Cloven Hooves

Tom grins suddenly. “That old fart still got you buffaloed? Look, Evelyn, it’s a big front. Just stand up to him and give him the same shit right back. He’ll only push you as far as you let him. I found that out a long time ago.”

“That’s easier said than done,” I mutter disconsolately, remembering his father’s piercing black eyes and square jaw. “Kinda skinny, ain’t she?” he’d remarked loudly to Tom the first time we were introduced. I’d stood still, too stunned to speak, until Mother Maurie shook my hand merrily and said, “Oh, don’t mind him, he’s just teasing.” But I hadn’t seen any laughter in his eyes. Only evaluation, like I was a heifer Tom had brought home for breeding stock. “He scares me,” I confess.

Tom laughs softly. “Only because you let him. Hey, he’s had to be that way to get where he is. If he hadn’t been direct and assertive, and pushed people for all he could get out of them, he’d still be plowing the back forty and trying to pay off the mortgages. He pushes. I know that. But it’s not like it’s just you. He’s like that to everyone, just to see how far they’ll push. Draw a line.” He sees the doubt in my face, offers an alternative. “But there are other ways to get around him. Hell, look at Steffie’s way. Be Daddy’s little girl when he’s looking, and do what you please later.” He chuckles fondly at how well Steffie gets around their dad.

It is all so simple for him. Tom is like that. People are easy for him. He meets them, he sizes them up, he knows just how to handle them. And they always like him. Instantly, the first time they meet him. And they go on liking him, always. When we were in college, all the girls had crushes on him and all the guys thought he was a helluva friend. The freaks and the bikers, the druggies and the straights, the profs and the frat guys: they’d all liked him. He shifts gears effortlessly, is never out of place. I have always envied him that talent; he is able to be anything that anyone needs, as required.

And to me, he is everything. Husband, lover, best friend. There are very few people in my life, but I have never felt alone since Tom came to me, he fills all the niches for me. I look at him and a wave of tenderness breaks over me. After all he has done for me, surely I can do this simple thing for him. Live near his family for a month, make them like me, be pleasant to them. It won’t be hard. Make Tom proud of me. In a way, it is a thing I owe them. And whenever things get hard, I’ll just remind myself that these people are Tom’s family, that without them, he wouldn’t exist.

For a moment, I flash back to the fact that without Tom, I wouldn’t exist. Not as I am now. He had taken a horribly introverted, socially hostile girl and made her over into a competent woman who was satisfied with her life. I think of our little cabin and ten acres of woods, of my job at Annie’s Organic Foods and Teas. I have friends now, real friends, something I’d never had when I was growing up. Annie and our regular customers, and Pete and Beth down the road, and Caleb our mail carrier and all the others that Tom had so effortlessly befriended for me. I’d ridden into those friendships on his coattails, learned to socialize by watching him. I should be past all these stupid doubts, should set them aside with the old scalding memories of grade school and high school and all the failed efforts of those times.

But still I hear myself say, “It’s just that the way they live and do things is so different from, well, from the way I was brought up and the way we do things. I mean, Mother Maurie’s house looks like something out of a magazine, and Steffie always looks like she’s going out to tea with Queen Elizabeth.”

Tom snorts a chuckle. “Yeah, well. I know what you mean. Sometimes it gets to me, too. But it wasn’t always like that. When Steffie and Ellie and I were kids, the money was a lot tighter. I remember plenty of hand-me-down clothes from the cousins, and lots of secondhand furniture. I remember when Mom’s end tables were wire spools with cloths over them. But in the last ten years, since the equipment dealership took off, Dad’s been able to do better for the family. And he likes that. He likes giving Mom and the girls nice things, likes living good with new furniture, and indulging Steffie and stuff. Hell, I know he can remember enough hard times for us. He’s worked damn hard to get the family where it is; don’t look down on him for liking to flash around that money isn’t so tight for them anymore. It’s a point of pride for him. But it doesn’t mean he’s going to look down on us for being broke, and having to keep things simple and cheap. He knows where that is, too.” Tom sounds a little hurt that I would find his family’s prosperity daunting.

“I know, but …” This time even I can hear the whine in my voice, and I stop a fraction of a second before Tom says, “Hush. Stop it, now. You’re just working yourself up over nothing. Relax. They’re going to love you. All you have to do is just relax and be yourself.”

