She looked up at him, her eyes kind of wet, and she said, “We don’t really belong here anymore, you know. Don’t you get it? Don’t you see? Don’t you want to? Come on, I don’t bite.”
He shook his head. He didn’t say no. He said, “Gotta take care of Strut. Yer scaring him. Get out. Get out.”
Strut didn’t look freaked or anything, but I didn’t like the way the air felt, so I ran out of the barn and went back to Earwig. I wanted to leave but I couldn’t just abandon the stupid kid. I pushed him and pulled him, but he groaned and wouldn’t budge.
She came towards me like something beautiful and terrible, and I wanted to run but I couldn’t. She pointed to the cigarettes, and I pulled one out and lit it and gave it to her. She said, “You saw, didn’t you? In the barn. All of it.” She looked at me, cold, her face squashed. “You like what you saw?” she said, sounding like she was accusing me of doing something wrong.
What could I do? I nodded. Of course I’d liked it. Thorns and all.
“How much did you like it?” she said, her voice soft and scary.
“A lot,” I said but I didn’t mean it.
She put her hand on my shoulder and pulled me close.
“What about Jim-Bob?” I said, grabbing her wrist.
“You’re here right now,” she said, like that was the best thing about me, and maybe it was.
She was my first kiss. She was taller than me so she bent down kind of low and licked my cheek. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, so I stood there and let her take my shirt and belt off. Her hands were cold. I didn’t know your hands could be cold when you did this. She kept touching her lips to my chest and forehead, like my mom would do when I was sick with fever as a kid. I tried kissing her on the lips, and she let me, but it was awkward and stiff so I stopped.
We lay down together and she guided me in. I should have known what to do, because Jim-Bob had told me what it was like—he heard his mom and either of his dads all the time—but what could I do? I thought the thorns would scratch me if I moved too much, so she did all the moving. It was over pretty fast, and when she was done she got up and left without saying good-bye or straightening her dress or wiping what was left of me off her leg. Her cigarette butt was next to my head.
I stayed with Earwig until he woke. He said he hurt all over and cried the whole way home. That’s the kind of sad kid he was. He didn’t ask me about what had happened or why I was the only one there and that was good because I didn’t want to tell him. I tried to think about the Apple Queen and how it felt to be in her, but all I could imagine was Rolo and how he’d talked to Strut and how that just seemed nicer.
* * *
I tried to go back to the barn after that and, I don’t know, apologize or something, but Rolo wouldn’t talk to me anymore. He wouldn’t even look at me, so I stopped going around there, even with Jim-Bob and Earwig to drink and smoke and look at pictures. We didn’t see last year’s Apple Queen anymore after that, either. I asked Jim-Bob what had happened to her and he rolled his eyes and shrugged and said fuck her.
Everything just got quiet and boring after that, but then Mr. Scarsdale returned to town because he’d heard one of his mares, Charles Schulz, had taken ill. Everyone was talking about it, not because anyone cared about the horse, really, but because Scarsdale rode into town in a white Lincoln Town Car, and it was as big as a boat. Our dads spent their time at the fancy bar—The Apple Turnover—wearing their Sunday suits when Scarsdale was in town. I think because if he showed up there he might give one or all of them a job, but he stayed on his farm with Rolo. They tried all they could, but Scarsdale lost interest because he had enough money to do so. He sent Charles Schulz to the vet and packed up his big car and left before they had the results. Earwig’s mom was the one who looked after her, and she let Earwig and me watch her do the examinations. Jim-Bob didn’t have the stomach for the smell of animals.
“It’s good for you boys to see how things work,” she said, watching the horse roll around in obvious pain. She put her head down and listened to its guts and said there was a lot of gas. She used something called a nasogastric tube, which she put in its nose and it went down all the way to its stomach. It was hard to watch her do that to Charles Schulz. She was a big thing, really sleek, and I could tell the tube made her miserable.
