Heather swallowed. She searched fervently for something to say, but she couldn’t seem to grasp anything.
“So don’t mind me,” Naomi said ruefully. “I’m just fine. I’m just not as fine as I’m supposed to be, so the light of my life is off to find somebody who hasn’t taken the code of enlightenment quite so literally as I apparently have. Somebody who meditates more and does less, I guess. And maybe has some unearned income; that might help. Also is happy to shit in a bucket and grow hair on her legs—but not under her arms! Because that grosses him out! And never, never, never wants to do something so insufferably self-indulgent as have a baby in this evil, fascist world, because, among other things, that would make him a father, which would make him not the baby anymore.”
Heather stared at her. An idea pricked her consciousness. “Do you … are you pregnant, Naomi?”
“No!” the older woman shrieked. Fresh tears flew from her eyes. She sighed then, a rasp of unhappy breath. “I mean no. I’m sorry. No.” She shook her head. “I thought I might be, but I’m not. Lots of rejoicing chez Roth over that one,” she said tersely. Then she looked up at Heather and frowned. “I really admire you, you know,” Naomi said softly. “I do, Heather.”
Her face went a little numb. “You do?” This was a fresh concept. “You admire me?”
“Yuh.” Naomi nodded. She swiped at her cheek with the back of her hand. “You don’t take shit from people. And this town’s full of people who would dearly love to give it to you, for whatever half-assed reason. Like it has anything to do with them! But you won’t take it. It pisses them off, you know.”
“I know.” Heather nodded.
“And I’m not asking for details, believe me. But I think it’s great. You walk so tall. It’s a great example for your daughter, you know.”
“Do you think so?” Heather said, amazed.
“Sure! You don’t wait for people to tell you how to live your life, you just get on with it. You’re the only home-grown feminist I’ve met since I moved here, you know. You ought to be proud of yourself.”
But Heather did not feel proud. She was brooding about being called a feminist. She didn’t want to be a feminist. She wanted to be beautiful for Ashley.
Naomi got to her feet and snapped off the computer. “This is stupid,” she said, addressing the dimming screen. “I’m just putting it off. I’ve got to go home sometime.”
Heather looked at her, then past her, out the window. Ashley was loading his car.
“I have to go, too,” she said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Sure.” Naomi grinned, her face streaky. “All right. Oh”—she frowned—“you said something about thread?”
“Oh, nothing! It’s fine, I’m sure I’ve got plenty.”
“Because we could look upstairs.” Naomi gestured toward the attic stairs.
Heather checked the window. Ashley was in his car, waiting.
“No.” She moved toward the door. “See you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” Naomi said, behind her. The door shut between them.
Ashley had the engine going, and the car was warm for her. He moved a drill off the passenger seat and hoisted it into the back. “Sorry.”
“All right.” She stared forward.
“What’s the matter?” Ashley said.
“Naomi just told me she’s getting divorced from her husband. She looks sad.”
“Yeah?” Ashley said. “This just happened?”
“I guess. She said, over the weekend.”
He nodded. The river was sluggish today, overflowing its own ice at a thousand different points. It bugged her, the stop and go of it, the failure to hold itself back or let itself go. She hoped they would make it onto the logging road today and not have to resort to Nate’s Landing.
“He was a jerk,” Ashley said. “I always thought so.”
“You did?” She turned to Ashley. There was a smudge of paint on the straight edge of his nose.
“He didn’t know shit about building houses. I had to go out there and fix everything he did. Not that I minded.” He smiled. “I mean, cause she paid me.” He turned to grin at Heather. “But still. He put this junk on the roof that was supposed to be for solar power, but it leaked like a sponge, and he refused to cut down any trees to give the house more sunlight, so Naomi had to heat water on the stove if she wanted to take a bath that wasn’t freezing. That’s one thing for a guy, but women like to be clean.” He laughed to himself. “She always said, if guys got periods like women, they’d be the first ones to demand hot and cold running water. And he wouldn’t even let her have a toilet. He had this creepy compost thing that was supposedly better for pollution or something.” He sighed. “Maybe she’ll want a toilet put in now.”
