Teddy’s sleeping at Mom’s house. He fell asleep on the couch, so Mom just covered him up. No sense waking him.”
“But,” I say, and stop. But what? But I want my baby? I want to read him a story, tuck him into his madeup bed on the rattan sofa, look up from Passion’s Furious Pride to watch his chest rising and falling under his blanket, his small mouth pursing in his sleep? Don’t be silly, Evelyn. Let him sleep where he is, don’t wake the child and drag him outside and across a damp yard just to put him back to bed again. Likely the boy will catch a chill from a foolish thing like that. You just leave my grandson be. I take my hand from the doorknob, return to my yellow cushion and white rattan seat. I try to immerse myself in Marlena’s thwarted passion for Duke Aimsly, to believe in people who cordially hate each other for months and then fall into bed with each other, muttering about raven hair and bee-stung lower lips and throbbing towers of maleness and secret chasms of womanhood. I look up at Tom.
I met Tom in the winter of 1969. My parents had sent me “outside” to college, to the University of Washington, and we met during an anthropology class. It was one of those huge 101 classes that every freshman faces at least once. Every day a wave of students poured into an auditorium, flowing into the crowded seats with no set pattern, dragging up the tiny flop-out desktops that were never quite big enough to support a full-sized notebook. There was no personal interaction with the professor at all. He came, he lectured, he left. Attendance was taken by a paper passed for signatures. Tests were mostly multiple choice. It embodied all the worst elements of mass education.
But I had always been a dedicated student. I sat every day in the front row, center. I stared up at the professor. I strained to hear his words over the muttering and shifting of the restless student herd, and to make out the spidery notes he scratched on the portable blackboard. Tom sat beside me. After several weeks, we noticed each other. He was the handsomest boy who had ever looked at me and smiled. It is good to remember that on evenings like this.
Later, I am still thinking of him as I watch him undress. I am already in my nightgown, sitting on my corner of the bed, drawing a brush through my hair. My hair is the color of mahogany from the sun, and unruly as always. It is neither straight nor curly, but when it is damp it makes waves of itself, and wraps itself around the brush bristles and the handle. I draw the brush slowly down my hair as I watch Tom unbutton his shirt.
One of the nasty little intrusive thoughts is that watching him undress is not as intensely pleasurable as it once was. It is my attitude that has changed, not the man, for Tom takes pride in keeping himself in good condition. His body is fine, and more than fine, much better a body than my own deserves. Tom could pose for beefcake. I could pose naked, and folks would have to look twice to see if I was female. I try not to be grateful for his body, for his sharing himself with me, for a small part of me insists that ungraceful and curveless as my own is, it is still a sturdy and useful vessel, a fine little animal to live in. But I cannot help taking pride in Tom and basking in his reflected glory.
I watch him now as he bends over slightly to tug his T-shirt off over his head. He is tall and well muscled and he bends gracefully, the muscles of his back delineated along his spine. He straightens, and his soft blond hair falls back into place, almost brushing his shoulders. I love his hair. When we are making love, it falls forward and brushes my cheek. I like to reach up and grasp the nape of his neck, feeling the muscles beneath my hand and his hair soft against my fingers, like the mane of a stallion. Dick Potter hates his son’s soft hair. Goddam Hippie Hairdo, he calls it, all in caps. But I feel a small victory in that Tom has not given in to his demands for a haircut.
He has been going shirtless for this last week or so, and the skin of his back is golden. When he straightens and looks at me, he is all tawny colors, golden skin, soft blond hair, and gentle brown eyes. Lion colors. He knows I have been watching him and he smiles, anticipating pleasure. He is so incredibly beautiful to me that an aching swells inside me. Not of desire, but of love thwarted. I love him so. And I am about to start a quarrel.
“Tom, honey, when are we going home?”
He stops in the act of lowering his pants and actually sits down on the bed in surprise. He turns to face me, his boyish face wrinkled with perplexity. He has been thinking of sex, not of neglected cabins and gardens going to weed. His fine lion hair is rumpled where he has drawn his T-shirt off over his head. His amber eyes, now the color of sunlight on beer bottles, go wide. “When are we what, Lyn?”
“When are we going home?” I repeat doggedly, patiently. “We were only going to spend a month here, remember? Just a pleasant spring interlude on the old family farm, camping out in the guest cottage, get Teddy out of Alaska for a while, let him see what a real spring planting time is like. Then somehow it became a month or so. Okay, May is fine, even though there’s a lot of stuff I wanted to get done on our own place. Teddy’s had a great time with the piglets and the chicks and the ducklings and all. But, honey, we’re in to June now, and I was thinking we’d be headed home any day now. Then, at dinner tonight, all of a sudden your dad starts talking as if we’re staying here the rest of the summer, and this winter, too.” I hear the stridency in my voice, take a deep breath. I stop ripping the brush through my hair as I realize my scalp is sore. Carefully, I soften my voice. “Babe, can you tell me what’s going on?”
Tom heaves the long-suffering sigh of the nagged husband. It is a new trick of his, one I don’t particularly care for. “Lyn. Honey. Don’t jump to conclusions. You’ve gotten so touchy lately. Yes, Dad did ask me if I would consider staying out the summer and part of the winter. You know Bix hurt his shoulder. Well, it’s going to lay him up for longer than we thought. So that leaves Dad trying to run the place and the business. And this is the busy time of year. Not only the farm to tend, but this is the time of year when folks are buying equipment. Being a man short around here is no joke anytime, so Dad invited us to stay on. That’s all. Just until Bix gets back on his feet. And between you and me, I don’t think that’s going to take as long as Dad thinks it will. Probably only another month or so. That’s all. And I didn’t give him a definite answer, because I wanted to talk to you about it first. But you know how my folks are. They think that if they just act like something is going to happen, it will.”
And it usually does, where we’re concerned, I think. No, I have said the foolish words aloud, I can tell by the sparks that light suddenly in Tom’s eyes. He finishes undressing in silence, kicking his pants away into a heap on the floor. He pushes the covers aside and swings his long pale legs into bed. His posture tells me I won’t be getting any tonight. He pulls up the covers before he speaks again.
His voice is a lie and a deception, reasonable and sweet. “If you want to take that attitude, then I suppose there’s no point to our discussing it at all.” You idiot, you spoiled brat, you cowering, narrow-minded little wretch, his attitude says to me. Refusing without even hearing me out. Heartless bitch. He hunches his shoulder under the white sheet and blue blanket. His soft hair fans out over the pillowcases. The pillowcases are white, but the cuffs feature Mother Maurie’s cross-stitch embroidery. A gaudy rooster on Tom’s, a plump little hen for me. The cross-stitched motto on Tom’s proclaims that he’s “all set to strut and crow,” while my hen petulantly affirms that she’d rather “set awhile.” They match a set we were given for a wedding gift. Steffie thinks they are adorable. They make me want to retch. Tom’s voice draws me back to our argument. “I’ll just tell them you didn’t like the idea, and that will be that.”
Oh, goody. You do that. I’d love to see their faces. I take a deep breath, put pettiness aside. “Tom. Don’t snap at me. You know what I’m thinking about, or at least you should. There’s our house. It’s been sitting empty since March, and we’re just asking for vandalism. God knows it’s probably full of mice and red squirrels already.”
“Pete and Beth said they’d keep an eye on it.”
“Pete and Beth both work, honey. Driving into our place twice a week only means they can let us know after the windows get broken. We’re not as isolated as we once were out there. Last summer I saw hikers and backpackers almost every day. And poor Bruno will be wondering what happened to us. I know they’ll feed him, but he’s only a pup. He’ll be half wild when we get back there as it is.