“What’s it like not to have a mother?” he asked.
I had learned that afternoons make boys profound—the long, slow crawl of light between the shutters, the lazy dust motes in the doldrums of the air. Boys are affected, unconsciously, by such things. You can see it in their eyes. In the sepia light of dusk, they are traveling.
“It’s okay,” I said. “She died when I was too young to remember her, so I never really felt the loss of anything.”
It was my stock answer when people lamented, unnecessarily, my motherlessness.
“Does your dad talk about her much?”
“I don’t know,” I said, not knowing what constituted “much.” It was true that he used to speak to her frequently at night, after he closed his bedroom door, as though it were his personal version of prayer. If I put my ear up to the door, I would hear him relating the events of the day, the progress of my evolution through girlhood. But he hadn’t spoken to her like that in a long time. Once, when I was little, I listened so long at his door that I fell asleep. After having your ear pressed against doors and walls for a while, you don’t know exactly what you’re listening to—maybe just that low, oceany hum of your own blood. It lulls you. He found me there in the morning, called me his beautiful stray, lifted me in his arms. I clung to him.
“Do you want to see pictures?” I asked.
“Sure.”
The old albums were in the attic, and I thought that such a dark, cramped place might inspire kissing. I felt bad about using the memory of my mother in that way, but I reasoned that she also would have wanted me to be kissed.
Peter was quite a bit taller than me, so I had him unfold the attic ladder from the ceiling in the hallway, and up we went. I knew right where the boxes with the albums were, because I had helped my father organize the attic just the previous summer. It had been my job to create all the labels. It was warmer up there in the attic, and Peter and I sat side by side, with our backs propped up against old suitcases, an album resting open half on his lap and half on mine. Our shoulders touched.
“This is my favorite picture,” I said.
“That’s baby you?”
“That’s baby me.”
Most family pictures show the mother holding the baby while the father sits proudly by—but this one was the opposite. In it, my father, looking lean and dapper, had me bundled up in his arms. He was sitting in the easy chair we still had downstairs in the living room, and next to him was my mother, perched upon the arm of the chair, looking radiant and aloof, the skirt of her dress draped perfectly over her knees. Her smile was something I couldn’t describe, except to say that it seemed to be queenly in the way that queens remind you of situations grander than your own puny life could conceive.
“She looks like you,” Peter said.
“Does she?” I was pleased. “I think we have a lot in common. Maybe that’s why she died.”
“Huh?”
“I mean, I know it’s morbid, but I think that sometimes. Maybe she had to die because we were so alike that the world couldn’t tolerate both of us in it.”
“That’s…” he said, looking uncomfortable. “That’s a really weird thing to say, Lumen.”
But it didn’t seem weird to me at all, and I was hurt by his response.
“Anyway,” I said.
We were quiet for a moment. Then he said:
“So what do you have in common? I mean, other than your looks.”
“Well, she didn’t go breach—and I’m not going to, either.”
He looked at me sideways with suspicious eyes.
“It happens,” I went on. “Not very often, but it does happen. My father says she was all lit up—he says she carried the daylight with her. The moon, it couldn’t have any effect.”
“I never heard of that.”
“Well, it’s true—whether you’ve heard of it or not. Some people just aren’t the same as other people.”
“Hm.” I could tell he still didn’t believe me. “And how come you think you won’t go breach, either?”
“We have the same blood. It stands to reason. Plus I can just tell.”
“But your father, he went breach.”
“Yes.”
“So you could be like him.”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging. “I can just tell.”
It is always a young girl’s dream to have a boy believe in her most colorful fantasies. You paint landscapes with your humble heart, then you seek to populate them with boys who will understand.
But then he underwent a quick change—as though he were brushing off the topic altogether. He clambered around so that he was on his hands and knees in front of me. I sat with my own knees pulled up protectively to my chest.
“Let me see,” he said.
“See what?”
But he didn’t answer. He was looking at my eyes, examining them. He moved his head from side to side, as though to get multiple angles on the subject of my eyes.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Shh.”
He kept looking, then he seemed to spot something—as though he had discovered a minuscule village somewhere in the core of my retina.
“Huh,” he said.
“What?”
“You’re right. Daylight.”
That’s when he kissed me. At first I held my breath, unsure about what I should do. Then when I finally breathed, I wondered if I should keep my eyes open or closed. His eyes were closed, so I closed mine. That’s when my other senses took over. I could smell his skin and that boy shampoo that smells like mowed grass. He pushed himself against me, and I touched his arm with my hand—squeezed his arm as if it were mine, as if our bodies were forfeit to each other’s—and then my hand was even on his neck, where there were little hairs, and I was allowed to touch them. I heard a tiny voice, like that of a squeak-mouse, and then I realized it was my own voice, and I thought how beautiful that sometimes your body knows what to do on its own.