“Was he nice to her?” Heather asked. “I mean, aside from the toilet and that stuff?”
Ashley pursed his lips. “Well, I guess. He didn’t beat her up or anything.”
They turned off from the river. The road, to Heather’s relief, looked good. “I like Naomi,” Heather said. They were driving slowly into the diminishing light. She felt as if they were hiding themselves, sweetly and slowly, crawling in tandem to their warm destination. “I don’t really know her.”
“Who knows anybody?” said Ashley. He stopped the car and killed the engine. There was a sound like crinkling as the wagon settled in snow, in its black ring of winter woods. The engine ticked over a bit as it cooled. She reached for his hand.
“Heather,” he said. His voice was musical and far afield.
“That’s my name.” She leaned over and took his lobe between her teeth, gave it a little tug. Her hand turned his face to her. “Make me cry out in the wilderness.”
In the darkness, she heard him laugh.
“Well, since we’re here …”
She helped him take off her shirt. Her breasts were full of milk, hard and high, and he fell on them as if he’d never seen them before. His skin gleamed white, though what light there was seemed to drain from the car, minute by minute, taking the warmth with it. But Heather was hot. Her hands and feet, her face, her back suddenly bared and pressed back against the brown carpet of the wagon floor—all were suffused with heat and drumming the persistent rhythm of her heart and breath. He was making her make noise, all right, her greedy noise. The windows fogged white, so thickly obscured that she could not have seen out even if she thought there might be someone there, and even if there had been light to see them by. The world had wrapped them up in their own heat and sweet darkness. If there was an outside at all, she simply didn’t want to know about it.
Her noise, his grunting and whispers, seemed to swallow up the other sounds, and so, at first, it did not occur to Heather that anything was happening. There were, for example, any number of explanations for those shrill human voices, the pounding of fists against metal. She might be giving voice to the voices inside her, say, or he might be kicking back against the side of the car, trying to climb faster and harder into her. Heather closed her ears and eyes and pulled him tighter, imagining faces at the window watching them, and smiled. A fist cleared fog from the glass. A woman screamed, and Heather did not recognize her own voice, or the word it said.
“My … fuck.” He bucked out of her. Heather gaped at him. A fist hit the glass near her head. She lay, numb and shocked, with her legs apart, as if they had been pinned there by the beam of light through the wagon’s rear window. “For … Jesus, Heather, cover yourself up!” he yelled. Then, when she didn’t move, he took her bra and pulled it roughly down. She winced as the fabric scraped her nipple. One of her shoes was half off. Outside, in the woods, someone was crying and crying. “Jesus fucking Christ,” said Ashley, yanking his sweater down over his head. “That stupid cunt, that cunt.”
A hand was fumbling with the door latch.
“Just wait,” Ashley yelled. “Just give me a fucking minute here.”
He twisted away from Heather, who had forgotten how to button the buttons on h
er shirt and was pointing them at the holes, as if she expected them to jump through by themselves. Her hands seemed huge and arthritic, like Pick’s, suddenly useless and full of pain.
“I told you,” a woman screamed. There was air in the car now, dark and cold. It ran over Heather’s chest and she pulled together the two halves of her shirt. “I said!”
“What do you think this will accomplish?” Ashley yelled back. “Now you’re going to be happy?”
“You promised me!” Sue sobbed, her cheeks plump and ravaged by tears. “What are you doing to me?”
There was a woman beside her, shorter and darker but with the same face—Sue’s mother. She had one thick arm around her daughter’s shoulders as she glared at Ashley. Behind them, around them, more dark faces. Eight, Heather thought. Maybe more than eight. She couldn’t see. The one holding the flashlight was tall. She wondered if she knew anyone that tall.