“Okay,” I concede. I can hear his unspoken hope that I’ll stop chewing on my worries, and let him doze again. So I lean back in my own seat and close my eyes. I pretend to sleep.

TWO (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)

Fairbanks, Alaska,

1963

Eleven. Betwixt and between. Two pigtails, the color of dirty straw. Fuzzy pigtails, down past my shoulders, the hair pulling free of the braid like strands breaking loose in old hemp rope. They have not been taken down, brushed, and rebraided in days, perhaps weeks. It doesn’t matter; no one scolds. My mother has six children, and her two older daughters are at a much more dangerous age than I am. They are the ones who demand all her watching. What is it to her if my hair has not been brushed and combed, the stubborn snarls jerked from my tender scalp, the long hair rebound so tightly it strains at my temples? It is summer, school is out, and we live in an aggressively rural area. There is no one to see her youngest daughter running wild as a meadow colt.

And I do. Both knees are out of my jeans, and my shirt has belonged to two older siblings before me. Boy’s shirt, girl’s shirt, only the buttons know. It lies flat down the front of my androgynous chest. There are holes in my sneakers, too, and my socks puddle around my ankles. Yes, that is me, eyes the color of copper ore, hard and green, a scatter of freckles across my nose. Unkempt, neglected child? Hardly. Free child, unwatched, unhindered, unaware of being free, as it is the only thing I have ever known. Free child in the deep heat of July, the forest baking around me in the seventy-some degrees of the Fairbanks summer sun.

I am where I should not be, but I do not even know it, nor would I care if I did. I am between the FAA tower on Davis Road and what will eventually be the Fairbanks International Airport. It is supposed to be a restricted area, but no one really cares about that. Not at this moment in time. If I want, I can follow the surveyor cuts through the forest until I’d come out to the small plane tie-downs. A bit farther, and I’d come to wide pavements of the airport, where the airplanes let people down right on the asphalt of the runways. There would be people and noise and traffic. All the things I hate. Where I am is much better. I am sitting on the bank of the slough and thinking it is the most beautiful place in the world.

The slough varies with the seasons, like a snowshoe hare varying its coat, but it is always beautiful to me. During winter it is a wide white expanse of snow, broken only by the protruding heads of the tallest grasses. The snow humps strangely over the mounds and hummocks of coarse grasses. Owls hunt over it, watching for tiny scurrying shrews and mice to break to the surface and brave the flat whiteness. If I walk cautiously, I can move across the frozen crust without breaking it, standing tall above the earth, my feet supported by millions of tiny ice crystals. Treacherous trickling sunlight sometimes softens my floor, and then I break through it and wallow up to my hips in snow that infallibly finds every opening in my clothing. That is the winter.

Then comes spring and breakup, when the slough fills with water that reflects the sky and the tangled branches of the trees on its banks and the tiny leaves budding on them. The white snow sinks down to isolated hummocks cowering in the narrow tree shadows, bleeds to death as seeping water that fills the slough. The slough flows with a perceptible current then, carrying off the melted snow to the Chena River, and birds cry above it, ravens black against the transparent blue sky. The wind of breakup reddens my cheeks, and my old socks wad down inside my battered boots. During the spring thaw, the slough is deep, how deep I do not know, for it is much too cold to think of wading in it. I jump from tuft to hummock to clump of grass to cross it, and at its highest flow I cannot cross it at all. I go home wet, my hands red-cracked claws of hands, my nose dripping, my eyes green with spring.

But that is not now. It is summer now. The early greenness has passed. There are tall yellow grasses, higher than my head, with waving tasseled heads of wild grains. The water has hidden itself beneath the living earth, only appearing in secret pools of shallow water banked with green mosses and ferns and squirming with mosquito larvae. Low-bush cranberries, tender little plants with tiny round leaves, no taller than my hand-span, coat the bank where I sit. Behind me, closer to the edge of the true forest, are twiggy blueberry bushes, bereft now of their tiny bell-like flowers, and not yet heavy with round blue fruit. Today I have seen a red fox with a spruce hen clamped in its jaws, and a litter of tiny rabbits just ventured from their burrow. I have seen the green bones of a winter-kill moose acrawl with beetly things, and pushed the bones aside to see the white grubs squirming beneath them. Myriad small creatures besides myself live and hunt here. The faun is one of them.