She said it had to be colic and depending on which kind it was she might have to operate. While we were waiting for the results, she started shining up her scalpels and the saws. But it wasn’t so bad, just too much solid food and not enough water. She gave it a stomach tubing, which put water in its gut and helped loosen up the food. Then when it all came out the other end, she spread it on a piece of cellophane and let us look.
“Apples,” she said. “Horse musta been mad for ’em. Too much of a good thing, you know?”
* * *
Last year’s Apple Queen waited to announce her pregnancy right before the new harvest. She did it by wailing and crying and saying how ashamed she was and only was coming clean of the crime because she couldn’t hide it anymore—her belly was too round for an Apple Queen now, even an ex one—and she was too goodly-godly to get rid of it. And when people asked where she got it she wailed louder and said it wasn’t wanted; she’d said, No, no thank you, no, in her shrillest voice, but it was Rolo who’d done it. He didn’t just fuck horses, she said, but pretty ex-Apple Queens too.
My mother had been the one to tell me, shaking her head and saying what an awful, awful thing it was and clucking her tongue and staring at the ground. That night I woke up sick and ran to the toilet and threw up my dinner. I crept down to the kitchen and called up Jim-Bob and got one of his dads—I couldn’t tell them apart either—and said it was an emergency and please could I talk to him. Jim-Bob yawned into the phone and said, after I asked, that no he didn’t fucking fuck last year’s Apple Queen. She was a frigid bitch who didn’t fucking put out and who’d said that? Earwig? That kid thinks fucking is when two people touch thighs.
I heaved into the kitchen sink but there wasn’t nothing left to empty.
In the morning before my father woke up to go to work I watched my mother slip on her fancy Sunday coat and take up father’s hunting shotgun. She looked at me and smiled soft and told me to grab my coat and come with. As we walked, more and more mothers and their yawning sons poured out of their houses. I saw Earwig gripping his mom’s arm and sucking on his fingers. He waved at me but looked tired and lost. Jim-Bob was with his mom, helping to light her cigarette as she walked. All the women had shotguns and were experts at handling them. They were the ones, not their husbands, who marched out into the middle of the night and scared off the yowling coyotes that kept their kids up. Last year’s Apple Queen marched in front of us on the arm of this year’s Apple Queen, brunette comforting blond. I kept staring at her round belly.
I held my mom’s hand and tried to pull her back but she kept pulling me forward. We stopped at Scarsdale’s barn and it all seemed so unreal, like watching a movie on TV. Rolo was in the barn brushing Strut. He watched last year’s Apple Queen point to him and hold her round belly, and he seemed to accept the injustice of it for what it was, but he took hold of Strut’s reins and tried to lead the stallion out of the barn. Strut got spooked by all the people and he jumped up and kicked his front legs. The women then began to shout about how the horse was tainted and oh what a poor thing and how kind it would be to destroy it.
I watched them run Rolo like he’d run a horse around the yard, except they ran him straight out. I saw Earwig’s mom running out with her hacksaw in one hand and a spatula in the other. She was arm in arm with Jim-Bob’s mother (both of them, I remembered, had been Apple Queens), whose shirt rode up, and I could see the scar that was left on her to bring Jim-Bob into this town, and I realized that’s what women did: they cut or were cut open. Last year’s Apple Queen just stood back and watched. I tried to meet her eyes—I wanted
her to look at me—but she wouldn’t.
Earwig gripped my arm and Jim-Bob’s mouth hung open as we stood dumb and watched the women tackle Rolo and hold him down. My mother fisted her hand in Rolo’s hair and held him still. They stripped Rolo down to nothing but his socks. He wasn’t fat or anything, but he had the kind of flabby flesh you get from a hard life packed onto his stomach and his thighs, his ass. They held him between them and made him watch as they spoke kindly to Strut and pulled him out of the barn, all the time Rolo was crying softly, and he didn’t say anything even when they used hunting knives and their hands to tear into Strut’s trembling neck. They tore him apart. They kept saying, this is what you did to that poor girl, see what you did to her? I’d heard rabbits scream before and that was something awful and foreign, but when a horse screams it sounds closer to the screams we make: simple and terrified, and I wanted to be able to make that noise and save that pretty horse, but my mom, who I felt love for even then, raised a red brick and shoved it down hard on Strut’s face and called it kindness.
