The Hungry Season

by Greenwood, T.

  Sam thinks about his last visit to the ATM, the dwindling account.The fact that the advance on the book is already gone, and there’s still no book.

  “And you could start over somewhere. A place without so many memories,” Hilary says softly.

  “This isn’t something I can decide right now. Mena and I will need to discuss this.”

  “I totally understand, but if you’re interested, I wouldn’t let it go too long. There’s another place up the hill a bit with a killer view, and they’ve been looking at that property as well.”

  “Okay. We’ll let you know,” Sam says, and hangs up the phone.

  He opens the oven door, reaches in for the souvlaki.

  The house in Ocean Beach was, until he bought this cottage, the only house he’d ever owned. They’d bought it from an old woman who was moving into a nursing home. She took their offer over another couple because she said she liked them, could tell they would take good care of the place. She had no children, and so when she moved, she left almost everything behind.

  Mena and Sam had felt like they’d bought a treasure chest instead of a house. They had so little of their own back then, they were grateful for the cupboards full of dishes, the furniture, the TV. For months, they’d discover something new almost every day. Boxes of Christmas ornaments, a steamer trunk of old dresses and suits, stacks of handmade quilts. He remembers Mena going through the drawers in the bedroom and finding a bundle of letters tied together with a hair ribbon. They’d been postmarked from Saigon, the airmail envelopes as thin as air. They found out later that her only child, her son, had died in Vietnam.

  Sam had found Mena sitting on the inherited bed, surrounded by the open letters, crying. She was pregnant with the twins then, swollen but, Sam thought, profoundly beautiful. He remembers her being barefoot, her toenails painted bright red.

  “I know I shouldn’t have,” she said, wiping at her eyes.Apologetic. “I’ll drop them by the nursing home tomorrow.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam said, sitting down next to her and gently laying his head on her belly.

  “He was her only child,” Mena said, her voice catching in her throat like a burr. “He was nineteen years old.”

  Sam closed his eyes and concentrated on the sounds of Mena’s belly.

  The souvlaki is cold in the middle. He eats around it, the hot edges, and then scrapes the rest into the trash.

  Mena is in the bedroom getting ready for rehearsals. She’s been going for over two weeks now, but she has hardly said a word about it. He asks her, periodically, how it’s going and she nods. “Good, good.” She almost always gets home long after Sam has fallen asleep.

  She comes into the kitchen and grabs her purse from the back of his chair.

  “What was the woman’s name?” he asks.“The one we bought the house from?”

  “Shirley?” she says, digging through her purse for her keys.

  “That’s right. Shirley O’Connell.”

  “O’Donnell.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, gotta go.” She smiles.

  “Come here?” he asks, surprised by how tentative he sounds.

  She raises her eyebrow at him suspiciously. She sighs and then comes to him, leans over and kisses his forehead. “Don’t wait up for me. It will probably be late.”

  This is the same feeling he gets every time they go out swimming together in the ocean. They’d always plunge in together, but within moments she’d be swimming away. He liked to stay at the shore, ride the waves. He liked to be where his feet could still touch the ground. She always needed to go beyond the waves, where the water was deeper. Farther. He’d watch her turning into a tiny speck against the horizon, and he hated it. It was excruciating waiting for her to come back.

  “Monty and Lauren are coming up this weekend,” he says.

  “Up here?”

  Sam nods.

  “Christ, where are we going to put them?”

  “I’ll talk to Finn about camping out for the weekend. Otherwise, you and I can pitch a tent.” He laughs. He thinks about the herbal supplements. He could give them another shot. He remembers a trip to Yosemite when the kids were ten, stolen moments after they’d fallen asleep in the other tent.

  She scowls. “I have rehearsal until ten on Friday night. And again on Saturday afternoon.”

  “Fine,” he says, feeling a little angry. “I’ll take care of everything. You don’t even have to be here.” He doesn’t want to be like this. “You’re the one who suggested they come up.”

  “I’ve got to go,” she says, glancing at her watch.