He is beside me, likewise lounging on the bank. He is stretched out to the lingering touch of the sun on his belly. He is totally unremarkable and completely marvelous. I love him as I love the sound of wolves at night, and stories of wild horses in thundering herds on the plains. I love him as I love my hands and my hair and my ice-green eyes. He closes the circle of who I am, and makes me complete. In loving him, I love myself. In my mind I call him Pan, but aloud I have never spoken a word to him, nor him to me. We are the closest of friends.

He has a boy’s face and arms, a boy’s curly thatch of hair atop his head, interrupted only by the nubbins of his horns, stubby things shorter than my thumbs, shiny brown like acorns. He has a boy’s chest, tanned and ribby, flat nipples like brown thumbprints. From the hips down he is neatly and unoffensively goat. His hooves are pale and cloven, slightly yellower than my toenails but much thicker. The hair on his legs is like that on any goat, smoothly brown, growing so closely it hides any trace of skin. His penis is gloved as neatly as a dog’s, held close to his lower belly in its coarsely haired sheath. The most I have ever seen of it is the pointed pink tip, moist like a puppy’s. To my eleven-year-old mind it is a superior arrangement, much better than my younger brothers’ dangling, wrinkled genitalia. More private in a way that is not prissy.

He rolls to face me, yawning, and then smiling. His teeth are white as only the teeth of young carnivores are white, and his eyes are a color that has no name. His eyes are the color of sunlight that has sifted through green birch leaves and fallen onto a carpet of last year’s leaves. Earth eyes, not brown nor green nor yellow. The color of a forest when you stand back from it.

He rises and looks at me askance, and I shrug and rise to follow him. My dog falls in at our heels. He pants delicately in the heat of the summer, making hardly a noise at all. Not for him some doggy lolling of a long pink tongue. He is more than half a wolf, my Rinky, with his sleek black coat and his pale cheeks and eyebrows. In the woods with me, he is all a wolf, and I am his cub as surely as Mowgli belonged to Akela. He has taught me everything, this dog, that a young creature must know to stay alive in the forest. From him I have learned to be still and to be silent, and to move with the forest instead of through or against it. I have watched him and seen how well he fills the niche that nature has allotted to him. I, too, will be as he is, perfect in my place.

We follow Pan, Rinky and I, and he leads us down the slough. We walk in the flat troughs that meander between the hummocks of grass. Short weeks ago, water flowed where our feet walk now. We flow as it did, silent and seeking our level. Pan has neither hips nor buttocks, but only the sleek flanks of an animal and the restless tail of the deer kind. His cloven hooves leave more of a mark than Rinky’s wolf feet, and my sneakers leave the least discernible track of all. Insects chirr around us, and the air is heavy with pollen and sleep. I can believe that, save for us, nothing larger than a shrew is stirring in the forest at this hour.

Then the duck explodes in front of me, right before my feet, her brown pinions slashing my face as she rises on her battering wings. Her nerve has been shattered; she withstood the passing of Pan and Rinky so close to her nest, but I, a human, am too totally foreign to her experience. I fall back with an incoherent cry, my hands rising to protect my face, but she is already gone. My eyes tear from the slapping they have taken, but that is the sole extent of their damage. When I lower my hands and blink my eyes clear of tears, they are laughing at me.

Rinky’s pink tongue does loll now, mockingly, dangling over his picket fence of white teeth and his smooth black doggy lips. Pan is worse. He clutches his belly, bends over it, brown curls falling into his eyes as he shakes with silent hilarity. His teeth are very white, his mouth is wide with mirth. Miffed, I ignore both of them, and crouch to examine the nest.

The nest is a late one, probably the duck’s second effort this year. To the casual eye, it is empty. But with thumb and forefinger I lift the soft blanket of down that covers the fourteen pale turquoise eggs. The eggs are not much larger than grade-AA chicken eggs from the store, but they are much more real. Eggs from the store are cold and bony white, their surfaces dry and chalky, trapped in cardboardy trays. These eggs are warm, and smooth, almost waxy to the touch. I take two and Pan takes one, and we carry them off with us, leaving the duck free to return to her brooding.

We go back to the sunny bank of the dried-up slough and sit on the moss and eat our eggs. Pan and I bite the ends off ours and spit the crumpled bits of shell aside before we suck out the warm white and the sudden glop of the yolk. Rinky puts his between his front paws and delicately breaks it with his teeth so that he can lap up the egg and eat the shell that held it.

