Perennials, page 11
He put his hand out. “It’s time to go.”
She swatted his hand away and spent a few more moments facing the mountain landscape, though she wasn’t looking at much of anything. She focused only on making the tears stop, on pulling herself out of the moment, so that she could get back down the mountain and get home and never have to think about this again.
When she was ready, she pushed herself up off the rock and began to walk in the direction of the trail. She watched her feet, putting one step in front of the other as she went down the rocky path. Her father followed behind her silently. He drove her back to the city, news radio playing through the car’s speakers and neither of them talking over it.
—
When Rachel got back to the dance, she saw Fiona standing with some of the other counselors from her section. Fiona didn’t notice that Rachel had returned. Yonatan was now playing an Israeli pop song, and the kids were surprisingly into it, letting loose, holding hands, jostling one another around the makeshift dance floor. Rachel went over to him.
“Who is this?” she asked.
Yonatan looked surprised to see her and then collected himself and said some Hebrew band name she’d never remember. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.
“Are you having fun?” she asked.
“Yeah!” He bopped his head in time to the music. “Are you?”
She shrugged. “It’s fine,” she said.
She grazed her fingertips over his shoulder, realizing only once the contact had been made that her brain had, somewhere below her consciousness, made the command: “Pick up hand. Touch shoulder with fingers.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asked.
“Huh?”
Rachel took out the Poland Spring water bottle she’d been keeping in her bag. “It’s vodka.”
He laughed. He grabbed the water bottle from her and took a tiny sip. His face puckered at the taste of it as if he had just sucked on a lemon.
She took a sip herself and felt that familiar burning in her lungs. This was her MO, carrying vodka around in Poland Spring bottles: to high school dances, to college football games. When she got to Michigan, she had realized that the other girls mixed vodka with juice or with Crystal Light packets, and without her trying, the undiluted alcohol had become her trademark.
“Hold your nose,” she said, and he briefly looked around the dance to make sure no one was watching, then took one more sip, doing as he was told.
He opened his mouth wide and let out a loud breath through it, like a lion exhaling.
“That is brutal,” he said.
“Brutal!” she laughed. “Your American slang is improving.”
He smiled at her. It was a slow smile of recognition, as if he was beginning to realize that he knew her or could grow to know her.
Then Yonatan turned away and put on an American song that everyone could sing along to. “I remember when…I remember, I remember when I lost my mind.” Even the counselors at the dance were becoming more relaxed, more fun. Both Chad and Jack were dancing innocently with the shyer girls. Jack held one of Sheera’s hands and spun her under his arm. It was the first time Rachel had seen such unabashed happiness come from the girl. Fiona was dancing in a clump with the girls from her section. She still had not noticed that Rachel was back, and Rachel was glad for it. Fiona was as close a friend to Rachel as any, but not close enough to eradicate the loneliness Rachel felt in this moment. When Yonatan turned back around and faced Rachel, she took his hand and began to dance with him. She swayed her hips left and right. “Who do you, who do you, who do you think you are?” They were only attached by their hands, but those two hands were a bridge, a now-permissible connection between them. She had given him, with her hand, permission to look at her the way he was now—his eyes suddenly open to the possibility that maybe they could, maybe they would.
He could dance, Yonatan. He had an innate sense of rhythm and a suggestive way about him as he moved, a confidence in his loose limbs. He was a musical person, and so it made sense that the music was a vessel for his sensuality that had, until now, been calmly, quietly hidden away. He took his free hand and put it in Rachel’s hair—not long enough for anyone else to notice, but long enough to graze her scalp, to comb his fingers just once through the waves.
It gave her chills. Without thinking, she gestured for Yonatan to follow her and, leaving the iPod to play by itself, led him to the athletic shed, which sat just at the edge of the woods, about fifty yards away from the basketball courts.
She pulled the door open easily; nothing was ever locked at this camp. Yonatan looked behind them before they walked into the shed. No one saw. But they could so easily have gotten caught, at an event where the entire camp was present. That was part of the fun.
She closed the door and pushed him up against it. He responded eagerly, grabbing her whole head of hair in his hands. He kissed her tenderly, but in response, she pushed her mouth hard against his, biting his bottom lip.
“Ow,” he said.
She didn’t apologize but kept kissing him—more aggressively than she normally kissed—and reached into his pants. It was larger than she had expected, and the discovery thrilled her.
“You’re so big,” she said into his ear, biting that too. “I want you to fuck me like an animal.” She was a petite girl, and sex hurt her easily.
He pulled away and looked at her. She could tell that she was more than he could handle. She was a handful, especially now, and his face reflected it: surprise and apprehension.
“Rachel, I don’t know if we should.”
“You don’t want to fuck me?”
“I do, I do.” He kissed her once, tender again. “You just…you seem not okay tonight.”
“I’m great,” she said, and took his hand and put it between her legs.
They held each other with their hands, grinding and moaning. She wanted to feel only the physical, and her whole body ached with it, with the buildup toward something better than the now. She wanted to feel him inside her, and she wanted it to hurt.
