The Hungry Season

by Greenwood, T.

  “I’m not letting you leave until you get at least a little work done,” he said. “Something to remember me by. And it’s on the house. My treat.”

  Now, face down and half naked at the tattoo parlor, she’s wondering if she’s really got the guts to go through with it.

  They’d stayed up late drinking a bottle of Boone’s Farm, watching reruns of I Love Lucy as she gave him a blow job, and afterward, her tongue prickly and her jaw numb, she’d shown him her idea.

  “That is the coolest idea for a tat I’ve ever heard,” he said, grinning. “But you’ve got to be careful with words. A lot of times people who get words done change their minds after. Like names and stuff.”

  “I won’t change my mind,” she said.

  “This is going to probably take me a few days. And it’s not going to be any sort of picnic for you either,” he said. “You sure you don’t want something smaller?”

  She shook her head. “Let’s do it.”

  Now, inside the parlor, her Boone’s Farm bravado is gone.

  “I’m gonna go get everything ready,”Troy had said. “You’re going to need to take off your shirt. Try to relax. I’ll be back in five.”

  She can hear him in the small lobby of the shop, talking to the girl who had taken her ID and had her sign the release. She’d watched to see if he flirted with her, felt a nasty pang of jealousy when he smiled his slow smile at her.

  When he comes back in, she shivers.

  “Are you cold?” he asks, and walks over to the thermostat on the wall. “Jessica likes it pretty cold in here. I keep telling her I can’t tattoo through goose pimples.”Troy laughs a hearty laugh and pulls on a pair of latex gloves he gets from a box on the counter.

  “Ready?” he asks, bending over so he can look her in the eye.

  “I think so,” she says, surprised by how frail her voice sounds.

  First, he rubs her entire back with rubbing alcohol. The smell makes her nose twitch, makes her remember getting her ears pierced at the Maryvale Mall when she was twelve.

  “I’m going to shave your back now,” he says, and she grimaces. Does she have hair on her back?

  “I just have to get all the fine baby hair off. It gets in the way otherwise.”

  “Okay,” she says.

  When he’s done, he rolls a stick of deodorant across her whole back. “This is to help the transfer stick,” he says.

  She’d found a used bookstore down the street from the motel. It was pretty small, but they’d had almost all of Sam’s books. She’d found a beat-up hardcover copy of The Hour of Lead and paid fifty cents for it. Troy had helped her cut out the pages with an X-Acto knife. He’d measured her back with a tape measure he kept in his truck. And he had gone with her at midnight to Kinko’s to get them enlarged. At the tattoo parlor, he’d shown her the machine that would turn the design into a stencil of sorts.

  Now he lays the design across her back, gently pressing the paper on her skin. He makes his way from the broad expanse between her shoulders all the way down to her waist.

  “Does it fit?” she says. “The whole chapter?”

  “This is going to fucking rock,” he says.

  She closes her eyes and hears the crinkle and tear of the paper covering the needles. She opens them again when he turns on the machine, and then there is the first prick and the hum that spreads through her body like a song. This is the hour of lead. I remember, because I am the one who lived.

  Hunger (n): hunger, craving, taste, need to eat, desire for food. Lack of food (n): food shortage, starvation, famine, appetite. Desire (n): desire, need, wish, passion, yearning, longing. Yearn (v): yearn, long for, desire.

  Sam thumbs through the water-damaged thesaurus, looking for clues. Looking for answers.

  ... appetence, appetency, appetition, craving, desire, emptiness, esurience, famine, famishment, gluttony, greediness, hungriness, longing, ravenousness, starvation, vacancy, voracity, want, yearning ...

