When We Were Animals (12 page)

“Lumen,” she said from the pool of lamplight in the street, “please.”

“What do you want?” I called down in a quiet voice. The night below was utterly silent.

“Lumen, I miss you,” she said. “Remember how we used to be?”

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s Christmas Eve, Lumen. I’m hungry. My mother used to make me pancakes in the shape of elephants on Christmas morning.”

Her mind was gone wild, her panicked eyes darting from one thing to another.

“Are you all right?” I said.

She sat down in the snowbank and pulled her knees to her chest, rocking back and forth slightly. She mumbled something I couldn’t hear.

“What? What did you say?”

“My turn,” she said. “They said it was my turn. Sometimes you bleed others, and sometimes you get bled. That’s the way. It hurts, Lumen. Apples and cheese—I used to eat them when they were cut up for me. I used to be pretty.”

“Who did it? Who hurt you?”

She looked up at me, confused.

“They did,” she said simply. “All of them.”

It made me feel sick to see her that way, but also angry. I found myself hating her a little also, despising her for being so frail outside my window. She made life—our lives—seem meager.

I could feel the spite bubbling up in me. It felt strange but good.

And then it was gone as quickly as it came, because below me Polly seemed to hear something that startled her. She stood suddenly and looked around.

“What is it?” I called down to her.

But she was no longer listening to me. Tensed like a threatened cat, she ran a few steps one way, stopped, listened some more, then ran a few steps in another direction and stopped again.

“What’s happening?” I said. “Polly.”

Her breath was coming faster now, and she ran toward the sidewalk and the street beyond.

“Polly, wait!”

I hurried out of my room and down the stairs as quietly as I could, so as not to wake my father, down the hall.

I opened the front door, and it occurred to me again that the blast of bitter night air was a relief. I was overheated, my heart going like crazy, my pulse driving in my ears, and the air seemed blissful and calming. I wondered, in some still part of my frenzied brain, if this was the same beatified air Jesus was born into so many years ago in his little desert manger.

Polly was no longer in the front yard. Now she stood in the middle of the street, her legs bent in a half crouch, poised to run for her life at any moment. But the street was empty. I leaned out the door and looked, and I saw nothing. She was spooked.

I felt bad about the little flare of intolerance I’d had for her just a few minutes before. She was damaged. She needed help.

“Polly,” I called in a whisper, which was as loud as I dared.

She seemed to hear me, because she turned her gaze in my direction for one little moment—a crisis moment of longing and sorrow, regret and fear—then she turned again and ran as fast she could down the street.

“Polly,” I called again, louder this time, but she didn’t come back.

I took a few steps outside, and then a few more. It’s a funny thing, sometimes, what we find ourselves doing. I observed myself as I walked, as though watching the actions of a character on television.
Oh, isn’t it interesting what she’s doing. I wouldn’t have expected that of her.
When I came again into my own mind, I realized I was standing in the middle of the snowy street in my pajamas and my bare feet.

I couldn’t see Polly anywhere. It was just me under the hazy, big Lake Moon. I turned this way and that, and the only sound I heard was that of my bare feet shifting against the icy surface of the road.

I wondered about that—my feet—and why they didn’t seem to sting from the frozen pavement. I looked back at my house, and it seemed smaller from the outside than it was from the inside—like a puzzle that strained your mind to think about.

In the sudden quiet of the empty night, I thought what a curiously wide place the world was—that you could stand in your nightclothes in the middle of a street and be quite, quite alone.

And then something else happened. It started to snow. They were gentle, quiet little flakes, like the dust or pollen of another season. I raised my arm and saw the snow collect on my skin, glistening along all the fine, light hairs.

You find glory in the strangest places.

I guess I wasn’t entirely surprised by what happened next. I guess I wasn’t. My body told me I had already known.

They came out from behind the trees in the woods across the street from my house. They had been watching me, you see. They had been there the whole time—that was what had Polly so spooked. They came out slowly, their pale bodies steaming in the cold, their skin taut and waxy against the wooded void.

I did not retreat to the house. I watched myself not retreating to the house. It was a wonder.

They came and stood in a circle around me. Rose Lincoln was there, and she approached and stood so close that I could feel her steaming breath on my cheeks.

“You’re lost,” she said.