At that time, I had a way of thinking of myself as a castle or a tower, something with many spiraling cobblestone steps that became secrets in themselves, winding around each other like visual illusions. The pleasure was in the climbing, the intricate architectures of thought and purpose. But it was on a rare occasion such as this when I could feel something else, something beneath the foundation of the tower, a rumbling in the earth itself that shook to delightful danger all those lattices of cold, cerebral mortar.
* * *
I had lost track of time in the attic, and when we climbed down the ladder I was surprised to see that a pale, dry dusk had infiltrated the house while we weren’t looking.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“What?”
“Prayer Moon. It’s the first night.”
Peter went to the window and gazed up at the sky.
“It’s still early enough,” he said. “I don’t live that far away. I can make it.”
“No, you can’t. The moon’s up.”
“But look—it’s quiet. I can make it. They wouldn’t bother with me much anyway.”
But my father, arriving home, wouldn’t hear of it. He called Peter’s mother and told her he would stay in our house for the night. There was plenty of room—such a big house for just my father and me. The couch in the upstairs den folded out into a bed, and I got sheets from the linen closet and made it up.
It was the first time there had been a boy sleeping in the house, and I wanted to assure my father that nothing untoward would happen. I found him in the kitchen while Peter was watching TV in the den.
“I told Peter he shouldn’t come out of the den after ten o’clock,” I said. “You can check on us if you want. Any time you feel like it.”
My father grinned in confusion and shook his head.
“I’m sure everything will be fine,” he said. “I trust you, little Lumen.”
That was nice to hear, but at the same time I had recently grown irritated by the idea that I was so invariably trustw
orthy. Hadn’t I just spent the afternoon in the attic kissing, of all people, Peter Meechum? Hadn’t I kissed right through sunset?
“How come you trust me so much? None of the other parents trust their kids so much.”
He smiled again, gently. And again there was something in it I didn’t care for. Was it condescension?
“Well,” he said, “you’ve never disappointed me yet. Never once. Such a perfect record earns you plenty of trust. Besides, you’re fifteen.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what the fact of my age had to do with anything, but I had an impression—and he turned to the sink immediately after he’d said it, as though embarrassed.
He made spaghetti and meatballs for dinner, and Peter and I were responsible for the garlic toast. Peter made a big production of spreading the garlic butter on the bread, and I topped it with the ocher-colored seasoned salt.
We listened to music during dinner—as we often did during the moons. That night it was the opera Turandot.
“The opera’s about a princess,” I explained, because I had read the libretto the previous year. “She refuses to marry any man unless he answers three riddles first. If he answers any of them incorrectly, he’s put to death.”
“I guess she has her reasons,” Peter said, and I couldn’t tell if he was joking.
“She’s a princess of death,” I said with great seriousness. “It’s her nature.”
After dinner Peter and I watched TV in the den upstairs, sitting side by side on the couch that had been made up as his bed. We turned the TV loud so we wouldn’t hear anything from outside. After a while we fell to kissing again.
It surprised me how quickly the whole thing became mechanical. I found myself too aware of the way our lips met, mapping out the movements of his tongue in my mouth. First he would kiss me square on the mouth, then take my lower lip between his two lips and leave a cold wet spot on my chin that I wanted to wipe off. Then he would turn his head sideways a little, as though passion were all about angles. (If we had been able to kiss with one of our faces turned completely upside down, I suppose that would have been truly making love.) Then he would leave a trail of ticklish kisses from the corner of my mouth up the side of my face to my ear, the lobe of which he took in his mouth. Then a bite or two on the neck, which I didn’t know what to do with. Then the whole thing started over again.
The problem was that I was thinking about it as it was happening, picturing it in my mind as though I were a disembodied viewer standing off to the side—and from that perspective the whole thing looked ludicrous. I kept thinking about my father, who trusted me implicitly, and what he would have seen had he come into the room during that mess. Not disappointment, not exactly. But it would have given him reason to remind me again that I was fifteen years old—which was a repellent thought. Had he come in at that moment, he would have seen his daughter succumbing sloppily to teenagehood—whatever preposterous versions of love or curiosity or risk such a state implied.
Then Peter’s right hand slid down from my neck to my chest and rested itself on the embarrassing nodule that was still in the process of becoming my left breast.
He froze suddenly. At first I thought it was because he was disappointed with what he’d found there. He lifted himself a few inches from me, his hand still on my chest, and gave me an intent, querulous look.
That’s when I realized he was waiting for me to stop him.
I had been so studious and removed from the whole situation that I had forgotten the role I was supposed to be playing. I was the good girl. The girl being groped and salivated upon in the den of her own home was the good girl. You were safe with her, because she didn’t allow anything to get out of control.
“I guess we should stop,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”
But he didn’t seem sorry. He seemed relieved.
He levered himself off me, then we sat and watched TV for a while longer. It was half an hour before midnight when I told him I was going to bed. He said okay and leaned over to kiss me good night.
“I’m glad we went to the attic,” he said.
It was a sweet thing to say, and the way he phrased it made me think funny thoughts—as though “going to the attic” were some kind of accepted rite of passage. Passage to the attic. I thought then that I knew something about rites, but I was wrong.
