Be Mine

  The secure jobs. The healthy son. The old farmhouse.

  Even the reliable cars—mine a bright and humming small white Honda, easy on gas, four-wheel drive, and his an enormous barreling white Explorer, moving down the road seriously, masculinely, like the idea of gravity itself on wheels.

  Two decades!

  A long time, but, all along, there's been passion, and there still is—although not like those first months, of course, when we spent all our spare time in bed.

  Then, I had a roommate, but Jon had a one-bedroom apartment to himself, so I spent my nights with him there. It was winter, but we slept with the window open because the radiator was right next to the bed, and all the dry dust that was sent up from it made sleeping, breathing, difficult.

  We had sex in the morning, in the afternoon, at night—a layer of arctic air over us, a burning layer of heat and dust under us.

  We made love in the bed, on the floor, in the shower, on the couch. We made love straight through my periods—blood on everything. We made love straight through the winter until it was spring and the green grass was crowded with fat, mechanical robins.

  One morning, on my way out of his apartment to my job at the bookstore, I crushed a pale blue egg beneath my shoe, accidentally, and had to scrape the mucus mess of it off with a stick—and even that seemed sexual.

  Even the smell of humidity rising from the grass seemed sexual.

  The musk of it. The muck.

  Those first weeks of spring I could smell my own body all the time, and Jon's, while I worked behind the counter at Community Books. And men seemed able to smell it, too. They stuck around to chat long after our exchanges had taken place—their books in bags, their cash in the register. Men craned their necks to watch me walk down the street. A troupe of break-dancers on the corner stopped what they were doing—their naked gleaming torsos in the sun—when I walked by. Ooooh, baby. Look at that.

  The cottonwoods burst, and the fluff attached itself to the two of us as Jon and I walked through the park with our arms around each other.

  At home, we had to pick the soft stars of it out of each other's hair.

  We got married in July. We bought the farmhouse. Chad was born, and then—and then?

  And then the next twenty years happened in the staccato flashing of some colored lights!

  Where, I wonder sometimes, have those wild friends gone?

  Jon and I stayed in the general area, but it's been fifteen years since I saw any of them around. Several would be older than I am, assuming they're still alive. But it's impossible to imagine any of them like this, like us, so much older, so much time having passed, so fast—and, yet, it seems as if it hasn't actually been so long that it wouldn't be possible to just call up, arrange a time to meet at the Red Room for a drink, to catch up, if the Red Room had not been closed for twelve years now, replaced by a Starbucks.

  A few weeks ago, it feels like, since I last saw those friends. Or a couple of seasons. Have I changed? How much?

  Sometimes I feel more like that younger woman now than I felt then, back when I felt already so old.

  But whether or not those wild friends would recognize me now—maybe I'm better off not knowing. Maybe it's just as well that I didn't keep in touch, can't make that date for a drink to find out.

  Besides, I never really was one of them, was I?

  Of course they wouldn't recognize me now.

  ***

  SAME handwriting, same yellow paper, and, again, in a red pen, today, in my box:

  Sherry, I hope you have a great weekend. I'll be thinking of you. I'm always thinking of you...

  A SLATE gray February day, Saturday, today. From my study I can see a hawk circling the bird feeder—Mr. Death, waiting for something smaller, and also feathered, to land there. Last night I woke up at least twice to the sound of something in the walls. Mice, or a squirrel, squirreling things away, making itself a nest out of the cold—nuts, pinecones, candy bar wrappers. Jon wants to shoot it, if it's a squirrel. He claims they'll chew the wiring in the walls and burn the whole house down, but I say how likely is that. The house is nearly two hundred years old, and the squirrels have been nesting in it longer than we have, and when the cold weather lifts, they'll find another place to live.

  Oh, dear, the hawk just got what it was waiting for. Happened so fast it took me a minute to realize what had happened, looking up from this page to the bird feeder, and seeing something small and gray flustering there, and then the cold swiftness passing over it—a shadow with wings, and then in a heartbeat, both of them were gone.

