The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope

by Rhonda Riley

  Sarah moved the mallets lower in the bowl, Gracie followed, and the sound sobered, changed rhythm. She looked around at us. “More?”

  “Yes,” Adam whispered.

  I nodded.

  Sarah looked at Lil, who mumbled, “Please. Yes, more.”

  Sarah picked up the tempo again. “Stay there and a little faster,” she said to Gracie. And the sound moved from somber to ticklishly pleasing. Then the room exploded. Adam, Lil, and then Rosie burst into guffaws and rolled on the floor. Sarah bit her lip in concentration. I went limp and happy, leaning back against Lil’s closet door, my head warm. But Adam and each of the girls suddenly sucked in their breath, then exhaled explosively, wiggling as if being violently tickled. Tears streaked their faces. Lil pounded the floor and clutched her father’s arm. Rosie tried to stand to do God knows what, but couldn’t make it up off the floor. Gracie kept her mallet moving, but held one hand over her mouth as if to stifle her laughter. A tear slid down her face and into her bowl. Sarah stared down, mouth open, eyes big, and her pupils dilated.

  The sound filled the room, and the strange St. Vitus dance of giggles, guffaws, and snorts continued around me. My head and chest hummed with a tender, amazing joy. But what I felt was clearly not the fantastic joke they all seemed to hear.

  Then, abruptly, part of it cut out. I opened my eyes. Gracie, a wide, foolish grin on her face, held both hands up in the air.

  The sound dropped and stopped. Sarah put the mallets down gently and rubbed her arms. Their laughter bubbled down to whimpers, then exhausted sighs.

  “Wow,” one of them moaned thickly.

  Gradually, the girls begin to move around me.

  “Oh, and to think I used to spend money on drugs,” Rosie said.

  Adam snored. Gracie stretched beside him and closed her eyes.

  Sarah, Rosie, Lil, and I slowly gathered up the dirty dishes and leftovers and wandered back into the kitchen. They washed the dishes while I sat at the table. I watched them jostling shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen. Bright-haired, slim young women. Lil now as tall as Rosie. So like me when I had been a girl. And so like their father when they rolled on the floor laughing earlier.

  I thought of Momma. For a moment, I saw her face drawn with illness, the appeal for forgiveness in her voice when she told me about my father. How could I explain to them what I did not understand? Adam was, and always had been, vast and strange, beyond my vocabulary. I glanced down the hall at the photograph of Addie and me hanging there. How could I explain that to our daughters?

  Lil put her dish towel down, came over to me, and laid her hand on my back. “Thanks for the sisters, Mom,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  She looked down at me. “You didn’t like the bowls as much as we did, did you?”

  “Oh, I like them. But it was different for me.”

  Sarah joined us at the table. “When I was a little girl, I worried about that.”

  Lil sat down next to her sister. “Worried about what?”

  “That I perceived—saw—things differently from everyone else,” Sarah said. “What if, when I look at a pumpkin, I see the color orange. But when you look at it, Momma, you see the color purple and when Lil looks at it she sees yellow. But if we all call the color we see ‘orange,’ then we would never know that we were actually each seeing different colors, would we?”

  Lil nodded. “I thought the same thing, but I had backup when I was a kid. I always knew Jennie saw the same thing I did. I was sure of it.” She pressed her lips together the way she always did after uttering her sister’s name.

  I thought of Adam, solitary, the only one of his kind. “There are things we’ll never know. But you’re not alone. None of you will ever be alone.” My words fell heavier than I intended.

  A short silence followed. Then Rosie volunteered: “I have the same problem with sounds. I’m pretty sure there are times I hear things that other people don’t.” She held up the pot lid she had been drying and tapped it on the edge with a big spoon. Ting! The sound reverberated. Rosie swept the spoon through the air as if following the sound. The arc of the spoon continued long after I heard only silence punctuated by Adam’s snores from Lil’s bedroom. Rosie banged the pot again softly and whispered in mock drama, “And sometimes, ladies, I hear that sound when there is no pot or spoon around!”

