Circle of Three

  He put his hand under my sweater and my blouse, and I stopped thinking. Then I realized I wasn’t thinking, then I forgot again. Then I remembered. I’m making out on my father’s grave. I sat up so quickly, I hit Raven in the nose with my forehead. We both said, “Ow,” and leaned over, holding our faces. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m really sorry. I can’t do this here. I forgot where I was. God! Is that blood?”

  I’d given him a bloody nose. He stood up and walked a little ways away, keeping his back to me, hunching his shoulders. He looked just like Raven, slight and tall and gloomy. And to think we’d just been kissing. It was like a dream. I thought about him sometimes, had some fantasies about us being a couple, but more like…more like an old married couple that didn’t have sex anymore. Or like a nun and a priest who were best friends. One day last fall he wore a skirt to school—just for first period, before they sent him home. He said it was a gesture, we should all challenge gender stereotypes, androgyny was the only sex role that didn’t exploit people. But after that some kids thought he was gay or something. I hadn’t known what to think. Well, I guess I did now.

  “Is it really bleeding?” I scrambled up and went to him. He half turned around to say no, but it was. All I had was my wadded-up Kleenex. I passed it over his shoulder. “I’m really, really sorry. I just, all of a sudden, you know. Remembered.”

  “We could go over there,” he said nasally, pointing to some trees.

  “Um, well. I guess I should get back.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because I’ve got that test.”

  “Whatever.”

  “But that was…” I went blank. I turned away and started gathering up our stuff, pretending I hadn’t said anything. How could anyone finish that sentence? Who would be stupid enough to start that sentence? “That was nice”? “That was fun”? “Thanks for feeling me up, let’s do it again sometime”? I often think my life would be a lot easier if I were a mute.

  Raven’s car is an old Plymouth station wagon he spray-painted black to look like a hearse. The vanity license tag says CDVRS RUS, which hardly anyone gets unless they know him. The inside smells like decaying leather, old bananas, and smoke. He always drives slowly and carefully, not like every other kid I know who can drive. I kept sneaking looks at him, trying to figure out how he was feeling. I hoped he wasn’t hurt or mad at me. I’d have apologized more, but I didn’t necessarily want him to think I wanted to start up again right away or anything—like bloodying his nose was the only thing stopping us from some hot and heavy love affair. But I didn’t really think he thought that anyway.

  “Hey, you know my friend Jess? The guy I told you about, the ark guy? Jess Deeping? That’s his road—if you turn right there, that goes to his farm.” Raven nodded but didn’t slow down. “Turn! Turn, okay?” The car slowed; we turned in at the gravel drive between the gateposts. “I just—I was thinking we could say hi, is that okay? He’s probably not even there. Look, those are his cows, that’s all his land, that whole hill. Isn’t it pretty? Some of it’s on the river, too.” Raven kept his eyes on the lane and didn’t look around. “We don’t have to stay if you don’t want to. We can just say hi.” We rounded the last corner and the house came into view, then the barns. Raven probably thought farms were hokey or retro or exploitive or something, but I thought Jess’s was beautiful. “That’s Mr. Green, the hired man,” I said, pointing. “Look, he’s painting. He’s painting that barn red again, and it doesn’t even need it. Isn’t this place pretty?”

  The dogs were swarming the car, barking and growling, pretending they were fierce. “There’s Tracer! Hi, girl!” As soon as Raven stopped, I jumped out of the car and dropped to my knees on the gravel. The dogs backed away, still barking, but I called them by their names and gradually they sidled over, all but Tough Guy, and started sniffing my hands, my clothes. “Hey, Mouse, hey, Red. Hi, guys, did you miss me?”

  I stood up when I realized Raven wasn’t getting out of the car, which was still idling. Mr. Green came over, wiping his hands on a paint-spattered cloth.