  Be Mine.

  Who would send me that first valentine, and then the second, and why?

  Have I ever said that to anyone, Be mine?

  If I ever did, I can only imagine it would have been to Reggie Black, the summer I was seventeen.

  But I never really wanted him to be mine. I wanted to be his. To be claimed by him. It was the ambition we all had, we girls, back then. Some guy's enormous class ring on a chain around your neck. Some guy's letter jacket. To come to school wearing his T-shirt, his ball cap. To have a bracelet with your name and his name and a + sign engraved on it. To show it to all the other girls, gathered around in the hallway. Look.

  With Reggie Black, I wanted desperately for him to stake such a claim, but he never did. Reggie was shy. Every day that summer he'd come over while my parents were at work and the house was a small, dark possibility behind us. We'd kiss on the porch. We'd sit on the swinging chair. Eventually we'd go behind the garage, and his hands might find their way to my breasts, but I waited all summer for him to say, Let's go inside. He didn't.

  Has anyone ever said to me, anonymously or not, "Be mine"?

  It took this long to be claimed, finally, and by a complete stranger!

  BOUGHT a new dress today at the mall. Silk, with pink flowers, a plunging neckline, very sheer. I'll have to wear, always, a slip under it, and a sweater over it for the next five months. But I love it. At the department store I stood in front of the three-way mirror for a long time and looked at myself in it, and thought, Well, not bad for her age.

  I owe it all, I suppose, to the elliptical machine at the gym. I swear, it is the fountain of youth. It's restored to me the figure of my girlhood. Or better. Back then, I ate too much. Especially in college, as an undergrad in the dorms. All the pizza, and the popcorn, the cafeteria—the meat and potatoes heaped on my plate. And I can still remember the cheese soufflé, exactly the kind of thing my mother would never have made, so rich that it made the air inside it seem heavy.

  And the heft of those white plates, and standing hungrily in a line at the steamed glass windows, and how even the wan green beans, the sliced carrots, pooled and slippery with melted butter in a silver trough, called out to me. These things which, at home, I would have refused to eat—suddenly, now that I had nothing but choices, became what I wanted. Now, when I see myself in photographs from those days, I realize that, although I felt incredibly sexy every minute of every day—braless, in short skirts, no makeup, my dark hair so long it was a hazard around candles and revolving doors—I was, frankly, fat.

  Then, graduate school, I learned to smoke, lost it all, and looked no better for it.

  And then I got pregnant, and never touched a cigarette again.

  Now, I wouldn't touch those green beans if they'd even been near butter.

  (All this self-control! Where did that come from?)

  Looking at myself in that three-way mirror this afternoon at the mall, I thought I actually look chiseled. All this muscle definition in my arms.

  And my waist! The other day I took a tape measure to it, twenty-eight.

  And my breasts, 36 C—exactly what I always longed for and never managed, even when I was fat. Don't ask me how my breasts got larger as the rest of me slimmed down, but the evidence fills the cups right here on my chest. My diet—no refined flour, no white sugar, no added fats—has done away with even that lip of flesh I carried below my belly b
utton for years after Chad was born—the evidence of my maternity, which I thought would stay with me forever, gone.

  Jon says that if he could have my body of twenty years ago again, or my body now, he'd take my body now.

  My body, which just keeps getting better, and better, until...

  A sobering thought:

  Once you've entered your forties, how much longer can this go on?

  Even the celebrities in People, cited as sexier now at fifty than they were at twenty—the photos of those women all look as if they were taken underwater. Something happens to the face. (The neck, the hands, the knees.) No amount of surgery can fix that, and no one really wants to see it. Better this blur, the photographers must think—this buttery light, this distant hint at the beauty that was once there—than to look dead-on into what's actually left.

  Still, this dress is gorgeous, with or without my body in it. A sensuous memory, a slow song, a beautiful immoral thought turned into something wearable, buyable ($198!). Something you can bring home on a hanger, gather in your arms, accessorize with heels and a handbag—weightless, feminine, eternal, mine.

