The Melting Season (11 page)

“Night, Timber,” I said.

Timber slammed the lid shut on the garbage can. “You take care,” he said.

Up above I could see the Milky Way. Inside, my husband rubbed his fingers against the lids of his eyes until he saw stars.

 

 

 

 

 

DURING THE COMMERCIAL BREAK we watched an advertisement for the Helping Hand Centers, a chain of plastic surgery hospitals expanding that very moment to a city near you. Rio DeCarlo was their national spokesperson. I did not like the way the name made it sound like a charity. I was sure there was nothing free about it.

“That Rio DeCarlo will do anything for a quick buck,” I said.

At the end of the commercial a list of new branches flashed on the screen. “Please don’t let it be Omaha, please don’t let it be Omaha,” I silently prayed.

“Moonie, look! Omaha!”

It was a good thing we did not have any money, I thought. I worked part-time afternoons as a bookkeeper at a welding company with a sinking business supplying various parts to farms across the states. A lot of bigger farms had gobbled up the littler ones, so there was less need for the small-time parts companies. There was almost no point in the job—I made just enough to pay our rent—except I needed the benefits and could keep Thomas on my plan while he figured out what he wanted to do next. He had been working with his father on his farm but they had fallen out the previous year. Thomas’s father was a difficult man, neither a saint nor a sinner, just a crank who was never satisfied with anything his son did. Thomas worked the fields and worked them just as he was raised, but somehow it was never fast enough. Farmers were always rushing in the spring when it was time to plant, to make sure they got the crops in before the rain. And rushing in the fall during harvest, bringing in their crops to make their money for the year. I always laughed when I saw how fast Thomas drove during those seasons, and how he slowed down to a crawl during summer and winter. It was like he was two different men during the year, or two different drivers anyway. You could tell what time of year it was by how fast the cars moved on the road. I swear Thomas dropped forty miles an hour off his internal speed limit come November.

That past September, something happened in the field between them. Thomas never gave me the full details. He just brushed me away when I asked him, like I was a mosquito dive-bombing him at dusk, and then stalked off to the balcony to have a chew. “Same bullshit as usual, Moonie!” is all he said later on in bed—but I think it had something to do with what time he got to work. And I was in charge of the wake-up calls in our household. I had been sliding lately when it happened. I had my own seasons, too, as a farmer’s wife, and it was always like that at the end of summer with me. I wanted to sleep in, snuggle up next to my husband. Thomas said he did not mind, he never blamed me for a thing, he liked being close to me in the mornings, too. Still, I was afraid to push him as to the whys and what-fors of the fight. We squeezed as much as we could out of his savings and I let my mother slip me some cash here and there, until he figured out his next move. “All’s I know is, I never want to work another farm again,” he said. But what else do you know how to do? I thought. His unemployment killed any notion of having a baby, but Thomas was in no rush to have kids anyway. He saw all our high school classmates getting married and stacking up babies like pancakes in the morning. Filling themselves up with these new lives, is what I thought. Thomas said they were giving up their free time, giving up their peace and quiet. “I don’t want to share you with anyone,” is what he would tell me. I would not have minded a little one running around the house, but I could not argue when we did not have much money anyway. There were a few months in there I was hoping he would start college, like Timber, but I was not going to push. For now, we lived our unconventional life, me supporting my man.

So I had no fear as we watched the commercial for the Helping Hand Center, only a low-grade buzz of annoyance. It was like his pill diets, or that time he ordered a box of ginseng online and he sipped it in tea for six weeks straight, or when he hung that weight off it for an hour every night (
that
he learned about from some show on ancient African tribes on the National Geographic channel). It was an idea that would flit and float around his brain like a bird until the season changed, and it was time to head somewhere new. I was the only thing that had ever stuck with him, and that was the way I liked it.

And then a week later his father died on the front porch of his house, sitting and watching the sun set with his dog sitting next to him. Alone in death, just him and his dog. (He had chased Thomas’s mother away years before; she lived in Iowa City with a new husband and a Guatemalan baby girl they had adopted our senior year of high school.) His father had an aneurysm. The doctor said there had been all this pressure building up in his brain for a while, maybe even for a year, and that could have been why he had been more difficult than usual. It was one of those things you can’t track or test, it just swells up like a balloon. Then it is like someone took a little pin and stuck it in your head and it explodes.

Three days after the funeral there was a call from the lawyer. Thomas’s dad had left him everything, the entire farm, and all of the money he had been stashing away for years. He had not been spending it on anything but building a bigger farm, a bigger legacy for his son. Here Thomas was thinking he could escape it, but there it was, more money than we could have ever dreamed of, and land, acres and acres for the taking. It was like we had won the lottery or something, only someone died. It was more money than we should have had. It was more money than we deserved. It was where our problems began.

 

 

 

 

 

“AND NOW,” I said to Valka, as she cradled my head in her lap, “I want it to end.”

We were curled up on the bed. My eyelids were swollen tight and I could only see a sliver of the room. My voice was raw. I had screamed too much. I had not stopped talking for an hour straight. Valka stroked my hair, all the way to the end, all the way down me, head to waist.

“We can make it end,” she said. “We can make anything happen.”

I almost believed her.

W
hat did I know about sex anyway? What does anyone know about it? I was only ever with the same person my entire life, so what we made together was what I knew as right. I read the magazines. There was too much detail in some of them, outright lies in others. Be aggressive toward your man. Be a pleaser. Nibble. Grip tight. Tickle. Or: wait for him. Let him lead the way. But I ask you, what did he know either?

I watched the movies, too. Movies made just for girls who lived nowhere near Nebraska. Saucy language, bold women. Inside jokes I got only half the time, two minutes later than I was supposed to. Those girls had a different life than mine. They were busy looking in the mirror, changing into another outfit. They were waiting for their man to say something witty, or trying to beat him to the punch. They did not know about being turned on by the smell of earth and hard work on their husband at the end of the day.