The others smiled. They seemed to have difficulty standing still for long. It was all girls. It was the first time I realized they traveled like that sometimes, separated by sex. It was a coven, a brace, a klatch. Marina Donald stood right beyond Rose, and I could see her fists clenching and releasing, eager for something to throttle. Sue Foxworth was there, too, looking distracted. She scratched at herself and gazed off into the woods as though she were already running through them in her mind.

Rose Lincoln took one long, languorous look up and down my body.

“Is this what you wear to bed?” she asked. My pajamas had pink and purple hearts on them. They were cotton. The bottoms had an elastic waistband. The top had buttons down the front. She reached out with her painted nails and undid the top button, then she undid the next.

She seemed to lose interest before the third. She sighed heavily and looked at the sky, the snow falling lightly through the air.

“You keep yourself separate,” she said. “Away from us. How come? Is it because you think you’re better?”

I tried to respond. I licked the coldness from my lips.

“I don’t…”

But what did I mean to say? That I didn’t keep myself separate? That I didn’t know why I kept myself separate? Her accusation felt strange to me, because I had never seen myself as having any agency in my exclusion from the crowd. I was the one excluded by them—I was the one kept at a distance by everybody else.

Wasn’t I?

“That’s right, you don’t,” she replied. “You don’t. I know you don’t. All you are is what you don’t.”

Suddenly she reached out with both hands and ripped my pajama top open. The remaining buttons popped and clattered to the icy pavement.

The others in the group closed in more tightly around me. Marina and Idabel McCarron were on either side of me. Their laughter was grotesque as they took off my pajama top and let it fall to the ground. Then I was bare-chested before them. Their nudity was nothing—they seemed not to feel it. How could they not feel it? My chest had never been exposed to anyone before. I was aware of it—my own brute nakedness—and my awareness was an excruciating ache that went all up and down my spine.

“She’s so small,” Sue Foxworth said. The fact that her voice was not accusatory did not comfort me.

Rose Lincoln got closer. She paid no mind to my bare chest. I tried to back away from her, but the girls behind me did not allow escape.

“It’s Christmas,” Rose said, her voice almost a whisper in my ear. “Don’t you want to tear something down?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. My voice was tiny and unconvincing. I tried it again, stronger. “No.”

“No what?” Rose said. “What are you saying no to? Do you have any idea? Or is it just that saying no makes you feel safe?”

I wasn’t hearing her. I shook my head and said it over and over:

“No, no, no, no.”

I came unfrozen and brought my arms up to cover my chest. Then I turned away from Rose and began to push my way through the bodies, feeling against my bare torso their bony protrusions, their ungainly knobs of skin and cartilage, their joints, their breath and fingers. But I made myself into a dart, and I kept pushing through.

They laughed. I could hear them laugh, but only from a great distance.

Behind me, Rose said, “What are you feeling right now, girl? What’s your body telling you? Huh? What are you feeling in your guts? In your lungs? In your muscles? Inside those pink pajama pants?”

That’s when I broke through. The bodies fell aside, and I stumbled with the sudden lack of restriction. I fell to the asphalt, coming down hard on my hands. Then I was up again, and I was running. But not toward the house. The house was behind me. I was putting everything behind me. I ran down the street in the opposite direction from the one Polly had run. I could hear their voices laughing as I ran. I wanted them behind me, too.

Except they were following. They ran, too, hooting and hollering as they went. They snarled and called out in obscene ways. I thought I could hear Idabel’s high-pitched laugh, hysterical, like a mongrel in the gullies. Some of them barked like dogs and gnashed their teeth together as though they would eat me alive if they caught me.

The snow came harder, but I cared nothing about freezing. It felt good, those pinhead flakes against my bare skin.
It is snowing on my body,
I thought in some calm part of my brain.
Snowflakes are melting against my bare skin. Such a strange feeling—so unlikely!

I ran. I ran past all the houses with their bright, cheerful Christmas decorations, their strings of lights, their plastic Santa Clauses on the front lawns. I ran past the crèche in the Sondersons’ yard, the little baby Jesus nested in hay, overlooked by Mary and Joseph and the three wise men with their gifts from far away.

It made me think of the North Star. I would follow it. I would run to it—I would capture it in my hands. Where might it lead me? Were there new messiahs to be found? Or would it just lead me into the wide open—the deserts of wind and black? And I thought that would be all right, too. Running through space like that, feeling as though your legs would never stop working.

