When We Were Animals (17 page)

The nighttime shame of our town. It’s what curtains were made for.

Now, in the town square, I reflected on the man’s shame.

I decided I wanted to be on top of the gazebo, the way Peter had been when he had looked so kingly during the last moon, so I stalked around it until I found a way up by overturning a trash can and climbing onto the sloped roof. I scraped my belly to pieces hoisting myself over the lip of the roof, but once on top, I lay back and luxuriated in the sting of my cuts.

It was quiet there in the dead center of things. So quiet. I could hear the insistent insect buzz of the street lamps. I could hear the creak of the hanging sign suspended over the barbershop, swinging back and forth in the breeze. I could hear the low mechanical click of the stoplights as they turned from green to amber to red—signs without meaning, because there was no one around to be directed by them.

It was a time to take stock of things, but I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to put it all in order, to line it all up. I wanted to go through the list of the people I knew and assess where they fit in my life. I wanted to draw a map and put them all on it. But my thoughts were all bloody or obscene, and it made me want to cry. And I did cry. My mind did weep while my body raged—and there must be something of the mind in the gutters of the body, because I could feel the tickle of real tears creeping down the sides of my cheeks and into the folds of my ears.

I must have slept, because when I opened my eyes again I could hear someone in the gazebo beneath me. It was still deep night, still no one in any direction I could see. I crawled to the sloping edge of the gazebo roof and lowered my head to look.

Hondy Pilt was there, staring right at me, as though he knew that’s where I would appear from.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said. He never said much, Hondy, but when he did his words were serene and wise-sounding. Even a simple hello.

I swung myself down off the roof of the gazebo, and I sat with my knees to my chest on the bench across from Hondy. For a full minute, we stalked each other with our eyes, as was our habit in those days. Because we were so keenly aware that any human interaction could end in passion or violence, it was important to determine, with muscles rigid and teeth clenched, the direction of the exchange as much as possible before you began it.

He sat pharaohlike, with his palms flat on his thighs, almost completely hairless except for the top of his head and the curls around his lumpy genitals. His skin looked pink in the light of the street lamps, ruddy and young. His stomach bulged a little, and there was a roundness to all the parts of his body. He was a large boy—but my instincts told me I didn’t have to defend myself from him, so I relaxed and breathed more deeply.

“How come you’re not with the others?” I said.

He smiled up at the serene stars.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “How long’ve you been breaching? It’s got to be over a year now, right? Are you ever going to stop?”

The street lamps buzzed their electrical buzz.

“Yeah,” I said, as though he’d actually answered. I glanced around to make sure no one else was in the vicinity. “You want to know something? I’m not a real breacher. At least, I’m not the same kind as other people.”

I watched for his response. Perhaps he would look at me with shock and horror. Perhaps he would march off to unite with the common heart that was not mine.

His gaze came down from the sky long enough to look me in the face.

But the pale gentleness of his eyes did not change. My secret shame, the starry sky, a leaf of newspaper blown down the middle of an empty street—to Hondy they were all of a kind. The progress of the slowly turning earth. We turned with it.

And I suddenly wanted to tell him more, to tell him everything.

“My mother, she never breached. That’s how I know. See, I have her blood. So I can’t be a real breacher. I’m something else. Something worse, probably—because for me it’s not about nature. You understand? It’s not natural for me. Even this—being here like this—it’s a lie. And my father, he doesn’t know. He’s been alone for a long time. He misses my mother more than anything. Sometimes that’s all he is, the leftovers of my mom. And sometimes I do things with Peter Meechum, who used to be called Petey, and I don’t know why he wants to be around me, really, he could have any girl—but there was also Roy Ruggle, who everyone calls Blackhat, and he’s gone now, and everyone’s happy about it except me, and I don’t know why I feel bad for him but I do, and Rose Lincoln used to be called Rosebush, and everybody seems to have a new name except me—I’m just Lumen, which means light, but I think there’s something gone rotten in me, Hondy—”

I stopped short. It seemed that the night might crack apart.

