“I …” I repeat, choking on the word.
“Come soon, then,” he invites me, sure of my assent. His forefinger touches my jaw, a fleeting farewell.
Then he releases me, and he is gone, blending in with the flow of people. I stare after him. He wears only a denim vest over his bare chest, and cutoff jeans do little to mask his strangeness. His hooves clack clearly on the smooth linoleum of the mall floor, but no one notices him, no heads turn to watch him pass. Only I stare after him as he is borne away by the current of shoppers. I hear his hooves long after I lose him in the rippling tapestry of people.
I close my eyes, try to still the quivering that besets me. Glass cold against my sweating hands, smooth against my back. I realize that I am backed against a display window, leaning against the cool pane. I straighten guiltily. My palms leave their imprints outlined in mist on the smooth glass. The bags of garments have fainted, have crumpled about my feet. Absently I pick them up, smoothing their sides. All my many minds are chattering at once. Someone is hoping that Maurie and Steffie will not notice how crumpled the bags are. Someone else is shouting that he spoke to me, that he uttered my name, that I have finally heard his voice. But the one in charge hushes all of them, tells them to be still. Firmly I tell myself that I have been daydreaming again, silly escapist fantasies to make myself feel important, and that if I don’t hurry up and get down to the restaurant … I am not sure just what will happen if I don’t get down to the restaurant soon, but I have an oppressive feeing that it will be dreadful. The chance for something to be wonderful has come and gone in a heartbeat, and I have missed it. Only the dreadful is left. So I go, sacks swinging with my stride, moving purposefully now, cutting in and out of the crowd like a freeway driver weaving among the slower cars. I try not to think I am disheveled, guilty, musky with secrets. I forbid my eyes to watch for him.
The restaurant is a dark cave that opens up suddenly in the wall of storefronts on the mall. There are no doors, there is only the open space with the rack of menus, the cash register, and a hostess standing guard. Beyond, all is dimness and muted music. The tables are shrouded with deep red cloths, the menus are gilt and scarlet, the place is cushioned with a red carpet. One wall is mirrored, but it takes some moments for me to realize this, to see that I have been scanning the mirrored tables for a glimpse of Mother Maurie and Steffie. The hostess does not approve of me, and makes no attempt to greet or seat me. I am used to such as her. “I’m meeting someone,” I say, and breeze past her, trying in vain to keep my bags from brushing the backs of chairs and catching on the corners of tables.
Just when I am sure they are not here, that there must be another restaurant near another Fredericks, I see them. They are sitting in a booth at the very back, looking cool and chic in their summer city dresses, an advertisement for champagne or lip gloss. I stack the bags against the end of the booth and slide in beside Steffie. I realize I am breathing as if I have run a footrace. I push the hair back from my face and feel the sweat wet on my palm. I don’t believe Steffie has ever sweated in her life, and she stares with frank amusement as I wipe my palm over my forehead and then slide my hand down the leg of my jeans.
“Did you get lost?” Steffie asks kindly.
“A bit,” I admit. “I always get turned around in malls.”
“Oh, me, too,” she lies companionably. She is perfect, as Steffie is always perfect. She wears a perky little outfit that reminds me of tennis whites, made dressy by her earrings and the slender bracelet on her graceful wrist. She dresses to go shopping with more care than I dressed for my wedding. Her skin is golden tan; her huge eyes are brown; if I were a man I would kneel at her feet.
In the silence that follows, Steffie takes a long sip of her drink. I cannot help but feel it is a thing she has been taught to do, that at some point in her adolescence Mother Maurie sat her down at the kitchen table and taught her just the way to sip discreetly from a tall glass of iced tea. She does it too well for it to be an accident of nature. I watch her as the naked brown savages must have watched Magellan claim their lands. The same awe and incomprehension. She glances at Mother Maurie and then back to me. Then she clears her throat, having selected a suitable topic for conversation with me. What, I wonder, were they discussing before I arrived? And why are they so painstakingly kind to me, when I obviously do not belong to their world?
