Wolfish, page 8
Elle a vu le loup, the French once said. She has seen the wolf. An idiom for a girl losing her virginity. And what then, I wanted to ask. Did she run away? Or did she chase it? Later I would think of the moment in the forest where Little Red first saw the wolf walk toward her. Not because Jack was a wolf, but because he, like the wolf in the story, was a stranger. What if Little Red had felt both wariness and interest in that moment? Could it be she saw the wolf and could not decide how to feel? I wanted only to make out with Jack, but also I wanted to dodge the weight of his disappointment. It would be nice if he could fall a little bit in love with me before I left. To see the wolf not as flesh-and-blood but tracks in the snow, the specter of something that might, at any moment, come back.
And so I tried to ignore the things he asked me to do. Eventually his palm just found the top of my head and pressed. It felt like we were floating on a large lake, playing that game where I tried to keep my head above the water while he tried to make me sink. My neck ached. Still, some desperate lizard in my brain kept narrating romance—the immediacy of our connection, the way we had found each other, not once, but twice, on campus—while trying to just clip out this part of the plot. All day I had wanted to be confident and blasé, but my repetitions of “no” punctured that. Later, I would realize a part of me started hating him then for making me feel like a prude, for making me hate myself.
Eventually he gave up, or I said I needed to go home. I don’t remember. When he insisted on walking me back, I agreed. I wanted to be witty and fun again; also, I was lost. Once we were on the quad, he swung an arm around my shoulders, behaving as if nothing had soured. Had it, in his eyes? Every few seconds I remembered the frustrated whine of his voice and the pressure of his palm, but it was easier to forget. He asked me what my future was going to hold, as if it were a package I had ordered online that would be delivered any day, and whatever I said made him laugh. The laugh buoyed me. By the time we reached my friend’s dorm, I felt sure I had crawled safely out of the lake. As if now I was lying beside Jack on the dock, body flayed to the stars, listening to the lap of water and wondering how it had ever felt too deep.
A few days later, Jack found me on social media. A few hours after that, I wrote back. Soon we were chatting on the phone, me in my childhood bed, him wandering the campus I wondered if I should join. Jack was both attentive and cheeky, a listener and a confessor, a reader and an eater. We talked about being from the West Coast, about having siblings more glamorous than us, about the incomprehensible kindness of our mothers. Early on I had written him a message calling him out for preying on younger women in his cape, but it was more flirt than reprimand, my only acknowledgment of the discomfort I felt that night. “He says he likes me more than anyone he’s ever met. (I say he doesn’t know me),” I wrote in my journal as he floated the idea of coming to Portland, or me flying to visit him that summer at his childhood home.
One day, I told him I had never really had negative adolescent experiences with men. Later he would lord this over me as proof of my naïveté, insinuating feminism was a club for prettier, worldlier girls. Only now can I look back on my teenage years and see how narrowly I defined—and thus narrated, to myself and others—“negative experiences.” Operating in the logic of Little Red, I believed threat implied stranger. Someone who would shout or grab me off the street. The boy from school who kissed me while I pretended to be asleep at a party, his hands searching, my body frozen—what was that? I did not feel traumatized by moments like this, only woozy with shame to be locked inside a skeleton I was not sure how to steer. I tagged those interactions, like Jack’s unwavering pressure on the dance floor, as blips of poor judgment. They were not threat, they were boys being boys. Drunken mistakes.
When it came time to decide on a college, I was careful to make excuses. It was geography, academics, a scholarship. What I did not say was that I could feel Jack’s expectation and it worried me. I wanted to go far for college because I craved a story I did not know the ending of, and Jack, it seemed, had already conjured a happy ending with me. I moved to Maine.
