Geometry and Rain

Missy sprinted out ahead of us up the hill. At the top, just off to the left tucked into a cove of tall pine trees were two naked bodies on a blanket. Startled, I stopped abruptly and stared. Sophie bumped into my back.

“What,” she said and I pointed. She gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth. The couple was about 50 feet away and on a bit of a slope so the full length of them was visible. The woman was on top, her hair falling over the face of the other, her hips writhing. The curves and angles of her body and the rhythm of their movements mesmerized me. I can’t say how long we were standing and staring but it seemed quite long. When they made more and more noise, Missy came back to investigate. She ran too close to them and barked, causing them to jump and look up. The woman’s eyes met mine and I instinctively crouched. Sophie ran. The couple grasped for their clothes or the blanket or anything to cover up. I called to Missy and felt my face go hot, my hands numb. Missy ran past me after Sophie and I found my legs were stuck. I couldn’t move. The man wrestled with his pants and cursed. The woman stared back at me like she was waiting for something else to happen. Something clenched in my throat and I crouched lower, panicking. I had a wild fear that she recognized me, knew who I was and would tell on me because maybe I had done something wrong. The man had found his way into his pants and stood up, scowling at me.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he yelled and started walking toward me. My legs came back alive and I burst from the grass and ran and ran.

I found Sophie standing in front of a log cabin with Missy at her feet. It had an inviting front porch that wrapped around the sides. A flowery sign that hung from the door read: “Open” and warm smells of fresh bread and sweet berries came from the house. Without a word, we mounted the stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. I saw movement from a window off to the right and then a clatter from within. Spooked, I took Sophie’s hand and was about to pull her away and leave the place when the door swung open and an old woman emerged with a basket of lollipops. She was short and white haired, round and kind looking. A wide spread smile seemed to be her only expression.

“Hello there, girls, no need to knock, you know; we’re open for business here. Welcome to Matt Donahue’s. Here, have a free sucker,” she said, her voice scratchy, warm. Sophie’s hand darted out and snatched a sucker. She inspected the flavor, frowned, and put it back. The old woman laughed and brought the basket lower so Sophie could see better.

“Take a look, sweetie, and pick your favorite color. I like green; tastes like apples,” she said. Sophie peered into the basket and fished around until she found the pale yellow wrapper of butterscotch. She took it and smiled up at the old woman.

“Thank you, lady,” she said, blushing and sticking the lollipop into her mouth.

“My name is Mary Mare; what’s yours?”

“Sophie,” she said and looked at me.

“I’m Jane; we’re here for the summer with our grandparents,” I said.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you both. Please come in, but your dog will have to wait out here,” she said. I told Missy to stay and pointed at her like I’d watched my dad do then went in.

The bins full of candy were the first thing I saw. Behind the counter was a haggard woman with black stringy hair flecked with gray, smoking a cigarette and reading a magazine. She glanced up at us but didn’t say a word or even smile.

“This is Mrs. Donahue, girls, one of the owners here. This is Jane and Sophie, here in town with their grandma and grandpa for the summer,” Mary Mare said. Mrs. Donahue mumbled something I couldn’t hear and hunched further over her magazine. Mary Mare put an apron on and walked into a back room where all the nice smells were coming from. Sophie and I grabbed bunches of Mary Janes and Slo Pokes and piled them on the counter.

We paid for the candy with handfuls of pennies that we counted out in front of Mrs. Donahue’s phantom white face, smoke spilling thick from her mouth and nose.

“Can we have a bag for the candy?” I asked.

“You got pockets?” she said, then turned around on her stool and went back to her magazine. I looked at Sophie and giggled while we filled our pockets. She stuck her tongue out at Mrs. Donahue’s back. I slapped a hand over my mouth and snorted laughter. We ran out laughing and stuffing pieces of candy in our mouths.

I watched for signs of the couple on the way back to the cabin but they were gone. Missy sniffed around the spot where there blanket left a crushed rectangle in the grass and I thought of the white hips lifting and falling. I thought of sleeping bags packed with naked bodies and dark nights lit by stars. I thought of Mrs. Dalby as that naked woman and an uproar of fluttery excitement erupted in my gut. I ran hard back to the cabin kicking up dirt.

Later that day I sat with Gram playing Uno, something she invited me to do often, only to have the cards lie untouched while we had long conversations instead, when she started talking about my dad.

“If your dad would just grow up, he’d be a good boy.” She shook her head and shuffled the cards again.

“Why do you hate him?”

“Oh, honey, I don’t hate him. We struggle with ‘im, that’s all. His parents are the real problem. When you were just a baby, you and your mom and dad lived in our four-flat right above us. Well, your dad was a janitor at some crummy hotel downtown where they gave ‘im drugs. He’d come home high as a kite and beat on yer mom. He’d be real violent and just nasty. He’d grab and twist ‘er—” I knew what she was talking about. My dad rarely hit my mom when they fought, although she hit him freely. Instead, he had a way of grabbing and twisting parts of her that stood out: her nose, breasts, ears.