“I’ve gone rotten somehow,” I said. “I used to be good. I used to know things. People used to give me prizes for what I knew. Now I don’t know anything, and I don’t even know what good looks like anymore. Remember we used to send valentines to everyone in class? They had hearts and flowers and shy girls in dresses and boys with straw hats? That’s what good looks like to me now. That’s how far away. And I don’t know what it means, except that I’m rotting out from the inside.”

Hondy Pilt shook his head.

“No,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“No.”

“What do you mean?”

I went over and sat next to him. He looked at the stars.

I wanted to smell his skin, and I did, putting my nose at the place where his arm met his torso. He smelled of powder.

Then my lips were on his chest, but it wasn’t like kissing—instead, they were parted slightly, and I brushed them over his skin as though I were reading some truth in the textures of him.

He looked at the stars.

He was so much bigger than I was. I leaned into him, pressed my little body against his. From my memory, a phrase throbbed into my brain like a heartbeat—“more than the sum of our parts”—and I liked it. I wondered what was made in the meeting of our skins. Something large but invisible.

I’d confessed to him.

I reached over and put my hand on his genitals. They were soft and warm. They felt strangely loose, unincorporated.

I wanted to stay there all night, but Hondy Pilt pushed me away. With one hand on my shoulder, he pushed me back as though I were a blanket somebody had thrown over him on a hot night. There was no malice in the act, the same way you don’t blame a door for being open or being shut.

Was I an open door or a shut one?

He stood, his attention suddenly caught by something I couldn’t see down the street. Some vagary of the night, I supposed—there were so many things I did not see.

My father got
the map I made him for Christmas framed and hung it in his office, where he could look at it all the time.

Peter Meechum continued making love to me in the afternoons. He said it made him very happy. One time he wondered aloud why I only had sex with him between full moons—which made me the exact opposite of some other girls. He wasn’t really asking, so I didn’t feel the need to answer him.

And it turned out that January’s Brittle Moon was the last breach for Polly. When February’s moon came, Polly remained indoors.

“Only eleven months,” she said. “I was cheated.”

“Maybe you just mature faster than other people,” I said to reassure her.

“You’re right. Maybe that’s what it is.”

She smiled, satisfied. She seemed to take it to heart. Suddenly she had no more patience for childish things. Her first order of business was to redecorate her bedroom. She told her parents she could no longer tolerate the pinks and purples. What she required, she told them, were what she called “tasteful blues and creams.”

The weeks went on. I hid my full-moon activities from my father, but I think he must have known. Once, there was a long scratch on my neck. He didn’t ask about it, but I know he saw.

We all have our fictions. It’s not for other people to expose them. And yet I wondered more and more about my mother. I wondered what fictions she might have had. What did she do indoors during the full moons? How did she occupy herself? What stories did she tell herself, all on her own, while the whole town went crazy around her?

In February everything
was crystals. There were icicles on every eave. I, too, was a brittle stalactite. It seemed that I might not ever grow up, that I might not ever be fully alive. Wandering the mine shafts, I had buried myself. I had shrouded myself with death. I was a premature ghost.

That was also the month that Mr. Hunter asked me to tell him stories.

It was in the middle of a
Hamlet
test. The only sounds in the classroom were the hiss of pens on paper and the occasional creak of a desk as we repositioned ourselves in our seats. I was in the middle of an essay question on the significance of Ophelia’s suicide when he startled me by leaning down and whispering in my ear.

“I’m pressing you into service,” he said. “Meet me in the auditorium after school.”

I couldn’t tell you how I finished that test, my stomach tight, my face gone flush, my pen clutched too tight in my fist. I had always been wary of the man, and I was not the kind of girl who received whispered invitations. But I went because I did what I was told to do. Agreeableness was my secret pride.

The auditorium looked empty when I got there, with a high, echoey stillness like that of a church between services. I let the door close softly behind me and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dimness.

“Lumen,” he said, and I could make out his form sitting on the edge of the stage. “Come in.”

“It’s dark.”