And that is all that there is to this day, but it needs nothing more. It is complete, like the scene trapped inside a glass paperweight, a whole sufficient to itself. I am eleven and lying there between a dog and a faun. We three make a circle, from human to beast and back again. I love them as I love my hands or my hair, unthinking, totally accepting. They are the two most important creatures in my life and always will be. When we grow up, I will be Pan’s mate and we will live and hunt in these woods and Rinky will always run beside us. I know these things as well as I know that the summer sky is blue and permafrost is cold.

THREE (#u4a6bf522-82d9-5d2a-b2e2-dab0ce50d7b3)

Tacoma

May 1976

I hate to shop for clothing. I hate to try things on. I hate the cramped dressing rooms with curtains that gape at the sides, with their floors littered with straight pins and tags. I hate pulling stiff, unfamiliar clothes on over my head, clothing ensorcelled with hidden pins and buttoned buttons that snare me inside their unyielding depths. I hate standing nine inches from a full-length mirror trying to see what I look like in this foreign garment, my hair mussed and my makeup smeared by my struggle to get into it. It makes me sweat.

Stupid. Stupid is how I look. The bosom gapes hungrily for my nonexistent cleavage. My socks-and-sneakered feet stick out the bottom where sheer-stockinged calves and slender ankles and chic white sandals should be. I smooth the dappled-leaf muteness of the fabric, loving it, wishing I could look as if I belonged in it. But I cannot. I look like a homely carnival Kewpie doll stuffed into Barbie’s prom dress. Ken would be horrified. I claw and fumble the buttons open, begin an attempt to slither out the bottom of the dress. It jams on my too-wide shoulders.

A saleslady whisks the curtain open. My olivine eyes peer at her from the dress bodice, my pale thighs goosebump in the sudden draft. “Oh, dear,” she says, and I am sure her sympathy is for the dress, not me. “You didn’t like it. Can I bring you a different size, perhaps? Would you like to try it in another color?”

Another body, I think. Another face. Bring me those, and I’ll try the dress again. “No, thank you,” I say aloud, and her eyes narrow with disapproval. She must be on commission. Mother Maurie and Steffie trip merrily past my compartment. They are having a wonderful time. Both my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law love the gay whirl of shopping, adore endlessly trying on clothes, just for the fun of seeing what they will look like. I, exposed still, shiver as they pass. Another saleslady trails them, her arms heavy with bright garments. “Evelyn,” Steffie calls without pausing. “We are absolutely starved! We’re going to that restaurant, you know, the one down near Fredericks? Okay?”

“Okay,” I mutter. I don’t know the restaurant, having never been there. I am not even absolutely sure where Fredericks is. It doesn’t matter. I’ll cope. The dress has a half nelson on me. My saleslady sighs and whisks herself off to another dressing compartment. She peeks into that one, exclaims delightedly, “Not everyone can wear that look, but, oh, on you!” She clasps her hands delightedly.

I free a hand and arm somehow, and tug the curtain back so that it gapes no more than three inches on each side. I inch painstakingly out of the dress, making a sincere effort not to tear the shoulder seams. I shiver in my underwear as I wrestle it back onto its hanger and suspend it from the hook in the dressing room. Once on its hanger, it resumes its original gentle lines, looks beckoningly lovely as it never will on my frame. I snarl at it as I stoop for my jeans and shirt, catch the snarl reflected in the mirror. For a brief instant I am eye to eye, fang to fang, with myself. It is not a pleasant experience.

Someone who once said he loved me compared me to a stag. An odd compliment, and not one that reassures one’s femininity. But a compliment, nonetheless, to be collected and clung to. I straighten and look at myself in the mirror, trying to find the stag he saw. I see only pieces of myself, I cannot perceive myself as a whole. Sensible cotton panties that magically guard me from yeast infections. Legs that remind me of the dark, footed legs of my great-grandmother’s piano bench. I can see the lines of my ribs. There are muscles in my belly, good, that is good. I think. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it isn’t feminine. How do you get rid of muscles on your belly? I wonder idly. My stubborn breasts have refused to follow me into womanhood. They are a seventh-grader’s breasts, their disgrace hidden inside smooth cups of foam-lined nylon that bring them almost to woman size. My collarbones stand out, my shoulders are wide, my neck is long and graceful. Is this the stag he saw? I roll my shoulders, watch the smooth muscles move under the skin. My face. I cannot see my face. I see the lines in my forehead, I see my wide cheeks, I should have plucked my eyebrows, the lipstick looks silly on me, not a clown’s mouth, no, more like I have eaten something unwholesome and it has stained my mouth this wretched color.