There are so many things about the world that might keep you laughing to yourself in the dark when you can’t seem to fall asleep. Then again, alone in my bedroom with a hallway between us, the idea of Peter Meechum once again thrilled all my senses. I put my hand on my breast the way he had done it before, and it gave me little shivers all over.
I wondered why romance was a thing I felt in a truly visceral way only when I was alone. Maybe the cold, logical part of my mind closed doors to real people. Maybe I needed to be taught how to open those doors. And I thought that Peter Meechum very well could be the one to teach me.
We’ve all of us got an inward brain and an outward brain, don’t we? When we are by ourselves in our rooms at night, unselfconscious and free, we are entirely different. That’s when you might learn the most about instinct.
But the moon made its exceptions in our town. Here’s another song from my childhood that I sing as a lullaby to my son.
Gather, young lovers,
In wind and in rain.
Cleave to the sky fires
That know not your name.
Unravel the day-screws
That tangle your brain.
Hold fast your white angel,
And cut it in twain.
Hold fast your black devil,
And cut it in twain.
And then, cut in two as we all are, can we ever take true account of ourselves? Or do we just lisp ourselves to sleep and dreams of freedom?
* * *
But the night when Peter Meechum stayed over was also the night when a pack of breachers stood outside my window howling. It was well after midnight, and I had not been able to fall asleep. I heard them out on the street, mewling in the peculiar way they had, which made me think of lonely cats on backyard fences in the nighttime.
Mine was the only window that faced the front of the house. My father’s bedroom and the den, where Peter slept, were both in the back—so they couldn’t hear.
Then I heard my name, called snakelike and taunting from outside:
“Luuuuuuuuumeeen!”
It was a girl’s voice. It was Polly’s voice.
Normally the breachers didn’t bother with people who kept indoors when the moon was out. They weren’t malicious—they didn’t stalk innocent prey. Normally they kept to themselves. They embattled each other if they battled at all. Some of them just liked to run through the streets—they kept on running until the sun came up. Others took to the woods and were lost in the morning when they woke. But by and large they didn’t make assaults on those who stayed out of their way.
So this was something different—my name teased out in that manic hyena voice they all had.
“Luuuuumeen!”
I hadn’t been sleeping anyway, so I went to the window and looked down.
There were six of them. They were naked, their skin pale and glowing under the light of the street lamps. They ran around in circles, testing the strength of their legs, the length of their arms. They hopped and ran and yipped and snarled. One of them grappled with another and was tossed into the shrubbery at the edge of our yard. When he got himself upright again, I saw there were perforations all over his skin from the brambles. He would hurt in the morning, but he seemed to feel nothing now.
In the middle of the pack, Polly stood very still, smiling up at my window. I didn’t like her smile. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was. Her smile was the stillest on the street, but there was a breeze that blew strands of her hair across her face. She made no attempt to remove them.
When she saw me in the window, her smile widened—she even laughed, seeming to luxuriate in my w
itnessing her in such a state.
“Lumen,” she said, seeming to breathe through her words, “come outside! Please, Lumen. Look at me. I want you to see me!”
The girl who stood in the street was not the girl I knew. Instead, she was some nightmarish inversion of the person who had played in the sprinklers with me years before. This girl was raw, viperous, glutted on nature and night. They all were. Like coyotes, they made mockery, with their bleating voices, of those who needed light in order to feel safe.
And yet they were all too human.
I had never seen Polly without her clothes on before. There was a sickly luminescence to her skin, as of a glowworm or one of those creatures that live so deep underground that they have no pigment at all. Her dropsy breasts—I could see that one was larger than the other, that the rusty nipples were more oval than circular, that they possessed the persistent misalignment of nature itself. There were red blotches on her stomach and legs, as though she were rash-broken, and I could see the freckles and moles that dotted her body—even a patchy birthmark that looked like someone had spilled coffee on her hip. The triangle of her pubic hair was discomfiting in the way it grew partly onto her thighs and up her stomach. While I watched, the breeze blew a chattering of tiny leaves down the street, and one of them got caught in her pubic hair—where it remained as long as she stood there.
Then she started to call my name in various ways, feeling it in her mouth, tasting the varietals with which she might be able to permute my personhood were I down there with her.
“Lumen,” she called. “Lumenal…Laminal…Lamen…Lamian…Labian…Lavial…”
It seemed, at first, like a child’s game—but the way she said the names made them sound obscene. They were versions of my name—if my name were some vulgar tropical fruit whose juice ran down your chin and whose pulp got stuck between your gnashing teeth.
As Polly continued her catechism, another of the breachers took notice and came to stand beside her. It was Rose. I didn’t know if it was just because Rose had a different kind of body or because she cosmetically altered it, but her patch of pubic hair was smaller and shorter than Polly’s—and as a result it masked less, and I could see the ugly fleshy nubbins of her vagina.
When We Were Animals Page 6