  Beside me, Lil pinched her thumb and forefinger together and sucked air between them. Sarah snickered.

  “No. No,” Rosie protested. “Nothing to do with smoking. It started when I was a little girl. Weird droning sounds. Stuff like those bowls.”

  I wondered what else Rosie might hear that I did not. I shooed Lil away and stood up.

  “Well, I have heard enough. I want to hear the dishes getting finished. Go! All of you.”

  They raced for the kitchen door. Once again, I felt myself to be the solitary one. They heard things I could not hear. They had potential out of my range, possibilities that would ferry them into a future blind to me. They were so young. All of them. Even Adam.

  Not long after she returned the borrowed singing bowls, Sarah began the first of her “anatomy” drawings, strange distortions of the human body morphing into animals. She turned Gracie and Rosie’s old bedroom into an ever-changing gallery. My favorite was a portrait of Adam as a centaur. She had followed him around the stables for days, stopping him at his work, asking him to take his shirt off.

  I caught her sketching me one day as I bent over in the garden. “I’m not taking any of my clothes off,” I told her and waved her away.

  “Oh, I really wouldn’t want you to for this one.” She grinned as her hand swept over the paper.

  The next day she had a new sketch up, a horse shown from the rear, turning to look back in surprise over its shoulder. The face peering over the broad, heart-shaped rump was an elongated, horsy version of my own.

  “She got you!” Adam laughed when he saw it.

  “Really?” I asked. “Is my butt that big?”

  Adam wisely just grinned and scooted out the door.

  Since their births, I’d wondered how different my girls were. As they matured, I couldn’t help but ask how it was that they didn’t seem to recognize the difference between themselves and others, even as they gave voice—literal and metaphoric voice—to that difference. How could they not know what was in their own blood? In their genes? But, I told myself, we are all stuck in our own skin. Limited to the singular certainty of our individual selves. Each of us knows the world only from a single perspective.

  Then the thought jolted me: not Adam. He was not limited to his own perspective, he had not always been stuck in one skin. He’d had mine and Roy Hope’s.

  I laughed.

  Again, he surpassed my understanding.

  How would they, his daughters, follow his lead?

  The year that Sarah had started her periods, I’d begun skipping mine. By the time she was in high school, I had gone through menopause. I had a relatively easy time of it, but I did notice I no longer had the single-minded drive toward sex, and desired it less frequently. Sexual desire had been a part of me since I had become a woman; I was uncertain of how to be a woman without it. Who would I be if it fell away completely?

  And even though I had not wanted a child for years, the final impossibility of it made the act less consequential in some way. But its meaning had changed rather than diminished. Lovemaking became a distillation of the bond between Adam and me. Now it was pure touch, pure connection without the tincture of other possibilities.

  When I entered the room of Adam’s body, everything else fell away. There was only him, his body, his mouth, his hands. Then the moment of sweet, bright harmonics bound us. That remained unchanged.

  During the days, Adam seemed a normal man. A normal, young man. I could feel, almost smell, the stallion on him.

  One day, as I weeded the garden, the tall, blond girl who had come home from school with Sarah wandered out our back door and toward the
stables. She had wide hips and a full figure, what people would have once called voluptuous, and a kind of brightness surrounded her. Her youth was heavy on her, like sweat. She walked into the open stable door. I heard the swish of Adam’s rasp stop. Then his voice, followed by hers.

  I walked past the stable a few minutes later, with a bushel basket of spent basil stems and roots for the compost pile, when Sarah rushed the girl out of the stable and toward the house, hissing, “Jesus, he’s my father!” She shook her head at the girl, whose voice rose defensively as the back door shut behind them.

  Adam stood inside the stable, wiping his hands and watching their retreat. I tried to read his face. We looked at each other. I walked up to him, pushed his hair up out of his eyes, and studied his face. Not a day over thirty he looked. I was fifty-two. He could easily have passed for my son. I thought of how other women must see him. For a moment, I imagined him in the world without me, outliving me.

