by Ruth Ozeki
It didn’t take long. It never did. In the grim yellow light of the bathroom, she washed away the traces that smeared the insides of her thighs. It wasn’t fair, she thought, bitterly. But it was a damn good thing that she hadn’t told Will after all.
“Cassie?”
Will stood next to her, hand on her shoulder. He reached over for the mouse and closed her files, then shut down the computer. The server had logged her off already. She’d fallen asleep.
“What time is it?”
“Time to get up,” Will said. It was still dark outside, but he was dressed. He was ready for his coffee and breakfast. She followed him into the kitchen.
“Will?” She was groggy, but she needed to talk to him. To explain what had been going through her mind.
But he was in a hurry. “What?” he asked as he put the coffee on, annoyed that he had to. He wanted to be in the fields before dawn. It was the start of planting.
So she kept it simple. “I want to think about adopting again.”
He couldn’t keep a grimace from rippling across the plane of his face, but he controlled it. “Cass,” he said, evenly, “can’t we talk about this once the crop is in?”
He hated the social workers and all the forms and home visits. Home invasions, he called them.
“Fine,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She meant it. She hoped he would remember the conversation later and understand.
He put his hand on her arm as she reached the refrigerator door. “Honey, I know how you feel.”
She elbowed him aside. No, she thought. You don’t. She broke the eggs one by one into a bowl, beat them, and lit a fire under the skillet. That was the problem. He didn’t know how she felt at all.
rocket-powered motorcycle
The jagged sound of my father’s breathing filtered into my bedroom through a baby monitor, which Melvin had installed in case Lloyd needed help in the night.
“I don’t want people spying on me in my own house!” Lloyd had said, eyeing the plastic transmitter on his bedside table. It was shiny white with pink and blue buttons and softly molded edges.
“It’s not people,” Melvin said. “It’s your daughter.”
“What earthly good would she be?” He plucked at the sheets in frustration. “Put that eavesdropping contraption in your camping car and maybe I’d see the point.”
“Out of range,” Melvin said.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t like it any more than you do, Dad. It’s just in case.”
He stared at me, then closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the pillow. “In case of what?” he said. “In case I decide to run away?”
Now, in the gaps between Lloyd’s exhalations, I could hear Ocean and Poo breathing softly in their corner and the creaks of the settling house. At night the house sounds were palpable, pressing against my skin. I tried to be still. I stood in front of the mirror and undressed slowly, examining my body in the green glow of the night-light, nude! as Cassie used to squeal. How prudish she was. I hugged myself to keep my limbs from twitching. I wanted to stomp and shatter the silence.
Instead I slipped on my robe and tied it tightly around my waist. It was the same mirror I’d had as a child, and I’d grown up in front of it, turning and craning my neck, searching for clues to the future. The mirror was the same, but the girl was gone, leaving only phantom limbs and a flicker of her excitements. The particular collection of cells that comprised her, the ones that Elliot had stroked and fucked, had long ago been sloughed off and replaced by new ones. Cellular turnover occurred in seven-year intervals, didn’t it?
Cell by cell you slip away, then resurrect.
And now? Elliot was back, and I could feel my cells quivering, all set to betray me again. He was still a handsome man, slightly thicker, not the whip-thin hippie I’d loved as a child, but to sleep with him now would make me somehow complicit, wouldn’t it? A molester of my own childhood?
Phoenix could tell what was going on the minute he saw us in the kitchen. Fourteen is an unforgiving age, and he still wasn’t talking to me. But it wasn’t just Phoenix. They all knew. Cass, and Ocean, too. Later, in my starry bedroom, in my arms, Ocean confessed to me in a whisper,
“Mommy, when I see people kiss, it makes my little butt hurt.”
What does that mean? She was small and warm in her flannel pajamas, squirming in her mommy’s arms. Sweet cheeks. Tangled hair.
Good night, Puddle.