  NOTHING like spring yet, but only one more week until Chad comes home for his spring break. This morning we woke to more snow—a long cold carpet of it on the lawn, curtains of it blowing in fat flakes sideways in a hard wind. While Jon was still sleeping in the bed behind me, I stood at the window for a while, and watched it, and I started to cry.

  Why?

  The snow?

  Or maybe the realization that it was only one more week until Chad would be home, and how excited I've been now, since he went back to California after New Year's, for my boy to come back. And, because I couldn't help but wonder—is this what it will be like from now on?

  From now on will I count off the days of my life in black check marks between Chad's vacations?

  Season to season. Holiday to holiday.

  I could, I suppose, move through them just as I always have—buying the appropriate cards, sending them out at the usual times, putting up the Christmas wreath, taking it down, planting bulbs in the fall, seeds in the spring. But will I do all of it emptily, waiting for Chad?

  And, after a few more years off at college, how often will he even come home?

  There will be, I suppose, some summer backpacking through Europe. A spring break with his friends in Mexico. Soon, he'll start calling in November to tell me, "Mom, I'll only be staying a few days this year around Christmas, because—"

  Then what?

  Is this the empty nest?

  Is that what I was crying about at the window, watching the snow?

  At Christmas, Brenda went on and on about it:

  So, how is it having Chad off at school? What do you do with yourself? Is it like getting to know yourself and Jon all over again, after eighteen years of motherhood?

  She and her partner eyed me smugly from their superior positions on the love seat, childless lesbians with books and Welsh corgis and endowed chairs at a fancy college as I followed Chad around their town house with my eyes. They'd been waiting for years, I thought, to see me crash and burn when my "career" of being Chad's mother came to an end.

  Was this—the snow and the tears at the window—what they had in mind for me?

  Sue predicted it, too. From her secure position as the harried mother of nine-year-old twins, she kept making sad eyes at me in the hallways when school started again in August. But I kept saying, believing it to be true, "Of course I'm going to miss him, but all I ever wanted was for my child to be healthy and to grow up, to be a happy young man, so how can I begrudge it now that it's happened by being sad?"

  "Because," Sue said. "Because it's so fucking sad."

  "Maybe a little," I said. Something like a button or a cotton ball—one of those things you always fear your child will swallow—felt lodged in my throat then, and I wanted to sob it up. But, instead, I smiled.

  ICE ON everything this morning. Jon chipped it off my windshield before he left for work. I watched him from the bedroom window as he did it. Beyond him, in the backyard, the neighbor's spaniel (named Kujo by their grandson) was dragging something dead around in the scrubbrush. A raccoon, I think—although he once brought the long slender leg of a deer into the yard and spent hours gnawing it, wild with it, giddy with it, dragging the bloody thing around in the snow as if he were in love before losing interest and leaving it there for Jon to take away.

  But this morning Kujo was going about his work, whatever it was, with grim determination, it seemed, rather than joy.

  I left about an hour later, and drove slowly. Black ice. I don't even know what black ice is, exactly, except that you can't see it, and before you know it you're spinning off the road.

  I wore the new dress. Ridiculous in this weather, but I couldn't resist. I wore it with a black sweater, black tights, and boots, and still the wind in the parking lot cut straight through it. I felt silly, but when I stepped into the office, Robert Z looked up from some papers he was grading and shouted, "Now there's a woman knocking hard on the door of spring. Good for you, Sherry Seymour. Brava for you in your beautiful dress!"

  I checked and double-checked my mailbox for anonymous notes:

  Nothing.

  Surprised to find myself so disappointed.

  TODAY in the hallway between classes, I ran into Chad's best third-grade friend, Garrett Thompson.

  I hadn't seen Garrett except from a distance (graduation) for—how long?

  After middle school he was never one of the boys sitting around our kitchen table on summer afternoons eating cereal (Trix, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs—all that starry-dry and empty sweetness) straight out of the box by the handful while the sun turned the air over their heads to dusty halos.