“You don’t need my help to be miserable,” Ashley was speaking. “You’re doing great on your own. Don’t you lay that shit on me. I’m just-”
“Now listen,” someone said. Heather turned her face to the noise, a voice she sort of knew but didn’t know. “Where do you get off treating your—”
“Who are you?” asked Heather, and everyone turned to look at her. She had been looking at that point in the darkness where that vaguely recognized voice was standing, but it was Sue who stepped forward, shoving Ashley away; she came near Heather, one hand reaching for the open flaps of her shirt collar. Involuntarily she reached for her own throat, touching the necklace he had given her.
“I’m his wife,” Sue said bitterly. “And who are you?”
“Sue,” Ashley warned.
She was close now, her face white except where the cheeks were hollow and the circles under the eyes, the color of smoke. Her long braid looked dirty and uneven, as if it had been lived with for days, untouched. She stared with mean, dark eyes, her mouth hard and slightly open.
“Sue,” he said again, even more tersely. He reached, with one cold hand, for Heather. A bolt of heat began at the place his finger touched her arm. Sue stared, then wept. He stepped nearer to Heather, thrilling her. His arm came around her shoulders as his wife howled in pain, untouched. Heather crumbled in gratitude. He was choosing her. He was picking her.
“I told you,” Ashley said. “I always told you, you get the thing you deserve to get.”
Sue sobbed. Her mother held her. The flashlight jerked from Heather’s face to his.
“So too bad you all had to come out,” he addressed the crowd. “Too bad my wife had to put on this little show, but that’s all there is, folks. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to move your cars. I’d like to leave.”
There were three cars, Heather saw, parked single file behind the station wagon, nose to tail on the narrow track. They would all have to back out, like a weird caravan en route to the past. It would be funny to be last in line.
“No way,” said the tall person with the flashlight. “You got something to settle with your wife. You got a kid to think of.”
Unthinking, Heather spoke up: “Two kids.”
Sue wailed anew. “How do we know it’s his?” said that known voice again, and Heather looked, abruptly recognizing the shape in the darkness: Ann Chase.
“Of course it’s his,” she said hotly. “Of course she’s his, Ann.”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Ashley said, and Heather flooded with love. “Now, are you going to get in your cars, or do we have to walk out of here?”
“I’m not leaving!” Sue howled, and even in the darkness Heather could see Ashley’s face tighten in rage. He had never looked at her like this, she thought, her heart racing as this small idea was added to the weight of revelation: he wanted her. He wanted her more than that person. He was picking her over that.
“All right, then,” Ashley said, his voice small and bitter. “Let’s go, Heather.”
She looked up at him. His arm was heavy across her shoulders. She no longer felt the cold, though her shirt was still mostly unbuttoned, and one shoe unlaced, and one pant leg hiked awkwardly up to just below her knee. He took a step into the snow, pulling her after him.
“Wait.” Heather went to the front seat of the wagon, unlatched it, and reached in for her bag. She wanted them to see it was her decision, too, that he wasn’t just taking her along, and paused for a brief survey of the darkness. “Well then,” Heather said. “Good night.”
Whore, someone said. Heather smiled. Ten minutes earlier, she had been placated by what she was, untormented by what she was not, but now he had placed her above his wife, and far from shaming her, this unsought tribunal had seen the proof of Ashley’s love. She had never felt so elated, so heady with pride. She took his hand again, and they walked into the woods as the crowd behind them seethed, conferred, and raced for their own cars. But she and Ashley were off the path by then, and the moonlight was beginning to light the snow as the trees thinned nearer the river. The snow was deep in places, but he supported her, one hand beneath her arm, and she didn’t really feel the cold. He said nothing but “Watch” or “Step here,” but he said them easily enough, as if there were nothing at all on his mind, as if they were just out for a night walk through snowy woods.
They came to the river’s edge. The water rumbled somewhere, softly, beneath its skin of ice. For the first time, Ashley paused. They had left the logging road to their left, and there was nothing here, only the faint suggestion of a kind of path beneath the snow. Heather’s right foot was very cold now, but she did not begrudge the cold. Ashley’s breath and her own filled the air with mist. Far away behind them, a car labored out of the woods.