In the weeks before Elliot arrived, I’d been flirting with Geek in the greenhouse. It was a desultory flirtation, killing time. We’d lie crosswise in the hammock, side by side, and rock to “Blue Hawaiian Moon.”
“Are you trying to seduce me?” I asked him once, sipping indigo nectar from the overhead feed, watching it travel through the loops of clear tubing.
“Can I?” he asked. We were sharing the tube.
“No. I’m too old for you,” I said. “A whole different generation.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, twirling the ends of my hair. “Age is relative, and anyway I’m a product of the Summer of Love. Love is in my nature.”
I was tempted. It was easy to forget I was ten years older than this person who swayed beside me playing with my hair.
Just as Elliot had been ten years older than me.
But of course it was different. Geek wasn’t a child. A child can’t be held responsible, can she? No matter how much she might have felt she was to blame? But even as I tried to absolve myself, I knew that in my awkward, childish way, I had seduced Elliot, hanging around the classroom after school, loitering by his desk at dusk. Of course I was complicit. And if so, if together Elliot and I had miscarried my childhood, maybe now, together, we could bring that girl back, to comfort and even to forgive. After all, he said he was sorry. The minute I heard those words, I knew I wanted to sleep with him again.
I lay in bed and stared at the peeling stars. I turned down the volume on the baby monitor and reduced my father’s breathing to a faint static interference. Pretending his breaths were waves on the beach, I drifted off to sleep.
In the clarity of the day, as I bundled up Poo to take him next door, the anticipation of the night before turned leaden. Cass was no help. She had on a frilly apron over her sweatshirt and would barely meet my eye as she lifted the baby from my arms. She didn’t approve, and I felt a temptation to linger, to ask her for a cup of coffee and a word of absolution. I wanted to explain to her, carefully, all that I was thinking and feeling, and maybe it would take the better part of the afternoon, but that was all right, too. My date with Elliot felt like a sentence, compared to the safety and the comfort of Cassie’s bright, sunny kitchen. But she blocked the door. It was the first day of planting, she told me. Will had left early for the fields, and she was busy. She’d be feeding the workers lunch today, as well as covering the office.
“Gosh, Cass,” I said, “I didn’t realize . . .” But just as I was reaching out my arms to take Poo back, the phone rang and she pulled a cordless handset from her apron pocket and withdrew into the house with my baby.
I sat for a while in the Pontiac, smoking a cigarette and trying to rekindle some excitement, but the feeling eluded me. I headed into town. I hadn’t been able to think of a restaurant, so he suggested meeting at his motel. Already things were different. For one thing I could now drive myself to get fucked.
I looked for his car in the lot, a baby blue Beetle, but of course it wasn’t there.
I knocked, and for a moment I panicked, almost turning to go, but it was too late. Mr. Rhodes opened the door. I couldn’t look at him. Instead I looked past him into the room.
Things were different.
There were sheets on the bed. There was no soup on the stove. The windows were curtained, not clouded with steam.
He reached for my hands. Speechless, I allowed him that. He shook his head and held on to my fingertips. “You haven’t changed,” he said.
Glancing up at him then, I felt young and suddenly re
ckless. I took a step forward and placed my hand on his cheek. He closed his eyes, mute now, turning his mouth into my palm. The naked arch of his neck bent to my gaze, and I felt my confusion abate beneath a wave of tenderness and power. His breath, warm against my palm, made my skin tingle all over, and then I remembered—This is what it feels like to be fourteen and thrilling at the edge of sex when it is still brand new, testing the waters where his desire laps your shore, sticking in a toe, and not understanding the swiftness of the current—
Enough. This is enough. Stop here—
But the pull of the past was stronger than I was. It caught me up. He slipped a DO NOT DISTURB sign around the doorknob. There had been too many locked motel doors, and it was happening too fast. Always too fast. But once locked in, I had to go through the motions.
