Pleasure

by Traci O. Connor

 

Then I tried to find some way of embracing my mother's ghost. Thrice I sprang towards her and tried to clasp her in my arms, but each time she flitted from my embrace as it were a dream or phantom, and being touched to the quick I said to her, 'Mother, why do you not stay still when I would embrace you? If we could throw our arms around one another we might find sad comfort in the sharing of our sorrows…

from The Odyssey

Her breath catches beneath her ribs like hair tangling in a low hanging branch. "It's okay," he says. He unbuttons her pants. Unzips slowly, tooth by tooth.

"Don't," she says. His palm on her stomach. His fingers wriggling beneath the elastic of her underwear.

His hand runs across the swell of her pubic bone. His hand burns her through to the center. "Still a baby," he says. His fingers, lingering on her tender skin, pull her inside out.

The boy's breath comes fast in her face and breaks against her lips. He pulls his hand from her underwear. The elastic snaps against her skin.

In the moonlight, the skin of his face is transparent; blood courses beneath it. Teeth in their sockets. Thoughts zing inside his scalp like skitterbugs across the surface of water.

"You'll like this," he says. His hair falls forward onto his cheekbones. The boy tugs at her pants, and she grabs at his hands. "Don't worry," he says, his voice calm. He pulls her jeans with her underwear down around her thighs and the cool air slaps her bare skin-his face so close to hers, she can see his breath swelling in his nostrils.

"I don't like this," she says.

"I'm not gonna hurt you."

The trees spin faster; the moon hops around in the dark sky. She feels his hand between her legs. "Don't," she says. Her breath rises in her chest, rushes in her head.

"Watch," he says. He puts his finger into his mouth and then moves over her so that his head blocks out the moon. He parts her legs with his other hand. He pulls his finger from his mouth and looks her in the face. His teeth glow, a string of pearls. She feels his finger, wet, on the skin between her legs, searching. It pushes up inside her. "See?" he says.

Pushes further. Her bones press into the ground.

She smells the dirt beneath her nostrils. Don't, she thinks. The night drums in her ears. Stop. Please. She closes her eyes and sees herself, naked, with her hands on her mouth.

She is turning turning. The earth swallows her like rain. The world spins pink, lavender, gold.

The boy rises to his knees and shoves his free hand into his pants. Sarah turns her head away. The moon lights in the white blossoms of a pear tree at the edge of the clearing. The blossoms are teaspoons of moon.

He moans. The moon shrinks in the black sky. The pear tree just out of grasp.

It's done, she thinks. The boy pulls his finger from her body and the last of her rushes into the night.

*

From his window, John watches for his mother to fly to life with bits of moon and star and purple sky. He rests his elbows on the windowsill, his chin in his hands, staring at the driveway beneath him.

Night after night: the satin of her skin, her hair flung across the cement like lace. He dreams of it, awake or asleep he can't tell, until he hears his own voice falling heavy as a rock.

Step on a crack step on a crack

Maybe he's just a fool.

John rises from his chair. The driveway glows all the way out to the street and then drops off into the darkness at the edge of the horizon.

He feels—suddenly—alone, sad.

He steals from the house, across the yard, and into the woods, feeling his way along the trunks of trees. He listens to his steps dragging through fallen leaves.

He walks for what seems a long time—though in the trees he can't figure—until the branches open up to a meadow of cut grass and a wide-open sky. Venus falls through the night. John watches it without blinking, wondering how it is that he sees it tumbling so fast across the horizon, hurtling towards him.

The moon rumbles close. John follows it to a pear tree at the edge of the clearing, and the pear tree shimmers, spilling measures of white light onto the dirt.

*

Sarah's mother, Rose, stirs the pots on the stove. She keeps them going: one two three four, lifts the spoon dripping from one pot, plunges it into the next. She works around the stove like the hands of a clock. one two three four.

Pot and pans, measuring cups, cookie sheets, spatulas, stainless mixing bowls, cereal bowls, the cut-crystal punch bowl, a hand-painted platter; a carved wooden basket, ashtrays—anything— spilling over the sink and onto the counter, the floor. Dewberry jam, scalded milk, burnt sugar, bitter cocoa. It doesn't matter. She turns the spoon in the pots, staring back at herself.

