Cloven Hooves Read online

  I arise and click off the kitchen light. Night flows into the room from the uncurtained windows. There was part of a moon, and stars peeping through the partial overcast. Rain tomorrow, maybe. Rain. Rain for the new crops rising in green rows. Good. Rain for the fields.

  Rain. If you lived in the forest, what would you do when it rained? Take shelter at the base of some huge spruce tree, I imagine. Or, here in Washington, a cedar. Rain seldom penetrated through all their branches to fall near the trunk. It wouldn’t be so bad. One could sit there, one’s back against the trunk of the great old tree, smelling all the damp rich smells of the forest. Smells of wet moss and dripping flowers, of rich black silt and resin of evergreens. Maybe get a little sap in one’s hair, but is that so terrible? Maybe get a little chilled, too, but nothing a sheepskin jacket wouldn’t stave off. But the mosquitoes? I don’t know. I drift away from the darkened window, seeking the lighted bedroom much as a moth seeks a candle flame. Good simile, I think to myself. Fly into the fire and destroy myself. But maybe I am dumber than a moth. A moth only does it once.

  I flick off the light as I enter the bedroom. I shed my clothes in a heap on the floor. Brush my teeth? Too much hassle. I climb into the bed, stretch out on the cool sheets. Almost simultaneously, Tom reaches for me. He draws me close and smothers me in an embrace. I work my head free, turn it so I can breathe cooler, unused air. He kisses the side of my neck, strokes my body randomly.

  “Do you mind, baby? I need you so bad.” He mutters it into the side of my neck, punctuating it with soft, dry kisses.

  Need, I think. That’s the word, Tom. A word I could stand hearing from you more often. So you need me now, physically. Well, maybe it’s the only need left that your parents and siblings can’t satisfy for you. That’s left for me. So maybe I should turn you down on that account, because it’s not enough, it’s not what I need. But I think not, Tom, my love. I think it’s all the more reason to satisfy it for you.

  Somewhere here in this bed, beneath this lithe golden body that is beginning to thicken at the waist, behind the face that is beginning to have lines, is the boy I loved so deeply once upon a time. And if he is still in this bed with me, although his form may be changed, how can I deny him? Never once, Tom, have you even mentioned the stretch marks that even now you are touching, never have you teased about the growing heaviness in my thighs and hips. Are you searching, Tom, as you knead that extra flesh, wondering where I went, how you can reach me? I’m here, Tom, I’m here and I need you, too. And need grows, a bridge between us, rising, building, ebbs for a moment, then returns stronger than ever. Builds again, and continues to build, until I teeter on the edge of a precipice. Then I feel him pulsing inside me and I slip and begin the long timeless fall into the warm darkness of release.

  The sheets are damp with our sweat. I open my eyes to darkness that seems too bright. Hazily, I wonder why the windows are not fogged. We both shift, moving apart, seeking cooler spots on the humid sheets.

  “I love you,” he says, and for a moment all is simple and true. And I can answer, without cynicism, without anxiety, without thought, “I love you, too.” This is how it used to be, I think, this simple, this good. Just he and I, together, and happy being together. In love. This is how it was.

  And I hate the thought, because it makes me know that this is no longer the way it is.

  He pulls me to him contentedly, snugs me up against his chest like a beloved stuffed animal, his hand flat on my belly, his wet penis soft against my buttocks. He slips into sleep quickly. His breath is warm and moist on my neck.

  I slip carefully out from under his arm, pad down the short hallway to the bathroom. My nightgown is there, on a hook, and I drag it down and pull it over my head. It is a diaphanous thing, a softly mottled pattern of huge flowers in whites and pale greys. Tom bought it for me, and I’ve always loved it. It is huge and loose and moves easily around me, as if I have nothing at all on. I remember a night in Alaska, a storm was coming up, and Teddy had left Mr Bojangles outside. I had gone outside to find the stuffed raccoon. The wind was up and it blew past me, streaming my hair back and my gown and outlining my body against the blown fabric. I heard Tom’s truck engine and I waited for him to come up the long drive, had stood still, my eyes averted from the brightness of his headlights, the wind flowing through my hair and nightgown. He cut the engine but not the lights and sat there in the truck, staring at me, his face white inside the darkness of the cab. Finally I moved to the truck, the wind whipping my gown around me, and when I moved he slapped off the lights, leaped from the cab, and grasped at me with shaking hands. “It’s you,” he breathed, and held me tight, clutching my body through the silky fabric. He laughed and it sounded silly, his shaky laugh. “I didn’t know what you were at first, in the dark. You looked like … a vision, a spirit, I don’t know what.” He put his face against my hair and muttered, “So beautiful.”