“Did you decide to buy that green dress you were trying on? We didn’t mean to hurry you, but I was simply dying of thirst. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all,” I lie, half a lie. What I would have minded even more was if they had waited for me outside the dressing room, chirping helpful comments. Sometimes they do that. I suspect they believe that if they had enough time and money, they could fix me. Like detailing a used car for resale. Cut my long unruly mane into something cute and perky, dress me in cunning outfits that disguise my unshapely legs and flat chest. Transform me into a wife worthy of Tom Potter. The idea terrifies me. It makes me talk too much, too fast. “I didn’t get the dress. At the last minute, I decided it was just too young for me. And I always feel naked somehow in a sleeveless dress.”
“You make yourself sound like an old lady,” Mother Maurie chides smilingly. Her smile seems a bit stiff. Suddenly I realize that my remarks have not been exactly tactful. The dress I have rejected is cut very similarly to the one Mother Maurie is now wearing. But on her its youthfulness looks appropriate. Mother Maurie is a tiny, delicate woman, a ceramic doll with large blue eyes, and Steffie is a long-legged golden blonde, a beach-party Barbie. It strikes me that they are the two ends of the spectrum for American femininity, and that I do not fall anywhere between them. Off the bell curve, that’s me.
“What are you having, Mother?” It is Steffie, considering a red-and-gilt menu. “Shall we have just a bite, or dinner?”
“Let’s go ahead and eat dinner. The boys will be ravenous when they get here, and it will save us the trouble of cooking and dishes at home.”
I smile and nod, pushing my tangle of brown hair back a little from my eyes. The boys, I think as I peruse the menu, the boys. And we are the girls, at least Maurie and Steffie are. The boys are her husband, my husband, her brother, her son, and my son. And yet there are only three of them. Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy, and Bess, the old nursery riddle-rhyme rushes unbidden into my mind. Five names for three men. Or boys, I mean. All boys, forever boys. And we are the girls forever. Even when Steffie gets around to getting married and settling down, she will still be a girl. And probably a virgin, as near as I can make out. All the women in their family are virgins, except when they are “in a family way.” Then Grandpa Potter’s teasing is vigorous and crude beyond my belief or endurance, as if they were children caught in a dirty game.
I order and eat mindlessly, finishing while they are still dividing sandwiches into dainty triangles, still nibbling small forkfuls of cottage cheese. I drink coffee to pass the time, adding more sugar and creamer each time the waitress refills my bottomless cup. I roll the empty sugar packets and the foil-lined creamer packages into tiny tubes, and make stars and hexagons and parallelograms on the tabletop. Infinitely amusing. Only boring people get bored, my mother used to tell me. “… any other errands for you, Evelyn?” I jump, and sit up straight in my chair. Both Steffie and Mother Maurie are staring at me, polite inquiry in their eyes. Sleeping in school again.
“I, uh, I want to stop at the music store and look at the tapes.” Suddenly it seems like a very juvenile errand. As well to say I was stopping by the candy store, to get red and green suckers and a handful of Double Bubble. I am embarrassed, and they know it.
“You and your music!” Mother Maurie gives a condescending snort of laughter. “All right, but you’ll have to do it while we’re in the drugstore picking up Tommy’s prescription. Did you remember to bring it?”
She goes right on talking as I dig through my purse, finally coming up with the small empty pill bottle for Tom’s allergy medication in my coat pock
et. It is sticky, Teddy must have played with it, and I surreptitiously wipe it on my napkin before I hand it over. I try to find the threads of the conversation again, only to realize no one is talking, they are all waiting expectantly.
