You discussed that in front of him? Tom, thats 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 havent 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.
Youre making a big deal out of nothing. Teddy is big enough to understand that what he wants isnt always what he gets. I dont 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. Its wrong, no matter what it is. And so what about your job? Clerking in some weird little shop, thats not a big deal. I mean, what are you going to become, manager of the fruit and nut section? The buyer for organic teas? Its not a big deal, Lyn! You can always get it back, or another piss-ant job just like it!
It is a big deal! Its a big deal to me! And youre damn right I dont like it when you take your ideas and plans to your parents first! Youre 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. Its hard to find a job you like, you should know that. Youve 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. Ive gone too far, way over the edge, past the unspoken boundaries weve 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, Im sorry. I just got so mad, I started to say anything to hurt you back. I didnt mean it that way, you know I didnt mean it. I understood about those jobs. I didnt want you to stay with them. But Im 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. Theres nothing for me here, and it makes me feel like nothing.
Teddy and I are nothing. He says it acceptingly, dully.
No. No, thats not what I meant. You and Teddy are everything. Dont listen to my words alone, you know what I mean behind the words. Please, Tom. Im 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.
Its okay, baby, its okay, he mutters, his lips by my ear. Lets just forget it. His voice is soothing. Were 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, thats 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 didnt know you felt so strongly about going home, thats all. Ill just tell the folks tomorrow that summer is the end of the visit. Theyll 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 hadnt thought of the financial angle, that certainly we can stay at least until the end of the summer, and well talk about winter when were 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, theyre what is important. What did I matter, anyway? Surrender to Tom, and it wont be scary anymore. I wont have to ask myself what would happen if just once I stuck to my guns, insisted on having my own way. I wont have to wonder if hed dump me, or tell me to lump it or leave, wonder what would happen to me without him. Give in to Tom, and it isnt frightening, we arent quarreling anymore.
Long after he tells me what an angel I am, and how much he loves me, and werent 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. Its 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 Dragons Mane and Orchard Spice, teas that Annie mixes herself in the tiny back rooms. It is an alchemists 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 Annies, treasures and surprises, delightful things to sell
I wont 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 wont be the one to indulge someones 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 dont want to think about where I have heard those arguing techniques before. I dont want to remember Mother Maurie applying them to Steffie all this spring, how she acts hurt by her daughters refusals but politely accepts them, all the while pointing out how logic and reason and good manners are all on her side. Eroding Steffies 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. Dont I know how well it works?
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 dont want to think about where I have heard those arguing techniques before. I dont want to remember Mother Maurie applying them to Steffie all this spring, how she acts hurt by her daughters refusals but politely accepts them, all the while pointing out how logic and reason and good manners are all on her side. Eroding Steffies 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. Dont 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, sleeps grip on him more sure and intimate than mine. He doesnt 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. Hed only have to roll to face me, make himself hard for me, Id do all the rest. Honey, he rebukes me gently, Ive 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. Dont know how hes been getting past the electric fence, but therere 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. Im alone.
Not alone.
His face fills my mind suddenly, and the musk I smell is not Toms 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 cats 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 Mauries 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 dont 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 isnt allowed to show it. Shes a lay teacher, a volunteer at the Catholic school. Shes not a nun, and to my way of thinking she isnt 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 Ill 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 Haritsens 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.