Cloven Hooves

He has been going shirtless for this last week or so, and the skin of his back is golden. When he straightens and looks at me, he is all tawny colors, golden skin, soft blond hair, and gentle brown eyes. Lion colors. He knows I have been watching him and he smiles, anticipating pleasure. He is so incredibly beautiful to me that an aching swells inside me. Not of desire, but of love thwarted. I love him so. And I am about to start a quarrel.

“Tom, honey, when are we going home?”

He stops in the act of lowering his pants and actually sits down on the bed in surprise. He turns to face me, his boyish face wrinkled with perplexity. He has been thinking of sex, not of neglected cabins and gardens going to weed. His fine lion hair is rumpled where he has drawn his T-shirt off over his head. His amber eyes, now the color of sunlight on beer bottles, go wide. “When are we what, Lyn?”

“When are we going home?” I repeat doggedly, patiently. “We were only going to spend a month here, remember? Just a pleasant spring interlude on the old family farm, camping out in the guest cottage, get Teddy out of Alaska for a while, let him see what a real spring planting time is like. Then somehow it became a month or so. Okay, May is fine, even though there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to get done on our own place. Teddy’s had a great time with the piglets and the chicks and the ducklings and all. But, honey, we’re in to June now, and I was thinking we’d be headed home any day now. Then, at dinner tonight, all of a sudden your dad starts talking as if we’re staying here the rest of the summer, and this winter, too.” I hear the stridency in my voice, take a deep breath. I stop ripping the brush through my hair as I realize my scalp is sore. Carefully, I soften my voice. “Babe, can you tell me what’s going on?”

Tom heaves the long-suffering sigh of the nagged husband. It is a new trick of his, one I don’t particularly care for. “Lyn. Honey. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve gotten so touchy lately. Yes, Dad did ask me if I would consider staying out the summer and part of the winter. You know Bix hurt his shoulder. Well, it’s going to lay him up for longer than we thought. So that leaves Dad trying to run the place and the business. And this is the busy time of year. Not only the farm to tend, but this is the time of year when folks are buying equipment. Being a man short around here is no joke anytime, so Dad invited us to stay on. That’s all. Just until Bix gets back on his feet. And between you and me, I don’t think that’s going to take as long as Dad thinks it will. Probably only another month or so. That’s all. And I didn’t give him a definite answer, because I wanted to talk to you about it first. But you know how my folks are. They think that if they just act like something is going to happen, it will.”

And it usually does, where we’re concerned, I think. No, I have said the foolish words aloud, I can tell by the sparks that light suddenly in Tom’s eyes. He finishes undressing in silence, kicking his pants away into a heap on the floor. He pushes the covers aside and swings his long pale legs into bed. His posture tells me I won’t be getting any tonight. He pulls up the covers before he speaks again.

His voice is a lie and a deception, reasonable and sweet. “If you want to take that attitude, then I suppose there’s no point to our discussing it at all.” You idiot, you spoiled brat, you cowering, narrow-minded little wretch, his attitude says to me. Refusing without even hearing me out. Heartless bitch. He hunches his shoulder under the white sheet and blue blanket. His soft hair fans out over the pillowcases. The pillowcases are white, but the cuffs feature Mother Maurie’s cross-stitch embroidery. A gaudy rooster on Tom’s, a plump little hen for me. The cross-stitched motto on Tom’s proclaims that he’s “all set to strut and crow,” while my hen petulantly affirms that she’d rather “set awhile.” They match a set we were given for a wedding gift. Steffie thinks they are adorable. They make me want to retch. Tom’s voice draws me back to our argument. “I’ll just tell them you didn’t like the idea, and that will be that.”

Oh, goody. You do that. I’d love to see their faces. I take a deep breath, put pettiness aside. “Tom. Don’t snap at me. You know what I’m thinking about, or at least you should. There’s our house. It’s been sitting empty since March, and we’re just asking for vandalism. God knows it’s probably full of mice and red squirrels already.”

“Pete and Beth said they’d keep an eye on it.”

