was moving. Shouldering Lydia out of the way, the matriarch raised herself to her full height. She was considerably taller than Deborah, and far more muscular. Her belly and throat swirled with thick hair lighter than the rest of her.

  With a roar, Mary brought herself down on Deborah’s shoulders. The girl cried out and staggered under the sudden weight. Around the room the others were growling and whining in excitement. A low sad howl came from Lydia as she retreated as far as she could into a corner where moonlight didn’t penetrate, hunkered down, turned her face (which was only slightly elongated and minimally furred) to the dirty wall.

  Mary’s black, hooked, razor-sharp claws swiped at the cotton sundress Lydia had made for Deborah last year, too big for her now and anyway not the right thing to be wearing here tonight. The cloth and the skin underneath tore. Deborah screamed; in her corner Lydia shuddered; Mary snarled softly. Deborah went for the old woman’s throat and then for the vivid yellow eyes with her own nails, which were painfully short and painted ragged pink. Mary struck her across the face and in the same gesture pulled loose the remnants of the flimsy fabric, so that the girl stood before her naked except for the tatters of her blood.

  The young body showed signs of Deborah’s own anger and of others’. A yellow-green bruise mottled the lower right quadrant of her abdomen, stippled with a raised pink rash from her obsessive shaving. The insides of her elbows bore old and new scratches, some of which had actually come close to veins. Across her back, just under her shoulder blades, ran a bright white scar, and both buttocks carried traces of hand marks and claw marks.

  One of the others—Marguerite, maybe, or Margaret (they didn’t really look alike, but they moved alike, which made them virtually indistinguishable in the blue-and-silver half-light)—brought the jar of ointment big as a human fist and set it at Mary’s feet. She made a commanding noise, and the younger woman crouched, dipped her hand into the jar, and brought it out caked with the pearly salve. She spread it thickly on Deborah’s body, working from the feet and legs upward; the girl’s flesh both shrank from the careful touch and rose to it.

  The unguent had an odor so sharp that Deborah could taste it long before it was spread on her lips and the roof of her mouth, and, not wanting to know, knew what was in it: sage, belladonna. Richer than cold cream, it penetrated her skin in a way that was deeply soothing and, at the same time, made her so restless that she could hardly stand in one place, though she didn’t dare move.

  When her cousin’s hands—padded, furred, but still flexible and with opposing thumbs—massaged the cream into her breasts, her nipples hardened and stung. When the curved, greasy fingernails went up between her legs, her clitoris throbbed.

  Deborah didn’t resist, but she didn’t participate, either; she didn’t pivot, bend, or stretch. Mary turned her, pushed her backward, forced the orifices of her body open, and then, when she was done, allowed them to close. Deborah refused to meet the ancient, powerful yellow gaze, as she had not looked into the eyes of any of the boys at the party, no matter how heavy they were on top of her, no matter what they said to her or how long they stayed. Mary was inserting something live into her. She was being impregnated again.

  Then Deborah’s grandmother brought in her hands and teeth a huge animal skin that had been heaped in such a way between two of the outside doors that it might have been the animal itself. Deborah knew what she was supposed to do: raise her arms in a certain way, incline her head, and accept the skin onto her own. Stubbornly, she did nothing, and there was a silence.

  The room stirred. There were whispered words and echoes of words, wordless whispers and movements as if another creature had come among them, a member of the family created this night at this moment.

  Face contorted by disgust and bewilderment, Ruth tried to hoist the pelt herself and couldn’t.

  Marguerite moved to help her, but Ruth shook her head and called for her daughter: “Lydia,” and then, “Lydia,” again.

  At first it seemed that Lydia, like her own daughter, would refuse to do what was expected of her, or would pretend not to know. Deborah hoped so, hoped her mother would at last do something definite. But Lydia did finally get to her feet and come to her mother’s side and take one end of the pelt. She was not a very large woman, really, and she swayed under its weight, her spine bowed noticeably as she was silhouetted against candlelight, moonlight, reflections off others’ skin and fur and eyes.

  Together, Ruth and Lydia draped the skin over Deborah. Her arms, shoulders, back itched from underneath the skin. Inside her vagina, inside her nose and ears and navel, she itched.

  Deborah had never hunted. She’d never skinned an animal. She’d never been closer to an ordinary wolf than the zoo, to a raw pelt than a leather jacket. But she knew this was a fresh wolfskin. It was warm and damp, and it quivered against her own quivering flesh.

  The ancient creature Mary had for some moments been stalking the girl, moving in circles as wide as the room would allow, behind and among the others. Now she stopped. She flattened herself to within inches of the floor and cocked her big ears erect.

