by KT Morrison
She was alternating from knitting to reading, taking a break when her knuckles began to ache, then picking up Stacy’s future-niece’s booties and resuming. It was a boon that a student like Maceo was here, and she looked forward to introducing him to the studio space properly. She’d taken him in tonight after the guests had gone to show him the space he’d have to work in when he wasn’t at college. He was so grateful and polite and fawned over her own paintings. But it was late, and he was tired and she didn’t know if his grace over looking at her work was honest or just good manners.
She’d never been to college, never got the chance. She was pregnant with Evan in her last year of high school. Even if she went, it wasn’t likely she’d have gone into an art program—she was kind of aimless back then. But in later years, after she’d got her GED, she’d become enamored with the idea of going back to school, maybe for art. She’d picked up painting again as a hobby (not that she had much down time with two babies and a homestead). More recently, since the kids were in high school, she’d gone back to painting again. No more clothes to be made, or kids to be schooled, and eventually the kids’ livestock were all sold off or passed away and her free time grew. When John built the addition, he put her in a studio space. Now she painted most days, had a group of women (and one man) who all met infrequently and painted or just drank coffee and talked about art. Last year, she’d even had a few of her paintings on display at the Iroquois Falls community gallery—though only one of them sold.
Across from where she sat, her tailor’s dummy faced her, a headless mannequin with half a dress slung around it, something she was making for herself to wear this summer. The form was a little ghoulish alone at night like this, but now she could see in the standing mirror just behind it, sitting between Marissa’s room and the bathroom, that Maceo slept with the door open almost a quarter way. Now she felt guilty about having the light on to read, and worried about the light of her laptop, too. But if it bothered him, he could close the door. Still, she reached up under the shade of the standing lamp beside her chair and pulled the chain to shut the light off.
She massaged her hand and stared at the screen of her laptop that seemed offensively bright in the new dark. She could go down to the kitchen or even the addition, but this was her spot where she liked to sit. It was warm and comforting. The heat from the fires below came up and made this room a sleepy sort of space at night time.
* * *
At eleven o’clock, the light came on in Maceo’s room slicing a bright oblong slash in the open doorway. She blinked and looked around her sewing room, beginning to think she’d drifted to sleep while she waited. Eyes darting to the laptop she rubbed her cheeks; the screen had gone dim from not being used, but she could see Evan’s flight was still in the air. Now she groaned and sat upright, pulling the bundle of knitting out of her lap and placing it on the felt top table next to her laptop.
The mirror against the wall had been placed there so she could get another angle on the mannequin while she tailored the dress, but from where she sat now she could see in the gap of Evan’s open door Maceo sit up in bed. She closed the clamshell lid of her laptop, worried he would look up and see her reflected in the mirror, her face lit up by the screen.
At first, seeing this young man sitting in her son’s bed made her nostalgic, made her miss Evan and even more eager to hear from him. But her eyes grew wide, watching now as he looked around, his hair mussed and sitting on the top of his head in a jagged clump, then pulled his T-shirt up and off, tossing it to the floor next to the bed. It was too hot up here and the heat had congregated in Evan’s room which often happened. A plain and pragmatic move on the young man’s part and she felt suddenly lascivious being privy to a private moment like that, Maceo not knowing he could be seen. And that feeling of badness had been pronounced because in that moment where he removed his T-shirt, she had seen his bare body, could see the young perfection of him, the tight tanned skin, the way his muscle and sinew pressed up against it, the way it flexed as he struggled to get the shirt off. It was a violation to sit and watch, but she was transfixed and pinned here because to move now would give her away and she would be embarrassed, so she kept quiet, hugged her arms over her chest and sunk into the chair.
