His stuff is leaking out of me, a funny, unbothersome tickle between my legs.
In another part of the country, in the small town where I grew up, at this moment, there are packs of young people stalking the streets, naked, their pale flesh glowing, their breath coming fast and angry, their limbs filled with the quivering of strength and movement. Many, tomorrow, will wake torn and bruised.
When we get home, Jack apologizes to the babysitter and gives her extra money. Then he drives her home. While he is gone, I go upstairs, where my son is sleeping. He wakes when I come into the room, reaching toward me, wanting to be picked up.
I look down at him for a few moments, all that wee human greed and desire. I refuse to pick him up, but eventually I do kneel beside his bed and recite to him a rhyme I learned when I was a little girl.
Brittle Moon,
Beggar’s Moon,
Worm Moon, more…
Pheasant Moon,
Cordial Moon,
Lacuna’s bore…
Hod Moon,
Blowfly Moon,
Pulse Moon—roar!
Prayer Moon,
Hollow Moon,
Lake Moon’s shore.
First you kiss your mommy,
Then you count your fours.
Till you’re grown and briny,
Better stay indoors.
He waits eagerly for his favorite part—the part about roaring—and then he roars. He wants to do it again, but I tell him no. I turn on his night-light, which the babysitter has forgotten. Then I leave the room and shut the door behind me. In the upstairs hall, there is only the sound of the grandfather clock ticktocking away.
I have become a mother. I have become a wife.
Soon Jack returns home. We prepare for bed without much talk. I check the locks on the doors downstairs. It is a thing he always asks when I slide into bed next to him. “Did you remember to check the locks?” he asks. And I say, “Yes,” and I can see by the expression on his face that he feels safe.
It starts to rain outside, the droplets of water sounding little tin bells in the gutters. Jack begins to snore next to me. The grandfather clock chimes one o’clock.
And what if I were to forget a lock one night? What if I were to leave a door wide open, casting angled shadows in the moonlight? Nothing would happen. In our neighborhood, there is no one out there in the rain, not a single person squalling under the stormy black.
All our skins are dry.
*
I wonder about it sometimes—what kind of girl I might have been, what kind of woman I would be now, if I had grown up somewhere else. California, for instance, where teenagers have barbecues on the beach and bury bottles of beer halfway in the sand to keep them upright. Or New York, where they kiss in the backseats of taxicabs and lie on blankets in the middle of parks surrounded by buildings taller by far than the tallest tree.
Would I now be one of those women on television who are concerned about what the laundry detergent is doing to their children’s Little League uniforms? Would I love my husband more or less? My son?
As a teenager, would I have been one of those girls who go to the mall and defend themselves, all giggling, against boys—huddled together like a wagon circle in the food court? Would my great concerns have been college and school dances and fashion?
In my town, expensive clothes were not held in high esteem. Girls bought cheap. Dresses, they tended to get torn apart.
It’s impossible for me to make the connection between who I am now and who I was then—as if I died long ago in that town and resurrected somewhere else, with a brain full of another girl’s memories.
Except that I miss my father.
They said I had his mind.
Polly admired him as well. She always told me it was okay that I didn’t have a mother—that I didn’t really need a mother because I had the best father in town. He made Polly and me grilled cheese sandwiches with ham and the tomatoes from the garden that he and I had cultivated with our own hands. Polly liked hers with cocktail toothpicks sticking out of each quarter. He called her Sweet Polly and said that when the time came she would have so many boyfriends she would never be able to choose just one and would have to marry a whole passel of them.
He stood smiling, tall and skinny at the kitchen island. She glowed for him.
*
Summertimes, Polly came to my house, and my father would greet her at the door.
“Sweet Polly!” he would say. “Lumen’s upstairs.”
The long, hot days of July, he would turn on the sprinkler in the backyard, and we would put on our swimsuits and play in the dancing water. The sprinkler was on the end of a hose, and it shot a Chinese fan of water in a slow back-and-forth arc that we liked to jump through. The only rule was that every fifteen minutes we had to move the sprinkler to a different part of the lawn to assure balanced coverage. Polly never remembered, but I always did.
We were the same age, but at thirteen it was clear that Polly was developing before I was. Her swimsuit swelled at the chest where mine was loose and puckered. She stood almost a full head taller than I did, and she did cartwheels through the shimmering water, her long limbs a dazzle of strength and nimbleness. When I tried to cartwheel, my body didn’t move the way I wanted it to, and I came toppling down into an awkward crouch.
After a while we were tired and simply lay on our stomachs in the grass, liking the feel of the fan of water as it intermittently showered us with cool needles. We lay in single file, our faces just inches from each other, our chins supported on our fists.
“Shell didn’t look so good when she came home this morning,” Polly said.
Shell was Michelle, Polly’s sister, who was fifteen and a half. She’d begun breaching just two months before. The previous night had been the last night of Hod Moon.
“My parents found her sleeping on the lawn this morning,” Polly went on.
“With no clothes on?”