Then they turned on Rolo and threw rocks at him and fired their guns at him and missed and said they wouldn’t miss again. He ran and they chased. For a nude, scared man he ran quick, and they split us up to see if we could find him, making jokes that the one who brought back his dick would win a prize.
* * *
Us boys ran away from our mothers and the women, and we were the ones who found Rolo huddled beneath a pine tree, holding his pale body tightly in his tan arms and legs. I could see his shriveled genitals shining with wet and I knew he had pissed himself. Rolo looked up at me and said my name, quietly, sadly, asking for peace, a kind gesture or word.
“You know him?” Jim-Bob said, and I didn’t know if he was talking to me or Rolo because he had a hard time looking at either of us.
I picked up a rock, a real jagged one. Earwig started whimpering and saying, “Hey. Hey. What are you doing?” He was looking from me to Rolo with a sad long face. He was too dumb to understand, but I knew Rolo was lucky because he had a chance to break free from all those things he loved and escape this place.
I screamed at Rolo and called him a horse fucker and threw the rock at his shoulder.
“Jesus fuck,” said Jim-Bob. “You hit him?” He looked at me with a strange sick kind of awe, like even though we had just seen our mothers ravage all around us it had never occurred to him that we could do it, too.
Earwig was crying like the stone had struck him, but it was Rolo who was bleeding. Rolo didn’t make a noise and he didn’t move, and I wondered if he had even realized what had happened. So I picked up another rock and raised it high in my fist. I aimed it at his balls but I missed and hit the soft, white part of his thighs. Rolo yelped like an animal then and got up on his shaky feet and stumbled, his pale ass and balls bouncing, his thin legs running him away to somewhere far better than here.
Food My Father Feeds Me,
Love My Husband Shows Me
My father is a great man of meat. Inside the hot, wooden house where the geese are kept, he stretches their long necks into straight lines and gavages grass and corn into their bellies, and when their wings can barely lift their plump bodies into the air he guts them and sears their livers with pepper and salt. In the pasture he keeps four fat, black cattle that he names after my forefathers: Luc, Pierre, Maurice, and Yves. When their bellies skim the ground he makes tartars of their loins with shallots and piquillo peppers. Then he buys four more fat black cows and names them Luc, Pierre, Maurice, and Yves. When he loves me best over my sisters he makes my favorite, pot-au-feu, and he cooks the meat so tender that no matter how much I suck on the flesh I still taste the bone.
I am often my father’s favorite. When all my sisters put their white and smooth hands to their chests and faint at the gore on his killing smock, I gently untie its knots and wash it with my bare hands until they stain red. Because of this, my father gives me the first and largest servings of leg and rib, and when he boils lamb’s head I am always allowed to chew on their glossy, black eyes.
When men come for my hand my father keeps them at bay by giving them the hands of my sisters, and they go gaily into common houses that smell of lilacs and goldenrod. But when the man with the short beard comes at night for a bride my father is all out of other daughters, and so he weeps and curses that he had not been given sons instead, for he would care less to lose a son. But my father must give me away, because a daughter is only a dowry to be won, even if he loves her as much as my father does me, even if there is no one left to care for him now that we are all gone, and my mother long dead.
The man claims to be no different than my father, for he too had once been a butcher, a great one, prolific in his craft. When he threw sumptuous feasts he would slaughter, by hand, fields of goats, sheep, and cattle. His hands confirm what he says, for no man that has slaughtered can hide the stains, and my new husband’s are streaked dark red.
On our way to his castle the peasants we pass on the road avert their eyes to their feet. The old women, their head and eyes covered with black scarves, tap their foreheads, chest and shoulders. They wrap their gnarled fingers around giant crucifixes that weigh down their thin necks. I ask my husband why he is no longer a butcher.
