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.
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