Prepare Her

by Genevieve Plunkett

  Prepare Her

  For Steven Bach (1938–2009), who encouraged me to

  “continue writing—anything and everything.”

  Contents

  Something for a Young Woman

  Arla Had Horses

  Single

  Rodeo

  Trespassers

  If Tooth Could Mean Heart

  Schematic

  A Bone for Christmas

  Farmer, Angel

  Your Next Breath

  Gorgon

  Prepare Her

  Acknowledgments

  Prepare Her

  Something for a Young Woman

  1.

  The shop owner, by then, knew all about it: the girl’s hatred of elbows and stray pieces of hair; how her boyfriend disliked the taste of her lip gloss; how she referred to far too many body parts as “it.” He knew which details she had made up to appear more experienced, even what she had swept over in an attempt to be coy. He listened to her, as bosses do, with hands folded, waiting through her blushes and her flights of qualifiers. The corners of his mouth and eyes remained still.

  The girl and the shop owner liked to talk. Once, they had been talking in the storage room, searching a heap of bubble wrap for a lost piece to a tea set, and he had gotten very close to her, blocking the door with his body. She had looked up and met the buttons of his shirt, tugging across his torso, and a flight of nerves had gone up inside her, like someone had smacked a screen door covered in moths. He had joked that someone might walk in and get the wrong impression, as if life could just be so funny.

  It had come to this, surely, by the girl’s own indiscretion—not just her candidness, but some kind of postural lingering, something learned but unconscious. She started to spend more time in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of her closet door, so that she could see all the way to her heels, which she raised off the floor. She saw less and less of her boyfriend, and when they spoke she thought she detected something in his voice, like the hook of suspicion. They broke up two months later, although it had nothing to do with the shop owner.

  “If I were to ask you what your preferences are,” the boyfriend asked, “what would you tell me?”

  The girl told him that he needed to be more specific.

  “Your preferences,” he said again. It was an odd word for him to be using, she thought, but before she could answer, he continued, “Well, mine are different. People already know.”

  When she went to work the next day, the shop owner was there, feeding the woodstove. She told him about the breakup and their strange conversation and he turned his face to the fire, to hide from her, she imagined, whatever satisfaction he could not, for the moment, subdue.

  “I was wondering when you were going to find out,” he said.

  He stayed for the day, when he would have usually left her in charge, and chopped firewood behind the building, hauling armload after armload inside with his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. It was the sight of the sleeves like that—the meat of his forearms darkened by hair—that made her wonder if something had changed between them and if, perhaps, he was waiting for her to do something about it.

  There was a large desk where she sat, in the back, by the stove. On one side of it, there was a stack of old magazines, and on the other, a shallow wooden box of loose postcards, mostly photos of old bridges and the fronts of hotels. The middle of the desk was kept clear for the exchange of money, the sliding over of small purchases in folded paper bags. She didn’t know what put it in her head to sit there—some adolescent notion of sexual liberty—but she knew, the instant that he returned and saw her like that, that it was the wrong thing to do.

  The shop owner dropped his eyes to the side and waited for her to climb down, then handed her the keys and told her to lock up in thirty minutes. She watched him go and heard the triple clatter of the bell above the door. There would be no more shoppers at this time. People did not like to stop roadside after dark, especially not to lurk through the twilight of scuffed velvet and sad lampshades. Still, she waited until closing time. She took the money from the cash register and recorded the profit onto a slip of paper. The drawer, now balanced for the next morning, was locked into the register, and the envelope of cash was placed in a small safe beneath the desk.

  The next week, the shop owner said that he would be on vacation with his family and, since the girl would be off from school, it was up to her to look after the shop. He assured her, in his instructions, that there would be enough chopped wood for the fire until he returned. She wondered, briefly, how she must have appeared, on top of the desk like that. She knew better than to worry that he would speak of it, but she also knew that it would always exist, as a small loss on her part.

  She worked diligently while he was away, even though she was alone and could have easily spent the time reading books or using the phone. She even dusted the stuffed emu that had remained unsold for so long that it had acquired a name, chosen by the girl who worked there before her, who had occasionally been mentioned by the owner with unwavering neutrality.

  At the end of the day, she locked herself in to count the register. Because the shop owner was not there to collect it, the money began to pile up in the safe. Then one night, the girl unlocked the safe to find the money gone, replaced by a small brown box. For a moment she feared that they had been robbed overnight, but then she saw that the box had her name written across the top.

  Allison.

  Inside, under a sheet of crepe paper, was a necklace with an oval black stone.

  Formal. Something for a young woman.

  2.

  Allison met the man that would become her husband during their last year of college, then followed him to the city. He was always saying that he had friends there. She didn’t know why she was surprised when the friends did, in fact, exist, all together in little compartments over the street. Like the college boyfriend, the friends had been biology students, but they spent a lot of time playing guitars plugged into big amplifiers, which they once accused her of moving two inches to the right based on dust patterns. There had been shouting. The college boyfriend had flown to her aid, his ears turning pink with outrage. She had cried and cried from the commotion. The city was making her sick with its fumes, its pockets of hot breath and burnt rubber. She swore that the cupboards smelled like newborn mice.

