When We Were Animals(34)

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.





    II





Chapter 5




We 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.