She was pushing her underwear to her ankles, about to take him in, when a light from the outside cracked into the dark shed. The door creaked, and Rachel first saw only the outline of two younger people as she opened her eyes. Two young outlines holding hands.
Rachel pushed away from Yonatan as he scrambled to tuck himself back into his pants. She pulled up her underwear and straightened her dress.
“What are you doing?” Rachel said to Helen, standing in front of Yonatan to shield his nakedness from the girl, though it was, of course, too late.
Helen had dropped Mikey’s hand. The two children stood there waiting for the adults to say something else.
“Mikey,” Yonatan said, putting on a deep counselor voice and stepping out from behind Rachel, “go back to the dance.”
“We weren’t—” Mikey began. “We were just…” He trailed off. Helen looked as if she was about to cry. As both counselors took in the desperation in her eyes, Yonatan seemed to realize that this moment was no longer his.
“Mikey,” Yonatan said more sternly now. “Come with me.” He guided Mikey out of the shed to return to the dance, saying something hushed to the boy as they walked away. Mikey turned back to offer Helen a helpless glance.
It was hard to tell if Helen was the type to tattle. She was so very much a girl still: a girl who was leaving a dance to fool around with a boy, yes, but still a girl. The look of shock and fear on her face suggested that what she had seen was far beyond her own desires and perhaps even beyond her own understanding. They had probably escaped to the shed only for the excitement that came from sneaking around. They were probably just going to make out. Yonatan, a grown man, had literally been holding himself in his hands. What, for this girl who thought playing four square counted as foreplay, who didn’t need to wear a bra yet, could be more earth-shattering than that?
“Helen,” Rachel said. “Please just do one thing for me.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Helen said, shaking her head back and forth as if she could shake the memory right out of it.
“Me neither,” said Rachel. “But especially, please, please don’t tell Fiona.”
Helen wiped a rogue tear away. “Does she like him?”
Rachel nodded. She thought of Fiona’s arms around her under the oak tree. Fiona asking Rachel if she wanted her to come for the phone call. Fiona, whom she was still hiding from. Fiona saying she couldn’t handle anyone seeing her naked.
“Of course I won’t,” Helen said.
They walked back to the basketball courts in silence. Fiona, finally seeing Rachel, rushed toward them.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Fiona said to her friend. “Should we go somewhere?” Fiona noticed her sister’s stricken face and put on her own forlorn and sympathetic expression. “Did she tell you?”
Helen panicked, unsure what she was supposed to say or what exactly Fiona was referring to, and looked to Rachel for support.
“Give us a minute,” Rachel said to Helen. Helen did as she was told, ambling unsurely toward the group of girls her age.
Fiona put an arm on Rachel’s shoulder. “Do you want to talk? What can I do?”
Rachel shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I just want to dance.”
7
John and Amy Larkin drove up Route 22 for Visitors’ Day. It was a clear, sunny morning, and Amy was surprised by how tired she was. As they drove, she realized that she hadn’t been up before ten since they’d dropped Helen off at camp three weeks earlier. Her body should have still awoken at six like clockwork given all the mornings over all the years making breakfasts and shuttling the kids to school. But every summer, once the kids were gone, she could not stop sleeping. She’d hear John’s alarm go off, roll over, and fall back asleep, only to reawaken some hours later to the late morning sun drenching her in its warmth. She wouldn’t get up right away; sometimes she would spend another hour in bed just watching the sun fall through the window. On these late mornings, she felt like a girl waking up in her mother’s bed—too small to have this thing all to herself and yet luxuriating in the feeling that this was a special occasion, that this could not happen on just any morning.
Her days were spent alone, planting flowers in the garden at home and then, later in the afternoons, driving to the community garden in town, where her vegetables grew, to harvest her cucumbers and tomatoes. Dinner was usually something simple, like a piece of salmon and a caprese with heirlooms and buffalo mozzarella. Sometimes John came home on time. Sometimes he did not tell her until the last minute that he wouldn’t make it for dinner. It had been like this on occasion when the kids were around, but it happened even more when Amy was the only one home. She never told him that this bothered her.
She had packed thermoses of coffee for John and herself for the drive, and she was guzzling hers. John had tuned the radio to jazz. He was doing that annoying thing, humming along to a song even though he had no idea where the tune was going. Amy had long ago stopped telling him about the things he did that annoyed her. She’d known John since she was nine, and now she was forty-six; she knew every one of his habits and tics, as spouses in most marriages did, but the difference was that Amy had watched those tics grow as he did. Now the humming, which was once a boyish quirk, had developed into a full-blown grown man’s assertion of himself. It was his way of taking up space in the car.
As they wound along the highway, she noted the breadth of trees flanking both sides of the road. There were no towns or even buildings in sight. Just trees. How quickly they had found themselves in the country. She felt a hint of jealousy of Helen, of her daughter’s still-intact childhood. She still got to attend camp, got to escape every summer, got to be a girl.
As soon as Amy drained the last of her coffee, she realized how urgently she had to pee.
“Honey, can we pull over?”