  “I have this thing where I can’t be around vomit,” the boyfriend had said the first time it happened and put up his hands.

  It was the pregnancy that caused them to move back north, to be closer to his family. His parents owned a large property with a barn, but you couldn’t call it a farm; the horses were old, likely to trot back from the pasture favoring a hoof, and the chickens were slowly disappearing. There was speculation of a fox, as if such a creature in that area needed speculation.

  Their decision to get married seemed not to rely on whether it was the right choice but rather on if his relatives in Canada could make it to the wedding, and if it was better to try to hide the belly or wait until after the baby was born.

  “Things usually go back to normal,” said the woman who would be her mother-in-law. “Before the third one, at least. And by the fourth, you don’t care, just as long as it isn’t another boy.”

  Theirs was a boy. They named him after Allison’s late grandfather. He was born in January, in their own undecorated living room, with the rug rolled up, so that it would not be stained. It was how the baby’s father had been born, same as his brothers, all four of them. Ideal, maybe, in the old family homestead, with its hearth and its lambskin throws. But this was a one-story ranch, spare of furniture and not fully unpacked. The midwife had needed a pan to collect the placenta and they found one in a cardboard box, next to
an unwrapped sushi kit and a ceramic cat with hearts for eyes. Come on, Mama, the midwife had said throughout the labor. Come on, like someone coaxing a stubborn cow.

  By summer, they were married on his parents’ property, under a rented arbor. These decisions—the birth, the wedding—as well as others, were made with the earnestness of dogs wanting to be good. They painted the nursery yellow, because that was the color of the husband’s room when he was a boy. She could not dispute this logic, she knew, without weakening the mortar that had fixed together happiness and bumblebee yellow always in his mind. Even though, the way she saw it, bumblebees were mostly black.

  In college, she had played the viola. She had always imagined herself in the symphony, with her straight, narrow back, wearing something thin, dark, and almost glittering. In the city, that may have been possible, but so far north, and now with the child, there were only opportunities in the early and late summer, when there were weddings.

  Her husband’s cousin played the cello and knew a wealthy couple who had taken up the violin years ago, as an answer to their “echoing empty nest.” They formed a quartet and met at the cousin’s church, in the basement, playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” between spines of stacked folding chairs.

  The night before their first performance, she found herself struggling to find something to wear. Something around her middle had changed since the baby, who was now four months old, and there was a veiny tint beneath her eyes. She found the necklace with the black stone in the back of a drawer, still in the box with the crepe paper, and put it on for the first time. The shop owner had never spoken of it, and she had never felt an obligation to wear it for his sake. She had taken it in the way someone might receive a confession: not entirely certain whether power had been granted or taken away. Still, the weight of the stone flat against her skin brought the small pleasure of knowing that she was once something unknown to the people there, to her son and to her husband.

  The boy grew, healthy and cheerful, and often satisfied to play alone. Allison took advantage of this, retreating to her room to work through a bit of complicated fingering. Sometimes, talking to the boy, discussing what color spoon he should use, or whether or not it was a good idea to dip his teddy bear into the bath, left her voice feeling frail, caught in the pitch of adult-to-child deception. Something needed to be purged, and so she would work it through the instrument, following an earthy, resonant phrase, like walking a trusted path.

  She worked, too. The husband brought in only so much as a high school science teacher, which had him in fits at the end of the day. Why, he wanted to know, was there always some teenager trying to tell him that whales were not animals?

  “They probably just mean to say that they are not fish,” she suggested, even though she knew it would make his eyes clench in mock pain; his fight was wearying, the enemy ever more insidious.

  It was her husband who got her the tutoring position at the high school’s library, which was better than her last job behind the counter at the coffee shop: being looked up and down by the worldly, latte-drinking citizens, scanned by their eyes for general intelligence, sex appeal, usefulness; being asked, in so many ways, what had gone wrong in her life. But even with her pupils, she was always up against a sneer, another dirty attitude, waiting for her to slip up.

  Her in-laws took the child during this time, which she was grateful for, even though it depressed her to hear them ask, every day, Are you a good boy?, and to hear them say, Watch your footing, be careful, until the anxiety was too much for him and he fell. That and they wanted to put him on a horse, which she fought outright, until they wore her down. It was an old horse, they said, a slow horse. Her husband had ridden it when he was a boy. All the boys had.

  They saddled the horse on the first warm day in April. The saddle was a western-style, large enough that mother and child could both sit without being crowded by the horn. Her mother-in-law would ride ahead on her pony and their horse would follow. There was nothing to worry about.

