When We Were Animals (9 page)

“You better go,” I said, sniffling and wiping the tears from my face with my palms. “It’ll be dark soon.”

“I’m going,” he said. “But you should know—you’re better than me. You’re better than all of us.”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be better,” I said. “Get out. Just get out. You don’t want to be a danger to me.”

That night I
stuffed cotton balls in my ears and pulled the blankets over my head. I went to beautiful places in my head. I was part of everything I touched, and the world was glad to have me on its surface. I imagined myself on top of a mountain in Switzerland. I looked out over the wide valleys and saw no towns and no roads and no travelers. There was no one around to be surprised or disappointed about what I was or what I was not.

I was alone and unfearful.

In the morning,
as my father and I sat at the kitchen table—he reading the paper and stirring his coffee, I ignoring my unappetizing bowl of whole-grain cereal—I asked him what it was like to go breach.

“It’s not something for you to worry about,” he said, not looking up from his newspaper.

“You mean because it won’t happen to me?”

I forget where it started, this mutual belief that I was unbreachable. Was it something he told me as a child? Or was it something I suggested to him that he picked up on? We had lived so long, he and I, with the consensual reluctance to give up the fancies of childhood—and now I didn’t know if this was one of them. Simply put, we did not talk about such things.

“I mean,” he said, “because it’s not something to worry about. Like the weather. It’s going to be what it’s going to be, whether you fret about it or not.”

I knew this to be true, but I wanted more information.

“But you went through it. Do you remember it? What was it like?”

He sipped his coffee and lowered the cup slowly to the table. Then he folded his newspaper twice and leaned forward to look at his daughter straight-on. His eyes were very large, with pale crescents of fatigue beneath them.

“Do you remember,” he said, “when you were maybe five years old, and you asked me about death? You wanted to know where your mother had gone. You asked if you would die and if I would die, and I told you it was an inevitability, and then we looked up the word inevitability in the dictionary?”

“No,” I said.

“It was one of those conversations you dread having as a parent. For years before it happens, you lose sleep trying to plan for it. But there it was. You wanted to know what it was like where your mommy was.”

He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I recognized the symptoms of trying not to tear up. I looked down at my cereal to save him embarrassment.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I told you I didn’t know what it was like. And do you want to know what you said?”

“What? What did I say?”

“You said—very matter-of-fact, as though you were quite positive about it—you said, ‘Wherever it is, it probably has curtains.’”

He laughed. I laughed, too. Though it sounded vaguely familiar, and I wondered if he had told me that story before. And if he had, why hadn’t I remembered it? Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.

“And,” he went on, “that’s when I thought, ‘That’s my girl. Whatever comes at her, she’ll be able to handle it.’ My little Lumen.”

He put his open hand on the side of my face, and I leaned my head into it a little bit.

I went to school, and my head was filled with that story all day. It wasn’t until many hours later that I realized something.

He hadn’t actually answered my question.

After school that
same day, as I was riding my bike home, Peter met me by the side of the road.

“Come on,” he said. The way he said it was not nice at all.

“Where are we going?”

“Just follow me.”

His parents had given him an old Volkswagen on his sixteenth birthday, and it was parked a little way down a side road. He got in, started the engine, and waited for me to join him.

Sometimes people wonder why they do the things they do. I don’t wonder. He was Peter Meechum, whom all the girls love, and I was nobody, whom nobody loved. He had given me a command, and I was particularly good at obeying commands. And I had never been invited into his car before. So I went.

I hid my bike in the trees by the road and got into the car. The interior smelled of rust and oil.

He drove into the woods, then turned off the tarmac onto a dirt road. It was cloudy, and there were no shadows on the ground. Everything looked flat, too close. You could suffocate on the grayness of the world. The road was unmaintained. Weeds grew up between the tire tracks, and deep divots jostled my body about inside the vehicle. A weathered road sign lay in the tall sumac, half buried by hard dirt. It announced that the road was a dead end. But everybody knew it was a dead end. Even I knew where this road led.

I looked at Peter, but his gaze remained sternly forward.

Soon the trees opened up, and the dusty sun shone down on the wide expanse of the quarry. Peter brought the car to a stop and shut off the engine. I wondered if he would force me to walk into the mine just as Rose had forced Hondy Pilt to do the year before. But he said nothing. The only thing to be heard was the wind groaning in the trees.

He opened his door and got out, and I got out, too.

“This way,” he said.

I followed him around the rim of the quarry to a small grove where the streamlet from the mountain above collected into three small pools before continuing down into the mine. There was a grassy clearing in the grove, and when you were in it you felt protected and safe. That day, though, it was cold. A sharp breeze made a whistling sound through the grove. I shrugged myself deeper into my coat and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Now what?” I said.

“Lay down.”

“How come?”

“Because I’m going to have sex with you.”

The expression on his face was determined and dire.

When I didn’t move at all, he took me by the shoulders and led me to the place where he wanted me to lie. Then he exerted a slight pressure with his hands, almost nothing, really, and down my body went as if by mystical coercion. Maybe he had magic-spell words, too, that he used to cast conjurations. You cannot always understand boys, the things they do. They act, sometimes, as though in thrall to severe but natural forces. They can be waterfalls or wind gusts.

I sat down at first, then he gave me another little push, and I lay back. The dry autumn grass tickled my neck. I stared up into the gray sky, circumscribed by the tops of needled evergreens. It felt like the sky was particularly low that day—a ceiling you could almost reach up and brush your fingers across.

Then Peter stood over me, looking down at me as though he were a giant and I was a poor little farmer at the bottom of a bean stalk.

“I’m going to have sex with you,” he said again.

“No,” I said—because that seemed to be the thing I was supposed to say.

“You said I was ugly.”

