Be Mine (2 page)

We'd never acted on those fantasies, of course. And then, like the pair of novelty handcuffs and the bottle of strawberry-flavored massage oil, they had been misplaced somewhere, sometime, between my second trimester and Chad's eighteenth birthday.

But, back at home, in bed, after our Valentine's dinner, Jon continued to talk.

"Do you think," he asked, "this is what your secret friend would want to do?" He slid my nightgown up over my hips.

"This?" He put his mouth to my breasts.

"Maybe this?" He spread my legs, holding one wrist over my head, pushing into me.

T
WENTY
years of making love to the same man—there may not be any surprises left, but there are no disappointments, either, no frustrations, no humiliations.

It was such a short time of my life, the years of sleeping with those other men and boys, but the wounds still seem somehow fresh—those bad mornings, the hangovers, the regrets, the bladder infections, the pregnancy terrors, the psychic injuries.

So brief, and so long ago, that it should all have faded in my memory, and yet it never has. I can still close my eyes and see myself in the full-length mirror of the apartment I lived in, looking at my body—bony and cold and blemished—as I made my way from the bathroom to the bed where some stranger waited, and wanting desperately to hide myself from him, and knowing it was too late.

And then there was Jon. Some wild friends from the bookstore where I worked introduced me to him, and I never needed to suffer that way again.

I was in my twenties, finishing my master's in English, seeing, among others, a man with a wife and two children, feeling old already. The apartment I lived in didn't have an oven that worked, but it didn't matter. Whatever I ate, I ate raw, or cold. I had a string of Christmas lights above my bed—the only light in my room, but bright enough to read by in the dark—and all my clothes came from the same secondhand store, a place called Second Hand Rosie's run by a transvestite with long, beautiful, braided red hair. I favored black dresses, with wild silk scarves. I was so thin that my shadow looked like the shadow of a broom.

Jon had been, like me, at the periphery of this group of wild friends, which was made up of a thirtyish woman who'd been divorced twice, two gay men, two younger women with crushes on the gay men, and a few others who'd dropped out of the university or come to the city to be near lovers, and then been abandoned by the lovers, and then gotten jobs at the bookstore. A bit of cocaine was involved, and some serious drinking, both of which I wanted to participate in, but would consistently throw up instead, or fall asleep, or have trouble breathing long before the actual party started.

Still, I liked to dance, and there were many long, good nights at a place called the Red Room—a sticky floor beneath flashing red lights.

Jon was a bartender there.

"Sherry, have you met Jon?"

I can still see the ring on the finger of the friend who introduced us as she gestured in Jon's direction—a star sapphire, gleaming like Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, shrunk down to the size of a thumbnail, captured in a stone, set in platinum gold.

My mother had worn a ring just like it.

We admitted to each other right away that we didn't really fit into the crowd that had brought us together. We hadn't, perhaps, come from solid middle-class families, but we'd always fantasized that we had. We'd done well in school. We liked to go to bed sober and read for an hour or two, in total silence, before going to sleep. We wanted to share an old house. Some land around it. A child or two. Salaries with good benefits and cars that started on the first try.

I ended my relationship with the married man, and the others. Jon broke up with the poet he'd been dating. He bought me a diamond solitaire—the kind of engagement ring we both imagined an ordinary woman would wear. We got married in my hometown at the church where I'd been baptized.

During the ceremony, a sparrow that had gotten somehow trapped in the church ("It's been here for days," Pastor Heine said regretfully) threw itself into a stained glass window and plummeted dead to the floor.

"Let's think of this as a good omen," Jon had said, uneasily, afterward, as we looked together at the soft gray mess of it on the marble floor.

Someone nudged it with the toe of a shoe.

Someone laughed nervously.

"Yeah," his sister, Brenda, said. "Isn't there a saying—you know, if the bird dies on your wedding day, you will be blessed with great happiness?"

(Only years later did she tell me that at the reception, the plastic bride and groom had slid off the cake and onto the floor, the frosting having grown warm under the lights in the hall, but she'd managed to settle them back at the top by pushing their feet way down into the cake before we noticed.)

It was hard to read such a thing, the dead sparrow, as a positive omen, but luckily neither of us had ever been superstitious, and now we've been together for two decades—all these years mostly happy years, productive and meaningful and prosperous years.

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.

***

S
AME
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!

B
OUGHT
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 button 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.