“Where are we going?” Heather said, as if she cared.
“To the mill. We can cross up here a bit.”
He led the way upstream to the Drumlins, where the water was low enough to expose the rocks. They were slick with ice, dark and scary. For the first time, Heather held back.
“Are you sure?”
But he had already gone first, feeling with his boot for a rough place. There was light now, lunar-white and cold. He was nimble, the way he moved, and graceful. He made it look easy.
“Come on,” said Ashley. “I can see the mill from here. It’s all right.”
It was all right. She took his hand, slipped a bit, but caught herself. Her hands were very cold and couldn’t grip well, but he supported her and she went, dreamlike, fording the river. She amazed herself, but then, Heather thought, everything was to be different now, and her own clumsy self was cast off with that other carapace-self of Ashley’s secondary woman. Now his own light would infuse her, and it only surprised her that it had taken her so long to understand this about herself—that she was as extraordinary as he had always said, that he would, given the choice, choose her.
Now he had left his wife and set out with her, even into this wilderness, even though it would have been so much easier the other way. He could come and live with them in the farmhouse on Sabbath Creek Road. They could marry, too, if Ashley wanted, though Heather didn’t really mind; the important thing was that they would bind their lives together, day by day and moment by moment, in the pleasure and love that was so obviously abundant between them. Pick would learn to accept him, and Polly would grow up with her father. How she would love her father! He would toss her into the air, and sing songs with her, clapping her little hands together, and take her on his shoulders so that she could see over the heads of other children. And other children! There would be more, perhaps: beautiful, like Polly, healthy and smart, alight with the adoration of their parents. She watched his narrow back, a step before her, one hand trailing behind to grip the hand she reached forward. “I love you,” she said, thanking him.
She saw the dull glint of her own car, alone in the mill’s lot, and was relieved, but he held her back when she tried to go to it and pulled her tightly against him. She felt him right away and caught her breath. “Come up with me,�
�� he said, his mouth against her neck. He was holding her tightly. “Come up. Jesus Christ, I want to fuck you.”
“Up where?” She could barely speak. Then, understanding, she said, “We could go to my house.”
“No. Here. I can’t wait.” He felt in his jacket pocket. “Shit. My keys are in the car.” He eyed the building, then grinned and took her around back where his ladder still rested against the rear wall. “I’ll just end up fixing it anyway.” He laughed; then he took a fist-sized rock and smashed a pane of glass. The shards fell in around the legs of a chair—the one she’d pulled to the window so many hours earlier, she thought, to watch his legs climb past on the ladder—and he reached in and unhooked the latch. The window slid up. “Good thing I haven’t put an alarm system in yet,” Ashley said. “Come on.”
He shimmied in first and turned to lift her. She felt bad for Naomi, but the thought fled in her rush for him.
“Sorry,” she said, embarrassed, as he hefted her weight over the sill. The glass shards crunched as she found her balance. The room looked queer, bereft of women and light, and it occurred to her not to touch anything, because now, in the same room where she had spent most of the day, she was an intruder.
“Come on,” Ashley said. He was pulling her again, across the room and up the stairs to the attic, where the air smelled of dust and stale fabric. There was cold light from the single window under the eaves, enough to make their skin turn gray. Ashley was dragging his shirt over his back, leaning forward to pull it down off his head. The ponytail flipped forward over his chest and lay there, almost feminine. “Take off your clothes,” he was saying. “Come on.”
But she couldn’t move very well. She was watching, instant by instant, more of his skin reveal itself; the shirt he had always unbuttoned but kept half on for warmth, the pants that were always pulled down to the backs of his knees … He was taking them away entirely now, baring his whole body. He unlaced his wet boots and put them aside, and then climbed neatly out of his underpants. Finally, he dragged away the bandanna from his ponytail, letting his hair hang loose to his breast, its untrimmed ends feathering one tiny nipple, and then there was nothing left. She stared at him, shocked as a virgin.
The Sabbathday River Page 18
