When We Were Animals (6 page)

Rather than simply being subject to them, I had wanted to know what it felt like to
be
one of the forces in this world.

But Petey Meechum
saw. The next day he found me tucked into the back carrel of the library, where I liked to be with my books.

“You did it,” he said. “I saw you.”

I panicked. I gathered my books, stuffed them quickly into my knapsack.

“Why did you?” he said. “I just want to know. Did you know he’d get in trouble?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying to get around him. I didn’t like being cornered.

“Wait a minute,” he said as I pushed my way past him. “I won’t tell anyone,” he called after me. “I just—I didn’t know who you were.”

Of course we had known each other for many years, but he meant something bigger. See how easy it is to become someone else? It happens all of a sudden—just like that. A ticktock of motion.

So who am I now?

The year that
Polly went breach, I had not yet figured out that life sometimes requires contingency plans for the loss of those close to you—that the more people you have buffering you against solitude, the less catastrophic it is when one of them disappears. Among people my age, I only really had Polly—and when she went breach, I no longer had her. She didn’t turn on me. It’s not that. She had simply been initiated into a corps I wasn’t part of. More frequently than not, our casual conversations in the school hallways (usually on the topic of test scores and the relative fairness of teachers) were interrupted by other students who shared giddy stories with Polly about what outrageous things had occurred during the most recent full moon. These others acknowledged me always with a curious, questioning look in their eyes, as if they were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know my name.

As it turned out, though, Petey Meechum, who had also not yet gone breach, had taken a strange interest in me after the day I had run away from him in the library. Except he liked to be known as Peter now, in the same way that Rosebush, perhaps as a result of her parents’ divorce, was demanding that she be called Rose. Apparently we were outgrowing the names of our childhoods. I was always Lumen. There was no evolution in my name. Well, there wasn’t until later, after I had left the town behind—and then I started calling myself Ann. Ann Fowler. I’m sure there are hundreds of Ann Fowlers in this world. You would have no reason to single me out. My husband, he believes Ann is my only name and that I have no middle name. He knows no Lumen. It is a secret I keep from him, because when he comes home he tells me about the troubles of his day at work—and Ann Fowler is a remarkably good wife.

So it was Peter Meechum who frequently came to my house to study in the afternoons. Unlikely as it was, popular Peter Meechum came to me for help with geometry. Golden-haired Peter. Peter, whom all the girls ached for in school, and somehow he had delivered himself to me. Peter Meechum in my very own home, where I would make us a snack of carrot and celery sticks and French onion dip. I would pour him a glass of orange juice, and he would drink it all in one long gulp—and then I would pour him another, and he would make that one last awhile.

I wondered how long it would be before he discovered any number of other taller, prettier girls to help him with math. But somehow one of my childhood incantations had borne him to me, and I relished it with the desperate appetite of someone fated to die the very next day.

“It’s an offense to my masculinity is what it is,” he would say dramatically. “My having to be taught math by a wee girl.”

He said it in a way that made me not mind being called a wee girl.

“We’ll have to compensate,” he went on. “After you explain tangents, you have to promise to let me beat you at arm wrestling.”

“Tangents are easy,” I would say. “It’s just relationships. Angles and lengths. If you have one, you also have the other. I’ll show you.”

In my room, sprawled out on the carpeted floor, I drew diagrams for him on blue-lined notebook pages.

“How do you draw such straight lines without a ruler?” he asked. “Your triangles are amazing.”

He ran his fingertips lightly over my triangles, as though geometry were a tactile thing.

“They’re perfect,” he said.

“They’re not perfect.”

He eyed me.

“Maybe you don’t know what perfect is,” he said. “Those right there—that’s what perfect looks like.”

That was something about Peter. His language made things happen. Things became funny when Peter laughed, and they became ridiculous when he labeled them so. He seemed, somehow, to belong prematurely to that category of
adults
—people who drove the world ahead of them, like charioteers, rather than being dragged along behind.

The truth is, I was in love with him—Petey Meechum, who was now Peter, who held a carrot stick in the corner of his mouth like a cigar while he was lying on his stomach on the floor of my room complimenting my triangles.

He sighed heavily and rolled over onto his back. He raised his arms toward the ceiling and used his splayed hands to make a triangle through which he peered, squinting, at the overhead light.

“After I graduate high school, I’m leaving,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“New York.”

I didn’t ask why New York. He would tell me without my prompting him.

“It’s like a city on fire,” he went on. “The streets are always smoking from underground furnaces.”

“Steam,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

“What?”

“It’s not smoke. It’s steam.”

“How do you know?”

“I looked it up once. I saw it on TV and wondered what it was. There’s a steam-heat system under Manhattan. Sometimes it leaks.”

His hands fell to his chest, and he was quiet. I felt bad for knowing more about his dream city than he did.

“What will you do in New York?” I asked, trying to resuscitate his vision.

“Lumen, don’t you ever feel like you want to leave?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this place. This weird little town with its weird little traditions. Other places aren’t like this, you know.”

“Every place has its own ways,” I declared reasonably.

He rolled over again, back onto his stomach, and there was something beseeching in his tone when he spoke again.

“But don’t you ever just want to get out? To go somewhere else? To be somebody else—even just for a little while?”

I looked down at the triangles in my notebook. The secret to drawing straight lines is that you use your whole arm, not just your hand and wrist. My father taught me that.

“I like it here,” I said.

“What do you like about it?”

I wasn’t prepared for follow-up questions. Part of me always resented having to justify my likes and dislikes. Other people didn’t have to. No one ever asked Blackhat Roy what it was he liked about hunting knives. Everyone just knew he kept a collection of them, all oiled and polished, in his bedroom.