Maceo still sat up, and her eyes went over his body revealed from the sternum up. He had a hard and lean body, his arms were muscular but not pumped up, just defined and masculine. His skin shone with the heat. He obviously wasn’t satisfied with removing his shirt, because he was looking around behind the headboard, eyeing the window set in the deep alcove of the dormer and considering opening it. She watched as he pulled the sheets away and swung his long legs out of bed and stood. He wore boxer shorts, his legs were tanned and showed off the movement of the muscle underneath just like his torso had. Then he was gone from her view, getting into the alcove. She heard the window slide open, watched the crack, waiting for him to return. Instead of reappearing and climbing back into bed, he was doing something else and her ears strained to hear. There was a snap of elastic, the sliding sound of cotton over skin, then he was in her view again, getting into bed naked. He’d taken his shorts off. In that sliver of lit space she watched now as he put a knee on the bed, saw the ridges of his ribs and the muscles of his waist flexing, his strong rounded haunch and rump. He had a perfect body and her eyebrows had wandered high as she didn’t move her eyes away from the private, intimate view. His genitals were hidden, but she registered movement between his legs, registered the tuft of his pubic patch in profile and then the movement of something dangling, swinging, thinking it must have been his opposite hand or something given the length away from his crotch. The whole moment extended over a mere second—a second filled with badness, voyeurism, shock, but also a certain humor. Also in that second, a thought spiraled up from the back of her brain, a prompt saying Uh-oh, don’t get back in bed without closing the door, John will be mad if all the heat from below went up and out that window, given how much it costs to heat the place, and how much time he spent stacking firewood, and also in that moment the thought John should install that ceiling fan at the top of the stairs like he said he would, push that heat back down so it doesn’t wander up here in the first place, and then as if in tune to her own thoughts, Maceo was pushing himself back up to stand, out of view again for a moment before appearing again fully frontally naked to her. The light was behind him as he filled the doorway gap, rim lit around his hair, one shoulder, his waist and leg. In the dim she could still make out the curve of his chest, light spilling over the ridged muscles of his side, the flat of his stomach and the dark tangle of hair below his navel and leading to a thatch between his legs. And between his legs she saw his penis. A dark shape, surely a trick to her eyes because it was so large, something huge swinging between his legs from side to side, the size of it surely an optical illusion, a normal size penis doubled because of a cast shadow... And then the door clicked shut.
The light from Evan’s room still shone in a thin horizontal line at the foot of the door, but then it was out a few seconds later, accompanied by the squeak of the bed springs as Maceo got into her son’s bed completely naked. Her heart pounded and a flood of shame washed over her as her brain began to consider how awful it would have been if he’d caught her eye in the mirror just now, watching him and not saying anything, watching from the dark. Her upper lip had gone sweaty, she could feel the chill of her rapid breath on it. Eyes wide in the dark, her hands opened and closed in fists, and blood swooshed in her eardrums like an ocean roar, her heartbeat pattering along.
It was just a naked body, Janie, no big deal. And you didn’t get caught.
But why hadn’t she looked away?
And why did she feel so strange now?—under the terror of potential discovery there was an unnamed rolling something, tumbling through her insides like a jagged ball of tumbleweed, scratching, tearing.
There was a time where she’d gone to the river down the valley below the property; it was summer,
about five years back now, and she discovered Evan and his buddies frolicking in the water without their clothes, just being kids. What where they?—fourteen, fifteen? She’d seen all his friends’ naked bodies, but it was cute and funny, and she’d backed away and then returned to the house before she embarrassed them all. There was no feeling like this back then, just laughter and sweetness.
* * *
Janie’s hand woke him. In his dream-state, his mind struggled to make sense of the feeling of touch between his legs. It was his doctor at first, holding his testicles and saying it shouldn’t hurt and he was saying It hurts a little, but to be honest, you’re a little rough, doctor, but then it was him and Janie in the doctor’s exam room, Dr. Greenwald had left them alone to discuss something important, and Janie held his testicles looking up in his eyes in that sweet way saying, Dr. Greenwald is going to reverse your vasectomy, John, we’re going to try again...
“We can’t, Janie,” he groaned, eyes fluttering, and rolling to his back.