  Sam thinks of the young man from Boston; he considers the spray of freckles across his nose. He cracks his knuckles when he’s nervous. He misses home. The men, all conscientious objectors, came from all over the country, unified by their pacifism, by their idealism, by their youth. He, like the others, had seen the recruitment brochure: Will you starve so that others may be better fed? He, like the others, had been working without pay at one of the conservation camps in Maine. When he saw the brochure, it was as if he’d finally found a way to really help. A real way to contribute. A way to save lives. This is what he thought then. But not now, not as he runs his fingers across his ribs, counting their careful ridges, their exact and razor sharp edges. This is not what he will think in the morning as he walks down the long wood-paneled corridor of Shevlin Hall to their dining area with its massive stone fireplace and stained glass. This cathedral of hunger. He will not think of Hitler’s victims as he sits down to his plate of pale potatoes, carefully portioned out. This is not what he will think when he presses the plate to his lips and tongue, licking until there is nothing left. Sam closes his eyes and sees him, lying on the narrow bed in the dormitory that night. He can smell the cold seeping in through the windows. It is winter now, and everything aches.

  When people are starving, the body begins to break down fat and muscle mass for energy, in order to keep the vital systems functioning (the nervous system, the heart). Catabolysis, the body’s attempt to save itself. Irritability. Lethargy. Vitamin deficiency, anemia, beriberi, pellagra, scurvy. Diarrhea, skin rashes, edema. Heart failure.

  He closes his eyes, squeezes them until the kaleidoscope stops spinning. Twist. Sam remembers Mena lying on the crinkly paper in the doctor’s office, the whoosh, whoosh, whoosh as the doctor rolled the Doppler device across her still-flat stomach. He remembers the way the doctor cocked her head and ran the probe across Mena’s skin again.

  “Is everything okay?” Mena had asked, her eyes and brow creased with concern.

  “Do you hear this?” the doctor asked.

  “The heartbeat, right?” Mena said.

  “Well, that’s one of them.” She ran the Doppler a few inches lower. “And there’s the other one.”

  “The other one?” Sam asked.

  “There are two.” The doctor smiled. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.

  For one surreal moment Sam thought that their baby had two hearts.

  “Twins?” Mena asked, her eyes softening and then filling with tears.

  “You got it,” the doctor said.

  Twist.

  He remembers going to the twins’ room, pressing his ear against their chests, their slumber so deep it was terrifying. He remembers the knock, knock, knock against their flesh and then the crash, crash of his own heart, rushing and flooded with relief.

  Twist.

  He is running with Franny and Finn down the beach, their bare feet slapping against the wet sand. And then he collapses onto the blanket next to Mena, the kids piling on top of him. He recollects the way his own heart thudded against his chest, the way their hearts thudded against his chest. He remembers thinking that they were, for at least a moment, simply parts of one larger, breathing entity.

  Twist.

  He remembers picking Franny up at the studio once and watching through the window as she danced. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old. She was just starting to dance en pointe. He stood at the door for nearly a half hour, watching, amazed by the precision with which every part of her body worked, the fluidity and ease with which her body moved. At the end of class, she saw him and her face lit up. She ran to the door, the wooden blocks of her shoes echoing against the floor. Daddy! she squealed, and threw herself at him, hugging him like she used to do when she was little, and he could feel her heart beating hard against his stomach.

  Twist.

  But he can’t do this. He can’t look at this pattern, at these fragments.

  He clicks the computer monitor on, stares at the luminous pale screen.

  When a bo
dy is deprived of the proper nutrients, the heart may develop an arrhythmia. Blood pressure lowers. The heart muscle will shrink. Atrophy. And eventually, it will simply stop. It begins and ends with the heart. It begins. And ends. Begins. And ends.

  Alice and Finn are in the garden, pulling out the weeds and uprooting all of the male plants. The Web site said that it was important to remove the males before their flowers open. Otherwise, they’ll pollinate and you’ll wind up with a bud full of seeds. He’s got pages and pages of color printouts to help them identify the male plants.

  “They all look exactly the same to me,” Alice says.

  “Me too,” Finn says, examining the photos again. “It says the males are taller.”

  “Just like people,” Alice says. Alice is about five feet tall, a whole foot shorter than Finn.

  “Here, I think this is one. Can you hand me a plastic bag?” You’re supposed to cover the plant before you yank it up so the spores don’t go flying everywhere. He covers the plant with the bag and tugs gently.