* * *
In the months after he received his collar, OR-7 watched his parents. The breeding pair in a pack will most often initiate a kill, leaving the younger ones to trail and occasionally help. OR-7 might have helped the charge. Wolves want their prey to run. To flee, so they can corner it and rush its legs, trap it to the earth with their jaws. Sometimes the prey tries to buck a wolf, the canine’s teeth still attached as she leaves the ground, sails into the air. But say the wolf wins. She will open the body cavity with teeth and claws. She pulls out the large internal organs first—slick purple heart, starchy lungs, nutrient-rich liver—then eats the stomach lining and the honeycomb of the intestinal wall, saving the smaller organs and marrow-filled bones and hide for last. OR-7 would have learned to kill, to eat, to cache food for later.
And then—on September 10, 2011, a warm day as far as I can tell, sky sun-bleached metallic blue, blades of cheatgrass rusting with autumn—OR-7 left home and didn’t come back. Russ and Roblyn were monitoring a handful of other collared wolves by then, all over the state, so they weren’t paying too close attention as this one crossed one county line after another, zigzagging southwest toward the Pacific. When they checked the computer in late October, though, OR-7’s path began to stand out. The wolf had gone over 250 miles. Suddenly he was the first known wolf in western Oregon in seven decades. Walking toward that half of the state crowded with people and empty of wolves. Howling, alone.
* * *
A few weeks into my first semester, I left the college library around eleven p.m. to walk to my dorm. The quad of the snow-globe campus was quiet. The air smelled like pine trees and old rain, and my mind was full of Robert Hass, the California poet whose words I had been introduced to in class that week. His poems were full of droopy trees and fog-soaked mornings, and I was surprised how swiftly my longing for Oregon had gotten caught between his words, gathering like lint in a comb. The nostalgia flustered me, revealing a homesickness I had so far kept tamped down. That was what I was thinking as I kicked my sneakers through the moonlit grass: how sorely I wanted a sign. A sign I belonged here, in a dining hall of lacrosse sticks and pastel shorts embroidered with tiny lobsters; a place where people referred to “the city” and only meant one place, New York, even though many took planes to arrive, passing over other cities as they went.
As I rounded the curve of a shadowy path about two hundred yards from my front door, I saw a pack of guys walking toward me through the trees. I do not know whether to call them men or boys. I could not tell if they were talking, but they had the straight gait of people who were not engaged in conversation but purpose. Their bodies were muscular, solid as a wall of trees. “We are what we can imagine,” wrote Hass in the poem “Winged and Acid Dark.” Some spark plug in the root of my spine told me to panic, but I was what my parents called “jumpy” and I was trying to learn to control it. Besides, this was a small town of students and retirees on the coast. I was used to seeing others returning from the library at this hour, and I imagined the group would murmur hello as we slouched past each other.
They did not. When we were a few feet apart, the line of guys formed a tight semicircle around me. They did not speak, but they stared, and when I looked back, I saw their faces were masked in white cotton T-shirts, with slits for eyes and mouth. The white athletic socks they wore on their hands turned their fingers into paws. I do not need to tell you what my heart did in those moments, or for the rest of the night, or for the nights that followed. What happened to my body is that it froze. The men were frozen too. It was a terrible dance. The moon gaped above us. Pray, I thought. Also: Prey. Nobody talked. I waited for their hands to reach for me; they did not. Finally, my body pushed through their bodies and ran. Nobody followed.
* * *
Though I knew the story of Little Red Riding Hood as a child, it did not make a big impression on me. My interest was held by stories about those who defeated the odds, not those who were defeated. I wanted stories I could live inside.
The version of Little Red I knew was some iteration of the Brothers Grimm telling. In that version she is still a damsel, but with the addition of the huntsman she becomes salvageable. He is the friendly passerby who heard loud snoring coming from the grandmother’s house and entered to find that “old sinner” of the sleeping wolf. Sensing the grandmother is inside, the woodsman scissors the wolf’s belly open, and out tumble two victims. There will always be evil, this story says, but that’s where man steps in. In defining the wolf as someone to fight and the girl as someone to save, the fairy tale offers up the hero of “male governance,” as fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes writes. It is as if this savior springs from the bone of a wolf and the bone of a girl. He is nothing without them. In my memory, a man was always rescuing Little Red and killing the wolf, but in the original Grimm version, she is the one who, once cut free, gathers rocks and places them inside the sleeping wolf. He wakes to a belly of stones “so heavy that he collapsed at once, and fell dead.” The huntsman walks off happily with his pelt, and the girl goes home, flush with new resolve to obey her mother and heed the path.