  When she is gone, he calls Monty back. “We’d love to have you up. Bring your swimsuits.”

  “That last scene was fabulous,” Anne says to Mena during their break. “You and Jake have such a powerful synergy.”

  Mena feels her cheeks flush with heat. “It’s a good play,” she says.

  “You want coffee?” Anne asks, grabbing a Styrofoam cup from the stack.

  “No, makes me too jittery at night. I have a hard enough time sleeping anyway.”

  Lately, she’s not been able to sleep at all. She stopped taking the sleeping pills the doctor prescribed after Franny died because they knocked her out so hard she was afraid the house might burn down around her and she wouldn’t wake up. They also made her feel sort of groggy and hungover the next day. She falls asleep okay every night, but around three or so, she wakes up and can’t go back to sleep. This is Sam’s prime snoring time as well, and so she might have a hard time falling back to sleep even if her mind wasn’t racing.

  “Me too, but I’m totally addicted,” Anne says, pouring the hot coffee into her cup.

  Jake is on the stage, talking to Lisa. Mena watches him lean into her. She laughs at what he says and touches his arm. Mena feels her stomach drop.

  “You said you’re married?” Anne asks.

  Mena feels herself blush again, feels caught. “Yes.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  Mena thinks of Sam sitting at the kitchen table, pushing souvlaki around his plate.

  “What?”

  “What does he do? For a living?”

  That expression has always struck her as funny. As if people do whatever it is that they do in order to live. Though, she might once have argued that Sam did write for a living.

  “He’s a writer. A novelist. The Hour of Lead, that movie you saw? It was actually based on his first novel.”

  “Oh, wow! That’s so cool,”Anne says.“I had no idea. I’ll have to check his books out. Do they have them at the Athenaeum?”

  “They should. He just did a book club meeting there last week.”

  Jake and Lisa are still talking. Lisa keeps flipping her hair back; she is sitting on the bed. May’s bed.

  Anne follows her gaze to the stage.

  “I know you’re married and everything,” Anne says, “but God, isn’t he just such a tall drink of water? I don’t know how you make it through some of those scenes. Seriously.”

  Mena looks at her feet as Jake jumps down off the stage and comes toward them. “That last scene was good, wasn’t it?” he asks Mena. “I think it’s starting to come together.”

  Mena nods and smiles. She grabs a cup from the stack and pours herself some coffee in order to have something to do with her hands.What the hell, she’ll be up anyway.

  “I’ve gotta go talk to Lisa,” Anne says, pinching Mena’s elbow—conspiratorially, Mena thinks.

  “Listen, I was thinking of inviting everybody over for a drink after rehearsal on Friday. I figure it might be nice to all get to know each other a bit off the stage as well.”

  Mena’s heart quickens. “That sounds like fun,” she says, sipping the coffee, which is both too hot and too strong.“Oh shoot, I can’t make it,” she says, remembering Monty and Lauren.

  “Oh really?” Jake asks. “That’s too bad. Maybe next time.”

  “Sure.” She smiles, nodding. Disappointed. “Next time.”


  The scene they are working on is one of the fight scenes between Eddie and May. It begins with a kiss and ends with a kick in the groin. They rehearse for hours, until her lips feel raw and her arms and legs are tired from fighting. By the time she drives home she is so exhausted she almost believes that she’ll be able to sleep tonight.

  Up in his loft, Sam turns on his laptop, stares at the scattered words that swim across the page. Letters, disconnected, adrift in that enormous white sea. The words try to stay afloat, but they can’t seem to rise up to the surface. They are drowning. All of them. In this terrible, terrible empty white.

  He thinks about the man, the one in the experiment. He has a name now: Billy. He is no longer a shadow, but the frail sketch of a man. The bones, his rib cage, his long fingers. Today he walks three miles through the snow: part of the mandated exercise during this phase of the experiment. He has lost twenty pounds already.