  Still, Chad mentioned Garrett now and then. Something he'd said or done in the cafeteria line or on the bus on the way home from school. Garrett, who'd been so much a part of our lives for years, still seemed like family, still seemed like a distant part of our lives.

  He recognized me before I recognized him—and when I finally did realize who he was, it was because he looked so much like his father, Bill, who's now been dead for a decade.

  Bill Thompson used to change the oil in my car at the Standard station, and we always talked, laughed together, because we had the boys in common. He was handsome—dark, dimpled, the kind of mechanic you'd find on a beefcake calendar: Mr. February. Shirtless, shining with muscle, provocatively holding a wrench in one hand.

  And we'd had plenty of time to get to know each other at Cub Scouts, hovering over some project made of marshmallows and pipe cleaners. We'd wound up together at Camp Williwama a couple of times, too, when Jon couldn't get out of work to go with Chad. It fell upon Bill to teach Chad, then, how to shoot a bow and arrow. I was clueless, hopeless, couldn't even string the arrow in the bow. One night around a campfire while the Wolf Pack whooped and howled in the dark, he'd passed a little flask of whiskey to me, and, sipping at it, I felt almost as if we'd shared some kind of illicit kiss—the whiskey tracing a warm sash of Bill Thompson down my throat, spreading across my chest.

  But of course it was nothing illicit. We were parents, surrounded by parents, and by ten o'clock our boys were exhausted and we'd all retreated to our separate tents, and then he died.

  For a year or two after his death, I'd overhear Garrett say to Chad in the living room, on their knees, moving little men around on the rugs, "My dad's got a motorcycle in heaven now." Or, when Jon came home from work and said hello to the boys before going upstairs to take off his suit, Garrett would say, "You're lucky that your dad is here instead of in heaven." I'd go downstairs and cry a little into a laundered towel, or step outside on the front porch until I'd managed to swallow the sadness down.

  "Mrs. Seymour!" Garrett called out.

  "Garrett. My goodness. Garrett;"

  I touched his shoulder. He smiled.

  He asked about Chad. About Berkeley. About Mr. Seymour. He said he was taking au
to mechanics at the college, and wondered if he could take an English class with me, knock off a requirement, but it wasn't his best subject.

  "Of course," I said. "I'd love to have you in class. Sign up for fall."

  But then he said he didn't know if he'd still be in school in the fall. He was thinking about the Marines.

  I said, "Oh, no, Garrett, you should stay in school. You don't want to—"

  "I feel like I owe my country," Garrett said.

  "What does your mother say about it?" I asked.

  He said, "Mrs. Seymour, my mother's dead."

  Dead?

  I took a step backward.

  We live in a small town. How could his mother have died, and I didn't know it? "Garrett, when?"

  "At Christmas," he said. "She'd gone down to Florida with my stepdad for the winter. The trailer they were staying in had some kind of problem. Carbon monoxide. They went to sleep and never woke up."

  "Garrett," I said. "Oh my god. I'm so—sorry. Did you—was there a funeral?"

  "No," he said. "My aunt went down there and had her cremated. I've got the ashes."

  The ashes.

  Garrett had his mother's ashes.

  He had, I remembered, like Chad, no brothers or sisters. Now, it was just Garrett, I guessed, home alone with his mother's ashes.

  Marie?

  I couldn't recall her face. We'd only spoken maybe a dozen times, and always in passing, in parking lots, driveways, hallways, maybe once or twice at the grocery store. I suspected she drank. Now, I can't remember why I thought it, but I usually insisted that Garrett come to our house when he and Chad wanted to play. I was afraid she'd drive the boys around in her banged-up car. Maybe I thought I smelled it on her one afternoon waiting for the boys after school. His father drank, we all knew that, because it had caused the accident that killed him.

  I put my hand on Garrett's arm. I kept it there until I could find a voice to speak in again, and then I told him that Chad was coming home on Sunday, and would he come to dinner if he wasn't busy?