  “What do we do with them?” Alice asks.

  “I don’t know. Maybe move them somewhere else?”

  “Okay.” Alice shrugs.

  “How many weeks now until your dad’s parole meeting?” Finn asks.

  “Two.”

  Alice is examining the top of one of the female plants. “This is pretty,” she says. “It smells good too.”

  For a week now, they have been coming to check on the plants every day. In San Diego, his mother had a garden. She spent hours out there pruning and weeding and watering. He never understood her fascination with gardening, but now he’s starting to. But instead of angel’s trumpets and birds-of-paradise and manzanitas as a reward for all that hard work, the way he figured it, he’d have several pounds of kind bud. If he was able to harvest it before they left Vermont, he might have enough to last an entire year. Just long enough to get through his senior year of high school. Not bad.

  “Does your mom have like a restraining order or anything?” Finn asks.

  “She will, but those things don’t mean much to my dad. She had one the last time too.”

  Alice looks up at him and smiles sort of sadly. She’s changed even since he met her; it’s funny how teenaged girls do that. Usually Finn didn’t get to see the changes until after summer was over, when all the girls came back to school after three months in Europe or Martha’s Vineyard or wherever the hell else their parents dragged them off to for the summer. And then BAM! Boobs. Butts. Makeup and clothes and all of a sudden Finn started thinking about the same girls he’d teased or picked on in a whole new way. It was weird watching the transformation happen.Alice seems a little taller than she was a month ago, and he thinks she’s starting to get real boobs, not the little bug bites that poked out from her T-shirt at the beginning of the summer. He has to concentrate not to notice them sometimes. She’s also started wearing her hair down long instead of in braids. Lip gloss and mascara. He can’t help but wonder sometimes if she’s doing it for him.

  He remembers how fast Franny went from being a kid like him to being a real girl.The difference was, she didn’t want any part of it. When she started getting boobs, she was pissed off. Dancers aren’t supposed to have bodies. “God, I’m gonna wind up like Mom, I just know it,” she had said. Their mother was voluptuous, at least that was the word he always heard other people use when they were describing her. His friends called her a MILF, which always made him feel kind of queasy. She was built, Franny said, like a brick house. And she wanted no part of that genetic construction.

  “I’m hot,” Alice says. “Can we go get something to drink in your house?”

  “Sure,” Finn says. “I think we got them all. Oops, here’s one more.” This one doesn’t come out as easily, the roots are tangled around a rock, and so he grabs his Swiss Army knife from his pocket and clicks it open. The blood comes before the pain.

  “Shit,” he says, instinctively thrusting his finger into his mouth. It tastes salty, warm.

  “Oh God, what did you do?” Alice asks. “Here, show me.”

  He takes his finger out of his mouth, carefully, and the blood immediately comes to the surface of the wound and spills over.

  Alice takes the bandanna she has tied over her head and quickly wraps it around his finger. “Here, put your hand on my shoulder. It needs to be above your heart so that the bleeding will stop.”

  They make their way back to the house, Finn feeling a little woozy. The bandanna is soaked through, and the blood is getting all over Alice’s T-shirt.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’m ruining your shirt.”

  “Big deal,” Alice says.

  Finn can feel his heartbeat in his finger now. He hopes he won’t need stitches. He’s had stitches before: once when his surfboard cracked him in the chin, and once when he and Franny got a hold of a rusty pogo stick and a can of WD-40. Something about the pushing and pulling of skin, the thick black thread makes him feel like he might throw up. He also starts to panic as he realizes that he’s going to need to explain this to his mother. He tries to think of all of the reasons why he might have a knife and what he could have been trying to do with it when he cut himself.

  “Okay, so there was this bird trapped in a fishing net? You were using the knife to set him free,” Alice says.

  “Perfect.” He smiles.

  Back at the house, Finn’s dad is in the barn shooting hoops. His mom is inside, going through a pile of dusty cookbooks.

  “Hi, Ma,” he says.