“So anyway, your mom asked Papa to keep ‘im out when he was high like that. So wouldn’t ya know it, he come home in a stupor and Papa just stopped him right at the door, told ‘im he can’t come in all coked up like that. Well, Bobby starts cursin’ and yellin,’ sayin’ it’s all Christine’s fault, callin’ her bad names. Papa says to ‘im, we saw the bruises; we know what he did. So then Bobby hauls off and punches your Papa right in the nose. I come runnin’ out to help ‘im and he punches me, too. That was it. Papa had to get ‘is gun out and force ‘im to leave that way.”

Her voice was louder and higher and her face red. I pictured my Papa going to get the gun from inside their apartment. When he returned to the sight of his wife being brutalized, however, his finger stiffened against the trigger, his vision blurred red, and the unambiguous, nearly palpable urge to kill overcame him. My father must have seen this distinctly when he raised his eyes to Papa’s, his glare displacing air in its wake. He must have felt the breeze from it.

Gram was shuffling the cards again.

“Then what happened?” I tapped her shoulder. She put the cards down and took a deep breath.

“I shouldn’t be goin’ on like this to you.”

“I wanna know; it’s OK.”

“Well, that was it. He finally left. But then he went and told his police-captain daddy on us and they come an’ arrest your Papa. They never did nothin’ to help him. They just let ‘im stay up there in that attic when he was comin’ down all shakin’ and sick. They even sat up there, held ‘im down all night once, he was so bad. Well you know me, I tell ‘em how it is. I went marchin’ right over there an’ told your grandma to her face: Your son is sick. You have to get him help. Take him to a hospital or a drug treatment place. Don’t just keep him up there in that attic leaving him to rot.”

She grabbed my hands and squeezed them; her eyes were wide and angry.

“She comes back at me and tells me it’s Christine’s fault. Says she drives ‘im to it! I just told her plain, that son of yours will die from this. It will kill ‘im dead.” She clasped her lips and stared at me.

“What’d she say?”

“If she didn’t just slam that door right in my face!” She started shuffling the cards again, shook her head. My head was clamoring. I rubbed my temples.

“What’s with that hair, young lady?” Gram grabbed a lock from the side of my head and flipped it.

“What?”

“It’s too long and straggly. I’m gonna cut it. Go get me the scissors.”

I didn’t like having it combed; it was something I always fought, and I always had it up in a ponytail, so I agreed. She set me in a chair, placed a shallow bowl over my head, and carefully cut the hair along the edge of the bowl, leaving me with a perfectly even, boyish cut.

Just after dark, I went to the nearby playground sporting my new haircut accessorized with red rubber boots, a blue Izod sweater, and jeans with holes in the knees. Before I left, I looked approvingly into the mirror: fun hair, cool outfit, straight hips. There was a group playing keep-away around the slide, girls against boys. I joined in, climbing up the slide after one orange-haired boy, his bright locks bouncing cheerfully. Arriving at the top, he gave a furtive peek behind him, glancing down at me, small eyes indistinguishable among a mass of fiery freckles, he swiftly disappeared. I climbed into position to go down after him when I was abruptly frozen in my spot. There was a girl down below pointing squarely at me, shouting: “There he is, up there! Get him!”

He? Him? I looked around, flushed, redly smiling, preparing to laugh when her mistake was discovered and pointed out by one of the other kids. I shivered. A voice behind me shouted: “Go down, man, run!” I swooped down, leapt to my feet at the bottom, and ran, settling in to the queer power of how it must always feel to be a boy. It was intoxicating, yet frightening to deceive these girls into believing that I belonged on the opposite team. At any moment they could notice my soft, long eyelashes, a girlish curve to my cheek. I could move in some un-boyish way and give myself away. But when I high-fived the boys and took off away from the girls, they believed I was a boy and they changed. The differences were subtle, but unmistakable. I treasured being chased by them, their squealing and giggling, their blushing cheeks and flirtatious grins. I was completely transformed in their eyes and its effect over me was total.

I ran fast, away from a dark-haired girl, looking back every few seconds to see her wide open laughter and ember-lit eyes pursuing me. Without warning I tripped on a protruding root and fell, my knee slashed open on a piece of slate rock, my face dug into rocky soil. I lay there, splayed out on the ground with a bleeding knee and a scraped cheek. It began to rain. The girls screamed, everyone scattered. I turned over and found the dark haired girl crouched next to me. Our faces, so close, seemed to freeze, eyes locked, her black pupils like tiny oil spills: shiny, beckoning. A car honked in the street. A truck rumbled by. The gritty taste of dirt lingered in my mouth, the smell of extinguished campfires hung, trapped under the rain. She placed one small hand on my shoulder, brushed a fingertip across my scraped cheek, her eyes asking if it hurt. I attempted to speak, but couldn’t get my mouth to move. The rain fell harder; a voice called from a distance. She leaned forward, pucker-lipped, close-eyed, summer-scented, and left the soft tremble of a kiss on my wounded cheek. She ran off. I sat there, drenched, a smile so big it ached.