Snakewoman of Little Egypt

by Robert Hellenga

  On Saturday night I went to the French Club movie: Breathless. À bout de souffle in French. I sat in on the discussion afterwards. Jean-Paul was there. I felt I didn’t understand anything. On the Hill we watched lots of movies, but not like this one. I didn’t understand that it was revolutionary; I didn’t understand, till the discussion afterwards, that it was poking fun at Hollywood; I didn’t understand that it was very self-conscious about being a film; I didn’t know enough to appreciate the unusual camera moves; I didn’t know what to make of Michel. But Patricia: I understood that Patricia didn’t want to be controlled by a man, and I was glad that she turned Michel in to the police to prove that she didn’t love him. If there’d been somewhere to turn Jackson in to, I would have done it. Claire too.

  What happened was that I confronted Claire during our first story conference. “The sunset stuff works well,” Claire was saying about my story. She was reading her comments off her computer screen. “But maybe give Alice a more complex and interesting response. For example, she might come close to pushing Aaron off the catwalk. Or at least think about how satisfying it would be to push him. And I’d like her to understand that the way she behaves now, the way she responds to this disappointment, will shape the person she’s going to become. Something like that.”

  “It would be satisfying, wouldn’t it,” I said. “Like pushing the buzzer when you were fucking Jackson.” I think I surprised myself as much as I surprised Claire.

  Claire leaned forward over her desk and put her hands over her face. I was sitting in a chair next to her. I spun her around and pried her hands apart. She was starting to cry.

  “I thought we were going to be friends,” I said. “Not just teacher and student. I thought that’s what you wanted. I wasn’t going to say anything, but you stand up there in the classroom and tell us to write out of our deepest values …”

  “I thought so too,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  I was thinking how I’d been in this same scenario, with Earl hammering away at me. I wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t funny.

  And then I really did take myself by surprise. I knew all along that I’d get around to forgiving Claire. I just wanted to be sure that she knew I was forgiving her. But now I asked myself, Who was I to forgive Claire? Who was I to be angry in the first place? Who was I to scold her, to disapprove? Did I want to act like God? Besides, my anger hadn’t been righteous in the first place. It had been jealous.

  “Claire,” I said. “I’m the one who should be sorry. And I am sorry. I had no right to push the buzzer, or to throw it in your face this morning.”

  “I’m forty years old,” she said. “I wrote a novel and won a prize, but nobody’s ever heard of the prize, and the book is about number two million on Amazon dot-com. It’s not even in the university bookstore. It’s a good title, though. The Sins of the World. You’d think there’d be a lot of books with that title, but there aren’t. Mine’s the only one. The Sins of the World, and I’ve committed all of them.”

  “You haven’t murdered anyone, have you?”

  “Well, all the others.”

  “Have you borne false witness against your neighbor?”

  “Well, I guess I haven’t done that either, but all the rest of them, especially coveting my neighbor’s husband. You know, Jackson was so good to me when Sins got so many rejections, and then I turned around and married Ray. What was I thinking?” She wiped her eyes. “Oh, it’s all right. Ray’s a good man, and he’s good to me too. I shouldn’t complain.”

  Another student was standing in the doorway. It was time for me to go.

  “Someone’s here,” I said.

  “Everything is material,” Claire said. “For a writer, everything is material.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “But please don’t write about this. Please.” She looked at my face for an answer.

  “Promise.”

  “And don’t say anything to Jackson.”

  “Not a word,” I said.

  7

  Balanced Reciprocity

  One Saturday afternoon in mid-October, the weather crisp and cool after a hot summer and a warm September, they caught the big groundhog that had made his home under Jackson’s deck. The dog heard him first and started barking at the kitchen door. Jackson opened the kitchen door and went out on the deck. When he leaned over the railing, he could see the groundhog in the Have-a-Heart trap he’d bought at Farm King. Sunny had been putting canned peaches in the trap. He buzzed her on the intercom. “Bonjour,” she said.

  “Got the marmotte d’Amérique,” he said.

  “I guess those peaches did the job,” she said. “Be right down. Au revoir.”

  The groundhog wasn’t happy, and they both wore heavy gloves when they lifted the trap onto a plastic sled. They took hold of the rope and pulled the sled up to the drive, and then lifted the trap up into the bed of Warren’s truck. Sunny’s truck.

  On the drive to Oquawka, an old river town twelve miles away, where they were going to release the groundhog far enough away so it wouldn’t show up at Jackson’s the next day, she put a Taj Mahal CD in the player and sang along: “I had the blues so bad one time it put my face in a permanent frown. Now I’m feelin’ so much better I could cakewalk into town.”

  The groundhog was asleep when they got to Oquawka.

  “Like Naqada,” Sunny said, looking around. “Seen better days.”

  They drove through town to the river, the Mississippi, and then turned north and drove along the river till they came to a scenic turnout.

  “You’ll thank us, Mr. Groundhog. Just be happy Mr. Jackson didn’t want me to shoot you.” Sunny pulled the hasp on the trap and released the groundhog, who scurried down the bank to the river and then came back up and headed in the other direction in a fast waddle.

