When We Were Animals(63)

“Yes,” she said, making her voice hard like a wall. “I knew that.”

“So my father told you? He told you she was unique? Isn’t it interesting that she was unlike everyone else?”

“Yes, it is,” she said again. She did not know the right way to respond. She looked helplessly at my father.

“I thought I might be unique, too,” I went on. “I thought it might be in my blood. Do you think things travel that way? From generation to generation? Through the blood?”

My father’s fork clattered down on his plate.

“Lumen,” he said, “that’s enough.”

“Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes the world isn’t as honest a place as you would like it to be.”

And then dinner was over all of a sudden. My father asked me to leave the table, and I did. There was a quiver in his voice when he said it, and Margot Simons wore a hard scowl that I knew later would melt into miserableness, and I felt tremendously sorry for her. Her lipstick was smudged at the corners.

I should have been kinder. To my father, to Margot Simons, to Peter Meechum, to everyone.

In English class, Mr. Hunter taught us Wuthering Heights. Violent Heathcliff. The smoky moors. Child Cathy tapping at the window, wanting to come in.

He evoked that scene for us. He said, simply, “There is a difference between being inside and being outside,” and we knew what he meant. We all nodded our heads, and our eyes grew unfocused.

When you are at a certain in-between age, you believe that adulthood is all about exclusion. You believe that what makes adults adults is that they are legitimized in their suspicions and hatreds. You exercise your own condemnations, and you believe this is the key to growing older.

And what do I believe now—me, a mother and wife, a woman who keeps her past concealed from her adoring husband? Is there something of that mine-dwelling girl left in me, who stalks her husband from makeshift blinds? Or has that girl grown into someone else altogether, naked to hurt, diminished by love?





Chapter 9




When my husband goes to work in the morning, I leave our son at the neighbor’s and drive to our family doctor. There is nothing wrong with me, but Jack insists that we have regular checkups. So I sit in a cold room wearing a paper smock and smile up at the doctor and the nurses, and I try my best to do exactly what they ask of me. I breathe when they tell me to breathe. I lie back. I answer their questions.

Sometimes I wonder if they will find something awful in me. I imagine the doctor taking me into his office, closing the door, sighing heavily, and diagnosing me with evil growing behind my sternum.

I would assure him that no, it’s not growing, it’s always been there. The same exact size, the same exact shape. In fact I’ve learned to live with it, my evil. There is nothing to be afraid of. I am a loving wife and mother, a perfectly normal person.

To the doctors, you are a body tainted by imperfection. The only question they ask is how far you have strayed from the ideal. That’s why white and red are the colors of the medical world. White is the pure self, and red is the damage. That is medicine.

But I am declared perfectly healthy.

My doctor says, “You get an A plus for today.”

I grin with pride.

Afterward, I pick my son up. He rushes to greet me, clutching at my leg as though I were the only thing standing between him and rude death. I put my palm on the top of his head.

“Mommy,” he says to me in his little voice.

He is white and I am red. But one day he will be red, too.

I take him to our neighborhood park, where he likes to fling himself treacherously around the monkey bars. I sit on a bench and look at the cloudy sky through the tree branches overhead.

People like to run around the perimeter of the park, and one of those runners collapses on the bench next to me. Breathing hard, she removes the cap from a bottle of water and upturns it to her lips. The plastic bottle crinkles. I keep my gaze focused on the sky.

“I know you,” she says.

Only then do I realize it’s Helena, the art teacher who recently moved from California and likes to sit on my husband’s desk.

“You were at the community league meeting,” she says. She wears tight leggings with a stripe down the side, and I can smell her sweat, sweet and pungent. “You know what? Somebody told me I work with your husband. It’s Jack—right?”

“That’s right.”

“How funny! I teach art.”

“No school today?” I ask.

“Part-time,” she says. “So what are you doing here?”

“I’m with my son.”

“Oh,” she says, looking around. “Which one is he?”

“He’s over there somewhere.”

She laughs. Her teeth are amazing. Her hair is tied up in a ponytail. Her skin is healthy and brown.

“I do ten circuits three times a week,” she says. “Trying to get in shape. I’m getting married in August. My fiancé—he’s why we moved out here, for his job.”

“Congratulations.”

“Anyway, your husband, Jack, he’s so great with the kids.”

“Is he?”

“Such a sweetheart. They all love him. I mean, there are some awful ones, obviously. Like that Nat girl. Impossible. You don’t even know. The nastiest little thing you ever saw. I’m surprised they haven’t expelled her yet. Did you know she left a used tampon in one of the teacher’s desks? I mean, who does that? Revolting.”