Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ shaping Tom, like a faulty cog that doesn’t quite mesh, machining him to fit into the gear chain instead of causing it to jam. I think they will steal Teddy from me, will teach him that he is a real grandson of the real family, and therefore belongs with them, not with his mother who is only a married-on artificial part of the family.

      If I think about these things, I can work myself up into a frothing rage. How dare they! I won’t let them! Mine, all mine, Tom and Teddy are mine and they shall never have them!

      Sick. Selfish. Sad. I know. But there is so little else for me to do. Tom goes off to work and Teddy trails off with him, or is “borrowed” by Grandpa to be shown off while he sits in Hanks Diner and has his morning coffee with the other good old boys. I stay here, in Snow White Steffie’s enchanted cottage, and try to deal with an oil smudge on a yellow cushion, Teddy’s sticky fingerprints on the glass-topped table, and the increasingly obvious sag of the rattan chair that was never intended for a man of Tom’s size. I know Mother Maurie will quietly mention these signs of wear to other family members as evidence of my waywardness and inferiority to a real daughter. And I experience the amusing dichotomy of watching myself mutter that I never wanted to be treated as a real daughter even as I try to get peanut butter out of the weave of a rattan armrest.

      When I run out of hopeless housework to occupy myself, I can fill my days with endless paperbacks. Passion’s Proud Fury and The Angry Heart and The Elegant Suitor and Flames of Desire. Steffie has a wall of them in her room, and she has told me that I can borrow them whenever I like. They are all romances, in different series, and she keeps them arranged by number. She marks a little X inside the cover of each one she has read, so she doesn’t accidentally start reading it again. It’s easy to forget, she tells me, which ones she has read, and she used to get deep into one before she realized she had already read it once before. The X’s, she tells me, keep her from wasting her time. The other books in the big house are technical manuals for tractors; Steffie is the family bookworm, all the Potters agree, and they are proud of her endless reading.

      There is an alternative to rattan maintenance and Passion’s Proud Fury. I can go visit the big house.

      In the day I can go over and watch Ellie work. She is a big rawboned woman, Dick Potter’s frame accidentally bestowed on a female child. Both seem ashamed of the error. Ellie minimalizes it by hunching around the house, wearing her plaid housedresses as if they were a clever disguise, like a tablecloth thrown over a packing crate. Ellie does only one thing. She works. She mops tile floors and sweeps hardwood floors, she scrubs walls, she pounds yielding white dough into loaves, she chops vegetables and tumbles them into simmering pots, she polishes windows and dusts shelves. She never stops. If I arrive during the day, she assumes I have some purpose there and ignores me. She is not one to stop and have a cup of tea and chat. Conversation with Ellie is a difficult thing, a trailing net of words that follows her from room to room as she straightens and tidies, snagging on feather dusters and Pledge cans and sponges and Comet cleanser. How is she? I am fine, and excuse me, I have to mop where you’re standing. And how is Bix? Bix is better, save for a crick in his back, serves him right for trying to work in his good boots while his shoulder is still banged up, and excuse me, I have to go get the Pine Sol.

      What else can I do with myself? Once I got up early and fed all the chickens, ducks, and pigs. I gave the chickens too much, the ducks too much, and the pigs not enough, and the poultry food is expensive, almost seven cents a pound now, and the pigs will break out of their yard if they get hungry during the day, and of course Mother Maurie knew I was only trying to help, but it’s not like farming’s in my blood, like in Tom’s, so I’m bound to make mistakes, but the wrong amount of feed can put the poultry off their laying, and of course that’s critical this time of year, so maybe I should let Ellie do it like always, but thanks for trying to help, it was so cute of me.

      Is it me?

      Sometimes I think it’s just me. I think there’s something wrong inside me, something mean and selfish and small that puts the worst interpretation on anything that’s said to me. When I try to tell Tom about what happened, he looks at me, puzzled. “Well, the wrong amount of feed can put the chickens off their laying,” he says, as if that explains everything, and goes back to reading his tractor manual.

      It is evening, night in the little house, but not at all peaceful. My nerves are trembling inside my body, I want to explode, to shriek and scream. And Tom, once so tuned to me he could answer my unspoken questions, does not even notice. So I will be good. I will be patient. I will be a good wife, and contain this unreasoning anger. I will think of something worthwhile to do.

      “I think I’ll go get Teddy,” I say. “It’s getting late, and I think he’s had enough television for one night. This time of evening, there’s probably nothing on that will interest him, anyway.”

      Tom grunts, flips back to the index, turns more chunks of pages, traces his finger down an already grimed schematic. My hand is on the doorknob when he speaks.

      “Oh, 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 СКАЧАТЬ