“Come on,” I said to Peter. “You have to understand tangents. They’re going to be on the test tomorrow.”

“I never see
you in church,” he said on another afternoon.

My father and I were not churchgoers—but we had frequently driven by when services were being let out, and I wished sometimes to be among those enlightened folk who had occasion to dress in finery in the middle of a plain Sunday morning.

Peter had taken to removing his sneakers when we were studying together. He tucked the laces neatly inside and set them side by side by the door. I liked seeing them there—that one touch of alien boyness that transformed my bedroom into something less than familiar.

“My father never took me,” I said.

“Do you believe in God?”

“Kind of.”

“You kind of believe in God, or you believe in a kind of God?”

I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a boy who takes off his shoes in your bedroom that God is a thing of the mind—but a very, very lovely thing of the mind? I stuttered along for a few moments before he let me off the hook.

“You know, I didn’t used to believe in God.”

“You didn’t?”

“Huh-uh. For a long time I didn’t. And then one day I did. Just like that. Does that ever happen to you? You’re going along, minding your own business, seeing things the way you’ve always seen them—and then all of a sudden those things look different to you?”

The way he was looking at me made me wonder if he was talking about something other than God. Or if maybe God and the way he looked at me with those voracious boy-eyes were related. I wanted more of it. His boy-eyes—his godliness, which I felt deep down, like a surge.

Then he leaned back, as though something had clicked shut all at once.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’m just feeling philosophical today. If you can help me pass this geometry test, I’ll give you a present.”

“What present?” I pretended to shuffle through the pages of my textbook, because I didn’t want to show him that I was out of breath.

“I don’t know—I’ll build you a house on the lake.”

“On the east shore, so I can watch the sunsets?”

“Sure. And another on the west shore so you can watch the sunrises. And a canoe to go back and forth between them.”

“Just a canoe?”

“Come on, I already built you two houses.”

“Fair enough.”

In school, Rose
Lincoln leaned over to my desk during history.

“I heard you’re tutoring Peter,” she said.

I said nothing.

“Well, is it true?”

I shrugged. “We just study—” I had meant to say, “We just study together,” but the
together
suddenly sounded, in one way or another, too complicit and damning.

“It’s okay,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. It’s not like he’s interested in you or anything. You know Peter—he’s a flirt. The other day he told me I looked nice in yellow. He let Angela Weston give him a back rub in the cafeteria. Carrie Bryce said he brushed her butt when she walked by him in the hall. And you know it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, I look so like hell in yellow. It’s just the way he is. The reason he likes me is that we understand each other.”

I wrote Rose Lincoln’s name in my notebook and spent the rest of the period crosshatching over it until it was an ugly blotch of shiny ink that bled through to the other side of the paper—and I thought that would do for a curse.

But I feared
that what Rose Lincoln said about Peter and me was true—that I was just a functionary to him.

It was a few weeks later. We were in my bedroom, and he was looking at a framed picture on the wall. The picture was of my mother and father when they were very young and just married. Peter had been spending the afternoons with me in my bedroom, and we had played many games of Parcheesi between studying sessions—but he had made no move to kiss me.

“What’s it like not to have a mother?” he asked.

I had learned that afternoons make boys profound—the long, slow crawl of light between the shutters, the lazy dust motes in the doldrums of the air. Boys are affected, unconsciously, by such things. You can see it in their eyes. In the sepia light of dusk, they are traveling.

“It’s okay,” I said. “She died when I was too young to remember her, so I never really felt the loss of anything.”

It was my stock answer when people lamented, unnecessarily, my motherlessness.

“Does your dad talk about her much?”

“I don’t know,” I said, not knowing what constituted “much.” It was true that he used to speak to her frequently at night, after he closed his bedroom door, as though it were his personal version of prayer. If I put my ear up to the door, I would hear him relating the events of the day, the progress of my evolution through girlhood. But he hadn’t spoken to her like that in a long time. Once, when I was little, I listened so long at his door that I fell asleep. After having your ear pressed against doors and walls for a while, you don’t know exactly what you’re listening to—maybe just that low, oceany hum of your own blood. It lulls you. He found me there in the morning, called me his beautiful stray, lifted me in his arms. I clung to him.

“Do you want to see pictures?” I asked.

“Sure.”

The old albums were in the attic, and I thought that such a dark, cramped place might inspire kissing. I felt bad about using the memory of my mother in that way, but I reasoned that she also would have wanted me to be kissed.

Peter was quite a bit taller than me, so I had him unfold the attic ladder from the ceiling in the hallway, and up we went. I knew right where the boxes with the albums were, because I had helped my father organize the attic just the previous summer. It had been my job to create all the labels. It was warmer up there in the attic, and Peter and I sat side by side, with our backs propped up against old suitcases, an album resting open half on his lap and half on mine. Our shoulders touched.

“This is my favorite picture,” I said.

“That’s baby you?”

“That’s baby me.”

Most family pictures show the mother holding the baby while the father sits proudly by—but this one was the opposite. In it, my father, looking lean and dapper, had me bundled up in his arms. He was sitting in the easy chair we still had downstairs in the living room, and next to him was my mother, perched upon the arm of the chair, looking radiant and aloof, the skirt of her dress draped perfectly over her knees. Her smile was something I couldn’t describe, except to say that it seemed to be queenly in the way that queens remind you of situations grander than your own puny life could conceive.

“She looks like you,” Peter said.

“Does she?” I was pleased. “I think we have a lot in common. Maybe that’s why she died.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, I know it’s morbid, but I think that sometimes. Maybe she had to die because we were so alike that the world couldn’t tolerate both of us in it.”

“That’s…” he said, looking uncomfortable. “That’s a really weird thing to say, Lumen.”