  The husband’s family owned acres, stretching into the forest behind the house, but it was no use riding where there weren’t any paths, so they followed the neighboring fields. As long as they stayed next to the tree line, where they would not trample the crops, it was fine. Allison felt her shoulders relax. If she closed her eyes, she could feel down through the trunk of the animal beneath her, down to the planting of each giant hoof.

  “A tractor,” said the boy, as they rounded a line of trees. He was excited to see a piece of machinery, like a familiar face in the wilderness. It was parked at the far tree line, by a woodpile. Allison could make out the form of a man, carrying out a repeated swaying motion with his body. As they approached, it was clear that the man was taking wood from the pile and throwing it into the back of a four-wheeler. Every time a log would crash into the bed, the sound would bounce off the side of the tractor, doubling up in echo.

  As they passed, the man threw in another log with a crash, causing the mother-in-law’s pony to bounce in annoyance, firing a little blast from under her tail. In response, the horse Allison was riding buckled at the knees, then danced from side to side before leaping forward at a full gallop. The reins fell from her hands, the boy shifted to the side, and at the same time she had all the time in the world to think of what to do. There was no hope of stopping. She kicked off her stirrups, hugged the boy to her chest, and let herself roll off the side of the saddle so that she would hit the ground with her back, her body a cushion for his. It was so very easy to maneuver. She felt like she could laugh.

  When she hit the ground, the air burst from her lungs. And she had a clear sense of déjà vu, accompanied by a thought: This is where it happens. It has always been right here. It was as if she and the boy had taken the fall over and over again, recycled throughout eternity.

  Her breath returned. The child struggled to free himself from her arms so he could watch the big horse thunder back to the barn, kicking up bits of horseshoe-shaped mud along the way. He was unharmed, unconcerned even. No one, for that matter, seemed alarmed. The mother-in-law, in pursuit of the runaway horse, could be heard whooping its name from the next field over. The man at the woodpile, who’d seen the fall, did not slow his swinging arms, nor did he call off his dog when it went to investigate the two figures on the ground. The dog licked the boy with a wet muzzle, pushing its insistent face back into them, no matter how Allison held out her arm.

  Her in-laws did not call it an accident. Neither did her husband. There was a lesson to be learned for the boy.

  “He’ll have to get back on sooner than later,” said the father-in-law. “We wouldn’t want him to develop a fear.”

  But that was just what Allison wanted: to arrive at the edge of a cliff and to back away, preferably on hands and knees; to see a rabid animal and to barricade the doors, call the fire department.

  They told her that she was worrying too much. The runaway horse had been found after the incident, standing square in his stall, eyes half closed. Just a big marshmallow, they said. A teddy bear. We’ll just put the boy on his back, while the horse grazes in the field. As if that were somehow safer.

  They lifted him by the armpits, red-faced and kicking, onto the back of the horse, who chewed, drooling gobs of green saliva.

  “There,” said the in-laws, with some breathlessness. “Now he can get down.”

  Allison watched the boy run back into the house; then she sat on an overturned feed tub by the pasture fence. She wondered why everything was wrong, why she couldn’t just be thankful that everyone was alive, that bombs were not falling from the sky.

  3.

  A year later, she found herself separating from her husband. There had not been an affair, or even an argument; it was just that he had left for a long weekend to attend a job training and she had not wanted him to come back. It was the anticipation of his face, drawn in fatigue and pained by private failures; the dirty swill of his eyes scanning the kitchen, the living room, looking to see wh
at had changed while he was gone, or what still had not been done.

  The training was for science teachers, kindergarten through twelfth grade. It was held somewhere in the Adirondacks, at a state park, in a small concrete building filled with beaver pelts, animal scat references, and cicada casings. The teachers slept in cabins and took cold showers in the outbuildings in their flip-flops.

  “We learned how to dissect owl pellets today,” the husband said over the phone. “You know what they are, right? Tell me what you think they are.”

  She had been about to throw a basket of laundry into the washing machine but set it down, standing over its armpit smells, the acrid shadow of his pillowcase that she’d washed twice already since he’d left. She sighed.

  “It’s all the mouse parts that the owl can’t swallow.”

  “Well,” he said, the word drawn in, a dumpling at the back of his throat. “The point is that you didn’t say owl poop, which is what half the people here said. Half. Can you believe it?”

  “No.” She gave the basket a nudge and it slid almost the entire way down the basement stairs, hissing, like skis, before it flipped and bounced to the bottom. She knew that the stain on his pillowcase wasn’t really a stain, just the place where his head ground into the pillow at night, the one place in the house that would always smell most like him and would always remind her of a thumbprint in cheese.

  He was upset to hear that she wanted to leave, but not as upset as she thought he would be. He told her to take the child and move to her hometown, only two hours away by car. He was certain that she would want to come back after some time alone. He would send her money. He would tell his parents that she was going to spend time with a sick family member, so that they would not think poorly of her. Everything would be fine. By the time they were finished discussing it, she was not entirely sure that the separation had not, in fact, been his plan all along.