  He touched my hair, ran his hand down my cheek. He took my hand and pressed it to his breastbone. “Don’t leave,” he said.

  Keeping my fingertips on his chest, I bent to put down my basket and pretended that he wanted me to stay with him in the stable. I did not want to think of what he saw—my graying hair and the lines on my face that told him I was far closer to my end than he to his.

  I unbuttoned and opened his shirt. The skin on his bare chest did not have the slight crepe-like quality of age. There was no sinking of the pectorals that I saw on other men my age, no gray hair. But the horse-kick scar remained. I traced it, wanting to press my tongue to it and feel its smoothness. I closed my eyes for a second and saw the pale star in the X-ray of his chest as the doctor had held it up for me to see.

  I licked my finger and added the dots and circle that would make a smiling face. “Remember those first months in Florida when Sarah drew that? It took days to wear off. You came to bed each night with it fainter and fainter. Then she would redraw it and the vanishing process would start again. She did that for months.”

  He nodded and looked down at himself, tapping his sternum with his fingertips, a gesture as old as Addie. “I think of it as a U.”

  “U for unknown.”

  We kissed and the odor of his sweat blended with the basil resin on me. He smelled different lately.

  “U for what I don’t know,” he said.

  I heard something new in his voice, a lack of ease.

  “Will you age at all? Will you change that way?” Then the question I did not say out loud, because I knew the answer: “Will I have to grow old alone while you remain young?”

  He looked down at his chest again, then past me, his eyes scanning the house and the land behind me. “I don’t know, Evelyn. I changed myself to be this.” He ran his hand over his youthful face. “But I don’t know how to become a middle-aged Roy Hope.”

  Anxiety rippled up my chest. I pulled him closer and lay my head against his neck.

  “Don’t go away,” he whispered.

  “No one is going away.” I looked over my shoulder out the door of the stable. My eyes followed the path of the girl. “Have you ever been with another woman?”

  “Evelyn. Evelyn.” He took my hand and led me out into the yard. Gripping my shoulders, he turned me suddenly to face away from him. “Look at the sky, Evelyn. Look at the pastures. And the trees. I love that sky, those trees and fields and every horse there. I love all the faces I see in town. I love the way the roads curve or go straight. All these things give something to me. I love all this. It is so beautiful. So beautiful.” His voice broke and fell lower.

  I did look at those green pastures, at the soft undulation of the distant, tree-dotted fields. The depths of cumulus towered in the distance. Through my tears, I saw the beauty he saw.

  He tightened his hold on my arms. He whispered again, hard and fast against my ear. “All those things and everyone else is outside of me. But you, Evelyn. You pulled me out of the ground. And I know how your tongue rests against the roof of your mouth, how the sweat gathers under your breasts in summer, how your narrow wrists ache after hours of hoeing, how you take your pleasure from a man. And I know all this not through empathy or imagination. Not even love. But because I have been you.”

  His last sentence was an unexpected turn. He had found the perfect pitch. As soon as he said those words, I knew them to be true. He belonged to me as no other had. And I to him. And he would, in some ways, never belong to me. I did not know his parameters. That was the source of my anxieties. It wasn’t the threat of infidelity. It was him.

  For months afterward, I thought of Dorian Gray. Every time I saw Adam shaving and my eyes tracked the skim of the razor over his ageless skin, I imagined a middle-aged Roy Hope. Like me, he would have reading glasses on the nightstand by his bed, a tube of Ben-Gay lotion on hand for his aching joints. Several times, when Adam thought he was alone, I saw him scrutinize his reflection, frowning as he leaned in close, turning his head side to side or pushing his hair up to expose a perfect hairline.

  Like all other questions about him, the question of his age dogged me, patient and loyal. But unlike other questions about him, time would inevitably make this question public, progressively more public.