He says butchering is in his past. Then he points to the dark sky and says, Each time the sun swings around the world we are all allowed to begin again, and he says this with such sincerity that I begin to love him.
We are married in a small ceremony attended only by his sleepy servants. He goes over the lines and movements as if by rote. On my hand he places a simple, thick gold band. He takes me to a great banquet hall for the celebratory feast, and though there is no one but us, twenty tables are laden with exotic cheeses and all manner of fruits. There are fifty different types of breads and all kinds of whipped butter, honey, mustards, oils. He slices apples and pears with an expert wrist, and these he hand-feeds me. Though I eat for hours from his hand, nothing fills me up as father’s sliced cattle could, or a spoonful of his stews, or even a morsel of liver from a fattened goose.
After we perform our duty to our bloodlines, I lie on top of him and run my hand across the coarse hairs on his chest, and they are blue in such little light. I ask if I might be allowed to go to the market and purchase some meats, only a little smackering, for I crave it so.
He denies my request and kisses me on my forehead.
So I raise my leg high on his stomach and ask that I may have my father wrap and send me a little bit of beef, so small that my husband will not even see it, and I can consume it in a far, unused part of the castle.
Little bride, he says, do you not love me?
Of course, I say. And I do.
A loving bride fills herself with her husband, and what her husband eats.
Then he rolls on top of me, and though I love him, I cannot help but stare at his red hands.
Through the first month of our marriage, I eat nothing but soft cheese and ripe fruit, and though I consume enough of these sweet and delectable bites to serve a village, the hunger for meat makes me weak, and my waist and breasts shrink each morning I look in the mirror. The nights are torture, for I dream of fattening myself on tenderloin and pâté, and sometimes I wake up with my mouth smothered in my husband’s hands, drooling and licking at the stains there just for a little taste. But I force my pride around me, close my eyes and chew figs and olives until I am ill. Sometimes, if I plug my nose, Gouda can taste like beef.
I ask once more for meat to quell my need, but my husband softly refuses.
He says, when I was a butcher, these hands (he holds them up before me and speaks of them as if they were a separate part of himself) clawed into tender flesh, and that the flesh of a lamb or a calf was not so different than that of a woman, or a child.
Oh, I cry to him, surely a cow’s hide is different than a good Christian’s?
He kisses the to
p of my head and tells me he loves me.
Do you? I want to say to him. Your hand-fed papayas and sliced Gruyère have shrunken my breasts, and made my hips as sharp at knives. But instead I lower my eyes and think of my father, and how he admires sharp knives.
My husband says I am to stay ignorant of such things. And though he holds me in his arms—strong, good arms—I smell the faint tang of blood on his hands, and curl myself deep into his body so I can be closer to that memory of meat. I salivate.
Is it odd, or wrong, to love a man’s hands more than the man?
My dear husband is nothing but kind and gentle with me, so when he tells me he must leave for a few months to visit his homeland across the Himalayas, I fall on my knees and beg him not to leave. But he says he must. It is his duty to visit his lordly bankers and the tombs of his ancestors, and I must remain and watch over his vast home as mistress.
These are the keys to my kingdom, he says and slips a large ring with hundreds of keys around my left wrist. It weighs my hand down to my thigh.
What bride can expect that her husband, no matter how much he dotes on her, no matter how much he loves her, will spend all his time at her carefully laid table, or her freshly laundered bed? So I kiss every hair on his chin and tell him I will spend my days admiring every bit of his home so that when he returns I will truly be mistress, and the home will be ours.
Then he tells me of a room that I have not known exists and would have never known existed, a small room, in the west wing of his grand estate, and that even though I have the means to explore, I must not do so out of love. He picks the key from the ring to show me. It is haggard and thin, like a knuckle bone.
What is in this room that your beloved wife must not see?
Only memory, he says. Keep your mind like veal, ma chou. There is enough to keep you amused in my home.
Magic for Unlucky Girls Page 5