“Pete and Beth both work, honey. Driving into our place twice a week only means they can let us know after the windows get broken. We’re not as isolated as we once were out there. Last summer I saw hikers and backpackers almost every day. And poor Bruno will be wondering what happened to us. I know they’ll feed him, but he’s only a pup. He’ll be half wild when we get back there as it is. And there’s Teddy’s school. He starts kindergarten this fall. I don’t want to have him start here, and then pull him out halfway through the year. Starting school is tough enough on a kid without doing that. And, last but not least, there’s the small matter of my job.”

In spite of my best effort, my voice was getting cold and rocky. Don’t make this a fight, I beg myself. Make it a discussion. He has to see the logic of what you’re saying, you don’t have to be a bitch about it. Just tell him. Lay it all out for him. I pause a moment, hoping he’ll say something. He doesn’t. I take a breath and go on.

“It took a lot of nerve for me to ask for this much time off. If Annie weren’t my friend as well as my boss, she’d never have said yes. But she can’t keep running the store on her own. She’s got some kid in there for the summer, but come winter the kid has to be back in school and she’ll be on her own. She’ll have to hire someone to take my place, and there won’t be a job for me to go back to.”

I pause and gather the reins of my self-control. Tom will see. He’s a reasonable man, one who has always treated me as an equal, as a person to be considered. But the silence lengthens and it looks as if he is having to struggle to control himself before he speaks. Neither of us are good at this, at quarreling. We do it very seldom, most things are settled conversationally, or one or the other of us will demur to the other’s area of expertise. I let Tom select the used truck we bought, he let me choose the insulation for the attic, we recognize there are areas where one of us is more knowledgeable than the other. But this is a different thing, an area of opinion based on emotions. And we are both experts on our own emotions.

“Jesus Christ, Lyn,” he sighs at last. “You make it sound like I’m contemplating murder. All we’re thinking about is spending a winter here with my folks and giving them a hand over a hard spot. I mean, hell, they paid for my college, they brought me up … I feel I owe them. And I have thought about all the stuff you mentioned. There’s a good school for Teddy just down the road from here. The school bus stops right by the gate. And I bet Pete and Beth could rent our place out for us in only a couple of weeks, if we let them know the kind of tenants we want. Taking care of Bruno would be part of the deal. And, hey, Dad said that if we were staying the winter, he saw no reason why Teddy couldn’t have that little pony that Red has up for sale. You know how he drools over that little pinto every time we drive past there. His eyes practically popped out when Dad mentioned it.”

“You discussed that in front of him? Tom, that’s not fair! You get his hopes all set up, and when Mommy wants to go home, that makes her the bad guy. And you still haven’t mentioned anything about my job.”

I am honestly angry now, paying no heed to the little sane voice inside telling me to be cool, be an adult, try to see both sides. Tom is frozen by his outrage, stiff as a corpse between the cold white sheets. The tendons stand out against his jaws when he speaks.

“You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Teddy is big enough to understand that what he wants isn’t always what he gets. I don’t see why you always have to get so mad. Any idea I have, if I talk it over with Mom or Dad first, you automatically hate it. It’s wrong, no matter what it is. And so what about your job? Clerking in some weird little shop, that’s not a big deal. I mean, what are you going to become, manager of the fruit and nut section? The buyer for organic teas? It’s not a big deal, Lyn! You can always get it back, or another piss-ant job just like it!”

“It is a big deal! It’s a big deal to me! And you’re damn right I don’t like it when you take your ideas and plans to your parents first! You’re supposed to be my husband! Remember? Usually married people make their decisions with each other, not with their mommys and daddys. And I happen to like my crummy little unimportant job. It’s hard to find a job you like, you should know that. You’ve walked out on enough of them. And my crummy little job was just fine with you last winter when it was the only damn thing that was feeding us!”

I stop suddenly. Carefully I fit my knuckles against my mouth and teeth, feeling where they would strike if I could hit myself, wishing I could. I wish I could. I’ve gone too far, way over the edge, past the unspoken boundaries we’ve set up for our quarrels. Never have I thrown things like that at Tom. He cannot hold a permanent job, that is something we both silently acknowledge, not as a fault but as a facet of his independent ways. Never have I thrown it at him like a dagger.

His eyes are wide open with vulnerability and hurt. I have struck true and deep, wounding him where the blood will puddle and congeal inside him. I have demanded my own way as something that is owed me, throwing his failures in his face to make it his duty to comply. He looks at me silently, his pain trickling through his guts, too badly injured to even fight back anymore.