  “Hey,” he said, “how you doing?” He shoved the rag in the pocket of his dirty coveralls and squinted, trying to see who was in the driver’s seat of the Plymouth. Mr. Green was an old man, maybe sixty, with a chubby, cracked brown face. He never had much to say, but he smiled a lot, showing two gold front teeth. “Come to see Jess, eh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, smiling back. “Is he here?”

  “Up at the house. Go on in if you want.”

  “Thanks. How’ve you been?” I asked politely.

  “Good, you?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  Mr. Green touched his temple with his finger and went back to his painting.

  I leaned in the window on my side. Raven was slouched in his seat, lighting a cigarette. His hair hid the side of his face. “So, um…”

  “Listen, can you get a ride back with this guy?”

  I stood back. “Yeah, I guess. You don’t want to come in?”

  “I’ve got some things to do.”

  “Oh.” I should go with him. I should go back to school. I was going to get in trouble. Plus I was ditching Raven for no reason, plus Jess probably didn’t need company in the middle of the day. “Okay,” I said. “Well, see you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” I didn’t move, though, so he had to look at me. He has pretty eyes, light blue with dark, curly lashes. I used my willpower to make him smile. I did—I stared into his eyes with my feminine charm and made him smile at me. “See you.”

  “Yeah. See you.”

  He waited a second and then very slowly drove away.

  Well, that was okay. This day could’ve been one of the kind that make you squirm at night when you’re trying to fall asleep, I mean it could so easily have made it onto my Most Embarrassing Moments list, but I fixed it. There at the end I took control somehow, I’m not sure exactly how, and I saved it. So I hope I’ve got it down in my genetic code or something now for future reference, a DNA memory, because that kind of girl power is definitely going to come in handy again.

  Jess’s front door was closed but not locked. I went right in. I was about to yell “Yoo hoo” or something when I heard his voice coming from the direction of his office. I went through the living room nobody ever uses, past the kitchen, the dining room. I stuck my head in the door to his study. He was sitting behind his desk, talking on the telephone.

  When he saw me, he looked amazed. And glad! He stood up, but he couldn’t get off the phone; he waved, gestured to a chair, but he had to keep talking. “So this is an IPO? Sure, I’m interested, but I’d need a prospectus. No. So there’s no revenue yet? They’re still losing money?” He laughed. “Sounds like my kind of—no, send me the prospectus, I can’t tell you until I see it. Okay. Okay. No, I agree with you. That’s what I’m saying, I want to look at the internationals. Listen, I’ll have to get back to you—” He smiled across at me apologetically. “Good, send it, that’s great. Right, and we’ll talk next week. So. Yeah. Okay, Bob. Thanks. ’Bye.”

  He hung up. “Hi,” he said, coming around his desk and sitting on the edge in front of me. “Look at you. How’d you get here? Everything okay?” He had on holey jeans and an old green sweater and muddy, ancient-looking work boots, and he looked good, he looked really real. I grinned at him, very glad I’d come, even if I was interrupting his workday.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said, “I just came to say hi—a friend dropped me off. Um…can you drive me to work at Krystal’s in about an hour and a half?”

  He put his head back and looked at me over his nose. “This is a school holiday, is it?”

  “Yeah. Teacher training day. In-service.”

  He lifted one eyebrow. He folded his arms.

  “Okay, I’m cutting.” I laughed, s
parkling my eyes at him. “You won’t tell Mom, will you?” I knew he wouldn’t, he was too nice. And I was too cute—I could tell I was getting to him.

  “Depends. You do this often?” He wasn’t smiling back.

  “No. Really, I don’t, in fact I never do. Really!” It was true, practically. “Just—today it was so nice out, and this friend said let’s have a picnic, and so we did.” Good; that could sound like a group of kids, not just me and one guy. I smiled winningly, shrugged my shoulders, spread my hands. “Didn’t you ever cut class when you were in school?”

  “Irrelevant.” He shook his head, but I’d made him smile. “I ought to tell Carrie,” he said darkly. “If you do it again, I will.”

  “Never again.” I put my hand on my heart.

  “You want a soda?”

  “Okay.”