They were still behind me, though more distant now.

At the place where the road turned ahead, there was a trail I knew of. It went up over a hill and down into a little valley and then deeper into the woods. It would take me away. To where I didn’t know. I didn’t care. Away was the only place I wanted to be, and I didn’t care what it looked like.

I launched my body up over the embankment and onto the trail, and I kept running. The snow felt like a static charge on my skin—the branches of the trees tore at me—the frozen pebbles of the trail dug into my bare feet. It was nothing. This was nothing. I could breathe right for the first time.

Lumen. There was Lumen, and there were the places people did not go. And Lumen would go to those places. She would leap over fences and crawl through mud. She would climb up on rooftops and call crazy with every little branch of her lungs.

It was a holy night. I ran. My father slept soundly in his bed, somewhere far behind me, and I ran. Elsewhere in the world masses were being performed and stock was being taken of the glories and regrets of life—and it was nothing to me, because I ran.

My sore legs ached with the same splendid vigor. I relished the soreness, as I did my burning lungs.

I was naked in the woods. It was a beautiful outrage.

I had started running in order to escape Rose Lincoln and her pack. Then I was running to put things decidedly behind me, to seek lovely new emptinesses. Then I ran to outpace the nagging of my ticklish brain. Then I just ran.

W
e live on a cul-de-sac. Our house is at the very end. During the days, when my husband is at work, the cul-de-sac becomes a playground. The mothers sit in front of their houses on lawn chairs and watch their children playing in the dead-end street.

Lola King lives next door. She is from New York and has very little patience for the provinciality of our burg. She has befriended me. She brings her lawn chair to my yard and sets it up next to mine. She also brings a pitcher of frozen daiquiris and two frosted glasses and even paper umbrellas to stick in the top. Her husband got into some sort of trouble back East.

“Cocktail time, darling,” she says, a cigarette dangling between her lips.

The other neighbors don’t approve. Particularly Marcie K
lapp
er-
W
itt, who lives three doors down from me. She wears sunglasses so we cannot see that her judgmental gaze is always upon us. Lola raises her glass to toast her.

I smile and am delighted.

The children run in circles. They draw on the pavement with oversize chalk. They shoot at one another with water guns that look like colorful missile launchers. My son is among them, and to watch him is to acknowledge how impossible it is to stay one thing for your entire life. Much of the time I stare at the clouds.

My son is four years old. He will not run wild and naked in the streets when he becomes a teenager. He will not hack away at the old, tired physical world just to watch it bleed. He will drink to excess with his friends. At most, he will urp up his dinner, drunkenly, on front lawns and then escape in shame. He will fumble awkwardly at the apparatus of girls’ bodies. He will be stubborn and recalcitrant. He will slam doors. But he will not run savage through the night, coyote-like, enamored of his own power to sunder and tear. He will not drink hot blood. This town is a very safe town. We have a neighborhood watch, a community league, and I am on the PTA.

But he does bite, my son. He has a problem with biting. According to the other mothers, he is too old to be biting.

Marcie Klapper-Witt brings my son before me one day. She has his arm clasped in her fist, up by his shoulder. His elbow is bleeding, and he is crying.

“Mrs. Borden, your son bit my daughter,” says Marcie Klapper-Witt.

“He did?”

“Yes, he did.”

“But his elbow is bleeding.”

“Fancy pushed him down after he bit her. To get him off her.”

Fancy Klapper-Witt wears a tiara everywhere she goes. Her favorite thing is posing for pictures.

“Did he hurt her?” I ask.

“He
bit
her. He’s really too old to be biting. You should look into that, Mrs. Borden. They won’t let him into kindergarten.”

“I’m very sorry, Marcie,” I say. “It won’t happen again.”

Lola smiles up at the other woman.

“Cocktail, Marcie? It takes the edge off.”

But Marcie Klapper-Witt marches off without saying another word.

I lean forward to talk to my son.

“Marcus, did you bite Fancy Klapper-Witt?” I ask.

He nods.

“Do you hate her?”

He shakes his head.

“Do you like her?”

He nods.

“Do you like her so much you want to eat her all up, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood?”

He nods.

“That’s what I thought.”

He sniffles. The tears have made streaks through the layer of dust and grime on his face. The blood from his elbow is smeared across his forearm.

“Does your elbow hurt?”