  She doesn’t look up. “Hi, honey.”

  “Um, I sort of cut my finger,” he says.

  “What?” she asks, looking up at him, distracted. She’s so damn distracted these days.

  He sticks the bloody bandanna-wrapped finger closer to her face. “I cut myself.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mena says, suddenly alert again. She quickly and carefully unwraps his finger, examining the wound. “It’s deep, but it looks clean,” she says. She stands up and leads him over to the kitchen sink. She keeps checking the temperature of the water with her own hand, adjusting it several times before she puts his hand under.

  “Ma, this is Alice,” he says.

  “Alice, I think we’ve got a first-aid kit in the car. Would you go look in the back of the station wagon?” she says without even looking at her.

  “Sure,” Alice says, and disappears outside.

  “How did this happen?” Mena asks.

  “I was trying to get a bird untangled from a fishing net,” he stutters.

  “Oh, baby,” she says. “This is a bad one.”

  She is turning his finger back and forth under the water, inspecting it. He can smell her breath: teaberry gum and coffee. He realizes he hasn’t been this close to her in a long, long time. And for a second, he wants to cry. He wants to howl like he would have even just a few years ago.Whenever he got hurt. He wishes she would pull his head close to her chest and say softly in his ear, It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.The impulse is almost overwhelming. He hasn’t felt like this, this terrible need for his mom, for a long, long time.

  But then Alice is back. She pulls out some gauze and tape from the kit and hands it to her. “Here’s some Neosporin too.”

  “Thank you,” his mom says, still without really looking at Alice. She is on a mission to make his finger stop bleeding. And something about this makes him feel good, important to her for the first time practically since he can remember. She makes Finn sit down at the kitchen table and applies the cream to the cut. It burns like a mother, and he bites his lip so he won’t cuss.Then she carefully wraps the gauze around his finger, securing it tightly with tape, which she tears off from the roll with her teeth. “There,” she says. “All better. If it bleeds through, though, I’m going to take you into town to the walk-in clinic.”

  Alice plunks herself down in the chair on the other side of the table from Mena. “Hey, is that the Moosewood Cookbook? My mom has this. She always makes the cream of broccoli soup.�
� She picks up the cookbook and starts to thumb through it.

  His mom looks at Alice like she forgot she was even there. And as soon as she sees her, really sees her, her face goes pale. “Alice,” she says too brightly, smiling. “Do you live at the lake year-round?”

  “Yeah. With my mom.”

  Mena is examining Alice the way she was looking at his cut, and it makes Finn’s skin crawl. He still feels kind of nauseous.

  Finn stands up, suddenly wants to get out of the kitchen, away from his mom.

  “You still thirsty?” he asks Alice, going to the fridge and pulling out a couple of cans of Coke with his good hand.They’re hard to hold on to with one hand, slippery and cold. He hands one Coke to Alice. His mom doesn’t even notice. She hates it when he drinks soda.

  “We’re gonna go listen to music in my room,” Finn says.

  “Oh, okay,” Mena says, blinking her eyes again, like she’s just waking up from a dream.

  Finn and Alice are in his room, listening to music. Mena is still stunned, too stunned to make a fuss when Finn closes the bedroom door. Her gut is heavy with a feeling she can’t seem to name. Doesn’t Finn see it? Can’t he see that quality, that something in that girl’s face? It nearly took her breath away. And it isn’t even that she looks like Franny—she doesn’t—but there was something, something when she smiled.

  Mena is surpised by the headache. It’s been almost two weeks since she last had one, not since rehearsals started. It starts as soon as Finn and Alice disappear into his room. She goes to her own room hoping it will go away in time for rehearsals, but it doesn’t disappear. Not even after Alice is gone.

  As she gets ready for rehearsals, she tries to ignore the headache, to will it away. The last thing she needs is to have to stay home tonight. At six-thirty, she grabs her purse and kisses Finn on the head; he’s at the table still, eating a second helping of dessert. He nods in acknowledgment but doesn’t speak.