He scanned my face, then drew me in close. With my face pressed into his neck, I could see the coarsened pores of his skin. I thought about his cells as I tentatively kissed them. I breathed and tried to recall his scent, the one I vaguely remembered from the flannel of an old sleeping bag, but it wasn’t there. Something else. Blackboards and chalk. The smell of felt erasers. No . . .
Cologne.
Expensive, but still I choked on it. I pushed him away. He caught my hair, wrapped it around his fist and tugged.
Oh, he said. I remember your hair.
He buried his face in it. I shut my eyes. If he would only tell me more about who I’d been, I would tolerate the cologne and maybe even grow to love it. His hand was on the small of my back. His fist never loosened its grip on my hair as he backed me across the dull beige carpet. The sway-backed mattress sagged under our weight—the springs had too much give, too soft for the hips and the heels to find purchase, to push him away. I placed my hands against his chest. I wanted to explain. Maybe I could make a joke of it—I don’t like sex that bounces, Elliot—I could give a little laugh—I don’t like to wallow. But it seemed awkward to demur on the grounds of an insufficient mattress. He removed some of my clothing, then some of his. The mustard-colored bedspread felt like spun plastic, cold where it touched my skin. I lay there, passive, staring up at the stained and perforated ceiling as he traveled over my body, touching my breasts, humming his discoveries wordlessly into my thighs.
Talk to me! I begged him silently. How have I changed? What do you remember—
He arched his back and spread my legs, and just then a memory surfaced, a quick flash to the very first time he pushed inside, how unexpected it was and how much it had hurt and how, to stifle a cry, I’d bitten my lip until it tasted sweet and I was bleeding from two places at once. And when finally he’d pulled out at the end and seen the blood and recoiled in shock from the stain of my virginity—You didn’t tell me!—I had lied and told him I was having my period.
It wasn’t much of a memory, but it was enough for now. As he eased his body against mine, I locked my ankles around his waist, and before he could start the bed bouncing, I shifted and rolled until I was sitting on top. Then the heat returned. He opened his eyes, surprised, but I could see he didn’t mind the way the heels of my hands pressed his shoulders into the spongy mattress, nor did he resist the rhythm I imposed upon his groin. It was not a thrusting so much as a stern undulation that rocked and built, locking our hips in a conjunction that existed solely in the present, so that when we both came, unfettered by any memory at all, I could throw back my head and let my throat open in a cry of reprieve. It mingled with his, then continued along on its own.
“You are amazing.” He lay on his side, reaching out to trace the line of my jaw with his finger. I turned my head away. On the road, outside the thin walls of the motel, I could hear the sounds of large engines as heavy farm equipment rumbled by. Armies on the move. The harrowers were squaring off against the undulating fields. The smell of dust and diesel and acrid fertilizer filtered in through the drywall and hung in the air. Planting had started, and it was spring, and these were sounds and smells that I remembered.
“I have to go.”
“Stay.” He held on to my arm. “Just a while longer. I mean, don’t you think this is amazing? After all these years?”
“I guess so.” I studied a water stain on the ceiling. It was shaped like a kidney. Its edges were brown. He wanted to talk now, to reminisce, but now I didn’t want to hear any more. It was over. I had to go pick up my kids.
He sighed. “You always were so orgasmic.”
I could feel my face flush. This was the danger of nostalgia—once exposed, it became vulnerable to correction. “Elliot,” I said, addressing the stain, “I never came.”
“What?”
“I never came.” I pushed up on my elbows and looked at him. “I was fourteen years old, for God’s sake. A fourteen-year-old kid getting screwed by her history teacher is way too uptight to have orgasms.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. If you remember me coming, either you’re remembering it wrong or I faked it. Probably I faked it. Now that I think about it, I used to worry about whether faking counted as a lie and a sin, so that shows you exactly how young I was.
“You were only fourteen?”
“What did you think? I was in ninth grade. You were my teacher.”
“But . . .”
In all honesty I’d probably lied about my age, too, but the fact was, he didn’t remember. I could see the doubt and confusion shifting across his naked face as he searched for an explanation. I knew what he wanted to say—But I was young, too! And it was true—twenty-three or -four at most.