He nods.

“Here,” I say. “Look.”

I use my thumb to take some of the blood from his elbow and paint it in two horizontal bands across his cheeks.

“Now you’re a warrior, Marcus,” I say. “Do you want to see?”

He nods.

The tray Lola brought the daiquiris on has a mirrored bottom, so I hold it up for him to see.

He is pleased by this and goes off to play again.

Lola turns to me.

“No Neosporin?” she asks.

“What?”

“For his elbow. Aren’t you worried about infection?”

I shrug.

“Bodies can withstand a lot of damage,” I say. “If you lean on them, you’re surprised how much they can take.”

Lola laughs and clinks my glass with her own.

“Darling,” she says, “you are a shooting star among drudges. You’re just so
ethereal
.”

I can feel my mouth grinning, though I am embarrassed.

“Well,” she goes on, “that little Fancy bitch had it coming. I guarantee it won’t be the last time in her life that some man tries to take a bite out of her.”

I stare at the clouds and listen to the cicadas make their repetitious song, and when the sun starts to go down, all the mothers gather their children into their houses. Lights come on in windows all up and down the street.

Lola calls her own children to her.

“Come on, brats! Assemble!”

Then she, too, goes indoors.

I’m the only one left outside when my husband comes home. He parks in the driveway and climbs out of the car. Our son is asleep on the lawn, curled up on the grass like a house cat.

“What are you doing out here?” Jack says.

“Enjoying the evening,” I say.

“Aren’t you cold?”

“Not to speak of.”

“Do you want to come in now?”

“I suppose so.”

But the answer to his question is really much more complicated than that.

They were wrong,
all of them. You do remember some things—fragments that gnaw at you—the sense of becoming another animal altogether. That Christmas Eve, I remember myself in the woods—a delicious kind of lostness that was dizzying and joyful. I was alone, I believe, the entire night. I felt large, bigger than the trees that towered over me. Wider than the sky at its widest. I was the center of all I observed. There was nowhere to get back to because I carried all of myself with me. I was my own home.

But I did return to the house. Somehow I did. I woke in the backyard at dawn. I was naked, curled at the base of a rhododendron shrub, the powdery snow melted into a fragile, concave nest around my body.

I was cold. I was starting to feel the cold again.

I crouched there, trying to assess the situation. My mind was still muddled, and part of me still felt bold and unapologetic. But that part was quickly diminishing.

It was still very early. No one was out. I sprinted across the lawn, around the side of the house, and in through the front door, which was still unlocked. Inside I stopped and pressed myself against the wall, breathing hard. I listened, but the house was still quiet. The heat ticked on, and the wall vents rattled faintly. My father had not woken up. I crept up the stairs to my room, where I got a robe out of my closet and wrapped it around my body.

Lying on the bed, I tried to sleep, but my muscles ached and my head was spinning—and I didn’t want to sleep, because I felt the opposite of tired.

So I took a bath in the bathroom down the hall. I made the water as hot as I could bear it, thinking to sweat out whatever was still in me from the night before. I was meticulous. I pried out all the dirt that had collected under the nails of my toes and fingers, I scrubbed the soles of my feet raw trying to get rid of all the yellowed mud caked in the creases. I picked pine needles from my hair, and they floated like miniature felled trees on the meniscus of the tub water. Sap knotted my hair in places, and I had to wash it three times in scalding water before I could dig out the coagulants with a plastic comb.

There was a knock on the door.

“Merry Christmas, little Lumen!”

“Merry Christmas,” I called back.

“You’re up bright and early. Ready for presents?”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

I stood, dripping dry on the bathmat. Wiping the mirror clear of condensation, I looked at the girl I saw there. Judging by her looks, her scrubbed pinkness, you would never know where she’d been.

Back in my bedroom, I dressed in red and green, as was the tradition with my father and me. I avoided looking at the windows, because I did not want to think about the snow and the trees and the clear sky of morning. I wanted to be inside and think inside thoughts. I wanted to feel the comfort of walls around me—and to speak the delicate languages of family and society and tradition.

Downstairs, my father and I took turns opening presents. He was eager to see me excited, and so I was excited for him.

He took many pictures of me, but I vowed never to look at them.

It hurt too much to think how completely the girl in those pictures was not me.

The last gift
I gave him was the map I had drawn for him.