The men are here, and I don’t know how or when they’ve arrived. Grandpa Potter, stooped but daunting still, rests his big hands on the edge of our table. His eyes scan the table, feasting on his wife and perfect daughter. He is given to saying things like “The Potter men have always been proud to say that their women dressed well, no matter how bad the harvest has been. We take care of our women.” His eyes skid over me, roll briefly toward heaven. He is a strange old man, I think, proud of his wife’s and daughter’s gentility and polish, but equally proud of his own rough edges and crude ways. He never minces words, never worries about giving offense. Of all Tom’s family, Grandpa is the one who never bothers to hide that he does not understand me, does not believe I will ever quite fit. He scares me, and I wish I could hide that from him. Right now, I want to sink under the table to escape that sharp stare. But suddenly Tom pushes into the seat beside me, his thigh warming against mine, and instantly all is well, no price is too great to pay for possessing him. Tall and golden he is, blond hair, brown eyes, big hands, and one big hand surreptitiously strokes my thigh before coming to settle demurely on the tabletop. He smells of Old Spice tinged with diesel oil, the mechanic’s smell that never quite leaves his skin. The hostess has followed them to the table, and I feel her eyes move from Tom to me and back again. She does not understand it any more than I do, why does this man who looks like a cigarette billboard cowboy, this gorgeous perfect man, sit down beside a woman like me? I move closer to him, and set my hand atop his on the table. The hostess looks away, moves away. I take a breath. I am safe now. My Tom is with me.
My Teddy is with him, clinging to his grandpa’s hand, his small head looking defenseless, his hair newly shorn and slicked. I don’t like it, and for a moment my anger flares, who does that old man think he is, always carrying out his compulsion to “keep those boys looking like boys” upon my little son? No one asked me if he needed a haircut. I love his dandelion tuft of fine hair, I don’t care if it covers the tops of his small pink ears. But Teddy is looking at me, his brown eyes big and round. He has been brave this time, not flinching when the buzzing razor nibbled down the back of his unprotected neck. I smile at him and try to put my approval in it, try not to remember how, when we first arrived in Washington, Grandpa took him to the barber, without my knowledge or consent, and brought him back, red-eyed and disgraced. “Momma’s little tit cried when the barber tried to shave the back of his neck and over his ears. Well, no grandson of mine is going to run around looking like a goddamned hippie. You wanna be like that, you stay with your mommy, baby boy. I’ll tell you, no son of mine ever behaved like that in public! Five years old, and he acts like a goddamned baby.”
And I had watched Teddy shrink with each contemptuous statement, and had foolishly made it worse by putting my arm around my little son, hoping to shield him from his grandfather’s disgust. And Teddy, my Teddy, had flung my arm aside and pushed me away, run out of the little house and into the fields to cry, newly ashamed of being afraid of something unfamiliar, newly ashamed of letting his mother hold and comfort him. And that wicked old man had glared at me and said, “You coddle that boy too much. Gonna ruin him. Time he was with men more often, instead of hanging around your skirts like Momma’s little tit.”
And I, too cold with anger to speak, had stared him down, driven him from the little house with my frozen green eyes.
But that was in another time and another place, and I cannot afford to think about it now. Instead, I make my mouth smile, and reach past Tom to hold out a hand to my Teddy. But my little son only smiles, a smile that is at once secretive and begging. He slides into the other end of the circular booth, forcing everyone to scoot over and sending Steffie up against me on the other side. Grandpa has missed none of this. “He’s Grandpa’s big boy today, Mommy. He’s gonna sit over here with me.”
Grandpa’s eyes are black, like little bits of anthracite coal set into his pale, soggy face. He was a big man once, had stood tall and had tanned, weathered skin. Maybe then the lines around his eyes had been laugh lines. Now he looks bleached, like something found under a pile of old trash, a soup label with the colors gone all wrong, the green beans turned blue, a farmer turned entrepreneur, a corned and blistered foot crammed into a pointed Florsheim shoe. I could have pitied him if he hadn’t been so hateful. Our eyes don’t meet, I don’t let him have the victory. I squeeze Tom’s hand and look into his eyes instead.
“Did you find the part?” Mother Maurie demands.
Tom nods. “Junkyard had it.” He turns to me. “You eat already?”
“Yeah, but if you …”
“How much was it?” Mother Maurie cuts in irritably. This is business, and Tom has no sense, mixing it up with a conversation with his little wife. Mother Maurie has shifted gears, is no longer the chic shopper but is now the shrewd businesswoman, versed in every facet of the family’s farm equipment dealership.
“Seventeen-fifty. New one is twenty-two, but if old man Cooper wants his tractor back in the fields by Tuesday, he’s gonna have to be happy with secondhand parts.” Tom goes back to scanning the menu hungrily, fielding Mother Maurie’s agitated questions easily.