“I don’t want to be bothered.”

I walked slowly down the sloping aisle between the empty seats, which always made me feel like a bride, and when I got to the stage he told me to sit, so I sat on the stage near him, but I kept my distance, my legs dangling over the edge, as his were.

He smiled a strange smile at me, and I didn’t know what it meant, and I waited for what would happen next.

“I want you to tell me about it,” he said. “The breaching.”

“Tell you?”

“Tell me what it’s like. You know I didn’t grow up here. I didn’t experience it myself.”

It felt like such a personal thing for him to be asking in such a direct and unapologetic fashion.

“I want to know,” he said simply.

“Why me?”

“Lots of reasons,” he said. “The main one is that you want to tell it.”

I didn’t enjoy being fathomed like that.

“I better go,” I said.

I stood and started to walk back up the aisle. I wondered what he would do. If he would demand for me to halt or seize me from behind. But he did nothing at all.

I was halfway up the aisle when I stopped and turned and saw him still sitting, unmoved, with a bemused look on his face.

“Where are you from?” I asked from my safe distance.

“East Saint Louis.”

“What’s Missouri like?”

“Actually, it’s Illinois—it’s across the river from Saint Louis.”

“Oh.”

“The mighty Mississippi. It runs brown with mud.”

“Oh.” Each word I said sounded smaller in the dark.

“Normal.”

“What?”

“You asked what Missouri’s like. It’s normal. Illinois, normal. Saint Louis, normal. East Saint Louis, normal. Partridge Street, with its kids riding bicycles before dinnertime—normal. So much normal you could choke on it.”

There was a roughness to him always, as though he were constantly chewing on some bitter root. He was someone who seemed to have little tolerance for things. His demeanor suggested I could stay or go as I pleased. So I stayed.

“It’s like a highway,” I said, feeling for a moment like I was standing alone, speaking to myself. “The breaching. It’s like a long highway in the desert, and you can’t see the end of it, and you can see everything for miles in every direction, and there’s nothing but you—and maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe that’s a bad thing, or maybe it’s both. But it’s just you and your guts in the middle of a desert.”

I waited for him to respond, but he said nothing at all. He just leaned forward a little and waited for me to continue.

And that’s how it started between him and me.

Sometimes I tell
myself stories still. During the days, when my husband is at work and my son is at school, I walk through the house tidying things and listening to the tales my voice has to tell.

“There once was a man, just like you and me,” I say, “except that at night he liked to remove his head from his shoulders and keep it in a wicker basket beside his bed.”

I straighten the pile of coasters on the coffee table and am gone out far in my imagination.

Lola King, who has let herself in by my kitchen door, startles me.

“Who are you talking to, sweetie?”

“Oh,” I say. “No one. Just doing some cleaning.”

“You’re losing it,” she says. “Let’s us girls have a couple Bloody Marys and go put dirty magazines in Marcie’s mailbox. What do you say?”

Lola is lawless. She sees me as the innocent she delights in corrupting. I wonder what she might look like running wild in the woods, naked under the moonlight, tearing at life with her painted fingernails.

She tells me stories about her life before she came here—in New Jersey, where her husband was acquainted with some bad men who sometimes cleaned their guns at her kitchen table. She means to appall me, so I widen my eyes and shake my head slowly back and forth.

We all have stories to tell. Our demons are sunk deep under the skin, and maybe we use stories to exorcise them—or at least know them truly.

Beggar’s Moon came
at the end of February. I went into town—but different parts of the town, the places where the others never went. I ran until I was out of breath, my burning lungs heaving for air while I stood naked and alone in the middle of an empty supermarket parking lot. There was an unearthly luminescent glow coming from the supermarket, and I walked toward it until I stood on the sidewalk in front of the massive plate-glass windows. Next to me was a recycling bin filled with empty beer bottles. It gave off an acrid smell that I found comforting. The rear of the store was dark, but they had left the overhead lights on in the front. I pressed my palms to the glass, wanting to feel the nighttime haunt of a place that the daylight had seen all populous.