You could say writing about the story today is, to take one cliché to describe another, beating a dead horse. This is because the most common iterations of the fairy tale, which stem from Perrault’s and the Grimms’ derivative version, feel so obviously rotten from the root. Just as girls should not be punished for stopping to stuff their fists with bright sprays of flowers, so Canis lupus should not be vilified for the predations of two-legged males. Perhaps the thing I hate most about the story is that there is no coexistence, no restorative justice, just two creatures in moral opposition. Only one ever makes it out alive.
Because I was so sick of it, I was surprised to realize the further I got from girlhood, the more I thought of Little Red. At first I believed it was because the story carried all the lessons I needed to ditch. “Wolves are trapped in folkloric narrative that defines them just as firmly as women, and, like women, they are feared and reviled for their potentially predatory power,” writes South African fairy-tale scholar Jessica Tiffin. If I just untangled Little Red’s story, I thought, maybe I could free us from it—free the women, free the wolves. I could be the huntsman, smirking with my axe. I see now this was wishful thinking. In a fairy tale of regressive lessons, it was not the lies in the story that tugged me back. It was its bulb of truth. That fear, some fear, was maybe useful after all.
* * *
There is one more part of the story with Jack. A jagged corner of the puzzle—a piece I am not always sure fits into my life. It begins when a girl—I’ll call her Anna—leaves home on an errand. She is not delivering a cake to grandmother, but she is picking up some papers for her mother, who works downtown. She is not in the woods, she is in Jack’s Vancouver hometown, and it is a warm June afternoon, the summer before both Anna’s and my last years of high school. Exactly one year later, to the day, I will fly there to meet Jack, and later, I will think: Would this day have happened if that one, a year earlier, had not?
The man who confronted Anna beside her car had just left a rehabilitation program. In the security footage taken a few minutes later, he was the one driving the car, with Anna in the passenger seat. When he pulled up to an ATM, she tried and failed to withdraw cash with the cards in her wallet while he stood beside her. Anna called her parents and said she needed money to buy food. They told her the credit card couldn’t give cash, and she should come home. Later they would say they heard no fear in her voice. Sometime in the next few hours, her captor snapped. When police found Anna the next day, she was dead.
It was easy to read about the murder. I saw her face: I clicked. From the articles, and the photograph her parents released, I learned Anna and I were both seventeen, wore scant makeup, and had freckles and wavy dirty-blond hair. Newspapers described her as “bookish.” I couldn’t think of a time when I had read an obituary for someone who resembled me so much, and tracing the outline of her life electrified and horrified me. “It felt good, in a bad way, to think about my own proximity to violence. To imagine my life as a near miss,” writes Rachel Monroe in Savage Appetites, her book about women’s fascination with true crime victims. My comparison to Anna was superficial; it said less about knowing her than about the media’s uneven coverage of the missing and murdered, that preference for white middle- and upper-class female victims who were conventional enough to be respectable, what journalist and PBS news host Gwen Ifill coined “missing white woman syndrome.” Because women like this—Little Red, Anna, me—are most likely to be cast as innocent, we are more likely to be seen as worthy of public protection and, hypothetically, grief.
When did Jack tell me about their relationship? Some night over the phone in the weeks after we had met, probably, while I was procrastinating the conjugation of French verbs and sprawled on my rug, eating chocolate chips that melted into my sweating palms. He must have just said it: last year, a friend was murdered. He did not know what to do with his grief. They had gone to school together, and though he was older, they had been close, or something. I wanted to know if he had had a crush on her, or vice versa, if they had ever had too much plastic-handle tequila at a high school party and made out in someone’s kitchen, or just had one of those moments I knew from my own life, where one friend drives another home and there’s a minute in the dark, parked car where time slows and hearts speed up, but then someone opens the door, and the spell breaks—but in my memory, I asked nothing at all. I told myself it was because it did not feel relevant to his grief, but really it was because I could not bear to know.
