When We Were Animals(70)

“Get out!” I hissed, trying to keep my voice low. I had backed myself up against the wall, and I was feeling vulnerable there in my pajamas with cats on them. “Get out now!”

That’s when he finally deigned to look at me, and his eyes went up and down my whole body.

“Cute outfit,” he said.

“Get out.”

“I’m going,” he said, tossing the book on the desk instead of putting it back on the shelf. “Don’t worry. I ain’t here to buy. Today I’m just looking.”

He moved toward the window to leave, then he turned around once more.

“Nice room,” he said. “You could sleep good in here. Cozy. Forget all your worries.”

Before he left, I found myself saying, “You can take it if you want.”

“Take what?”

“The book. The Carson McCullers. You can take it.”

And that’s when he flinched as though I had struck him. He crossed the room in two long strides and slammed me against the wall, grabbing my head and holding it in the vise of his two palms. He looked like he wanted to kill me and spoke through gritted teeth.

“Bullshit,” he said. “Intellectual clusterf*cking bullshit. People cleaning their glasses and discussing themes. Don’t f*cking mistake me. I ain’t here for your classroom handouts.”

I stood all hot, unable to breathe, until his anger subsided. Then he let go of me and left. But on his way out the window I saw him look once more at the bookshelves, and I recognized in his expression the ardent pining of a grown man banished from a religion that as a young boy he thought he might be able to truly love.

*



I thought if I remembered what it was like to be a good girl, these things would stop happening to me.

The next night, at dinner with my father and Margot Simons, I ate two servings of everything. With great politesse, I passed the dishes to and fro, across the table. I said please and thank you, and I complimented Margot Simons on the corn casserole she had brought in a foil-covered dish.

“Somebody’s in a good mood,” said my father, and I simply smiled blankly in response. They were pleased, I could tell, though I also caught them giving me suspicious gazes when I wasn’t looking.

I helped clean up after the meal. As my father washed the dishes, I dried them and put them in the cupboards where they belonged, arranging them neatly in stacks, making cheerful conversation and chuckling at the stories they told that were supposed to be funny—as if nothing in the world mattered outside these walls, as if there were not grown men speaking drunkenly of my dead mother, as if no pestilent boys were breaking into my bedroom, as if things were not about to change for good.

Afterward I went to the mine. I found my way to the cistern and confessed myself to the inky black of the chasm. I spoke to my mother, because I thought her soul might be down there somewhere in the airy echo of the night, floating free and buoyed on the drafts. I could hear my voice being carried somewhere, and I thought it might be to her.

I told her of many things. Of my two boyfriends, the dark one and the light one, and how they hated each other but both coveted me for some reason. Of my wee body and how I knew it contained some force larger than itself, and how it hadn’t yet bled, though maybe that was because it needed that blood for the strange and frightening power it possessed. Of the man who said he knew her, who had gone away and changed his name and then come back just to gaze at me with endlessly suffering eyes. Of my father and his goodness, though not of Margot Simons.

I spoke of many things, and it relieved me. And then I fell asleep, cuddled against a stone outcropping over that depthless shaft.

I guess I knew then why some people speak to God.

*



And this, too, is chattering down a well—telling stories to myself in the dark.

My husband and child are upstairs, and they are dreaming of colorful things. But I don’t sleep well. I rise from the marriage bed like the ghost of a wife. I creep downstairs, haunted. I pour myself a glass of milk and squeeze chocolate syrup into it. I stir it with a spoon that goes tink, tink, tink on the insides of the glass.

And then I fetch my pages from their hiding place on the top shelf of the pantry, behind the stacked boxes of spaghetti that are no longer used since my husband has become fearful of carbohydrates. I set the stack of pages on the kitchen table, and I add to it, one page at a time. I never knew I had so many words in me. I dust them up, the words, like a good housewife, collect them where they gray the white paper.

But who am I writing to? To Jack? To myself? Who are you? You are not my mother, who wore orchid gloves on her wedding day. You are not my son, to whom one day, as an acknowledgment of his blossomed manhood, I might bequeath his mother’s lineage. No, not that. You are not the world at large, from whom I seek forgiveness or solace. Never that. You are not even some version of Lumen herself, not future or former or alternative or lost.

You are no one. And you expect nothing. And your eyes fail you, your head nods in drowsiness. I hope you are happy there in whatever empty, lightless caverns you roam and call home.

Earlier today, this afternoon, there was a commotion at the park. My son runs to the monkey bars, and I notice all the neighborhood mothers constellated in excited chatter at the edge of the playground.

Lola is there, too, sitting apart on one of the benches, stretched out and smoking.