When We Were Animals(5)

“Wait, Jack. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you laugh?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was nervous. What if someone sees us?”

“Let them,” he says.

So I reach up under my skirt, hook my underpants with my thumbs, and pull them down. He unzips his pants, and I straddle him. While he quakes and gurgles beneath me, I gaze out the windows of the car. The road where we’ve stopped is indistinguishable from any of the others in the area—a quiet residential neighborhood with sidewalks and shade trees. In truth there is no danger of being caught. The residents of this area are good and decent people. Their lives, after midnight, consist of sleep or the late, late show on television, played at a low volume so as not to wake the children. The streets are empty. The mild breeze dapples the sidewalk with the shadows of leaves in lamplight. But there is no one out there in the dark. No one.

Jack moves under me. I hold his face to my bosom, I kiss the top of his head. In a few moments, he is finished.

He wants to kiss me passionately to show that his love for me doesn’t end when his sexual urgency does. He’s a nice kisser after all these years.

He rolls down the windows for the rest of the drive home.

On the way, he points to the sky.

“Look,” he says. “A full moon.”

“I know,” I say without raising my eyes. The car drives along in the quiet, fragile night.

“What do you call that one? Octopus Moon? Spanky Moon?”

“Blowfly Moon.”

“Blowfly. That’s my favorite one!”

I’ve told him very little about my childhood or the town where I grew up. What little I have told him—for example, that we had names for the different full moons—he finds quaint and charming. He pictures me as a prairie girl, maybe. Or a Mennonite.

His stuff is leaking out of me, a funny, unbothersome tickle between my legs.

In another part of the country, in the small town where I grew up, at this moment, there are packs of young people stalking the streets, naked, their pale flesh glowing, their breath coming fast and angry, their limbs filled with the quivering of strength and movement. Many, tomorrow, will wake torn and bruised.

When we get home, Jack apologizes to the babysitter and gives her extra money. Then he drives her home. While he is gone, I go upstairs, where my son is sleeping. He wakes when I come into the room, reaching toward me, wanting to be picked up.

I look down at him for a few moments, all that wee human greed and desire. I refuse to pick him up, but eventually I do kneel beside his bed and recite to him a rhyme I learned when I was a little girl.

Brittle Moon,

Beggar’s Moon,

Worm Moon, more…



Pheasant Moon,

Cordial Moon,

Lacuna’s bore…



Hod Moon,

Blowfly Moon,

Pulse Moon—roar!



Prayer Moon,

Hollow Moon,

Lake Moon’s shore.



First you kiss your mommy,

Then you count your fours.

Till you’re grown and briny,

Better stay indoors.



He waits eagerly for his favorite part—the part about roaring—and then he roars. He wants to do it again, but I tell him no. I turn on his night-light, which the babysitter has forgotten. Then I leave the room and shut the door behind me. In the upstairs hall, there is only the sound of the grandfather clock ticktocking away.

I have become a mother. I have become a wife.

Soon Jack returns home. We prepare for bed without much talk. I check the locks on the doors downstairs. It is a thing he always asks when I slide into bed next to him. “Did you remember to check the locks?” he asks. And I say, “Yes,” and I can see by the expression on his face that he feels safe.

It starts to rain outside, the droplets of water sounding little tin bells in the gutters. Jack begins to snore next to me. The grandfather clock chimes one o’clock.

And what if I were to forget a lock one night? What if I were to leave a door wide open, casting angled shadows in the moonlight? Nothing would happen. In our neighborhood, there is no one out there in the rain, not a single person squalling under the stormy black.

All our skins are dry.

*



I wonder about it sometimes—what kind of girl I might have been, what kind of woman I would be now, if I had grown up somewhere else. California, for instance, where teenagers have barbecues on the beach and bury bottles of beer halfway in the sand to keep them upright. Or New York, where they kiss in the backseats of taxicabs and lie on blankets in the middle of parks surrounded by buildings taller by far than the tallest tree.

Would I now be one of those women on television who are concerned about what the laundry detergent is doing to their children’s Little League uniforms? Would I love my husband more or less? My son?

As a teenager, would I have been one of those girls who go to the mall and defend themselves, all giggling, against boys—huddled together like a wagon circle in the food court? Would my great concerns have been college and school dances and fashion?

In my town, expensive clothes were not held in high esteem. Girls bought cheap. Dresses, they tended to get torn apart.

It’s impossible for me to make the connection between who I am now and who I was then—as if I died long ago in that town and resurrected somewhere else, with a brain full of another girl’s memories.