The night before I graduated high school was the night Anna should have turned eighteen. A year earlier, she and Jack had celebrated the day with grocery-store cake. He told me this in a long, meandering email I woke up to the next morning. I read it repeatedly, trying to figure out how I fit into it and how I should respond. Here was someone he had cared about, perhaps just platonically, but deeply, on some sharing-birthdays level, and now, less than a year later, she was dead, and I was here, and now he cared about me. She should have been the one whose graduation he was celebrating: it seemed so obvious. I could not help wondering if Jack had seen a flash of Anna on the track when he ran toward me, or if he had just found me at the right stage of grief, someone who could adore him, or who represented enough of the same things to be worth chasing, to keep talking to even after I decided to go to school a thousand miles away. Unsure how to support him in his grief, I wallowed in horror, and also, unspeakably, envy. Not because of what happened to Anna, but because of the real estate I imagined she now held in his mind. I was greedy. I wanted to be the sole girl—the sole woman—in his skull. I sensed this made me a terrible person. I did not know what to do with the shame.
A month after I spontaneously traded my ice-cream shop wages for that ticket to meet Jack in Vancouver, we flew our different ways for college, and not long after that, when he offered to visit me in New England, I said no. It was not that Anna had come between us, but that I did not want to think about her at all. I wanted to fall in love without being reminded of other women dying. I wanted a world that, as the night on the quad would soon remind me, did not exist.
* * *
Within minutes of arriving back at my dorm, I called campus security and reported the masked men. The next day, an officer called me to confirm their identity on camera footage. Their headquarters was behind the little white house where I had just attended my first student newspaper meeting, and I kept my head low as I walked down the driveway, trying not to feel like a snitch. The security director was a tall, jovial Mainer with silver hair and a low baritone. He was so popular among students that he had become a sort of college meme, handing out plastic wristbands with Security’s number and cheerily posing for photos with anyone who asked. Everyone wanted to be friends with him, not just because we thought it would get us out of trouble if we got busted for partying, but because being liked was anointment by the institution, and in a bubble of overachievers, that was a badge you couldn’t turn down. If your nineteen-year-old friend was puking in the hallway, Security wouldn’t get you in trouble; they would make sure your friend was safe. I didn’t know if the masked men were a legitimate threat, but I trusted Security would solve the problem. Now, sitting on the edge of a plastic office chair, I watched a stream of silent video that showed the men keying into one of the dorms, jostling one another in the foyer like herded cows.
“That’s them,” I said. The officer, one I didn’t know, ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “Creepy as heck with their faces and hands covered like that.” I nodded. What else was there to say? These were the faces I would think of, years later, when reading about the ancient warrior men who, when masqueraded as animals, did things they would never do as men. The officer told me these were first-year soccer players who had been initiated. That is code for drunk. Hazed. Security staff had already spoken with the guys: they were very sorry about their inebriated “prank.”
“They meant no harm,” he said. That did not make me feel safer, but it did make me feel foolish: like I should have been in on the joke. When he mentioned some names, I recognized one as someone who sat behind me in microeconomics, a guy who had already smiled and retrieved a pencil that I had dropped on the floor. He wore the sweatshirt of his boarding school and had the blunt, forgettable attractiveness of a Ken doll. Then the officer told me the soccer players did not know whom they had scared, but they wanted to apologize face-to-face. I thought about it. I wanted to see how the men wore sorry across their lips. But some shard of my teenage self did not want to interfere with the equilibrium of that afternoon economics class, or anything else. I said I didn’t need a personal apology. On one level, it seemed only fair. They had had their masks, and now I could have mine. I wanted to let them think I could be any woman on campus. That I could be anywhere, watching them. That at any moment I might step toward them, collapse the space, open my mouth. That the hunted could play hunter. Mostly, though, I did not want to be known for my tattletale fear.