“No,” I said again. I wanted to reach up and run my fingertips across the sky. I thought it must be silky and lush. Maybe my hand would sink into it. I was no longer cold.

He kneeled down and leaned over me.

“Take off your pants,” he said.

“No,” I said. I could hear my voice saying it. It was a charming voice—I was charmed by it. I could hear myself saying it in the space between the trees. My voice there between those leaves that fretted and shivered.

Then Peter was unzipping my pants and tugging them over my narrow hips. When he got them to my ankles, he realized he had to take my shoes off as well, so he wrenched them off without untying the laces. It was a very awkward process, and I felt sorry for him—and I kept laughing inwardly at the girl whose body was being turned this way and that.

He must have gotten my underpants off, too, because I could feel the reedy grass tickling my bare bottom.

So there it was. The whole thing. The low ceiling of the sky above, the ticklish sumac beneath, and me sandwiched between the two, my bare lower half looking like a ridiculously pale chicken leg, I suppose, one sock tugged partly off my foot like a floppy dog ear.

Peter unbuckled his own pants and took them off. His underpants were plaid. He stood over me.

“Are you going to do it?” I asked.

“Do you want me to?”

“No.”

“It’s happening anyway.”

“Okay.”

He moved my legs apart and kneeled down between them. At first he just examined me with his eyes. Then he fell on me and started moving against my body. His muscles were rigid, his weight on me like a load of lumber pressing me to the ground. They were lurching movements, spasms of anguished effort. He did not kiss me at all. Before there had been lots of kisses and not much else. This was the reverse of that. So maybe kisses were the opposite of sex. Maybe they were the birth of the death of sex.

I thought,
It is happening. This is happening,
thinking,
All our days add up to one day, and then they become something else. The point on the number line where negative becomes positive. The future the mirror image of your past—everything contingent on this moment here, the great, holy zero. My zero to his one. My nothing to his something.

It was happening. I was waiting for it to happen. I could feel his movements, rough, even angry, against the skin of my thighs. There was a certain pleasure in not having to do anything—in having everything done for you while you just waited. He struggled away, and I waited and felt the warm, stinging chafe of his efforts.

I waited. I knew to expect the pressure of him between my legs, but there was no pressure. Then everything stopped.

For a moment there was an expression on his face of physical industry—vulgar, beautiful things flitting through a heated boy-mind. But then his eyes met mine, and that strange violent desire drained out of his gaze. Instead of falling on top of me, he stood back up.

“Never mind,” he said.

I sat up, suddenly embarrassed by my nakedness.

“What happened?” I said. The sky now seemed very far away, measureless compared to how small I felt.

“Nothing happened,” he said. “Never mind. You said no.”

He was shifting nervously.

“You couldn’t do it,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was something I was realizing aloud.

“I could have,” he said. “I didn’t. You said no.”

I reached for my pants, which were all balled up in the weeds. I put them on, and neither of us said anything.

We drove in silence back to where my bike was stashed. He stopped and waited for me to get out. But I didn’t get out.

“You couldn’t do it,” I said. I didn’t want to cry in front of him again, but I could hear the tremor in my voice. “You couldn’t even if you tried. I’m a nun.”

“You’re not a nun.”

“Yes, I am. I’m a nun, and nobody wants a nun. Nobody dreams about nuns.”

“You’re not,” he said, but his voice was tired, unconvincing. He just wanted to be away from me.

It was too late. In the woods, for a moment, he had been an animal, he had functioned by beast logic. Now, again, he was just a boy. Was it just that he wasn’t able to be the bad man, no matter how hard he tried? Or was I the one responsible for his transformation? Was I the antidote for breaching?

Did I ensnare what the breaching set free?

When I take
my son to preschool, Miss Lily, his teacher, takes me aside and tells me that he has been having discipline issues and that the day before it was necessary to separate him from the other children for a while.

As she speaks, I watch my boy run forward to greet his friends. He seems happy enough. Though I know that signifies nothing. I know how love and hate grow from the same seed.

“I mean,” Miss Lily goes on, “I’m sure it’s not something to worry about. Usually it’s only a form of expression. We just need to work on redirecting it. But, again, I don’t see it as a reason for real concern, Mrs. Borden.”

She knows me as Ann Borden. I used to be Lumen Ann Fowler. Then I left the town where I grew up and I became Ann Fowler to signify that I was a different person. Then I married Jack Borden and became Ann Borden. A life of vestiges.

“Mrs. Borden?” she says again.

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

When I leave, I drive across town to the high school where my husband works. I am a good driver. I obey all the traffic signs. I am always respectful to pedestrians, with their breakable bodies.

I do not use the school parking lot when I arrive. Instead I park around the corner and walk to the side of the main building, where Jack’s office has a window that looks out on a large grassy expanse with trees and benches and fiberglass picnic tables. I sit at one of the benches, where I can see into his window. His back is facing me, and I can see that he is hunched over his desk, scribbling away industriously. The hair on the back of his neck is closely cropped. Sometimes he has me do touch-ups with a pair of clippers after he comes home from the barbershop. The skin of his neck is burned slightly from standing in the hot weekend sun, watering the front lawn.

I sit on the bench cross-legged. The advantage of my spot is that it is behind the large trunk of an oak tree, so if he should ever turn to look out the window, I can simply lean back and be completely hidden.

When people enter his office, Jack stands and greets them. Then he waits for them to sit before he does. His adult colleagues smile a lot when they are in his office—he must be a charming man. When his At-Risk students come in, they sometimes fidget, and their heads swivel twitchily. Jack leans back in his chair in these situations.

I pick at the bark of the oak tree while I watch. Underneath is smooth, supple pulp.

When the students begin to talk, I notice that he nods a lot and listens with his head a little sideways—as though his brain were weighed down with the careful consideration of their words. The students seem to respond well to it.