  Hair was growing between Deborah’s skin and flesh. Someone had raised the shade over the south window, or had torn it down; someone had opened two of the courtyard doors. Deborah’s eyes didn’t flinch from the bright moonlight as they usually did from sun. Rage swelled unimpeded in her groin, in her throat and heart. Her pulse had quickened alarmingly, exhilaratingly, and abruptly she surrendered.

  She’d done what she was supposed to do. She was pregnant. She was here, and open. She was ready.

  Mary said, “No,” and everything stopped. The assembled creatures stirred in surprise. The cousins, Ruth and Marguerite, briefly met and held each other’s gaze, waiting to see what this meant and what it presaged.

  Mary said, “Too soon. You have more to learn. You have more to prove.”

  Ruth threw back her head, opened her long mouth, and bayed. Hannah gave a series of staccato yelps that simulated laughter. Lydia huddled against a dark wall. Deborah pulled the wolfskin more tightly around her and tried to reclaim the power, but it was gone. “Nana,” she pleaded.

  “No,” the ancient creature
repeated. “Wait. Go deeper.”

  “I’m pregnant—”

  “Not the baby. You. You go deeper. You show me.”

  Deborah hated her. Fury sprang alive in her fully formed.

  Ruth pulled the wolfskin away. Deborah thought to attack her, thought to hold on to what was rightfully hers, but her grandmother was swifter, surer, stronger than she was (not ready), so she gave up, let herself be stripped again, let herself be stood naked and shivering and itching before all the women of her family until her mother brought her an ordinary man’s white shirt. It came well below her knees in front and in back, and the sleeves covered her hands, her nails.

  Shaking and sobbing, she couldn’t manage the buttons, so with both hands, clumsily, she held the shirt closed over her breasts and genitalia and ran out of the room, out of the dark and layered old house into the crowded courtyard where the altar was ready, the pot still boiling because the fire had only just been put out. The wail of a baby was receding behind one of the stone walls.

  Some of the women tried to stop Deborah or were accidentally in her path, but she pushed easily past them all, through the courtyard into her own backyard, into her own house and room. Her mother didn’t come after her; Deborah didn’t know why she’d expected her to. By staying behind with the others Lydia was, of course, making a choice despite herself, but Deborah didn’t think her mother saw it that way.

  Deborah dressed herself quickly, buttons and zippers familiar and manageable now, the white shirt flung like a shameful skin on the floor. She packed some things (she couldn’t think what to take so she packed randomly, clothes and makeup and a book or two pulled without design from her shelves) and she left, left her house openly by its front door on 32nd Avenue.

  Behind her in the house on Ingram Street—the mother house, Mary’s house—there was cacophony. There was howling and crying; there was triumphant barking and laughter.

  Hannah and her numerous followers feigned outrage. Some of them stalked the three remaining members of the city clan, and Margaret attacked Ruth, but Hannah called her off. Mary moved in. The two matriarchs positioned themselves to stare into each other’s yellow eyes, both acknowledging it was not time yet for the confrontation they both desired, although Deborah’s pregnancy and defection brought the time closer. Soon. They licked their long lips. Mary raised her head and howled, and Hannah replied.

  Around this residential block in northwest Denver, neighbors stirred uneasily in their sleep or went out onto their porches in their nightshirts to see what was disturbing the peace. Dogs yipped nervously and scratched at their kennel gates. Cats called to be let in, or sat inside on windowsills and stared balefully out.

  But this was a quiet, safe, orderly neighborhood, and no one was really afraid. Except Deborah and her unborn baby, running.

  Chapter 2

  Deborah had been sitting in the back booth of the coffee shop since long before the sun came up. After she’d been there a couple of hours she’d ordered a Coke float because it sounded okay and she needed something to do with her hands and mouth. But then she couldn’t eat it, and by now the ice cream had all melted and the float was a disgusting gray color. The waitress had stopped coming by.

  For most of the night the only other person in the place had been some old guy in the booth across the aisle. Deborah hadn’t noticed him when she came in or she wouldn’t have sat here. But he was asleep—or dead—on the seat, and he hadn’t moved once.

  Deborah kept moving from one seat to the other and back again. She didn’t want her back to the door; she didn’t know who might come in that she’d have to run from—stranger or family, both dangerous. But the door was on the east side of the building and that whole wall was windows, so she kept seeing pieces of her reflection.

  When the sun started to come up the light got too bright and she had to face the other way until her eyes didn’t hurt so much. She kept moving, trying not to call attention to herself but knowing she was, knowing the waitress was watching her from the kitchen and was going to call the cops, or the old guy on the seat across the aisle was watching her from under his eyelids.

  People always looked at her. Maybe because of her hairstyles, or the rings in her nose. Maybe because she was so skinny. Maybe because of the long scars on her cheeks, which sometimes she outlined with makeup to make them more noticeable. Or maybe just because she was ugly—or because, no matter what she did to herself, she wasn’t ugly enough.