Janie kissed his shoulder.
When his eyes opened, all he saw was the bedroom’s cedar strip ceiling that he put up himself. No doctor’s office, no exam room. It was his wife’s hand in his underwear, teasing his testicles and tugging on his pecker. He lay on his back, sleep drawing his mind to return to its warm embrace, Janie’s hand encouraging him to the land of the living. Sleep’s pull was strong because a few minutes ago it had engulfed him and folded him deep in its clutch.
Janie squeezed on the head of his cock, held his testicles in a clutch, pulled and stretched on his sleeping penis. Some excitement filled it, pumped volume to stretch it out and make it rubbery.
“What time is it?” he mumbled.
“It’s early still,” Janie whispered and kissed his shoulder again. She pushed the waistband of his underwear down under his testicles, squashing them up around either side of his penis. With the tip of her finger she teased around the very point of his penis. He rolled his head to the side, registered the red diode display on the alarm clock.
“It’s after eleven, Janie.”
No answer, she just kissed his shoulder once more. So he lay there and drifted in and out while Janie’s hand played between his legs. At times he’d grow almost hard enough he thought he could roll over and do it but then it would fade. He had to be up to go to work in five hours.
* * *
John’s penis resisted her, but she persisted. She choked an OK sign under its head and gently tugged it upward underneath his belly. She’d like to intertwine her legs with his but Sheba was in the way, curled in a furry loop on the quilt, sleeping at the foot of the bed. His breath came slow and steady and she listened, hoping they would take on that lustful depth that would show she’d roused him.
He grunted. “I’m so full,” he said. “I ate too much of that cake.”
“You did,” she said, pressed her lips to his hairy shoulder. “And you drank a lot of beer.”
He groaned again and rolled her way but heaved a heavy arm over her. His penis pulled away from her fingers, folded up and swallowed away by the weight he’d put on the last ten years. She curled her finger in his waistband and snapped it up to cover his genitals again. She snuggled against him and he hugged her.
“I know you have to get up early,” she whispered.
Sheba groaned and stretched out. Both the dog and her husband’s breathing grew long and dozy and soon she was the only one awake in the room. She lay and stared at the ceiling till she was sure John was fast asleep again, then she carefully hoisted John’s arm off her and shimmied herself out of bed without waking him.
Closed in the bathroom, lights off to spare John’s sleep, she sat on the toilet with her chin in her hands and stared at the fuzzy towel hanging on the rack. No pee came, and she didn’t even remember why she’d come in here. Now her own breaths came slow and heavy and their languid sound saddened her. They grew shaky. They trembled. She struggled to keep them quiet. Sobs came, dry and tearless, but tinted with her frail moaning, and soon she was racked with them, hunched over and blurting into her hands. Tears streamed at last, warm and wet and making her fingers slip together. Inexplicable sadness took complete control of her and she eased off the toilet to sit on the floor and cry fully into her hands with her panties twisted around her ankles.
When it was over she felt lighter, but bewildered. Her nasal passages were swollen, she breathed through her mouth in long, jagged pants, her tongue too thick for her mouth. The towel was pulled down as she dried her face and hands, sniffed and snorted, pulled up her panties, stood and stared at the pale ghostly reflection in the mirror above the sink. Eyes puffy, mouth hanging open, her hair was a tangled mess. She brushed it straight again.
“What was that about?” she sighed to herself and gave a soft laugh.
She slipped out of the bathroom, tiptoed through the bedroom and into the sewing room. Laptop collected, she made her way quietly to the top of the stairs, pausing at Evan’s door. In her son’s bed, Maceo would be sleeping, a young man in a foreign country staying with a foreign family, and soon her own son would be in the same situation. She rubbed her temples, staring at the closed door, then went quietly down the stairs and into the kitchen.
By the under-cupboard lighting she sat on a stool and continued her knitting. The radio was turned to NPR, her laptop was open. At 12:15, Evan texted her.
