When We Were Animals(21)

Then they were all there together, as though by the instinct of pack animals, all casting their lewd voices up at me, their skin spectral and yet hideously biological, bleeding, lurching cadavers regurgitated by the earth and sent wandering down the abandoned thoroughfares of our little town—and here they were, uncharacteristically still, all their unclean gestures pointed in my direction—as though to tempt me, as though to mock me for not being tempted, as though the land itself hated me for existing so dry and tidy above its fecund soil.

And that’s when Polly started to laugh, high and hysterical—a harsh, shrieking laugh that had no sense in it. And when she laughed, the others laughed, too, and they started to split off from the group—as though suddenly roused into action. First one ran off down the street, followed by two more. Then another—until the only one left was Polly herself, who, when her laughter died away, licked her lips slowly, her tongue moving between her teeth.

Then she, too, turned to run down the street in the direction the others had gone—and I was left to stare at the empty street, the ratchety shadows of tree branches against the lamplight, the only sounds the ticking of the grandfather clock down the hall, the insistent tapping of a twig against the glass of my window, and the stiff flood of my own pulse in my ears.

*



The bald white maggotry of it! The spitting, drooling indecency of it! I couldn’t sleep that night thinking about it. I can’t sleep this night remembering it. We live in an eggshell. We swim in phlegmy albumen—the world outside tap-tap-taps against our chalky home. I stand beside my marriage bed, staring down at my husband, who snorts with rough sleep. I am forever gazing downward at people who live in dream worlds. The breachers, too. They run through the night, but they run in sleep, they run undercurrents deep in memory. In the morning there is no shame because they were not themselves—or their selves were buried so deep that their waking minds are blameless for their nighttime deeds.

I don’t sleep the way others do. I fear sleep—and I fear not sleeping.

Once the pack below had gone, I sat in my room, clutching at myself in the pool of moonlight cast through my windowpanes. My head was crowded with so many things it ached with fullness—Peter’s compulsory kisses, his hot boy-breath, the pressure of his hand over my lung, like a medical examination, the hiss of voices in the street, the exposed reechy bodies of those I see in school every day, Turandot, the princess of death, my father declaring me fifteen—fifteen!—his embarrassed eyes focused on the project of scrubbing a pot in the sink.

So much shame. I live in an eggshell.

There is so much shame.

*



The next day, I saw Polly in school. She sat next to me in our biology class. She said she was exhausted and rested her head on my shoulder.

She asked me what was the matter. She said I looked worse than she did.

I told her I hadn’t slept well.

She called me poor Lumen, and there was no hissing in the way she said my name.

I didn’t like how people could be one thing at night and another thing during the day.

I asked her if she didn’t remember the night before—coming to my window, calling my name.

She said she didn’t remember a thing.

But I could tell by the way she said it that she was lying, and I told her so.

She shook her head and said in a voice filled with sadness but not apology:

“Oh, Lumen, these things—it’s like they happen to different people. Other lives.”

So we went on, scribbling away about centrioles and lysosomes and Golgi bodies and other microscopic organelles that committed invisible acts of violence and love upon each other many times every second.





Chapter 3




That was the year in my life when everyone I knew went breach, one at a time, little oily kernels of corn popping against the pot lid, until I was the only one left, a hard, stubborn pip in the bottom of the pan, burned black.

Menarche was my magic word that year. Before I went to sleep each night, I whispered the word thirteen times—once for each regular moon and once for the Blue Moon, just in case—hoping that mine would come. My father, he never asked a thing about it. He gave me a fair allowance. It was understood that I would be self-sufficient enough to purchase my own products and take care of myself when the time came. So he remained unaware that I was not bleeding like the other girls were.

At my annual checkup, I lied to the doctor about it. I told him I had my first period six months before. He asked if it was happening regularly. I told him yes, regular. Regular as could be.

Polly seemed particularly taken with her breaching. She painted herself with the new habits of womanhood—the tip of her finger on her lower lip when she was lost in thought, a languorous lean against the school lockers when she spoke with boys, fingernails colored somber browns and oxblood reds.

Peter went breach a few months after we kissed in the attic. I had wondered if I would see a dramatic change in him, but he was the same. I asked him about his breach nights, but he didn’t like to talk about them. He said, “You shouldn’t be thinking about me when I’m like that.” If anything, he became all the more proper and gentlemanly to compensate for whatever it was he did when the full moon rose. I admired his rectitude, but it made me feel lonely, too—as though he were visiting me in some foreign country where I lived all by myself, and we were both pretending that the rest of the world didn’t exist.