  In the beginning, before the caloric restrictions, before the starvation phase of the experiment, he dreamed of home. He dreamed of Mary, of her creamy thighs and the smell of her hair. He’d wake up, his entire body electric and buzzing with desire. He’d have to hide his erections under the covers. He could feel his heart ready to explode with yearning. Every inch of his skin wanted her. But now, he only dreams of food. He dreams of his mother’s creamy pea and ham soup, the smell of spiced beef and parsnips and potato bread. If Mary enters the dream at all, she is liquid. No different than the steaming bowls of potato leek soup.

  Sam leans back in his chair. Listens to the crickets outside, at the strangely noisy night.

  Sometimes, before, when he was working in his office at home, he would stop typing and listen to the sounds of their house at night, and it was like music. In Finn’s room, the sound of his stereo, faint but certain, rhythmic: the beating of drums like a metronome. The clinkety-clank of the kitchen, the tinkling of glasses, the rush of water, the cymbal clash of a copper pot. And in Franny’s room, the shuffling of feet. There were words for those sounds, whispery words: tendu, ronde de jambe, degages.The words come to him again now, the whispers of her slippers on the floor. And those whispers turn into the wind howling in Billy’s ear as he walks.

  The men must walk twenty-two miles every week, even now that their meals have been reduced from three to two a day: watery soup, macaroni and cheese, rutabagas, steamed potatoes, lettuce.The calories going into his body cannot match the ones being spent. Someone in the group is cheating, and in order to find out who it is, the scientists have cut their diets to a thousand calories a day. At night he dreams of oranges, of tearing into the rough bitter flesh of an orange with his teeth only to meet the sweet wet meat inside. He wakes up, gnawing and sucking on his own hand.

  The ground beneath his feet is slick with ice; the wind is bitter. He shoves his hands in his pocket and buries his chin inside his scarf. When they were in town earlier that day, he’d caught sight of himself in a storefront and pitied the man he saw. It took several moments before recognition set in. And when it did, it felt like a punch in the stomach, and that pain was indistinguishable from the pain brought on by his hunger.

  After leaving Graceland, Dale was only able to make it to Nashville before her eyes started playing tricks on her. She doesn’t like to drive at night. All of the lights make her feel like she’s playing a video game. Her depth perception is off. She gets dizzy. And so she’d found a Red Roof Inn just off the highway. The room reeked of smoke and something else she couldn’t quite identify, and she was too excited to sleep. She had taken her last Ambien the night before, and she knew if she didn’t do something, she’d be awake all night in that stinky room.

  Next door to the motel was a bar, a small quiet place. She sat down at the bar and ordered a beer and a shot of whiskey. The bartender silently brought her a Bud Light and a shot of Jameson, which she’d thrown back quickly. Energized by the heat traveling down her esophagus, she slammed the shot glass on the bar and took a long pull from the beer. “Another one, please,” she said.

  The guy sitting next to her was eating a Philly cheese steak, and the smell of onions and peppers filled her nose, tickled her brain.

  “That good?” she asked the guy.

  He chewed slowly and nodded.

  “I’ll take one of those too,” she said to the bartender, and smiled at the man.

  He was older than she was, maybe forty. He was wearing a cowboy hat and a plaid shirt. The snaps were pearly. Suddenly, she imagined what the sound of them unsnapping would be. She could almost hear the rhythmic pop, pop, pop.

  She ate half of the sandwich and drank another couple of beers. By the time she did the next shot, the guy had moved closer to her. Close enough that she could smell Old Spice cologne mixing with Irish Spring on his skin. Close enough that she could imagine what it would feel like to touch the bristly hairs on his chin, those pearly snaps on his chest. She was drunk and leaning into him when he suggested they go back to her motel.

  “Whatcha doing in Nashville?” he’d asked.

  “I’m a writer,” she said as he tore at her clothes. “A biographer. I’m on my way to do a very important interview,” as his teeth tore at the strap of her bra.

