When We Were Animals(17)

The way he was looking at me made me wonder if he was talking about something other than God. Or if maybe God and the way he looked at me with those voracious boy-eyes were related. I wanted more of it. His boy-eyes—his godliness, which I felt deep down, like a surge.

Then he leaned back, as though something had clicked shut all at once.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m just feeling philosophical today. If you can help me pass this geometry test, I’ll give you a present.”

“What present?” I pretended to shuffle through the pages of my textbook, because I didn’t want to show him that I was out of breath.

“I don’t know—I’ll build you a house on the lake.”

“On the east shore, so I can watch the sunsets?”

“Sure. And another on the west shore so you can watch the sunrises. And a canoe to go back and forth between them.”

“Just a canoe?”

“Come on, I already built you two houses.”

“Fair enough.”

*



In school, Rose Lincoln leaned over to my desk during history.

“I heard you’re tutoring Peter,” she said.

I said nothing.

“Well, is it true?”

I shrugged. “We just study—” I had meant to say, “We just study together,” but the together suddenly sounded, in one way or another, too complicit and damning.

“It’s okay,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. It’s not like he’s interested in you or anything. You know Peter—he’s a flirt. The other day he told me I looked nice in yellow. He let Angela Weston give him a back rub in the cafeteria. Carrie Bryce said he brushed her butt when she walked by him in the hall. And you know it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, I look so like hell in yellow. It’s just the way he is. The reason he likes me is that we understand each other.”

I wrote Rose Lincoln’s name in my notebook and spent the rest of the period crosshatching over it until it was an ugly blotch of shiny ink that bled through to the other side of the paper—and I thought that would do for a curse.

*



But I feared that what Rose Lincoln said about Peter and me was true—that I was just a functionary to him.

It was a few weeks later. We were in my bedroom, and he was looking at a framed picture on the wall. The picture was of my mother and father when they were very young and just married. Peter had been spending the afternoons with me in my bedroom, and we had played many games of Parcheesi between studying sessions—but he had made no move to kiss me.

“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.