“Can I show you anything else?” It is the saleslady, peering in at me. She can show me nothing that I have not already seen. I clutch my jeans and shirt to myself.

“No,” I mutter. “Thank you, no, not today. Thank you.”

She leaves again. I wonder if someone is waiting for this dressing room. A tall, elegant woman, garments draped gracefully over her arm, folded money inside her pocketbook. Her high cheeks smooth as polished wood, salesladies never wrench her curtains open. Things like that are reserved only for those like myself.

Stop making yourself miserable, I scold myself. Why stop, I respond, when I do it so well? Everyone should be good at something. I pull on my jeans. Wranglers, size nine, as familiar as my own skin and more becoming. My shirt. A plain and simple button-up-the-front blue shirt, tuck it in, zip my fly and button it, buckle the leather belt. Better than armor and buckler is a pair of jeans that fit well, a leather belt that buckles snugly, a blue work shirt that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. I button my cuffs, and grin at myself in the mirror. Better. I take a worn tissue from my jeans pocket, smear the lipstick from my mouth. Better and better. I feel more like myself.

There are bright plastic sacks laden with trove collapsed in the corner of the dressing room. I gather them. Sears, The Bon, the 3-5-7 Shoppe. Mother Maude’s and Steffie’s bags, full of dresses and shoes and … No. Gay little frocks, and bright sling-back pumps and sun togs and beach cover-ups. Maurie and Steffie would never buy anything so mundane as dresses and shoes. I smile at the thought. Their bags hang on my arms, cut into my wrists as I hurry down the wide avenue of the mall, looking for them.

I am not good at malls, either. Steffie has tried to make me feel at home in them, but it does not work. They are too foreign to my experience. She swims through them as easily as a tropical fish glides through its pebbled and planted tank. But I am constantly distracted, bombarded by their infinite variety. There are too many possibilities, too many things to buy. Usually, I buy nothing simply because I cannot decide what to choose. Steffie selects effortlessly from the racks, tries a dozen garments, and buys two, never worrying that perhaps in the next store there will be a dress even more fetching, slacks even more flattering to her derriere. I envy her that certainty. I know I will never achieve it.

I slow, or try to. The stream of moving people pushes me on, so I continue down the mall. Perhaps I mistrust places where the sun never shines, where time stands still and the weather never changes save for the window displays. I lose all sense of direction, all ability to make decisions. Streams of people move both with me and past me. Sometimes I feel giddy and wonder if I am standing still while they pass. But here I am, at the end of the mall, and it is the wrong end, Fredericks is at the other end of the mall. I about-face and begin the trek back.

I wonder if Mother Maurie and Steffie will be impatiently waiting for my arrival. Or will they order without me, and begin their meal with no more thought than they give to a cockapoo waiting outside in the car? I have been a member of their family for six years. What is wrong with me that I cannot feel toward them as I should, cannot be free and easy as if I were really part of their family? It’s not them. It cannot be their fault. They are always correct, always calm and composed, always kind. Steffie is so polished, so incredibly perfect in all her roles. Today she is the fashion-conscious woman of the world. And Mother Maurie is, as always, perfect in the supporting role of “Steffie’s Mother.” I know I am jealous of them and the easy way they fit into this place. I know they do not intend to make me feel awkward and homely and provincial. But they do.

I am halfway up the mall when it happens. From out of nowhere, a man’s arm around my waist, closing tight, pulling me from the stream of shoppers as easily as a bear hooks out a salmon from a spawning run. He is a rapist, a ritual killer, a mugger, and I am too startled to even speak, and then a voice by my ear says, “Evelyn.”

I have never heard his voice before, so how do I know it? Is it the way he says it or the timbre of his throat that slackens my muscles, leaves me standing in the circle of his arms like a doe poised in oncoming headlights, my smile as blank as the mannequin’s watching us from the display window?

He grins at my expression, his brown curls falling into his eyes, his teeth very white, his mouth wide with mirth. He holds me in the backwater of his arms, safe from the current of mindless shoppers that brush past us. He is taller than I remember, and his eyes a more honest shade of brown. We stand without speaking, and I have the eerie sense of a circle completed.