When We Were Animals(50)

Peter started coming over regularly after school, three afternoons a week—three because that is a fairy-tale number and because I liked putting symbols on those days in my calendar to anticipate and memorialize them.

We had sex on those three afternoons every week. We never said much—never said a thing afterward. The act was bigger than words. I was illiterate in the language of bodies, so I abandoned myself to it, and it was lovely not to think so much—simply to feel the firecracker spark of nerves starting in my toes and skittering up my legs.

When it was done, we were diligent about our homework.

I was frequently embarrassed. I knew what we were doing was natural—but not all nature was the same. The stars didn’t care about sweat and kisses and panting. They glistened prettily way up there in their heavens. They beatified the sky with their cool, gemlike indifference.

So why shouldn’t I?

*



January’s Brittle Moon came.

I didn’t want to see anyone else, so I didn’t go to the woods. Instead I ran in the other direction, to the center of town. In a parking lot, I found a woman still out after dark. I stood watching her, naked, unashamed. I felt as though I could hurt her. The town, it was mine. The parking lot was mine. She saw me in the distance. What I must have looked like—the tiny, pale-skinned naked girl with her little fists clenched! The woman ran. When she saw me, she ran to her car, fumbled her keys, dropped them to the ground, picked them up again, finally got the car door open, launched herself inside, and closed herself in.

I twitched for wanting to claw at her face. I wondered when was the last time her skin was opened up.

Two thoughts occurred to me simultaneously:

Why was this woman afraid of me?

Why wasn’t she more afraid of me?

I went to the town square, where there was a clock tower, a monument to the soldiers of some war, a gazebo surrounded by grass and trees and shrubbery. It was the place where, last month, the breachers had attacked the girls and boys from the next town.

I trampled over the grass, the frost crystals tickling my toes. The storefronts were all lit up by buzzing street lamps. In the far distance I could hear the low, tidal hiss of the freeway that carried traffic past our little town. But there were no cars going by on the streets around me. No one drove on the three nights of the full moon. Adults lived in dread of running over the wild breachers bounding across dark streets.

Also, they didn’t want to see. Once, out of curiosity, I crept up on a house down the block from where I lived. The lights were on in the front room, and I could see someone in there, sleeping on a recliner in front of the television. I put my face against the pane of glass and even tasted it with the tip of my tongue. It was metallic, cold. Then, as though he could sense me there watching him, the man woke suddenly and turned to the window. Our eyes met. I recognized him. We’d never spoken, but I knew him from the neighborhood. He wore a straw hat when he watered his lawn and always smiled at me when I passed by on the way home from school.

Now, seeing me, he looked at his watch and clambered up from the recliner. For a moment he seemed undecided about what to do. I was surprised, standing naked before his window, that I wasn’t more self-conscious. But I wanted to see him for what he truly was. I wanted to watch. Finally he came to the window. We looked at each other again, but then his eyes dropped, as if in shame or modesty—and then, very slowly, so as not to incite me, perhaps, he drew the curtains closed.

The nighttime shame of our town. It’s what curtains were made for.

Now, in the town square, I reflected on the man’s shame.

I decided I wanted to be on top of the gazebo, the way Peter had been when he had looked so kingly during the last moon, so I stalked around it until I found a way up by overturning a trash can and climbing onto the sloped roof. I scraped my belly to pieces hoisting myself over the lip of the roof, but once on top, I lay back and luxuriated in the sting of my cuts.

It was quiet there in the dead center of things. So quiet. I could hear the insistent insect buzz of the street lamps. I could hear the creak of the hanging sign suspended over the barbershop, swinging back and forth in the breeze. I could hear the low mechanical click of the stoplights as they turned from green to amber to red—signs without meaning, because there was no one around to be directed by them.

It was a time to take stock of things, but I couldn’t think straight. I wanted to put it all in order, to line it all up. I wanted to go through the list of the people I knew and assess where they fit in my life. I wanted to draw a map and put them all on it. But my thoughts were all bloody or obscene, and it made me want to cry. And I did cry. My mind did weep while my body raged—and there must be something of the mind in the gutters of the body, because I could feel the tickle of real tears creeping down the sides of my cheeks and into the folds of my ears.

I must have slept, because when I opened my eyes again I could hear someone in the gazebo beneath me. It was still deep night, still no one in any direction I could see. I crawled to the sloping edge of the gazebo roof and lowered my head to look.

Hondy Pilt was there, staring right at me, as though he knew that’s where I would appear from.

*



“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” he said. He never said much, Hondy, but when he did his words were serene and wise-sounding. Even a simple hello.

I swung myself down off the roof of the gazebo, and I sat with my knees to my chest on the bench across from Hondy. For a full minute, we stalked each other with our eyes, as was our habit in those days. Because we were so keenly aware that any human interaction could end in passion or violence, it was important to determine, with muscles rigid and teeth clenched, the direction of the exchange as much as possible before you began it.