  And we had made love there, on the young lawn that was more than half moss, in the dark of the rising storm, the wind sweeping over us, and then the rain coming down, drenching us both, but failing to chill us.

  I find I am standing outside the little house, on the prickly little lawn that surrounds it. My feet remember the cement slabs that make up the walkway, cool and rough against their soles. I look around me.

  But there is no true night here. The big mercury lamps on their poles hum, and insects dance around them. The lights are still on upstairs in the big house. There is no darkness, only a greyness that wearies my eyes as twilight never does, a thirsty nondark that has drunk most of the stars away. The air is muggy and still, too warm for a real evening. The true night has been kidnapped, the moon itself is a mercury light, this stale air rushes up from blowers somewhere.

  A few more steps and I am in the driveway, the toothy gravel pressing into my feet. I ignore it, walk lightly across it, my feet curling over the stones and taking no hurt from them, remembering lessons years old. Past the kitchen garden, to the edge of the pastures. I smell cow manure, and chicken-shit fertilizer and the dryness of the soil. We had better get rain soon. I stand, my hands resting lightly on the barbed wire, and my nightgown is limp around me. On the other side of this pasture is the chicken yard and a small pond. And the tracks of cloven hooves graven deep in the mud there.

  I will not go. I will not.

  I realize I am listening, not just with my ears, but with my skin, my nostrils are flared, all my senses are reaching, searching.

  The hands I put over my ears are cold, and the gravel bites my bare feet as I run back to Tom’s bed.

  EIGHT

  * * *

  Fairbanks

  Summer 1965

  Blood. Blood on my cotton underwear, in the toilet, on the toilet paper in my hand. Red blood, my own red blood staining me. The bottom falls out of my stomach. I am caught, cornered.

  This is supposed to thrill me? This is supposed to make me say proudly, “Now I am a woman! Ah, wonderful womanhood!” I feel sick and angry, not proud. This blood, leaking from me as uncontrollably as snot leaks from a runny nose. I wipe again at my furry little underbody, and the tissue comes away stained red, clots and strands of red. I’d feel prouder to look at my dog, gut shot. Are they crazy, all those stupid booklets about getting your period, your monthly, how neatly they put it, like it’s a magazine you subscribe to, and the talk about the sweetness of knowing one is a woman? Anne Frank’s diary, with that bit about “despite the smell, the mess and the bother, it is like I have a sweet secret.” Or some bullshit like that. Damn and damn and damn. I know I will have to go to my mother.

  And my mother, who has never failed me yet, does. She takes the news without surprise as I tell her, “Mom, I think my period’s started.”

  “Oh, dear,” she says, as if I had told her the dogs had pulled down the laundry line again, or that some idiot had shot up our mailbox. “Oh, dear.” Third daughter, what do I expect, brass bands and banners? This is old hat to her. I don’t want her to celebrate o
r announce it, but I want her to say something, to explain to me what has changed besides this annoying leakage of fluid from my body. Instead she says, “Well, you understand about what’s happening, don’t you?” and I say yes, because I do, I know all about the lining of my uterus peeling away, congealing and then uncongealing, sliding down my vagina like dirty dishwater down a drain. I understand all that, but that isn’t what I need to understand. There must be something more, something that’s been held back. I wait.

  “Well, you’ll need some things,” she says, then, shocking me, she calls, “Sissy, Candy!” They come, rattling up the stairs from the basement, alert, responding to some note to my mother’s voice, inaudible to me. When they reach the kitchen, she asks them in a lowered voice, “Do either of you have an extra sanitary napkin belt?” Exposing my vulnerability to them. I blush with anger, not shame or modesty. Fury like a fire bursting through me. I hate them all.

