Five Tuesdays in Winter(9)

Hugh wanted to come with us to the animal farm. His mother told him he couldn’t, that she needed him to move some furniture for her. He pressed her on what furniture and why couldn’t Charlie do it and she wasn’t prepared for the fight. She left the room abruptly.

He leaned over to me, his smell stronger now. “My mother thinks you are trying to bedevil me.”

“Hugh, stop it,” Kay said. “Jesus. Carol, that is not what my mother thinks.” She was pouring more Cheerios for Elsie. “Bedevil,” she said and held it in for about ten seconds then broke into a fit of laughter. Hugh joined her and for a while all you could hear was the little snaps of their throats.

David’s Animal Farm wasn’t a farm. It was more like an amusement park for animal lovers. You bought tokens for the dispensers of food, which were just bubble gum machines filled with pellets. The pellets tumbled into your hands and baby goats and sheep would come running over and you put your hand out flat and felt their big black lips delicately nibble them up. Hugh squatted next to one of the machines, put Stevie on one knee and Elsie on the other, and gave them a steady flow of pellets. Soon they were surrounded by goats. Hugh started putting the pellets in his ear and on his nose and the goats mauled his face with their rubbery lips and Stevie and Elsie giggled madly until someone in a David’s T-shirt told him to stop. They also sold milk in baby bottles to feed the littlest goats. We got bottles for the kids and I sat on the ground with Elsie and we held the bottle together as a tiny black-and-white goat sucked the milk down.

Hugh tried to put his face where our goat was. “I want to be a baby goat. Feed me!”

But he was quiet on the way home. Kay tried to get him to talk but he would only answer with one or two words. I was in back with Stevie and Elsie who wanted to sing, and while we sang I heard Kay say, “You scare me when you get like this.”

We went through town, past our apartment, then out on the neck toward the Point.

“Why did they put these sorry little shitholes right here?” Hugh said. “Nice road, crappy house. Sorry about that.”

One of the shitholes up ahead was my father’s. I saw a woman in a yellow shirt crouched down in one of his flower beds. My mother. I felt a strange whirring in my chest.

Go home! I wanted to scream out the window at her. Let all his flowers die. We’d been through this so many times, the dry-out places, the circle of chairs, the specked linoleum, all the apologies and tears that meant nothing.

Before the kids’ naps, we all swam. The day had grown hot, hotter than it had been all week. Mrs. Pike joined us wearing a bathing suit. She had some blue knots in the veins, but her legs were strong, surprisingly muscular.

Hugh noticed this, too. “Those Richard Simmons classes have been paying off, Motherlode.”

I grinned, but she had no idea what he was talking about.

He looked at me. We were in the shallow end. Stevie was swimming in his wings back and forth between us. He’d said it for me, I realized. I was swinging my arms along the surface of the water and he was imitating me. I understood that I had his full attention now. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I’d never had any boy’s attention before as far as I knew.

“Carol, I just used the last of Elsie’s diapers in the bag,” Kay said. “Would you mind running up and getting a few more?”

“Sure.” I lifted myself out of the pool.

“Now where is she off to?” I heard Mrs. Pike say from her chaise as I unlatched the gate.

“Who knows, Mother.” He was speaking loudly to be sure I heard. “But she makes perfect and vivid sense to me.”

I walked quickly across the grass. On the patio I dried off as best I could before I went in and up to the second-floor bathroom with the changing table and the big bag of diapers beneath it. I shut the door to pee. My bathing suit was still wet and I had a hard time peeling it down and a harder time pulling it back up when I was done. I flushed the toilet, grabbed two diapers, and pulled the door open. Hugh was there, his hands on either side of the door.

“Just making sure you got the diapers.”

“Right here.”

We looked at each other. He lifted a strap of my bathing suit off my shoulder then set it down again. “You were a little crooked there. In your rush.”

“I should get these down there.”

“You should.” He stepped even closer, closer than I’d ever been to a boy before. “But let’s just step in here. Just for a couple of minutes.” He took my hand and led me back into the bathroom and shut the door and looped the hook on the door into its metal eye.

“Now. You,” he said. The whole thing was like one of my stories at night. It was actually happening. “You are trouble. I, like my mother, think you are trying to seduce me.” He came close to me again. “Are you?”

I didn’t know how to respond.

But he wasn’t listening for an answer. He reminded me of my dad, going in and out of focus like that. He breathed heavily. I smelled mayonnaise from the ham sandwiches Margaret had made us for lunch. He slid his finger under the strap again, this time hooking it and pulling it off my shoulder. He did not lean in to kiss me, which was how I thought these things were supposed to go. Up close his beard was sparse, too much space between reddish shafts.

He pushed me with his body against the changing table. One hand started kneading my right breast and the other went up into the suit from below. It was a tight fit. The suit was from last year. I felt his fingers wiggling around like they were looking for a dime in a small purse.