But I was so much younger.
Nineteen seventy-four. I remember that summer before school started, before I fell in love with Elliot, because it was the last summer of my childhood. The high point in Liberty Falls was Evel Knievel’s historic attempt to leap across the Snake River Canyon. There were posters up in all the store-front windows—Evel dressed in skintight white leathers, dripping with fringe, standing next to his star-spangled, rocket-powered motorcycle.
All the kids were going, and I wanted to go, too, but Lloyd said no. He didn’t actually come out and say that it was cheap, low-class entertainment—after all, Cassie’s daddy was going, and he was taking her, and it wasn’t right to criticize your neighbor. Instead Lloyd said it wasn’t safe. He didn’t approve of thrill seeking. Life was dangerous enough, and it was disrespectful of God to promote jeopardy, never mind profit by so doing.
Later I couldn’t help but identify when Cass told me that Evel’s safety parachute had opened prematurely, cutting short his flight and sending him and his motorcycle on a slow drift downward, to the bottom of Snake River Canyon. Similarly tethered, I thought I understood what it must have felt like, getting jerked out of the trajectory of one’s life like that. I felt a desperate need to cut the cords, to give my own little throttle an extra squeeze and torque and sail out from a cloud of spitting gravel into the clear, empty air. In my mind’s eye I could see the ground rising up to meet my wheels, safely, on the far side of the canyon.
What the mind’s eye couldn’t see, at the age of fourteen, was clear to me now: the real possibility of free fall, sans parachute, sans safety net at all. I sat up in bed and contemplated Elliot, who was trying hard to understand what he barely remembered.
“I can’t believe it,” he was saying, dumbfounded. “How could I have been sleeping with a fourteen-year-old?”
Not a fourteen-year-old. Not any old fourteen-year-old. Me.
He was my great leap forward, and I had loved him, and he had fallen short, landing me smack in the gulch. I’d been crawling out ever since, had even reached the far side of stability, until now, when life’s restless cycling delivered him back to me again.
“Generally guys get sent to jail for what you did,” I informed him. “You were a child molester, Elliot.”
Watching his face sink as he grappled with this new crisis of conscience, I realized I didn’t care. I just wanted to ride his discomfort, hard, until it caught up with mine. I wanted to
feel him again, between my legs, my rocket-powered motorcycle, once turbocharged.
I wanted to choke him hard.
I wanted to hear him splutter.
little bear
She had come by late to collect Poo. Face flushed. Eyes hard and wild and shining. It was a look Cass recognized from a long time ago, and she didn’t need to ask where it came from. Poo, sensing his mother’s fever, struggled in Cass’s arms. He wanted to be near the source, to press against that radiating energy, and who could blame him? She handed him over, and he bounced up and down in Yummy’s arms, gurgling and paddling her cheeks with his fat pink palms as she covered his face with kisses. Cass collected the last of Poo’s things into a sack and opened the door. Only then, with Yummy standing safely outside, did she ask through the screen, “Are you going to see him again?”
Yummy turned around on the stoop. “I know it’s crazy. I know I should just tell him to fuck off, but part of me . . .” She shrugged. “He said he’s sorry. I don’t know. He’s leaving on Sunday. I guess I’ll see him one more time. . . .”
“I’ll take Poo,” Cass said. “It’s fine.”
Double-click and bring up the atlas of North America. Zoom into the map of the western states. There were border crossings into Saskatchewan due north, all along the edge of Montana. Portal, Poplar, Climax. Tiny one-man outposts where they never searched luggage or checked the trunks of cars. It would be easy. Cass smiled. Climax. What a place to cross over. She’d always liked Saskatchewan because of the names: Moose Jaw, Lucky Lake, Success. Any place with towns like that had to be optimistic and upbeat. Cass didn’t have much experience with optimistic and upbeat, but suddenly she wanted to try.