She is upset with the parts supplier and doesn’t care who knows it. Wants everyone to know it, as a matter of fact. If they think they can get away with treating Potter’s Equipment this way, they are in for a surprise, she’ll go right to the factory for parts after this, just cut them out entirely, and let them eat that. Why, she must order two or three thousand dollars’ worth of parts a year from them, and for them to let us down like this just isn’t good business, as they’ll soon find out. Her own ruthlessness is giving her great satisfaction. She speaks clearly and almost loudly, so that other people at other tables hear and know just how hard-nosed a little businesswoman she is. She is proud of her savvy, and so is Grandpa Potter, for he nods sagely as she carries on.
Tom’s fingers close over mine and hold me fast. The others at the table are talking, and he is replying to them, but his fingers against mine are a different conversation, and a different man is speaking to me from the one who they know. I listen to him alone, letting the other voices fade into a background hum like summer bees. I know I do not belong in their world. What matters to me is that somehow, Tom’s world and mine have intersected, and that in that brief crossing, we can be together.
FOUR
* * *
Fairbanks
Winter 1963
My family is a family of poachers. Very few people know this outside of the immediate family, and almost no one else would believe you if you told them, for we seem very ordinary people. My mother works making floral arrangements in a flower shop. It is a part-time job, and she is always home before we are. She believes children need a mother to come home to. My father works for Golden Valley Electric Association. He works in the coal-fed GVEA generator building that is right across the playground from my school. Sometimes, when I miss the bus, I walk across the street and sit amid the darkness and noise of the big generators until he is ready to take me home. I think of the electrical power plant as a great cave full of large machinery exuding a constant deafening level of sound. There are ladders, and gauges to check, and it is always warm there, in contrast to the immense cold outside.
People call my father the plant engineer. I find this tremendously confusing. For one thing, my mother works with plants, not my father. For another, although there is a train that goes right past the back of the GVEA plant and leaves mountains of coal there like gigantic mounds of droppings, to my knowledge my father never runs the train engine. But this is not the sort of thing I am adept at explaining to adults, so when they say he is the plant engineer, it is easier to let them persist in their ignorance.
The GVEA building is grey with bl
ack windows and tall black smokestacks that speckle the snow outside our school with black soot almost as soon as it falls. The snow outside the school never tastes good, and I never eat it, no matter how thirsty I get.
The name of my school is Immaculate Conception School, and I go there with my two younger brothers and my little sister. My two older sisters go to Monroe High School, which is joined to ICS by a lobby, like Siamese twins joined at the hip. Both schools feature Jesuit priests in black cassocks with the unnerving habit of sometimes turning up in plaid flannel shirts and black pants, looking almost like anybody else. There are also nuns in white wimples and long, whispering black skirts interrupted only by the chattering of the rosary beads that hang at their hips like holy six-guns. The nuns are more honest, and never dress as anything other than nuns.
That is me, out on the playground, and I am easy to spot because I wear a battered play parka of lined corduroy, and my legs are bare. It is twenty below zero, but it is still required that we spend the morning recess outside. Little girls are likewise required to wear dresses or skirts to school. No one but me seems to find a contradiction there. We are supposed to play games, I suppose, frolicking about in fifty-two degrees of freezing while remaining girlishly modest. The boys play games, running and falling on the snow, tackling one another, yelling with smoking breaths. I stand and watch them, unable to comprehend their pointless energy. The other girls stand in clusters and talk. Most of them wear nylon ski jackets in bright blues and reds, and their waterbird legs are encased in bright tights that match their pleated skirts. I hate tights. They are always puddling down into little circles of fabric around my ankles, and then I have to pull them up by grabbing the waistband through my dress and trying to heave them up. It is impossible to do this in a ladylike manner. It is easier to go bare-legged and endure the cold than to endure the superior looks of little girls whose tights never puddle around their ankles, the shocked scowls of the playground nun as I try to wrestle my tights back up into place. I’d rather have chilblains and frostbite.
Cloven Hooves Page 3