  I followed him out to the kitchen, where he got down a bag of pretzels and opened a Coke. “I’ve still got some phone calls to make,” he said. “Can you take care of yourself for a little while?”

  “Sure, go ahead, don’t worry about me. You won’t even know I’m here.”

  He looked amused and doubtful, but he didn’t say anything. We went back to his office, and I sat on the sofa on the other side of the room from his desk, so he couldn’t hear me crunching pretzels while he talked on the phone. He called somebody named Bill to order fish liver oil and TMR, whatever that is, and he called somebody else, I guessed the vet, to talk about some poor cow’s inflamed uterus and whether he should give it antibiotics, electrolytes, or dextrose and estrogens. He called two different places for estimates on belts and pumps and vacuum regulators for his milking machines.

  I watched him while he talked, thinking how efficient he was but still nice to people. You can learn a lot about somebody by listening to their side of a phone conversation. My mom’s formal with strangers, almost too polite sometimes, to the point of sounding cold. Sometimes my dad was rude, especially to salesmen or people asking for charitable contributions. Jess had a soothing voice, even and low; I couldn’t imagine him ever yelling at anybody. He was kind of a mystery to me, though. Even though he seemed so peaceful and easygoing, I was sure there was a lot going on inside of him. Would I want a man like him if I were older? A man who felt things a lot, didn’t just think things? Jess is quiet, but I think he would tell me anything at all, anything I wanted to know, if I just knew the right questions to ask.

  I got up and walked around the room. All the bookshelves were crammed with Holstein journals, Holstein sale catalogs, record books, a million books about dairy farming. On a cork board by the door were photos of cows wearing ribbons. I didn’t want to disturb Jess, but I could see that behind his desk were the interesting pictures, ones with people in them, so I sidled around behind his chair, being as quiet as I could, and checked them out.

  Wow, he looked exactly like his mother. Ora—I remembered the name. She had a big cloud of shiny light brown hair she wore up in an old-fashioned bun, but otherwise she didn’t look old-fashioned at all. She was beautiful, very tall and slender, with big dark eyes and a soft mouth. She was laughing in the picture, standing by a rose trellis in a pretty housedress, and holding out her hand—she had long white arms—as if asking somebody if she could help. Jess, probably; if he’d taken this picture, he’d have been a little boy. I could see his face in the mother’s face so clearly, the same long eyelashes and sharp-sided nose, but most of all the same expression in their eyes. Hard to describe—because they weren’t really sad, were they? But that’s how Ora looked, and it was how Jess looked sometimes, like he knew about something painful and heavy, it would make you cry if he told you what it was.

  There was a picture of his father, too, a snapshot of him taken in this room, sitting at the same desk where Jess was sitting now. He looked much older than his wife, and smaller; he was a little, serious-looking man with frown lines between his eyes and smile lines around his lips. He looked worried and kind.

  The best was a photograph of the whole family, Jess in the middle with his arms around his parents’ waists, grinning into the camera. He was so skinny! He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, and his long, streaky, rock star hair was much lighter than now. I’d have known it was him anywhere, but he looked so different, loose and crazy or something, reckless. I stared and stared, trying to see the man I knew in the boy’s features. His mother wasn’t laughing in this picture; she was looking at Jess, and her pretty profile was vague and wistful. They weren’t at home, they were standing in front of a modern brick building with aluminum windows. Daffodils bloomed between two bushes—maybe it was Easter. Jess’s father had on a suit that didn’t quite fit him.

  Now they were both dead and Jess lived all by himself. Did he get lonely? He had Mr. Green and some other hired men, but they didn’t seem like much company. He had all his cows, which he knew by name (he said). He had friends, probably, and an ex-wife but no kids, and he was a member of the city council. Did he have girlfriends? Maybe I’d ask him.

  “Going to the bathroom,” I mouthed, and he nodded and pointed and kept talking. I went out and down the hall and into the bathroom next to the kitchen.