Evan: got here safe, mom! It’s beautiful and warm. I’m safe and in the car with Maceo’s parents. Hope Maceo is having fun (does Dad have him in a plow yet?) G2G but we’ll Skype later—go to bed!
She sent him her best, told him she loved him, he said the same, passed it on to his dad and sister, too. She told him she’d let them know. She shut her laptop, heart full and happy, snuck up to bed and was asleep before one o’clock.
Morning Routine
Morning routines were arranged to get him out of the house quietly and without fuss. No shower—he’d do that at nights—and down in the fridge would be a packed breakfast and a packed lunch Janie had already prepared for him. The coffee maker would’ve woken at 4:30 on its own and prepared him a pot. Janie would’ve left his clean thermos on the counter next to the coffeemaker.
But he was still in the bedroom, fully dressed in clean flannel and jeans, sitting on the bed watching his wife sleep while Sheba stretched and yawned and began her little dance, eager to get going. It was 4:50.
Janie slept peacefully on her side, curled toward the center of the bed where he’d woken to see her beautiful face. Her light blonde hair spread out on the pillow behind her like a billowing flag. She’d come to bed in one of his worn-out flannel shirts. It pooled around her slender frame, the unbuttoned cuffs in wide open envelopes around her fine wrists.
Sheba gave an irritated stress-yawn laced with a high whine and dragged her nails on the hardwood, stretching again.
“I’m coming, Sheebs,” he whispered.
Jane’s pouted lips were parted, she breathed through her mouth. Her eyes were closed, her long lashes jittered as her eyes darted back and forth and he wondered what she dreamed about. Last night he rebuffed her when she asked for sex. And there she was, a beautiful woman, and at one time she’d been a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl, the prettiest one in their school, and he would’ve given anything to be naked with her between the sheets. Now he was a tired man; tired and overweight and wasn’t able to reliably get hard. It all seemed like the blink of an eye. It was just twenty years ago where they’d been so young and everything ahead of them seemed like an eternity.
He was careful not to wake her as he got over top of her and kissed her cheek. She stirred but didn’t wake. When he rose, Sheba began her dance again, going around in circles, and he said, “I know, I know, we’re going already,” and opened the door before she made too much noise and woke Janie.
They went through the sewing room and past Evan’s room, the door open a crack, and he wondered how Maceo slept last night. Then he was down in the kitchen, taking out his pac
ked lunch from the pantry fridge, pouring a whole coffee pot into his contractor-size thermos, throwing on his work coat, lacing up his boots, bracing himself for the cold. Sheba loved it, instantly leaping out the open door, jumping off the wraparound porch, running around in a circle, throwing her shoulder down in the snow and running with her back legs and shoveling with her face. He clapped his thigh for her, encouraged her to hurry up, walked around the porch and along the side of the house and down through the pathway toward the pickup truck. Sheba squatted for a pee.
He’d already hit the auto-start, and the F250 was up and running, its big diesel motor clicking away. He waited at the passenger side until Sheba came racing around the corner, and he held the door open so she could leap into the cab. Then it was just the two of them closed inside, the radio turned to the Wolf. Classic rock for the classic guy. He put it in reverse, did a three-point turn to get the F250 nose down on the hill and headed to work.
* * *
Maceo would start classes on Tuesday, but he had an appointment with the registrar at ten o’clock this morning. She planned to take Maceo to Rochester in the kids’ truck, show him the roads to get there, then she had some errands she could do and he could call her to let her know when he was ready to be picked up.
She was out of bed at six after tossing and turning in a light sleep once John had left the bed. One cup of coffee down, she switched to tea, brewed a pot and sat on the stool at the kitchen counter listening to the radio until the sun came up. The chickens needed to be woken and fed and watered, and she knew Maceo wanted to do that; or at least had expressed interest in it last night, and she didn’t think it was just out of politeness. He wanted the full experience so she would wait for him to get up.