“Tom, Tom, I’m sorry. I just got so mad, I started to say anything to hurt you back. I didn’t mean it that way, you know I didn’t mean it. I understood about those jobs. I didn’t want you to stay with them. But I’m hurt, too. When you go to your folks all the time, for advice and make decisions with them, it makes me feel so small and unimportant. There’s nothing for me here, and it makes me feel like nothing.”

“Teddy and I are nothing.” He says it acceptingly, dully.

“No. No, that’s not what I meant. You and Teddy are everything. Don’t listen to my words alone, you know what I mean behind the words. Please, Tom. I’m sorry for what I said.”

I crawl across the bed to him, wrap my body around his stiff one, my belly to his warm back. I bury my face into his hair, so soft against my face, and rock his unyielding body on the bed. My anxious hands run over his body, kneading at the hard muscles, stroking, caressing the stiffness out of him, massaging away the anger and hurt that divides us. Eventually he relaxes in my embrace. He rolls in my arms, embraces me.

“It’s okay, baby, it’s okay,” he mutters, his lips by my ear. “Let’s just forget it.” His voice is soothing. “We’re both too tired to be discussing anything, much less fighting about it. We both said a lot of nasty things. If you want to go home at the end of the summer, well, that’s all there is to it. I can understand how you might feel a little overwhelmed by my family. Mom and Dad have had to be aggressive, just to survive in this business, and they encouraged it in us kids as we grew up. Grab the buck, make the deal … you know how they are. So when I saw a chance for us to make rent off our place, and both of us pull in wages here, and Mom picking up the grocery bill, well, I thought it might really set us up, financially. Put us on our feet, give us a second swing at things. I didn’t know you felt so strongly about going home, that’s all. I’ll just tell the folks tomorrow that summer is the end of the visit. They’ll just have to understand.” His eyes are opened wide as he says this, honesty and hurt gleaming in them as he gives it all up for me. Sacrifices it all.

And he has me. I capitulate instantly, telling him I hadn’t thought of the financial angle, that certainly we can stay at least until the end of the summer, and we’ll talk about winter when we’re both rested, yes, it would be wonderful for Teddy to have a pony, and the job was, well, only a job. On, and on. Giving it all away. Making up for the hurt I had done. What did it matter, anyway? Tom and Teddy, they’re what is important. What did I matter, anyway? Surrender to Tom, and it won’t be scary anymore. I won’t have to ask myself what would happen if just once I stuck to my guns, insisted on having my own way. I won’t have to wonder if he’d dump me, or tell me to lump it or leave, wonder what would happen to me without him. Give in to Tom, and it isn’t frightening, we aren’t quarreling anymore.

Long after he tells me what an angel I am, and how much he loves me, and weren’t we silly for arguing, and how much his folks will appreciate his help, yes, and long after he falls asleep, I lie awake and look at myself naked and helpless in my own mind.

I think of the little shop Annie runs. It’s in the front half of an old house at Ester, not that far from the Malemute Saloon of Robert Service fame. Not that far for me to drive, even when the roads are white with packed snow-ice and my headlights cut through the black Alaska day. It is a warm place, a wood stove in the center of the room, and then all the bins full of nuts and seeds and organic grains and little cans full of spices and bright boxes of teas with wonderful names like Dragon’s Mane and Orchard Spice, teas that Annie mixes herself in the tiny back rooms. It is an alchemist’s shop for food, a place where the ordinary becomes gold. The walls are planks of honey-colored wood, and they are covered with shelves and hooks and alcoves full of merchandise, soft leather bags with porcupine quill embroidery on them, massage oils in precious bottles, ceramic teapots with whimsical faces, created by an old friend of Annie’s, treasures and surprises, delightful things to sell …

I won’t be going back to that. I know it suddenly, with a sureness that trembles through me. My place there is gone, taken by another. If I go into that store again, it will be as a customer, as one who stands in the public area, not one who goes behind the Dutch doors and talks over the bottom half as she mixes a special tea. I won’t be the one to indulge someone’s child in a horehound drop or a stick of real licorice root.