  These three guys came in together, acting all cool, and she was sitting way in the back so they didn’t notice her right at first but she noticed them. The skinny one with both sides of his head shaved was actually cuter, but Deborah knew from the minute she saw him that the short one was the man she’d been waiting for all her life. Her soulmate. A father for her baby.

  He was so cool. He wasn’t like the others. He had these gorgeous blue eyes. His hair was light brown—maybe he’d been really blond when he was a kid—in this thin little braid all the way down past his butt. He didn’t have much hair on his arms or legs or chest, and no beard at all to speak of. She loved it that his skin was so smooth. Maybe if she humped him now some of his genes or whatever would get into the baby and the baby would be smooth-skinned, too.

  Pretty soon all three of them came and sat down in her booth, and they all started talking, and then pretty soon his two friends went away and this one stayed and they talked and laughed some more. He didn’t ask her any questions. When they got up to leave he didn’t offer to pay for her Coke, and anyway she wouldn’t have let him. She had almost fifty dollars; her mother’s purse had been right there on the table when she’d left the house last night. Her mother owed her.

  She couldn’t believe they hadn’t followed her. She’d deliberately never mentioned Becky’s name to anybody in the family, but she couldn’t believe they didn’t know anyway. Not her mother; her mother didn’t know shit. But she really thought Nana would know, would come after her or send Grandma or one of the cousins to bring her back.

  Maybe Nana did know. Maybe Nana was waiting for her right now, outside this guy’s apartment, outside his bedroom, inside the room maybe, in the shadows that all looked like wolves or like the skins of wolves, just waiting. She shivered, and he tightened his arms around her, and for an instant she thought she was going to kill him, sink her teeth into his throat.

  He was staring down at her face, just like in soap operas and movies. It made Deborah feel warm and desired. It also made her nervous, not knowing what he saw.

  “What happened to you?”

  You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, she thought fiercely. Aloud she said, “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  He was running his fingertip along the scar between her shoulder blades. It sent unpleasant shivers down her back. “Sexy,” he muttered.

  She turned over so he wouldn’t see it anymore.

  But then he said, “Hey, you Oriental or something?”

  “No. Why?” She knew why. People always asked that. Viciously, she thought of saying, No, I’m a werewolf but she didn’t.

  “Your eyes are kind of slanted.” He touched the corner of one of her eyes, and Deborah clenched her teeth so she wouldn’t bite his finger off. “They’re neat-looking,” he said hastily, so she knew he didn’t mean it. “They’re pretty. You’re pretty.”

  Angry and aroused, Deborah put her hands up on both sides of his head and pulled down on it roughly so that he lost his balance and almost fell on top of her. She kissed him again. Up till now she’d had only little-kid kisses—except, she supposed, at that party, but she didn’t remember anything about that, didn’t want to remember.

  She opened her mouth against his so that he’d know her teeth were there, then pushed her tongue into his mouth. It was a dare: he could have bitten her tongue if he’d wanted to. He didn’t. She sort of wished he had. She would have.

  He groaned. He braced himself with one hand on the bed and shoved the other hand under her head, trying to make it seem
like he was holding her instead of the other way around.

  Deborah trailed her hand romantically across his chest, which was pale and practically hairless. She wanted very much to please this guy, to make him like her, to make him stay with her forever, even though in her family men never stayed. She didn’t have to be like the rest of them. She could be different.

  For just a second, though, she thought that the little finger of her left hand had snagged his smooth skin, had drawn blood. She even knew what his blood would taste like if she stuck that finger in her mouth.

  She had been ready. Nana was wrong. She’d show her.

  For just a second, she imagined sinking her teeth into his throat just above his collarbone. She pushed on it, pretending that the pressure was part of the lovemaking, and he sighed appreciatively. It seemed loose and breakable and not very far under the surface.

  For just a second, she imagined having the baby, and it was his. It was a boy and she sacrificed him all by herself in exactly the right way even though nobody’d bothered to teach her the right way yet, and her mother and grandmother and even her great-grandmother were proud of her. Or it was a girl, and Deborah was afraid of her before she was even born.

  Under her half-clenched left fist, under the thick jeans, his dick twitched. She knew she was supposed to do something, but she didn’t know what. Deborah always felt like that, but to feel it now, in bed with the world’s finest guy, panicked her, enraged her. What if she didn’t do this right, either? What if he didn’t like her? How dare he make her feel this way?

  He guided her hand to his fly—gently, tenderly, as if he’d chosen her. She told herself that was a lie; she could have been anybody. But some part of her believed he’d chosen her. Some part of her believed him when he told her softly, “You’re really something, you know that, Deb? I love you, you know that? Maybe we could get married someday.”