  They stopped at the Blue Goose for lunch and each had a beer and split a third beer, and then they stopped at a little park on the edge of town to admire the monument to Norma Jean elephant.

  Jackson was relieved. The groundhog had really bothered him, gnawing away under the house.

  “I want to go on a picnic in the country,” Sunny sang, “Mama oh, and stay all day, I don’t care but don’t do nothing just while my time away.”

  On the way back she pulled into a motel next to the Schuyler Melon Farm. The Schuyler barn was closed up and the tables were shut away; but the empty stand was still there, with a sign: MELONS: $3 EACH.

  “Melons like sandy soil,” Jackson explained.

  Sunny looked at Jackson. “I don’t know if I’m eighteen or thirty-five.”

  Jackson didn’t say anything. He was suddenly aware of the surface of his body, of the joints that still caused trouble, of the deep fatigue that lay below the surface. He was aware of the surface of her body, too, where her blouse lay over her shoulders and over her breasts, the way it was tucked into her jeans, even the pressure of her socks separating the soles of her feet from the soles of her shoes and the ring circling her finger and the watch circling her left wrist that was a little too loose and kept riding up.

  “You’re not going to turn me down, are you?” she said.

  Jackson laughed. “No, I’m not going to turn you down.”

  “We’re going to commit adultery. At least I am.”

  “Your first time?”

  “In this life,” she said, leaning over and opening the dash and poking around for something. “You go arrange for a room. I’ll pay you later.”

  They sat next to each other on the edge of the bed, and Jackson thought about Claire. But Sunny wasn’t at all like Claire! Sunny was hungry, but she wasn’t needy. They didn’t take their clothes off for a while. They were feeling shy, or maybe mistaking something else for shyness. Then they started touching, kissing, talking, joking.

  Sunny started to unbutton her lumberjack shirt. She said something in French. She sounded, to Jackson, as if she’d been practicing: “Voulez-vous baiser en levrette?”<
br />
  Jackson laughed.

  “Did I say something funny?”

  “Very funny.”

  “So what did I say?

  “You asked if I wanted to fuck you like a greyhound bitch.”

  “What’s so funny about that?” She laughed.

  “You learn that in your French class?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  They messed around for a while and then took off their clothes. She handed him a condom. “Une capote anglaise.”

  “An English hood.”

  “Baiser en levrette,” she said. “I thought it meant something else.” She laughed and turned over and stuck her butt up in the air.

  “Maybe it would be better faire l’amour à la papa,” he said.

  “You mean like missionaries?” she said. “I don’t want you to be bored.”

  “Have you been looking at the sex tips in Cosmopolitan while you’re standing in line in Hy-Vee?”

  She laughed again and rolled over on her back and opened her arms. The look on her face was warm and open, as if she already knew all about him.

  On the way back Jackson wanted to stop at the McDonald’s on the highway, but Sunny wanted to cook something. She’d borrowed one of Jackson’s cookbooks—The Flavor of France—and had started cooking French up in Warren’s apartment.

  “I’ve got a chicken in the refrigerator,” Jackson said.

  “What more could we ask for?”

  “Mushrooms. I’ve got some mushrooms too. And the bottle of wine you gave me.”

  “It felt like my whole body was on fire,” Sunny said, putting her hand on his leg. “It was like being struck by lightning. It was like a pot of raspberry jam boiling over on the stove.”

  “You know just what to say to a man,” he said.

  “I like pulling into the drive,” she said. “I like the crunch of the gravel under the wheels.”

  “You did a good job,” he said. She’d graded the drive about a week earlier.

  “There’s a low spot up ahead that needs more gravel. I should probably put a pipe under it. And that tree.” She pointed at a big old oak that had fallen across the fence into Jack Delacort’s field. “I can take care of that.”

  “If there’s property damage—the fence—the insurance may cover it. I can get Mason’s Tree Service to take it out.”

  “I like seeing the lights on too, from my window. The woods can be really dark if there’s no moon. It’s a great place. It’s not a cabin, but it’s not a regular house either. Maybe some kind of lodge, but not really a lodge either.”

  “Let me know when you figure out what it is. Claude fixed it up inside like a French country house with that fancy stove in the kitchen, and French tiles and copper pots. He used to give great parties, invite fifty or sixty people.”

  The dog was waiting for them. If she was annoyed that she hadn’t gotten to go along, she didn’t show it. She went to Sunny’s door, then Jackson’s, leaping for joy.

  They left the truck outside, next to Jackson’s pickup. Jackson liked to see the two pickups side by side. Red and green, Ford and Chevy, six cylinder and eight cylinder.

  Sunny came around the truck and waited for Jackson to embrace her, or at least touch her. Which he did. He bent to kiss the top of her head.

  “I’m really happy here,” she said. “I said I was going to be happy, and I am. But what does it mean?”

  “What does what mean—being happy?”

  Jackson was wondering the same thing, wondering what it meant, and what it would mean to eat this dinner together, and how pleasant it would be to sit at Claude’s French farmhouse table with this woman. He recognized the feelings: endorphins, the chemistry of love. He didn’t fight against them. As an anthropologist he was aware of the mating habits of higher primates and familiar with the evolution of sexual dimorphism in animals. But maybe he was a little afraid anyway. Of the mystery of it. He’d been through it enough, too many times, maybe. Always seems different at the beginning. But love grows old, and waxes cold, and fades away like morning dew. It was like climbing a mountain he’d climbed before. But this time it really was different. But that was the same too. It was always different.

