Burning (19 page)

I think it was because of the horses that I allowed Ben Stanley to slowly raise the hem of my skirt. He pushed the fabric up above my knees and looked at my bare legs. No one before had looked at me like this. I had not known that it was possible for anyone to do so, and I felt shame wash over me. To allow him to touch the hem of my skirt, to gaze as he was at the skin of my lower limbs—it felt unclean, more than that
—marimè
.

But I had made a choice when I left the store and climbed on Ben Stanley’s motorbike. This was where that choice had led me. So I asked my body to stay still, and I waited to see what would happen next.

He took my right leg in his hands. His blond head lowered over it and I felt his hot breath against my bare skin. And then his lips touched the inside of my ankle, feather soft, the lightest of kisses.

I had never before known true hunger. When his lips connected with my leg, kissing me first on my ankle and then in a line, kiss after kiss, up the inside of my leg to my knee, it burst like a flame in my core—urgent, pressing hunger, a desire I could not refuse, one I would not want to refuse even if I knew how.

I heard a little sound like a whimper, and as if from far away I recognized that it had come from my own body. Eyes closed, head back, I allowed myself the pleasure of receiving
his kisses without thinking about what they meant, what taboos they were breaking, one after the other, each kiss severing one of the many ties that bound me.

He untied the laces of my sandals and slipped them off. His hands, so strong and warm, caressed my feet. I opened my eyes and looked at him. Still his head was bent, worshipful.

And then came a wave of something that at first I did not have a word for. I liked the sensation, and I considered carefully how to name it. Ah. It was power. I felt
powerful
, with my feet in Ben Stanley’s hands. I felt powerful, and beautiful too—but perhaps what was even more wonderfully surprising was what I
did not
feel.… After that first instant of fear and the rush of pleasure that had followed, I did not feel shame. No—this was not entirely true. The shame was still there, less now than before but with me still, as if drawn behind a curtain of something much, much better.

“You see?” said Ben Stanley, smiling up at me.

“I do.” I smiled, as well.

He rested my feet in his lap, his fingers playing lightly on my calves, drawing invisible patterns across them. I saw in his eyes that he felt it, too, the hunger that nearly consumed me, but I saw, too, that he intended to control it.

He did not want to frighten me. He did not want to push me farther than I might want to go. I liked this. Ben Stanley,
gazhò
or not, was kind.

This I had known all along.

“Tell me more about you,” he asked.

“What do you wish to know?”

He shrugged. “Whatever you want to say.”

Down by the water, one of the horses laid back his ears and nipped at the horse next to him. The other horse took several steps away.

“When I first came here, I hated the desert,” I told him. “It seemed to me that there was not much to see, and what little there was held no mystery. But today you are showing me places I could not have guessed existed.”

Most likely he thought I meant this quarry, which was true enough, but I spoke also of the way I felt. It had been like a desert—barren, flat, scorched dry—but it seemed to me now that there could be secret, hidden places anywhere, unexpected oases just beyond the horizon.

“The desert is pretty much all I’ve ever known,” Ben said.

“Soon you will leave it.”

He nodded. My feet he held still in his lap, and his hands felt warm and wonderful.

“Your family will be pretty pissed about your coming out here, huh?”

Of course he could not possibly comprehend the enormity of what I had done, coming as he did from his
gazhikanò
world. For him it would be like a game, to disobey his parents, to go where he was not supposed to be. Perhaps he would be put “on restriction,” or his parents might “ground” him. Child’s play.

I did not wish to tell him what it would mean for me. He would feel responsible, but he was not. I had made my own path.

So instead of answering his question, I asked my own. “What will you miss the most when you leave this place?”

He answered right away without having to consider. “The feeling that I totally belong. Here, everyone knows everything about everyone. It sucks a lot of the time, but it’s nice, too. To not have to explain myself or introduce myself or anything. Even the things that aren’t so great about me—and there are lots of them, probably—everybody knows what they are and accepts me anyway. I guess they don’t really have a choice, in a town this size.”

His answer resonated deeply. Already I felt my family stretching far away from me. Where were they now? What were they doing?

