The Ram (9 page)

“I’ll remember to draw it in the morning,” he speaks to the room. And then he’s in the void of sleep, waking with a start only once when a dream takes him to a possible world, an alternate reality where he lost both feet to the serrated teeth of a monstrous fish and upon escape from it, he lay with his belly soft against the earth. His thick, near-black blood seeped into the dirt, helping the powers of spring in their task of thawing the clay and sand, letting the earth take away his life.

Late Winter, 1992

24 Peach

When her foster parents hand her a Cabbage Patch doll with sandy blond hair and green eyes, they tell her they had it made special for Peach and she can name the doll Peach or any other name she’d like. They tell her the doll was made to look just like their new ward, to welcome her into their home.

Peach doesn’t point out the one problem with the soft-bodied doll: Peach’s eyes are hazel, not green. But she sleeps with the doll at night, aware at nine years of age, she should be breaking the habit of liking dolls, not getting new ones. But the house is a new place, the woman smells of chicken soup no matter what she eats and the man sets out to work an hour ahead of schedule so he can bike alongside all the cars on the road instead of drive alongside them. This house is nothing like the home from which she was just ripped away. That house was a home. This house is a house. But the doll is comforting and she takes the people at their word, that they got the doll especially for her.

She goes to a new school, eats at a new dining table. This one is oak. She sleeps in a double bed, not a twin bed, and has her own room this time. She does her best not to think of the Barrows or her foster brothers and sister, the people who’d been with her in the house turned into her home. Six weeks have passed since she was removed from there, deposited here. And the doll remains at her side while she learns to live in this house. Peach looks into the flat, painted eyes of the doll and decides maybe she does have green eyes. This man and this woman have given her a doll that is supposed to be just like her. And if they say she has green eyes, she must have green eyes. So she stares into mirrors, turns her head toward light, away from light, and decides yes, her eyes indeed are green.

And when she has truly convinced herself her eyes are green and not hazel, she finally names the doll Peach. This Peach has soft, yellow yarn for hair and a cherubic face. The doll’s dress is made of blue, clingy fabric that gets snagged on the Velcro closure of Peach’s backpack. She gets by in the house, with this set of man and woman, by carrying around a version of herself.

Until she hears the man and the woman speaking one afternoon while she does her math homework at the island in their kitchen. They’re talking about finances in the other room and Peach only catches some of what they say. She doesn’t make a point to listen intently. She learned long ago the trick to staying in foster homes longer than a few weeks was to be as complacent and silent as possible.

But then the woman says something about Peach and income. And then the little Peach, the fake Peach made of plastic and a soft, cotton body is brought up. It turns out that the doll was not bought just for her. It was used, a hand-me-down from the last girl who was in the house.

Peach goes to her room and shuts the door. The doll is on the bed and she scoops it up in her arms and cradles it close to her neck. The plastic is impregnated with the smell of baby powder and smooth to the touch. She looks into fake Peach’s eyes and frowns.

Peach knew her eyes were hazel, not green. But she had been told otherwise, told what she should be, and she did her best to be it because “being it,” whatever people wanted her to be, was the key to survival in the foster system. She pulls the pencil she was using for her long division out of her pocket and throws the doll down on the bed. Over and over, she plunges the pencil through the green eyes of the doll whom Peach feels has more identity than her. The doll never tries to be anything but a doll. A doll with green eyes. The pencil tip breaks, a sharp point of graphite sails off into the carpet of the room, lost.

Fall, 1990

25 Riley

He plays a Native American, a member of the Wampanoag tribe, in a short kindergarten skit put on for students and their parents right before Thanksgiving break. The entire play lasts fifteen minutes. One of the ears of corn gets distracted by a tune only she can hear and breaks into a spastic, jerky dance while Riley delivers his line. He stays stoic—as he imagines all Native Americans are from what he’s seen on television—and puts his hand on his chest.

“I bring eel to eat,” he says and then he bows, a touch all his own.