  Candy does. She brings it to us in the bathroom where mother has taken me, holding it rolled and secret in her hand, lest any of the males in the household see it. I take it from her, feeling its unspeakableness and grubbiness despite its whiteness. It is a band of elastic that goes around my waist, with two teethed clips that hang down before and behind to grip the ends of the sanitary napkin. I have to adjust the elastic to my waist, and my mother insists on helping me, and on helping me fasten the sanitary napkin in place. For the first time in my life, I hate the touch of her hands on my body. I feel intensely, personally violated that anyone should witness this. The humiliation is too great for tears, only anger can suffice. I look up to find that Sissy and Candy are at the bathroom door, peeking in.

  “Get the hell out of here,” I snarl, but they stand there, unmoving, their eyes as open and stupid as cow moose when I startle them in my rambles. I take a breath to scream at them, but my mother makes a motion of her hand and they are gone.

  “Now, you know,” she says, as if she were speaking to a simpleminded idiot, “that you must change the pad when you use the bathroom. And dispose of it in the garbage, not the toilet. Wrap it so the dogs won’t smell it and drag it out.”

  I am already pulling up my jeans, snapping and zipping them, so full of hatred and anger for what they have done to me that I cannot speak. Diapered like a baby, the hated white tissue snugged against me, rubbing against me with every step, I leave, going straight from the bathroom out the front door of the house. Heading for the woods. I whistle up my dogs. Minnie, my old bitch, is too hot and sleepy to want to go with me, but Rinky bounces up, always ready for a run. He stops suddenly, and then advances, his tail out straight, his ears up. He sniffs me rudely, shoving his snout into my crotch. I cuff him, hard, my cupped hand making a clopping sound as it connects with his muzzle. He backs away and gives his tail a desultory wag, as if to show he was only kidding, no insult intended, can’t you take a joke?

  No, I can’t, not today, and I set off down the lane at a wolf trot, and he has to trot to keep up with me. At the end of the lane I cross Davis Road and enter the woods. The beaten earth of my path is firm beneath my sneakered feet, and I break into a run, needing the deep woods and exertion, needing to think while not thinking, while with every step the white pad chafes mockingly against my high inner thighs. I push myself, stretching my stride, feeling the heat of my exertion and the thin summer sun of Fairbanks warming my shoulders.

  What it is, you see, is that I never really believed it was going to happen to me. Those stupid filmstrips with their sexless diagrams showing the uterus and vagina and ovaries in outlines of black and white have nothing to do with blood on one’s underwear. The sappy hygiene talks, the nun’s lectures about how it is the duty of girls to remain chaste and modest, lest they lead boys into temptation, the little booklets from Kotex passed out to take home and read, all that had nothing to do with me. That was something for girls who were wearing nylons and ratting their hair and sneaking cigarettes in the lavatory and passing notes about boys. Girls who wanted to be women, who dreamed of being feminine, whose barrettes matched their knee socks. Traders of lipsticks, stealers of their mothers’ eye shadow. Ear piercers, boy kissers. They’re the ones who deserved blood running down the insides of their thighs, not me. I never asked for any of this. I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

  But it got me, anyway. Damn and damn and damn. Got me like a bullet in the neck on a cold winter night. Unavoidable and unchangeable. I am a female after all.

  This is a major defeat for me. Up until now, I’ve been a human. I’ve been free to come and go as I please, with my mother giving no thought to it. This will change, I know, as soon as it occurs to her that I am not only capable of sex now, but of pregnancy. There will be limits on my running, questions about where I have been when I come home from the woods at ten o’clock on a summer night, my hair tangled with bits of moss and grass, the knees of my jeans damp and stained.

  Up until now, I’ve been free to dream of anything. But now they will expect my dreams to be female dreams, of dates and dresses and husbands. Of perfume and jewelry and high heels. The substance of life replaced with trinkets. No hunts and kills and long cold runs in the grip of winter. No significance to anything, other than the catching of a good mate.