  Jess had left the toilet seat up. Well, why not? Mom used to scold Dad about that all the time, but I could never figure out why it was the man’s job any more than the woman’s. Jess lived alone, though, so the whole thing wasn’t even an issue.

  After I peed, I stared at my face in the mirror, especially my lips. How many times would I be kissed in my whole life? So far, about four times, but today was by far the most serious. I’d only done it once with tongues before. Too weird. But I might get used to it. Caitlin did it all the time, or so she claimed. In fact, Caitlin was probably sleeping with Donny Hartman, her boyfriend since ninth grade, but I didn’t know for sure. Jamie knew, but she’d sworn not to tell, and I could only get hints out of her.

  I stuck out my tongue, examining the little pink bumps on it. It wasn’t disgusting because it was mine, but the thought of Raven’s tongue, that was different. Tongues. Who’d invented that? Who was the first person to put his tongue in somebody else’s mouth and decide that was a good deal? And what did the person whose mouth he’d put it in think the first time? It was like—pesto or something. Who could ever have thought grinding up leaves and putting them on spaghetti would be a good idea?

  Breasts, too—what was the huge deal there? I pulled up my blouse and studied mine in my bra, a 32-A. Caitlin was a 34-A; Jamie didn’t even need a bra but she wore one anyway, she wouldn’t say what size. My breasts were coming in okay, I guessed; I wasn’t obsessed about it like some girls. Leslie Weber, for instance, who stared down at her own chest all the time. She sat across from me in English, and that’s all she did, stared at her own breasts, like they were actively growing before her eyes.

  “Boys will want to touch you there,” Mom said to me once, in the most horrible, the most excruciating conversation we ever had. It wasn’t the sex talk—we’d already had that when I was about eight. This was the date talk, brought on by Brad Donnelly asking me out to the movies last summer, just the two of us, not in a group. Big deal. Just because Brad was a junior, Mom decided it was time to talk about date behavior and condoms and AIDS and syphilis and breasts and French-kissing. Gross. Like I didn’t already know all that. She actually used the word fondle. It was like an out-of-body experience, and me thinking, Is this really happening? Is my mother really saying this? The horrible part wasn’t that she thought what she was saying might actually apply to my life; that was kind of flattering. The horrible part was thinking about how she knew all that stuff—she knew it because she’d done it herself. Which is obvious, but still creepy and revolting and bizarro.

  I heard Jess walk by the door, heard water running in the kitchen, and guessed he was finished with his phone calls. It was funny to think of him being a businessman, not just a guy who milked cows and went fishing and taught funny tricks to his dogs. I remember being surprised to see him in a suit an
d tie and all at my dad’s funeral. Like, because he was a farmer all he could ever wear was denim and flannel. Silly. I had a grass stain on the shoulder of my blouse, I saw. I was saving up thinking about Raven for later, though. I combed my hair with my fingers and went to find Jess.

  We went outside and walked down to the river, to the dock that went out from the bank along the rough shore, which was half trees, half grass. The dock was high enough so you could sit on the edge with your legs hanging over and not get your feet wet. Except in spring after a hard rain; then the river flooded and the dock disappeared until the water receded. Jess was an expert fly fisherman, but here from the dock he just did what he called coarse fishing, using worms and what-have-you to catch chub and perch and roach fish. Last summer he taught me how to bait a hook with wasp grubs, how to cast a float rod, how to reel in a big fat carp. Maybe someday he’d take me fly-fishing.

  We sat on the end of the dock and talked about fish for a while, and how we wished spring would hurry up because we were sick of winter. He must’ve thought I had something to tell him, that I’d come by for a particular reason, because pretty soon he said, “Everything okay?” and looked out over the water instead of at me, in case I felt shy about talking.

  I really hadn’t come for a reason, not that I knew of, it had just been a while since I’d seen him and we were driving right by his lane. Spur of the moment. Still, what popped out of my mouth was, “Everything’s great, except my mom had a date last night. Can you believe that? My dad’s been gone for half a year, and she goes out with this body builder.”