And his parents cannot get the costume of the paper bag headdress and the apron made of scrap suede from his mother’s sewing stash off of his body. He insists on staying a Native American and his parents joke that he’s “gone native,” turning their faces away to laugh when he hollers out battle cries and whips an imaginary horse around their living room settee.

The Alberstons bag goes soft and rips from continual wear. The suede is stained with his sweat and lunchtime sandwiches of peanut butter and raspberry jelly. When he speaks to adults, he’s polite and sparse with his words. But when he plays with his friends, those children he’s identified as part of his tribe, he’s untamable, free of pretention. Riley decides he should stay a Native American forever.

His interest in eel as a food plagues him and thus his parents, and at his constant prodding, they finally look into getting him some eel to eat. Except Boise, Idaho is not near an ocean and does not have a significant Japanese population. There is nowhere to find eel as food and so they compromise with Riley and take him to a pet store with an extensive aquarium section.

There he presses his nose to rectangular containers full of saltwater and spies the electric blue eyes of a monster. The eel has an elongated face and a strong underbite decorated with needle-like teeth. Its mouth gapes open and Riley opens his in response. He locks eyes with the fish that looks like a snake, held captive by its strange presence. His parents pry him away and he cries on the ride home, ripping his headdress from his hair as white as beach sand, tossing it to the floor mat at his feet.

His mother turns around and smiles at her son, her hands grasping the side of the passenger seat. Her wavy hair billows around the headrest and there is a smear of purple lipstick on her upper teeth.

“I see you’re done being a native?” she asks and then pats him on the leg. “That’s good, Riley. You’re not a real Native American anyway. All your ancestors came from Europe a long time ago. You don’t need an excuse to be a wild little boy. Europeans have been wild enough through the ages.”

When he hears this from his mother, he stops his crying about the eel and desperately tries to reach down to the torn and crumpled brown bag at his feet, lines of crayon approximating feathers and beads at the rim of the cap. But his seatbelt restrains him, his arms too short to get back the costume and put it on his head. He’s helpless, unable to go native again and sits back, feels the anger necessary for a resplendent tantrum building in his head and gut and finally screams and weeps because he is nothing more than a plain, white boy.

Saturday, the 28
^th
of March, 2015

26 Peach

She wears a dress that dips in a wide V down the front of her chest. The deep burgundy color complements her skin tone, making her white flesh luminescent in the candlelight. The dress had been too long even for her long legs, so she had to hem the bottom. The stitches were crooked and if one looked closely, it was easy to see the slinky fabric was bunched and bulbous because of the poorly done sewing. But Peach was counting, yet again, on people’s inability to notice details. So many of her choices were riding on that one assumption alone. Most people were so inattentive, so enraptured with themselves, she was convinced she could commit murder here, in this fine Italian restaurant, and someone would order another glass of Prosecco.

Linx picks at a sprig of rosemary alive and thriving in a small pot in the center of their table. He rubs one of the dark green needles and then brings his hand up to Peach’s nose.

“Smell that. That’s what all of Tuscany must smell like,” he says and then pours himself a glass of water from a carafe stacked with ice and lemon.

Peach pulls up on her dress. The cut was unusual for her to wear. She didn’t usually enjoy showing that much breast, and as soon as she got to the restaurant and noted how Linx was staring at her chest, she regretted her choice in attire. She hadn’t put the outfit on for him. It was for her. A celebratory gesture, something suggested to her when she spoke the other night with the stars. Peach had to treat herself right during her time of transformation.

“The meat is a bit dry. It should just fall off the bone. But the tomatoes are vibrant,” she says and pushes the lamb osso buco around on her plate. She doesn’t particularly enjoy eating lamb, but she had to have it when she saw it on the menu. She thinks of a paper placemat she read at a Chinese restaurant in late January. 2015 is the Year of the Sheep.