  Before the year was out, Gracie announced her engagement to Hans, the Dutch student she had been dating, the man she had been with the night Adam and I drank the Kool-Aid. They wanted to get married soon, they explained. Then Hans would be able to legally work in the United States while he completed his doctoral degree. Their engagement was no surprise, as Adam had predicted; we’d seen a lot of Hans since that night. But their shy addendum to the engagement announcement was completely unexpected: Gracie was pregnant—a happy accident, they explained.

  I should have been disappointed that she had not been more careful with birth control, but all I felt was relief in knowing she could have children. Her pregnancy was the final proof that the girls, despite their sexually ambiguous beginnings, were normal. Not mules but fertile women!

  Gracie insisted on a wedding at the ranch. She and I strolled out of the kitchen so she could show me where she wanted to stand with Hans as they made their vows. As she pivoted, surveying the land around her, her long red braid swung out behind her and she shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun. “Yep, this is the spot. And in about a month, the sun will be setting right over there.” She pointed.

  I realized that we were standing where all the vans and cars had parked the night Adam heard her voice ring out sweet, joyful. I understood why she was choosing to commemorate the spot, and I smiled. She reminded me so much of my younger self at that moment.

  The guest list was effusive and rambling, a menagerie of our past and present. Gracie wanted an informal wedding not much different from their parties, except that it included North Carolina relations and friends, as well as Florida horsemen, Hans’s family, and, of course, a varied pool of the girls’ friends—hippies, academics, campus activists, and a few Florida cracker cowboys.

  As we all gathered just before the ceremony, I watched my sister, Bertie, who’d recently found the Lord, bless the non-Baptist masses with a fixed scowl of restrained piety. My brother, Joe, and his wife, Mary, struggled politely through a conversation with a local philosophy professor. Freddie and Marge showed up with banjo, guitar, and regrets from Cole—his wife, Eloise, was ill. The two of them were the most at ease, settling in among the long-haired musicians.

  After a few years living in Florida, we’d resumed contact with our Clarion relations, a few of whom had even come to visit. But now I could see the shock that registered in their eyes when they saw Adam’s face, so much younger than theirs and mine. Those sideways, assessing gazes reminded me of what we had endured in our last year in North Carolina. I appreciated how much the move had spared us and opened up the girls’ lives. But I could see our Florida neighbors and friends making the same comparison now. If they had assumed I was simply aging prematurely, meeting my middle-aged siblings corrected that notion. I
did not want to lie again. I did not want to be shunned again. When their eyes lingered a moment longer than normal on Adam’s face, I looked away, ignored the smolder of anxiety under my ribs, and turned my attention to other guests.

  The wedding ceremony was flawless. The girls were all beautiful, especially Gracie in a long, white, cotton lace dress. Rosie set aside her overalls and donned a long dress to be the maid of honor. Lil and Sarah sang. In his dark suit, Hans looked a fetching combination of shocked and proud. He was clearly a good and reliable man. Adam and I had no qualms about him, and Hans’s family seemed to adore Gracie, but we cried at the wedding all the same.

  After the short outdoor ceremony, we all ate dinner on long tables set up in the pasture. Hans, normally a rather reserved person, got drunk enough to serenade us in Dutch, then hug and kiss us all, proclaiming his love for everyone. Sarah, the official wedding photographer, captured all our goofy, happy grins. But there were no other surprises. No tainted Kool-Aid. Though I did detect the smoke of marijuana on a few of the guests.

  The music went on until early in the morning. We made strong coffee and breakfast for the motley gang of stragglers who had camped all night. Then the honeymooners left for a month in Utrecht.

  When they returned, Gracie was almost four months along and beginning to show. They continued living in Gracie’s small apartment, where they would stay until the lease ran out or the baby was born, whichever came first, then live with us for a few months after the birth while Hans completed his degree. We counted down the weeks.

  Several times I had bouts of anxiety about the baby, though no nightmares as I’d had when I was pregnant with Gracie. Once I asked Adam, “What should we tell her? Should we warn her that he might not look right at first?” I was asking only about the baby, but as the words came out of my mouth, I thought of all her questions that would naturally follow.