  They will change me now. I know how it will start. Subtle, sneaky ways. When I am dragged into the stores in late August, to shop for school clothes, it will begin. Lacy, stretchy, flat little bands to go around where I’m supposed to have breasts but don’t. Like a mocking reminder to my body that it is supposed to do something in this area, sprout out suddenly. Nylons, snaky things with absolutely no insulating value, replacing wooly knee socks. Tight, shiny boots that only allow one pair of socks under them instead of mukluks or Dingo boots. Ruffles on my blouses, lace, ribbons, anything to stick out on my chest and make it look like I’ve got something there. And at Christmas they will give me sweaters with bunnies on them, a new dress, a brush and mirror set. There will be no .22 ammo in my stocking, no wind-up toys, no bars of fat chocolate. There will be cute little bottles of cologne, and scarves, and costume jewelry. Good-bye reality, hello womanhood.

  I remember once, when I was very small, my father took me out on the front lawn, and we gazed for long minutes up at the night sky until he suddenly said, “There it is, you see it, right there!” And it was Sputnik and he told me all about it, getting more and more excited as he spoke, explaining what it all meant that the Russians could get a satellite up into orbit, and that the moon was a satellite, too, and not so far away as people once thought it was. One day, he told me, if I studied hard, if I did well in my math and sciences, I could go to the moon. I suddenly know that when he told me that, he, too, was forgetting that I was a female and would someday be a woman.

  It is a step backward, this becoming a woman. The diapering pad, the helpless dribbling of blood, the restrictions of activities—all moving backward toward an infancy of sorts. I am less today than I was yesterday, lessened by the leakage of blood from my body. And it isn’t even my fault, but the punishment will go on the rest of my life.

  I reach the wild meadow. I am winded, my throat is dry, and Rinky is panting. I stop running as suddenly as I began, and sink down to rest. The ground is damp, and the tall grass is over my head when I sit down. I am hidden, safe, invisible to all except the sun in the heavens and the occasional hawk. Rinky casts himself down beside me, flings his muzzle up onto my denimed knee. He pants, dribbling saliva over my leg with each exhalation. I scratch his ears absently and he closes his eyes in ecstasy.

  Okay, I bargain with myself, not speaking aloud, for I never speak aloud in the woods. The human voice is too singular a thing, too jarring to be harmonious with the subtler speech of the forest and its beings. All right. It’s bad, but let’s look at just how bad it really is. Okay. This is going to last for three to five days, according to the booklets. Five days at the worst. Five days a month, twelve months a year. Oh, my God, that’s sixty days a year, two months out of every year with this th
ing in my underwear. Trying to hide extra napkins when I go to school, damn, I bet that’s why they carry purses. To hide these damn things in. Hoping your period doesn’t start suddenly in the middle of the arithmetic test, or on a day when you don’t have a sanitary napkin in your purse. Shit. Two months a year. But it doesn’t go on forever, it stops sometime, when you are fifty or so, so that’s, let’s see, about thirty-seven years times two months, that’s, oh, my God, that’s seventy-four months, that’s more than six years sentenced to this torment. Damn!

  I fall back in the grasses onto my back, and stare up at the sky, sightless as a dead thing. The sky stretches away, blue and eternal and uncaring; useless to ask it why I am cursed, useless to wonder if there is any way to circumvent my fate. I try to forget the cottony wad of paper jammed up against me and enjoy the day. The sunlight touches me, the grasses make thin shadows that dapple over me. Rinky, bored, rolls over onto his back also, bares his belly to the warmth of the sun, snorts, and then sighs in great contentment. Easy for him to do. He has a penis decorating his belly. Vaguely I wish I were a dog, enduring a heat and a flow of blood only twice a year. Much more sensible system. I doze, almost, content in my discontent.

  I know he is near before I know it, the change in the air as subtle and slow as clouds moving across the sun. His scent is on the light wind, riding it, coming first in snatches of possibility, and then stronger, warmer, until it is a certainty that he is coming. I lie still, eyes half-closed, feigning indifference. It is a game we play sometimes, stalking each other. I am better at it than he is, once managing to startle him so badly that he leaped at my laughter and slipped into the slough. I know it rankles with him that I am better at stealth, but I do not let the slight smile inside me bow my lips. Let him think I am unaware of him right up until the moment that he leaps at me and I do not flinch. Drive him crazy.