Until this very moment, I have never told anyone about it—not even my husband. Sometimes you hide away a memory because it is so precious that you don’t want to dilute it with the attempt to recount it. Sometimes you hide a memory because the disclosure of it would reveal you to be a different person from the one others believe you to be. And sometimes you may hide a memory because it inhabits you in some physical way, because its meaning is inexpressible and dangerous. That is this memory—evidence, baleful proof—just the recollection of him opening my gift.

He unrolls it on the ground, kneeling before it like a supplicant, head bowed, prayerful and quiet.

What he says is, “You did this,” and his voice is full of wonder and admiration. He does not bother to thank me. It is a gift beyond thank yous.

Using his fingertip, he travels from one place to another on the map, and at each location he pauses to examine the detail. It is as though he lives, for the moment, in that map, as though he and I are travelers on a different plane.

That plane is a place where you can redraw yourself from scratch.

The pen lines are so perfect, so straight and lovely—who would ever want to cross them?

I had two
visitors later that day. The first was Polly. We stood, shivering, on the sidewalk, because I did not want her in my house. The space inside those walls was suddenly precious to me.

“Are you having a good Christmas?” she asked.

“I guess.” I shrugged.

“Did you get good presents?”

Her face was still splotchy with bruises.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Oh, this’ll go away. It happens.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s walk.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. It’s Christmas.”

“It’s cold.”

“It’s not so cold.”

In truth it was very cold indeed, but I liked the punishing feeling of the icy wind. So we walked slowly down the middle of the street. There were very few cars out, but when one came we stepped aside and let it pass.

We said nothing for a few minutes. She seemed to be waiting for me to confess something, but I didn’t feel like confessing.

Eventually, she said, “So?”

“So what?”

“So last night.”

“Yeah.”

“It finally happened.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Everyone was wondering if it was ever going to happen for you. Are you relieved?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember any of it?”

“Not much.”

“We tried to look for you, you know. But we couldn’t find you. You’re fast. I never knew how fast you were.”

I said nothing. The swiftness with which I had run naked through the woods was an unfathomable topic for me.

Polly, observing my reluctance to speak, stopped in the road and turned to face me. In some dim part of my mind, I found myself enthralled by the abrasions on her skin. I could wander free on the landscape of her injuries.

“Hey,” she said. “Are you all right? I know it’s a big deal. It’s scary. I remember my first time.”

I remembered her first time as well. She hadn’t seemed scared at all. She had seemed proud and gloating.

“Do you remember,” she said, smiling, “how you used to say it wouldn’t happen to you? I mean, you were so convinced that you were different. I bet that seems silly now, doesn’t it? All that worry for nothing.”

“I guess so.”

“You get used to it. You do. You begin to look forward to it, even. Look, we’re young. We’re only going to be young for a little while. Then we’ll be old forever. We might as well enjoy it, you know?”

A car came, and we stepped out of the road into a snowbank.

“You know,” she said, “I kind of envy you that you’re just starting. But it’ll be better now. We’ll be together. It’s like you moved away for a while—but you’re back now.”

The thought that I had traveled so far by accident the night before made me sick.

“It feels wrong, Polly,” I said. “It just feels wrong.”

“But it’s not,” she said. She took my shoulders and gave her head a maternal shake to reassure me. “It’s not. Don’t you see? It’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s only beautiful. That’s the only thing it is.”

She shivered, then put her arms around me.

“Come on,” she said. “Hug me. It’s cold. Let’s just forget about everything up till now. The past is dead and buried. That’s what the breach is all about, right?”

I put my arms around her. Beneath the perfume of her shampoo, her hair smelled like something else—the fecund tang of earth and rot.

My second visitor
of the day was Blackhat Roy. I saw him coming from down the street, and I rushed to meet him outside so my father wouldn’t see him at the door.

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Heard the news,” he said. “You’re out. You’re fair game.”

“I’m not out.” In the daylight you scoff at the shadows you cowered from the night before. I had my mother’s blood. I knew I was different. I had faith that I was still not like the others. “I was helping my friend, and I was attacked. I ran.”

“Spent all night running away?”

“Go away.”

He sniffled from the cold, wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“I saw you,” he said.

“When?”

“Last night. In the woods.”

“You didn’t. I remember. I ran away from everybody.”

“Fuck everybody. It was just me. And you saw me, too.”