I watched the movies Thomas liked, too, the dirty ones. From standing to screwing in no time flat. I hated the high-pitched squeals from those girls with the ginormous fake breasts, bouncing up so high I wanted to yell, “Duck!” at the screen. Thomas loved those movies. Thomas, who never wanted me to wear makeup. Thomas, who said I should keep my hair long, and never change the color. “Keep it real,” he would tell me. Thomas watched those movies sometimes when I was not around. All I could wonder was, why am I not enough for him?

There were the other girls from town—I guess I could have talked to them about sex. It seemed like that was all they wanted to talk about when I was growing up. There was a slumber party I went to in high school, a few months after Thomas and I did it for the first time. We played a game of “I never” that I ended up losing, or winning, depending on how you looked at it. (Rim jobs? Oh dear Lord, I almost passed out.) Then Margaret kept talking about how big her boyfriend’s penis was, calling it practically every name in the world but that. I think she had even made a few up. “I love sex,” she said. “Call me a slut, but I love his big ol’ ding-dong.” She made all the other girls spread their index fingers apart to show how big their boyfriends’ penises were, then offered her opinion. “Five inches, that’s average, that’s what they say,” she would say and nod. I froze, then lied and said I was still a virgin. Everything they were talking about, the way it felt inside of them, the length, the girth, none of that was familiar to me. I was hoping some of them were lying, too. I locked myself in the bathroom later and cried and then pretended I had puked when they started knocking on the door. I never went to another slumber party again.

And then there was my mother, who told me too little, except sometimes when she told me too much. There were the bedtime stories that scared me. And once, when I was fourteen years old, she took me for a walk around the block at sunset to talk about sex.

She was being as honest as she could, I know that now, but she was being something else, too. This was a few months before I started high school, before I met the boy who would become my husband. I was just a little sprite of a thing, but I had long blond hair that fell down to my waist in long waves. It was almost like she could see it coming before it happened and she wanted to get her digs in there first, before she lost me for good.

Our block was noisy on summer nights. There were kids all around, hollering, tweeting, screeching, and they played stickball till sunset and then raced after fireflies with nets and mason jars until their mothers called them home. Jenny was doing cartwheels for our father on the front lawn. Off in the distance, past the bowling alley and down the back roads, the cornfields washed back and forth quietly in the wind. Not that I could see them, but still I knew they were there. I had an ice cream cone in one hand and it was a sticky mess. My mother had bribed me out the door with it. Her breath was thick with cigarettes and the smell of that wine she drank out of a giant box near the kitchen sink. This was before she started drinking beer. She said she switched because she never knew how much she was drinking from that box until it was gone already. I think she just liked to crush the empty cans with her fist.

“I’m going to tell you a story, Miss Catherine,” said my mother. Her hair was up high on her head still from her day at work, her lipstick long gone, dark moons of eye makeup pooled under her eyes. She was smoking one of her Virginia Slims. I still thought she was beautiful and classy. “And I just want you to listen close. Don’t ask questions. Just listen.”

I had heard parts of the story before in my life. There were always bits and pieces of it floating around my brain but it was hard to put it all together. It hurt to put it all together. Her mother dying when she was still little, her father dying when she was in high school. Cancer everywhere, but still my mother smoked. “I know I shouldn’t,” she said, and then she took another drag from her cigarette. How she met my father at an ice cream social when they were in college, but she had put their relationship on hold. She had majored in international studies, and was supposed to move to France for a few months. That immersion program that was a disaster. She got lost on the streets of Paris. Or was it the trains? She got off the plane and turned right around and came back. She never even saw the Eiffel Tower, not even from a distance. Sometimes when she told the story she said she came back for love. (Depending on how she felt about my father that day. Or how much she had had to drink.) He had loved her, she said. Someone had wanted to take her on, take care of her. Her lonely orphan self. My mom could make us feel sorry for her any time of day or night. Maybe we did not like her very much, but we knew she had her pain.

“And now I am going to tell you my one regret in life. I held on for so long. My virginity was a precious thing. Now I know girls these days don’t see it that way anymore, but I am telling you it is important. I waited for your father forever. And then, two weeks before we got married, we just could not wait a minute longer.” She stopped walking and I stopped with her. There was a ripple in her voice. “Well,
he
couldn’t wait. I could have waited.”

I did not say a word. I was scared all of a sudden.

“Let me tell you what it’s like, Catherine.” She moved her face in closer to mine and leered at me. I held my breath and waited for the truth. “Imagine a wall. And imagine something pressing up against that wall as hard as possible. It’s like this brick wall, and something’s trying to break through it.” She flattened one hand in the air and punched it with her other hand. I could feel the punch deep in me. “You are that wall, Catherine. You’re the wall.”

I dropped my ice cream cone on the ground and did not stoop to pick it up. The ants were all over it in seconds.

I heard those words again in my head, for days and days, for weeks, for months, for the last ten years, forever, in my head, my mother, her fist, the struggle, the wall, and me.

I did not have sex for a few years. I was in no hurry after that. But it did not matter how long I waited. I was already ruined. Maybe I had been ruined before that. I remembered that, though. Other things she had said about sex in the past floated faintly in the back of my mind. But I remembered that walk around the block.

 

 

 

 

 

“YOUR MOTHER SOUNDS like a real piece of work,” said Valka.

“It does not matter what she is,” I said. “You can’t go blaming your parents for your problems forever. What happened was between me and Thomas. Between a man and his wife.”

“True, that,” said Valka. “You have to own your issues. They are yours and no one else’s. But, my dear, darling friend, I am just trying to understand here. Why you can’t feel.”