I touch Tom, running my hands down his long flanks, wanting him to roll back and hold me. I imagine him running his hands over me the same way I am touching him, stroking my flesh, making it desirable by his touch. Make me special by wanting me. I want him to put his hands over my diminutive breasts and make them important by pinching the nipples between his fingers, by testing his teeth gently against them.

I have stirred myself to heat, and I need him, I need him to bury me in physical sensations so my mind will shut up. I don’t want to think about where I have heard those arguing techniques before. I don’t want to remember Mother Maurie applying them to Steffie all this spring, how she acts hurt by her daughter’s refusals but politely accepts them, all the while pointing out how logic and reason and good manners are all on her side. Eroding Steffie’s belief in herself until Steffie gives in, and then pampering Steffie to show her how smart she is to obey her mother. It works every time for her. Don’t I know how well it works?

I clutch at Tom, slipping my hand over his hip and down, cupping his balls, and then gripping his penis firmly. I will it to swell in my hand, to become a sword that will subdue my doubts. But he only mutters, sleep’s grip on him more sure and intimate than mine. He doesn’t need me, not the way I need him. He can quarrel with me, make up, and then turn away, go to sleep, forget our temporary division. He is not frightened when we disagree. My nipples are hard, I press them into his back, feel the contact as agonizingly tantalizing. I rub against his passiveness, driving myself crazy. Turn to me, touch me, I beg him silently. Make me desirable, make me important, make me real.

“Lyn,” he complains, wriggling out of my embrace, away from the thigh I have thrown over his hip. He’d only have to roll to face me, make himself hard for me, I’d do all the rest. “Honey,” he rebukes me gently, “I’ve got to get up extra early tomorrow.” He takes a deep breath, sighs it out. I lie in the warm place on the sheet that he has just vacated. His scent is on the pillows, and I breathe it in, savoring where his flesh has been like a dog sniffing after a bitch in heat. “Gonna show Teddy a deer,” he mutters to his pillow. “Been watering at the duck pond. Saw his sign this morning. Don’t know how he’s been getting past the electric fence, but there’re hoof marks all over down there. Gotta sleep, baby.”

He goes away, off into sleep as surely as he will go off to work tomorrow, leaving me aching and alone. Unimportant. Of what value is a woman undesired, a woman who does no task, fulfills no function? The sheets chill around me, become wide plains of glacial whiteness, Tom a distant mountain range I will never scale. I’m alone.

Not alone.

His face fills my mind suddenly, and the musk I smell is not Tom’s anymore. The lust that hits me now is sudden and unexpected as a hammer blow, a directed passion that makes my desire for Tom a mere itch, a passing fancy. I know him suddenly, more thoroughly than I have known any man. His tongue, I know, would be raspy like a cat’s tongue, eager to seek out my secrets, and his cock would fill me and swell against me. To him I would be everything, companion, friend, lover. Merely by being me. I imagine the sleek fur of his flanks under my hands, how my fingers would find the rumpled nubs at the base of his horns as I directed his mouth on my flesh.

I move against the sheets, my nipples rasping against Mother Maurie’s percale, and surrender to my fantasy. But my imagination is not enough to sate me, and I am still too proud to touch myself. Sleep is the only one who takes me this night, and my dreams touch me too softly to ease me.

SIX

Fairbanks

Spring 1964

He is always there for me, in the woods. He is not a god to me, nor an animal. But in one sense he is like a spirit. He is the essence of the forest, of the moss and mushrooms and animals and trees and plants. When he is with me, then the forest is with me as well. And the forest is the only place where I feel whole. My world is divided into three parts: the school, the home, and the forest. Only the forest is peaceful, healing. Only the forest is mine.

With each passing year, school only gets worse. The pressure is on. Not for grades. I assume As are my right, and I get them, without fail, despite teachers who dislike me and other students who harass me. I batter them out of Mrs Haritsen, drowning her in extra-credit work I don’t really need to do, always flapping my hand frantically with the correct answer, writing a five-page essay when a three-page is asked for, always using complete sentences, punctuating faultlessly, writing large and clearly on all my papers.

She hates me, of course. But she isn’t allowed to show it. She’s a lay teacher, a volunteer at the Catholic school. She’s not a nun, and to my way of thinking she isn’t a teacher at all. She is from the states and is young and is afraid of Alaska. I can tell. And that makes her hate me.