“You look nice,” Linx says and takes a swig of water. “Beautiful, I mean. Not nice. Nice is too plain. Radiant? I like radiant. Wait, that’s a word, right?”

She smiles at his question and nods at him and then at her dish. Linx’s first generation American status meant he struggled with vocabulary on occasion. He was better off than his mother, a tiny Thai woman, petite even by her own country’s standards, who spoke nearly all her sentences in a mishmash of English and tonal Thai.

Sawing a piece of meat from the hollow bone in the middle of her dish, Peach brings the flesh up to her tongue and bites down mindfully. It tastes like springtime.

“Have you ever seen how rams will just run at one another, the males, that is, and butt one another so hard with their horns they become dazed and just stagger around for a moment? And then they do it again. Why do you think they do it?” Peach poses the question to her dinner mate and cleans a bit of the osso buco sauce up with a slice of crusty bread.

Linx twirls his pappardelle around on his plate. A piece of wilted spinach clings to his fork. “Mating. They’re fighting over the woman sheep, Peach.”

“Ewes,” she corrects him, envisioning a bizarre creature with the head of Angelina Jolie and the thick, black body of an unshorn sheep. Peach was expecting Linx to give her that answer. Something rote and textbook. Linx had the tendency to avoid deep consideration of questions when he could pop off a basic answer and get back to more pleasant conversation. But she felt the rams must
like
the pain. She imagines how it must feel to crush bone on bone, to smash your head into another person’s head and come out victorious in whatever it is you’re fighting for.

She supposes both humans and sheep do battle in the same way. With their heads. One powered with wit, the other, with hormones. In some human cases, with both wit and hormones, or neither.

“Right,” she says, “but there are always enough ewes to go around. I think, in the end, the rams are fighting more for themselves and less for the flock of sheep.”

Linx puts down his utensil and takes up rubbing the plant again. He opens his mouth to speak but Peach beats him to it.

“I guess the question is, do you make the decision to fight or not fight? Choice. That’s what makes up the plot of our lives. To ram skulls or not? Even if it kills you.”

Linx releases the plant and waves down the waiter. A man in black pants and a white button down arrives at the side of the table and Linx orders a panna cotta with black cherry sauce for them to split.

“You’re radiant,” he tells Peach, over-enunciating the word, “but you can be confusing. So, you want to make some life changes?”

“You’ve known me for years,” she replies. “I need to change. I need a big change.”

What he replies with catches her off-guard. She coughs on a piece of salty crust as it travels down her throat.

“I like you as you are. But if you want change, then be my partner, my girlfriend. Officially. That would be a change. We’d be out of the limbo we’re currently in. I could actually sleep over.”

“Linx,” she starts but doesn’t get a chance to explain away her inability to commit with some small falsehood. Linx holds up a hand for her to stop.

“I know. Not now. Not yet. I’m not the change you’re looking for, right? Even if I’m nothing like Adam.”

The name makes Peach put down her fork and drop her chin.

She looks down at the cut of meat left on her plate. Some delicate, fresh baby was butchered for her meal. And she’s taking the lamb’s energy and using it to power discussions about a relationship she doesn’t wish to have with her best friend. The lamb could have lived its life on a hillock of deep green pasture instead. But it was now a part of her meal, in this dish and dancing with the bile in her stomach at this very moment.

“Do you know,” she starts, noticing the waiter making his way through the crowded dining room with their dessert, “that the recipe I’m eating is traditionally made with veal? But it can be made with any sort of meat. Because what died in order to make something phenomenal isn’t important. It’s the
cut
of the meat that is.”

Peach lifts her hand and pokes a finger straight though a marrow-less section of bone. Linx barely looks at her, his mind on his inability to lock down his heart’s desire.

“Osso buco means ‘bone hole.’” She brings the bone up, held by her index finger. A trickle of juice and sauce smelling of wine and thyme runs down her wrist. “This is what I feel like sometimes, Linx. Hollow bones. And if you can’t use them to fly, you just feel like you’re made of emptiness.”