Crybaby Ranch (10 page)

“We are?”

“Can't go into town looking like trick-or-treaters.”

“Hmm.”

“Yep, no visitors,” he says. “Just the two of us.”

Out the window, cloud cover breaks up and moonlight flickers into the room. I sit with legs draped across Bo's lap, our faces inches apart. If he doesn't kiss me in the next second, I'll pop.

I don't wait. I kiss him.

Bo kisses me back; he touches my mouth lightly with his own. Then lifts me onto his lap and kisses me deeply. Like a startled bird, I do not stir, but lie in his arms motionless. I have not been kissed in two months. I have never been kissed with this enthusiasm and finesse. Bo's mouth roams slowly in and around mine, as if he were considering moving in permanently, as if he were approving of the arrangement of teeth and tongue.

I put my arms around him. I wonder at the many sensory transmitters collected in and about my mouth. All that mechanical activity of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, thank God these nerve fibers have not been dulled by the traffic of fork and spoon.

As earlier when caught outside in the chinook, I feel somewhat drunk, with a mixture of excitement and terror in the emotion of the storm. Once again I have lost my sense of direction and don't know if I'm heading for shelter or have turned in confusion toward danger. I let Bo lay me on the bed. I watch him take his clothes off in the dark.

“Bo?” I whisper. We don't know each other well enough for this. We are moving way too fast.

Bo lays his body alongside mine. “Suzannah,” he whispers back. His hand moves to find the hem of my nightshirt. I don't want this pace to continue but I feel oddly passive about expressing this thought. In Bo's arms my body is, for once, more alert than my mind. Each new spot he touches on my skin sings its own tune and I long to hear the rest of this music.

Bo cups the bare curve of my waist and touches my bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. I believe any moment one of us is going to come to and set things right. I'm pretty sure, even, that I'll be the one to do it. I intend to.

And then, “Suzannah,” Bo breathes, “you're ready for me.”

I'm a cliché. While my body revolts against my mind, splitting me into two, my body itself splits and I feel my insides gush out, pumping fluids held in bondage too long. I open to Bo's weight and his hardness inside me. I welcome the smell of smoke in his hair and bath soap behind his ears and I burrow beneath his chin. Tears leak out of my eyes.

How are we ever going to work ourselves back into the positions in which we belong? I recall Bo's tanned arms cooking at my stove and how I dallied with mind photos of them contrasting someday against these pale sheets. But this is an event out of order, not as things should be. Porno slides mistakenly shuffled into family shots and shown to the good neighbors down the street.

Within moments of Bo whispering, “Zannah, oh God,” I feel my uterus contract sickeningly. I know right away what this means.

“Let me up, Bo.”

Bo nuzzles deeper into my neck. He glides a hand downward to between my legs and, there, presses a nerve bundle above and just to the left of my clitoris. I shudder with a flood of sensation. A long-held release of sexual pleasure segues into a surge of emotional disappointment in both of us.

I take a chance on heaping more indignity upon myself: I ask, “Caro?” I need to know about him and Caro. I need to know now.

“Caro?” Bo jerks out of me and rears up onto his knees. “Shit. You hear her car?”

Without even a hum or flicker to warn us, the power returns. In the bright overhead light I had flipped on earlier while looking for the candle, I see my blood smeared all over Bo as he kneels between my legs. All over him and my nightgown, me and the sheets. And I see the truth about Bo and Caro. He doesn't want her to know he's here with me.

I pull the pillow, pushed up against the wall behind my head, over my face and wail.

Bo says, “My God, Suzannah, are you okay?” He pries the pillow off my face. “What's going on, Zannah?”

I keep my eyes closed and cry, “Caro. You're having an affair with her.”

“Never mind Caro. I need to know if you're okay.”

I look at Bo's earnest face bent over me and burst into laughter. He looks like a cross between Dr. Freud and Chief Crazy Horse, with his black mustache and goatee and his red zigzags and polka dots. Then I start crying again.

Bo says, “You drank too much wine.”

“And you took advantage of it,” I sob.

I scoot out from under him and head for my bathrobe hanging behind my bedroom door. “In some cases that might be called date rape.” I feel so embarrassed at the indignation of my menstrual blood smeared all over him and me and the bed that I welcome the rage that inserts itself as a crutch to help get me out of this room and away from his scrutiny. I push into my robe.

“You didn't answer me. Is this normal?”

“Normal? Not for me it isn't,” I shoot back, deliberately stretching his meaning. “I don't sleep with friends' lovers.” I yank the sash on my robe. My voice gets shrill as if I have squeezed the sash around my vocal cords instead of my waist. “I don't take advantage of people when they've been drinking either.” I spin out of the room before my face cracks because Bo looks funny sitting on the edge of my bed wearing nothing but face paint and I don't know if I'm going to laugh again or sob. Hysteria must feel like this.

In the bathroom I step into the tub, then out again, and lock the bathroom door. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Purple whiskers and purple bulbous nose. How did Bo keep a straight face while I railed at him? My tear tracks catch the light.

Since the flare-up of fibroid tumors, my period, though back into a normal five-day run, often starts in an unexpected torrent. Anywhere from twenty-four days to thirty-two, unless my life undergoes a big change—like a divorce and a move to a new home. Then it can be weeks late, like this. Erik once suggested, as he followed me out of the movies with his jacket tied around my waist, that my ignorance was a negation of my femininity. “Suzannah, can't you catch some
clue
first?” As if he were so alert to life nothing ever got by him. His whole life got by him. All through our marriage I was so frequently setting fires beneath him, just to get him to react, I felt like a pyromaniac.

Bo is knocking on the door and I am ignoring him. The shower is running over my head, but I hear every word: “Suzannah, please, I'm scared. Just tell me if you're all right.”