She can force me to do things. She will be giving the spelling test, strolling between the aisles of desks, giving a word, a sentence with the word, and the word again. “Pneumonia,” she says. “The doctor says the sick child has pneumonia. Pneumonia. Oh, heavens!” The whole class looks up, startled, from their papers. She is standing over my desk. “Evelyn. Look at your hands! I am not going to correct any paper handed in by such a dirty girl. You go and wash them this instant!”

And I rise and go back to the big sink in the back of the classroom, to wash my clean but badly chapped hands. I use the coarse powdered soap in the barely warm water, and dry them on rough paper towels. She continues the spelling test without me, as if I do not matter at all, and, of course, to her I do not. I store the spelling words in my head, “psychiatrist,” “physician,” “symphony,” as I scrub at the backs of my hands where the constant chapping of cold water and wind has turned the abused skin dark, nearly black. I sand some of it off, leaving my hands raw and sore, and return quietly to my desk. I fill in the words quickly, ignoring the bird-black eyes she turns on me, hoping, hoping that I’ll raise my hand and ask her to repeat them. I must never give her that chance to smash me. I know that tomorrow it will be something else.

One day I came to class after PE, having changed too quickly, and all the boys laughed as I came in the door. I glanced down, chagrined, to find my shirt buttoned unevenly, the childish lace-necked little-girl T-shirt beneath it showing all my flat ribby chest and small green-raspberry nipples through its soft fabric. Any other teacher might have seen my scarlet face and called the class to order, pulled their attention away from me. Any of the nuns would have. But Mrs Haritsen has none of the softness and kindness the nuns hide behind their flat black exteriors. All Mrs Haritsen’s softness is on the outside, in her curling soft hair and pastel dresses. Within she is colder than black flint. Mrs Haritsen required me to stand at the board and write sentences. “A Catholic girl is a modest girl. A Catholic girl is a modest girl.” Until the board was filled with my handwriting, and my arm ached with holding my hand up and my head ached with pounding blood. But I did it. And she must give me the As I have earned.

I know what I am like to her. I am a wild and savage little animal. She perceives me as refusing the good civilization she offers me. Like a muddy feral kitten, rescued from a thunderstorm, spitting and sinking its impotent fangs into the hands that seek to smooth its rough fur, scorning the saucer of warmed milk offered it, choosing instead to huddle beneath the sofa and hope that someone will leave the door standing ajar, if only for an instant, so it can risk its draggled tail in a dash for the dark and storm outside. I am neither cute nor likeable.

So she puts the pressure on me, and it is not for grades, nor for anything else I understand. I don’t know what she wants me to give her. I only know that if I give it, I will no longer be me. Me is all I have, and I cling to me, instinctively, without even knowing how tightly I hold on to my selfness.

I am not like the other girls, who ask her questions about her clothes and her hair and her nails, who listen giggling in a circle around her desk at recess as Mrs Haritsen tells them something cute her husband said, or something “wild and silly” she did in college. I don’t like it when she talks about how much she misses Idaho, and how much we are all missing by growing up in “this wild place.” She feels so sorry for the other little girls, and her pity makes them vaguely insecure, wondering what wonderful things they are missing that evokes so much condescension from her. I don’t want her pity. If she doesn’t like Alaska, she can leave. Does she really think the woods will turn into a city because she wants them to, that the roads will widen and be paved, that the winters will become less cold and dangerous because petite Mrs Haritsen thinks they should? She’s stupid. I force her to give me As, and hope she will go back to the states soon. I pray that a nun will teach me next year.

Home is almost as bad. My sisters fight over boyfriends. Jeffrey met Sissy at a dance, but when he came to visit her at our house, he met Candy, and now he’s asked her to the movies instead of Sissy. My mother is at a loss as to what to do about it. She tells my sisters that they must sort it out for themselves. She asks them, rhetorically, if either of them really wants to date a boy who could be that insensitive. Of course they do. He has a car. My mother folds her lips and irons a mountain of laundry, refusing to listen to any more squabbling. So Sissy cries and calls Candy “that bitch” when I am the only one around to hear it. And Candy primps endlessly in the bathroom mirror, ignoring the pleas of those with bursting bladders, when she isn’t sulking because Sissy won’t lend her blue eye shadow to her.