“We’ll be there in half an hour,” John said, his eyes on the road.
“I can’t wait half an hour.”
“You can’t hold it?”
“No.”
John sighed. “You and your tiny bladder.” He did not say this affectionately. John had not learned to let go of trivial annoyances in the same way that Amy had. “I haven’t seen any signs yet for rest stops.”
Amy hadn’t either, and she waited patiently, with her thighs pressed against each other, until she saw a blue sign with the stick figure drawings of a man and a woman and the block letters EXIT 31 over it.
“Exit 31,” Amy said, pointing to the sign. “Five miles.”
“I see it,” John said.
In five miles, Amy made a conscious effort not to point out the sign again, and John remembered to take Exit 31, turning the wheel sharply around the tightly curving road.
They ended up at a stoplight and a T where their road met a perpendicular two-lane country road. There were no further signs for a rest stop.
“Turn right,” Amy said.
“How do you know?”
“I just have a feeling.”
John looked at her suspiciously. But he made the turn anyway.
They passed patches of thick woods, no people or homes in sight, followed by open expanses of farmland. Amy wasn’t sure whether they were in New York or Connecticut at this point.
“Where are we?” John said, as if hearing her thoughts. He leaned over the steering wheel and looked out at the road and at the next farm they passed, with its red barn and silver silo towering over it.
“Beats me,” she said.
They drove for a few more minutes, still not seeing a gas station or any sort of public restroom.
“Cows!” Amy exclaimed as they drove by dozens of them grazing. “I’ll take the brown ones; you take the ones with spots?”
He grunted. So he wasn’t in the mood today.
“Ame, let’s just pull over,” he said, already pulling onto the side of the road near a lush patch of trees and bushes.
“No,” she said, pushing her knees closer together. Her bladder pulsed.
“We are in the middle of bumfuck Connecticut and now at least ten minutes from the highway. No one is going to see you.”
“It’s embarrassing, John.” She sounded like a little girl to herself, the way she whined. Why didn’t he have to go? He’d had coffee too.
“Well,” he said, sitting back in his seat. This was his move, the lean back, which signified that he was reserving his right, as the breadwinner and patriarch of the family, to make the final decision. Once he did the lean back, that infuriatingly stubborn move—arms folded, satisfied scowl on his face—there was no bargaining with him.
Amy sighed and poked through her purse for a packet of tissues. She took one from the pack and made her way, with a frown, out of the passenger door and around the back of the car.
He had pulled alongside a rough patch, which dropped steeply from the road, and she stepped carefully down to a more secluded area, snapping twigs under her feet as she went. She found herself surrounded by overgrown bushes and the thick trunks of trees with lush summer coverings of green leaves overhead. She arrived at a clearing behind a wide-based tree, which would shield her from the view of anyone on the road, and, with the hand holding the tissue, lowered her underpants to below her knees and lifted the hem of her dress with the other.
She exhaled as the stream of urine gushed out of her, splattering on the dirt between her feet. She heard a car driving along the road above.
“Shit.” Her pee had started to make a puddle on the ground, and a few drops splattered back up her legs. As the stream began to slow, it trickled onto the inside of her thigh and down the length of her calf.
She wiped herself and tried to clean up the mess she’d made on her leg with the one tissue, wishing she had brought the pack with her.
She heard some sort of crunching in the leaves on the other side of the tree, and she had a mental glimpse of herself as someone else would see her: squatted, panties down, bare-assed. God dammit, John. She scrambled to right herself, pulling her underwear up and letting her dress down.
As she did so, she heard the crunching come closer, a light pattering along the floor of the grove.
“Hello?” she said. She was almost certain it was an animal, but what if it wasn’t? What if this was her last moment on earth; how would John explain it to everyone? To the kids? Even within her trepidation, she felt something akin to satisfaction that her disappearance would be John’s fault.
She approached the tree and peered around it to look in the direction of the pattering. The animal’s ears were sticking up, and its black eyes were open wide. The deer had stopped moving, startled by Amy. It was just a baby, though no mother was in sight. She was so used to deer digging through her vegetable garden and eating her lettuce that she knew them only as nuisances. This felt different. She felt a sympathy, an instinctual sadness for the fawn, worrying that it had been separated from its mother. But what would she do if it had?
The fawn was standing only a few feet away from her. Amy looked into its black eyes, wondering whether it was a boy or a girl. She took one small step forward, testing it, seeing if it would run away. It just stared back, unfazed. She thought it was supposed to be afraid of her.
She heard another scampering and then saw a larger deer approaching the fawn. The mother. Instantly the fawn turned and followed it, leaving Amy, who suddenly remembered that John was waiting in the car.
—
They arrived at camp half an hour later, as John had said they would. She probably could have held it.
They drove up the hill, past the stables, and to the parking lot below the flag lawn.
“Do you remember our first kiss under that tree?” she asked him as they parked, pointing to the elm tree on the lawn.
“Of course,” he said, not romantically but matter-of-factly, as if he was almost offended by her asking. But she liked how he said it like that, as if implying, “How could I forget?”