I stay silent and let hot water spill over me. Now I hear tools. I peek out of the shower curtain and see the tip of a knife sliding beneath the hook, lifting it purposefully from the eye.

“I have to know you're okay,” Bo explains, once inside the bathroom. “Please…” From behind the shower curtain, I hear he is restraining his anxiety to a subdued politeness.

I have a Tampax in now. My dignity is restored; it's time to reduce his. Let him worry.

“I'm going to take a look at you. It's okay.” He's speaking as if a crazy person lurks behind this curtain. As if I have the knife, not him. “I can look at you in the shower,” he says. “We did just make love.”

Fury erupts. “We did
not
‘make love.' You took advantage of me.” I stop short of accusing him of rape again. “You committed double adultery with me. You sleep with your friend's wife. Then you sleep with your”—I'm losing track of my thought—“with your friend's wife's…wife, I mean, friend.” My body vibrates with anger at him, myself, the awful mess of all this, and I ignore the inner voice that accuses me of throwing false light on our encounter. I brought this scene on myself. Plus, it serves me right that my period, which I used for so long as a shield in my marriage, should impetuously flag my desire for this man.

“You have plenty of energy,” Bo diagnoses from the other side of the curtain.

I continue to yell at him. “What kind of man does that?” I never yelled at Erik, my parents, Beckett. I have never yelled before. I don't dislike it. But I keep hoping he will correct me and say he is not sleeping with Caro, that I misunderstood his abrupt withdrawal from our lovemaking at the mention of her name and his silence on the subject since.

“Please tell me, do you always bleed like that or did I hurt you? Are you hurt internally?”

“I'm hurt e-ternally.”

“It's okay, Suzannah,” he soothes, as if he's giving up on me answering him rationally. “One peek—just to read your condition. Then I'll let you shower.”

Lulled by his pleading, I still think I hold the right of consent and I slap his hand in surprise when he tugs the curtain aside. He doesn't flinch. He's pulled on his Levi's, but left the top buttons undone. No shirt and barefoot. Concern softens his eyes. Dr. Crazy Horse. I burst into a bark of laughter again like a nervous loon calling for its mate, then abruptly sober up.

He gives me a once-over. Appeased at the clean thighs and clear water flowing down the drain, he asks, “Is it your period?”

I turn my back.

“Got supplies?”

I don't answer.

He closes the curtain, and I hear him checking the cupboard under the sink to see for himself. “Yep. We're set there. I'm just going to wash up myself,” he says. “Then I'll be out. One minute, I swear.” And lullabies me with small talk about his bathing progress throughout his hurried splashings. Then, blessedly, he does leave.

Quite a while later, I turn off the shower and put on my bathrobe. The water pressure dropped midshower, and I see, as I leave the bathroom, it's because Bo has the washing machine going. He's still here. In the kitchen. And—I can't believe this—cooking.

He alternately stirs eggs in a bowl and grates cheese into it. A pile of chopped parsley and chives rests on the counter. He's dressed and turns to me when I enter the room. He says, “It's permanent.”

For a crazy moment I think he means him cooking in my kitchen for the rest of my life. Then he gestures toward his face. My face threatens to break into a merrier response to him than I am really in the mood for, so I turn on my heel and go check myself in the bathroom mirror. My clown face has not faded one degree from washing in my shower. Again I rub soap on my washcloth and scrub and rinse and scrub and rinse. I end up with red blotches surrounding my purple whiskers and nose. I give up. I am wiped out. In the mirror I see one tired clown cat.

Back in the kitchen Bo scoops the parsley in his fist and dumps it into the bowl of eggs. Reaches over to stir potatoes frying in a pan, then turns the burner down low. “I'm sick about this, Suzannah. I don't know how to fix things.”

I tip him off. “Leave.”

“Then I don't know how I could ever come back.”

I shrug.

He pulls out a chair for me at the table and brings a warmed plate of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Tea, toast, and jam. I may have acquaintances here—women I look forward to knowing better—but there isn't anyone I feel comfortable enough to share this ignominy with—except Bo himself. The complexity of this realization dulls my wits. I accept the offering of food and sit.

Bo doesn't join me; he goes into the mudroom and takes the laundry out of the washing machine and puts it into the dryer. He stays in there, even though the light is off, for a long time after I hear the dryer start.

I was about two and a half or three when I first heard the story of the little boy who cried wolf. I pretended one afternoon while crawling between the sofa and the living room wall to get stuck back there. “Help,” I cried to my mother. “I can't get out.” But my giggles erupted before she fell for the trick completely, and she squinted her eyes at me and told me the fate of the little boy who cried wolf. “Never again did anyone believe what that little boy said. Not even when a
real
wolf was trying to eat him.”

The story left a deep impression on me. I became over-conscientious about telling the God's honest truth and never again cried wolf. Until tonight. Tonight I felt stuck between two places more ungiving than the wall and the sofa.

When Bo comes back into the kitchen, he announces that he has decided to stay the night. He'll sleep on the sofa, cook breakfast in the morning, help around the cabin tomorrow, and in this way hopes to earn my trust again. I can rest, make jewelry, go for walks. By the end of the day, he figures, we might feel comfortable with each other again. He doesn't know, he says, but this theory is the best he can come up with. I can go sleep now if I like. My bed has clean sheets on it. He'll use the ones in the dryer, when they're finished.

I tell him this isn't necessary. I tell him the story about the little boy who cried wolf. He's off the hook, I say. “I am as guilty as you are.”

We argue a bit about who is guiltier, each of us campaigning for ourselves as winning candidate.

Then Bo concludes, “We are not in good shape with each other. I'm going with my first plan.”

I can't budge him.