  Afterward, when he was gone, she’d drawn a bath and soaked. Her back stung; he hadn’t been as gentle as Troy. She sank into the water and let the heat massage her shoulders. Her skin was still tender; Troy said it could take two weeks or more before the tattoo healed.

  She had almost passed out in the bathtub and had to coax her body out of the warm water and into her sweats.When she went to pull the plug in the tub, she gasped. At first she’d thought it was dirt, but while she knew she was probably a little dusty from the road, she certainly wasn’t this filthy. Then, as she peered closer at the black flakes swimming in the water, she realized what had looked like dirt was actually hundreds of tiny words. Sam’s words. She felt panicked, breathless, wondering if this guy had somehow managed to tear the tattoo right off her back. She yanked off her T-shirt and stood facing away from the mirror, cranking her head around to see her reflection behind her. Her heart was pounding, her hands shaking. But the tattoo was still there. It hadn’t gone anywhere.

  Scabs. Troy had told her this might happen, the scabbing, but she had no idea it would look like this.

  This morning, despite a terrible hangover, she wakes up early, intent on getting to Columbus by dark. No more distractions. No more men. She spreads the map out on the ugly geometric bedspread. Unless something terrible happens with her car, she is pretty sure she’ll get to Vermont by Friday. She traces the journey with her finger. Columbus. Then Buffalo. Then Vermont. She is so close.

  Outside, it is overcast and muggy. She’s ready to go north, to get out of this sticky weather. She puts on a clean T-shirt and balls up her sweatpants. The yellow dress peeks out of the corner of her duffel bag, and she smiles. She touches the soft hem and thinks about what she’ll say, what he’ll say when she finally gets there.

  Finn is in the garden, checking on the plants. He and Alice are going to try an experiment; Finn read that sometimes you can force the flowering of the female plants. In nature, they begin to flower when the days start to have twelve hours of light and twelve hours of darkness. He figures that if they cover the plants at exactly twelve hours after sunrise, then uncover them twelve hours later, then they can trick the plants into flowering. And the quicker they flower, the quicker he’ll have some bud. He knows it’s probably not too smart to call attention to the plants, and a bunch of grocery bags flapping in the wind might be sort of suspicious. So he’s not going to do it with all of the plants, but at least a few. He doesn’t want to sell the stuff for Christ’s sake. He just needs to have enough to help him get to sleep. The stuff from Muppet is gone.

  As he examines the plants he thinks about his mother’s garden at home, the virtual jungle out beyond their back deck.

  Most days after school Finn would go home, change into his wetsuit, and head out to the beach u
ntil dinnertime. Because his parents both worked at home, somebody was always at the house. He was the opposite of a latchkey kid. Sometimes he envied his friends whose parents worked all the time, if not their freedom then at least their ability to be alone. The only way he could get any peace and quiet was to go surfing. Except on Fridays.

  On Fridays his mother did the grocery shopping, both for their house and for her weekend catering gigs. His father had a weekly chiropractor’s appointment on Fridays. And Franny had ballet every day after school, including Fridays.

  Finn’s dad kept the fridge stocked with beers (and he never counted them), and there was always some really good Greek cheese and olives, something left over from the previous night’s dinner. On Fridays before he went out surfing he’d help himself, popping the cap off a Sam Adams and making a plate of cheese and olives, taking everything out to the deck. He’d love to sit there in that wild jungle of plants. The smell of jasmine and hibiscus was so thick it could almost make you high.

  After he’d finished the beer and the plate was covered in olive pits, he’d get his board out and lay it across the outdoor table where they ate dinner most nights. He always had a bar of Sex Wax on him—he’d ruined at least two loads of laundry forgetting to take it out of his pocket.

  He was methodical about this process. He’d saved for an entire school year to buy the long board. It cost six hundred dollars, custom built by a guy who worked out of his garage down on Newport. He was pretty sure this was kind of Zen, because when he was waxing his board, his head was in such a quiet place. The rhythm of it was like the rhythm of the waves crashing onto the cliffs below. With the plants breathing all around him, it was a sort of nirvana.