They had of course discovered what I had done. My father would have returned to collect the rest of us. My mother would have told him that I was missing. Ben Stanley’s friends—Hog Boy and Pete—perhaps my parents would press them for information. Or perhaps my parents had turned their backs on me already. Like Ana’s, it could be that my name already was
marimè
.

My mother and father, they would recover. They had other children. And Violeta, much as she loved me, had Marko and her baby to consider. Stefan was still too little to comprehend what had happened, and it seemed doubtful if Alek would really care—he and I had not been close. But Anelie—her heart would break and break and break for me. She would have to muffle the sound of her tears.

I wanted to talk about them. I wanted to pretend just for a little while that they would be waiting for me to return. “I have two sisters and two brothers,” I told Ben Stanley. “A big family, most likely it seems to you.”

“I’ve just got the one brother. But you knew that.” His smile, endearing and so open.

“Yes. My older sister—you have seen her.”

“The one who’s pregnant?”

I nodded. “Violeta. She is not so much older than I am. We were children together.” I did not say the rest of it—that we had planned to be wives together, and mothers.

“But also,” I continued, “I have younger siblings—one a brother, almost thirteen.”

“Not much older than James.”

“And a younger sister, too, and a baby brother as well. Not so much a baby anymore—he is three years old—but he is my mother’s last, and so he will be the baby always.”

“With James, I feel like I’m doing this terrible thing, you know, by going off to college.” He did not say it as if he expected or hoped I would contradict him. He was not looking for me to assuage his guilt. He was sharing his fears with me, that was all.

Still, I felt the argument well up inside me. “You do well to leave your brother,” I said. “He is not your child, he is your sibling. He will miss you, of course, but he will learn from example—that it is all right for him to leave also, when he is of age, that he has the right to lead a life of his choice. Perhaps it is your leaving that will give him courage to follow his own path, wherever it may lead.”

There was real passion in my voice, and it was not lost on me that I was making an argument in favor of my own betrayal.

“I’m not so sure I want James to follow his own path.
Sometimes it’s safer to stick with the herd. Like those horses,” he said, raising his chin at the mustangs. “They know there’s safety in numbers. In blending in.”

“Ben Stanley, are you a hypocrite?
You
did not win any races by staying with the pack. In order to win, you had to forge ahead.”

He grinned. “Yeah. I guess so. But I’m stronger than James.”

“What makes you so certain?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but then he seemed to realize that he did not have an answer. Finally he said, “I don’t know.”

I nodded, satisfied. “No,” I said. “You do not.”

We watched the horses. They seemed to be enjoying the pond; several of them stood ankle-deep in it, eyes half-closed.

“Why were you going to marry that guy?” Ben’s question came out suddenly, as if he had finally built up the courage to ask something he had been wondering for a long time.

“My people are very different from yours.” I did not know how much to reveal; I wanted to share myself with Ben Stanley, but at the same time I did not wish to hear him scorn our traditions, our beliefs. Even as I questioned many of them myself, I was not inclined to listen to others’ reactions.

“My mom said something—about arranged marriages? Is that true?”

I listened to the way he spoke, searching for any sign of mocking or disgust. But all I could hear was curiosity, and in his face I saw his eager desire to know me—nothing more.

“It is true,” I said. “Our parents choose our spouses, often when we are very young.”

“And do you—have a choice in the matter? Do you
have
to marry the person they choose?”

“My people recognize that these are modern times,” I began. “If I were to refuse, most likely my parents would support my decision. Now, however, it will probably not be an issue anymore.”

“You mean because you came here—with me?”

I nodded. And then I went on. I told him more than I had meant to share—about the way I had known for many years that I would marry Romeo Nicholas, about helping Violeta prepare for her wedding to Marko, about my life at home in Portland, how it had revolved always around the family, and also about how things had shifted—grown less certain in my own mind—as my eighteenth birthday and the day of my wedding grew closer.