  He kissed her on the lips. The dog tried to push herself between them, as if she wanted to separate them. Jackson put his hand on the dog’s head and then on Sunny’s bottom. He kissed her again. Because he thought that this was what she wanted. It was what he wanted too.

  The pile of firewood was handsome. Over a full cord. It wasn’t really cold yet, but he’d build a fire anyway.

  Sunny went up to her apartment to change her clothes. When she came back down she was wearing a dark blue turtleneck and a clean pair of jeans. Jackson had a fire going in the wood stove. She looked through The Flavor of France. She made herself right at home. She didn’t ask where is this, where is that. She just opened cupboards and found what she needed.

  Jackson fed the dog and put a tablecloth on the table, which was scored with burns from Claude’s Gauloises. He closed the wooden shutters against the dark and opened the bottle of French wine that Sunny had brought earlier—an expensive Bordeaux. Jackson liked wine, and he’d always drunk what Claude drank, but Claude wasn’t too fussy. For a Frenchman. At the end of a party he’d pour all the leftover wine into one bottle. Jackson closed his eyes and held Sunny in his imagination, putting together a picture from the sounds she was making—cutting, chopping, using the clicker to light the back burner on the right-hand side, which didn’t work properly—and from the sounds she’d made that afternoon, little cries and growls, as if she were in fact a greyhound bitch.

  He opened the wine to let it breathe and they each had a beer.

  “Do you have any kir?” she asked. “That’s what they drink in France.”

  Jackson remembered a lot of things about his stays in France, but he didn’t remember drinking kir.

  “It’s crème de cassis with white wine. If you use champagne, it’s called a kir royale.”

  “Did you learn that in your French class too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever tried it?”

  “No, but I’d like to.”

  “We’ll have to get some,” he said. “Crème de cassis and champagne.”

  “Chicken Marengo,” she said. “It says here that on June fourteenth, eighteen hundred, Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Austrian army at Marengo, and that his cook made up this recipe for him. To celebrate.”

  “I think it’s supposed to have crawfish,” Jackson said.

  “What are those, crawdads?”

  “And little fried eggs—or just yolks.”

  “We could use shrimp.”

  “If we had some shrimp.”

  The owls were making a ruckus outside the kitchen window.

  Sunny was very intense when she cooked. Jackson drank his beer and watched her while he made a salad. She’d pushed up the sleeves of her turtleneck, and she had a pencil stuck through her hair, which had started to curl up behind her right ear, and she was wearing new glasses in fashionable gold frames. The glasses took some of the backwoods out of her. He hadn’t noticed them before.

  Jackson cut up some bread and went to check the fire. He added two chunks of gorgonzola to the salad while she browned the chicken pieces.

  “Intentionality is the enemy,” she said. Jackson recognized Claire’s mantra. “You’ve got to be open to surprises at every stage of the game. Like this afternoon. Were you surprised?”

  It had been a long time since Jackson had been so surprised, or since a surprise had come boiling up out of him. It wasn’t that he thought he knew everything. It was that he didn’t have any idea of what else he wanted to know. Unlike Sunny, who was learning new stuff every day and was too excited to keep it to herself.

  “Intentionality is the enemy,” she said again. “Leave yourself open for surprises at every step of the way. Don’t try to plan everything out. I think that’s really true.” She paused. “Were you surpr
ised?” she asked again. “This afternoon?”

  “I was very surprised. How about you? Did you surprise yourself too?”

  “Not exactly. I was just starting to wonder.”

  “About what?”

  She tried to explain in French what she wanted to say, but she couldn’t manage it.

  “You brought your own capote anglaise,” Jackson said. “That looks to me like evidence of intentionality.”

  With the shutters closed, the kitchen was suffused in a warm glow.

  It was the end of the fourth full week of the semester. Jackson asked her about her classes, and she told him. She was working on a story for Claire, reading Euripides’ Bacchae in Great Books, studying the passé composé in French. But it was her biology class that was on her mind.

  “Professor Cramer’s something else,” she said. “He doesn’t put up with any nonsense. At the beginning of each class he picks a name at random from his class list—there are too many of us for him to know our names—and he interrogates that poor student: If you don’t know the answer to the first question, he doesn’t ask another student, he just keeps asking you one question after another till you melt down, and then he takes off his glasses and starts shouting ‘CAN’T YOU READ?’ I’ve learned to read, believe me.”

  “Has he interrogated you?”

  She nodded. “About the Miller-Urey experiment.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This guy—Stanley Miller—wanted to see if he could create life, figure out how it got started, by going back to the way the universe was at the beginning.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He put water and ammonia in a flask with hydrogen and methane gas, and then he boiled it up and zapped it with electricity. Like lightning hitting the earth. He kept doing that and after a week he’d produced a molecular soup containing amino acids. Those are the building blocks of proteins, life itself.”