He was a good listener. Truly he seemed interested in what I had to say; he asked questions occasionally, like why I had not attended high school and what kind of work my family did, but mostly he was quiet. His eyes did not leave my face, and when I tried to pull back my feet, to tuck them beneath my skirt, he squeezed them, began to massage them, so luxurious to me that I could not draw them away.

“But it’s all off now, huh?” It was sweet the way he could not disguise the pleasure he felt because my engagement to Romeo had been broken.

“Unfortunately, it is not so simple as that,” I said. “There is the matter of the bride price, already paid. It will cause my
family embarrassment … embarrassment and shame to have to return the money.”

“Bride price?” His forehead wrinkled. “Do you mean that Romeo—he
paid
for you?”

There it was. It had taken longer than I thought it might, but at last it emerged—his incredulity, his disgust at my people’s practice. This time when I shifted and pulled my feet from his lap, he let them go.

“Fifteen thousand dollars,” I said, knowing the amount would shock him.

“I don’t care if it’s fifteen
million
,” he said. “Money shouldn’t have anything to do with love.”

“Often,” I said, “love does not have anything to do with marriage. This is true of your people, too. We are just more honest about it.”

I saw the fight in him, and I saw, too, how he restrained it, willing himself to listen to me. So I went on.

“It is not ideal,” I admitted, “but very little of life really is. And it is not as if I was to be sold into slavery. I could have refused. My father would have listened.”

“So why would you agree to it?”

“You think you see things clearly, but you do not see
deeply
, Ben. The same is with the way you think about your brother, and your parents’ situation also. You see only how things appear to be from where you are sitting. But rarely is an answer so easy, so one-sided. Perhaps there is more than one truth.”

He ignored my philosophical interpretation. “Did you
want
to marry him?”

“I wanted to stay close to my sister Violeta. I wanted to please my parents. I wanted to make my family proud.”

“So why are you here? With me?”

I looked out onto the pond, imagining how wonderful it would feel to shed my clothes and wade into the water, walking farther and farther until my head was completely submerged.

“Have you ever read a book called
The Catcher in the Rye
?”

“Sure. It was required reading last year.”

“What do you think of Holden Caulfield?”

Ben shrugged. “I don’t think too much of him. He’s kind of a pitiful character, I guess. Closed-minded.”

“Do you know the scene—when he sits with his sister Phoebe and tells her that he wants to be a catcher in the rye—that he wants to stand in a rye field near the edge of a cliff, and keep kids from falling from it?”

“Sure,” he said. “I wrote a paper about that scene. My teacher was crazy about that book. She loved to talk about Holden Caulfield, about how he based his whole fantasy around something that wasn’t even real.”

“I do not understand,” I said.

“He thought that the poem said ‘If a body catch a body,’ but really it said ‘If a body
meet
a body.’ ”

“Yes,” I said. “I read that. His sister corrects him.”

“Yeah, but my teacher made us read the actual poem. It was written by this guy Burns. Mrs. Clark—my teacher—said the word ‘meet’ doesn’t just mean … you know, meet. It means … hook up with.”

I felt confused now, a feeling I did not enjoy. “Explain this to me,” I said. “I do not know the poem.”

“Well, Burns meant—you know, he meant that if a man and a woman met in a field of rye—where no one was looking, where no one would know that they had met at all—would it be so wrong if they, you know, enjoyed each other. If they made love.” He looked embarrassed. “I know the poem, actually,” he said. “I had to memorize it for class. For extra credit.”

“Tell it to me.”

“Well, it’s different. It doesn’t sound like regular English.” He must have seen on my face that I very much wanted to hear the poem, for he cleared his throat and said, “Okay. Here goes … ‘Comin thro’ the rye, poor body, / Comin thro’ the rye, / She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie, / Comin thro’ the rye! / O, Jenny’s a’ weet, poor body, / Jenny’s seldom dry; / She draigl’t a’ her petticoatie, / Comin thro’ the rye! / Gin a body meet a body / Comin thro’ the rye, / Gin a body kiss a body, / Need a body cry? / Gin a body meet a body, / Comin thro’ the glen, / Gin a body kiss a body, / Need the warl’ ken?’ ” He stopped.