She thinks about a place beneath a canopy of trees. How she will clear a little space of fallen leaves in a beam of sun angling through high branches. She will lie on her back with her hair spread over the ground, twining with pale grasses and getting lost. Her arms sink into the warm dirt-down down-and then clear yellow sun seeps into her eyelids, pools in her eyes, swirls through her throat, her lungs, her belly, turning circles inside her-flipping end over end like she did in the pool when she was little and weightless with her knees pressed against her chest and her hair swishing across her face. one two three four.

*

From the woods: sound crinkling like paper. The whisper of a cricket.

The boy collapses next to her. He doesn't touch her, but Sarah feels him-the way the air is disturbed, knocked out of shape.

A cloud passes and the pear tree goes up in smoke. The boy's tongue slips across his lip. He shifts on the blanket, and it comes to her all at once, rushing into her belly, her chest—

She breathes shallow, fast, trying not to cry. In and out, nowhere for it to go, her breath vanishes—poof!—a magician's dove.

The whispers quicken, rising from the trees, chasing across the network of her nerves. She closes her eye. Her body splinters. She flies into the sky.

In the woods, a stick breaks. Oh, she thinks, startled, as if slapped.

The boy sits up and casts his silhouette across her stomach. "Alright, well," he says, "I'm gonna get something to drink."

She focuses on the sound in the trees, closes her eyes to hear more clearly.

"Okay?" he says.

As quietly as possible, Sarah pulls her underwear up to her hips. Her jeans. Waves of sound from the woods lap against her face.

Another stick. Smaller.

Shadow lifts from the pear tree, blossom by blossom.

"Did you hear me?" he says.

"Sh."

"What?"

*

I should go to her, John thinks. Should punch the boy in the face. A stick breaks beneath his foot and the moon flits to the top of the trees.

*

The pear blossoms shift against the trees, changing them as moving water changes the size and shape of rocks. Sarah blinks, but there's no mistaking the subtle movement.

The boy whispers, "There's someone over there."

The pear tree steps onto the grass.

"Who the hell is it?" His breath is noisy. "Ha ha," he says, "a real funny joke, huh?" but he's not talking to her and she doesn't answer.

The pear tree shimmers. An armadillo pauses in a pile of fallen leaves. A cottonmouth slides on its soft belly. A scorpion unfurls its tail link by link.

He yells, "You can come out now."

The pear tree stares him down.

"Shit," he says.

The breeze wobbles through the blossoms.

"You know who it is?" The boy pokes her on the shoulder, angry.

"What do you mean?" she says. "It's no one."

"What?" he says. His hands tremble. She feels him trapped inside her, clawing at the back of her skin. "What are you, crazy or something?"

A figure steps from behind the pear tree and into the woods, weaving in and out of branches.

"Aw fuck," the boy says, "what is it?" He spins with his hands spread wide and then backs away. The figure hovers at the edge of the meadow. The boy turns on his heel and runs in the direction of his house. He crashes through the trees.

John runs—a funny, lopsided run. A run Sarah would recognize anywhere.

The breeze chases him across the clearing and the pear tree scatters a handful of white petals onto the grass.

*

John's window is empty. Sarah's beaten him home. Maybe he's lost in the woods; he has no sense for them.

Sarah kneels beside the oil spot. She imagines the shadow, an outline. Follows a crack stitched with spindly weeds. She stares, waiting—as it will—for his mother's body to take shape on the cement.

She closes her eyes and sees John's mother, Anne, with a tomato in one hand and a knife in the other. The sun trickles into the kitchen sink. You want to help me with these? Anne nods at the tomatoes piled in a wire bowl on the counter.

The white hands of the moon trace Anne's nose, the curve of her chin. Her neck. Her breasts. Her body twisted at the waist. One arm caught beneath her; the other thrown out to catch her fall. This shadow marks her hair. This crack (step on a step on a) the length of her spine. See her eyes reflecting the clouds?

The moon strokes the swell of her hip, her legs, knees, calves, ankles, feet pressed together—the high arches, the pink toenails.

She wears a long, satin gown—as if she has just come from a party. Hear her laughing? The song escaping her lips? The dress is woven of maple leaves turned to wine velvet. Of the locus blazing orange. Sarah touches the swells and eddies of the fabric.

The wind stirs the leaves at the top of the cottonwoods. The wind stirs Anne's hair on the cement, mistaking it for morning glory.

In the distance, a man sings a sad song. His voice rides in and circles away.

Sarah speaks softly to Anne, "Can you see me?" The wind answers. A paper cup skitters from the road into the driveway, turning end over end.

*

Rose crimps the edge of the piecrust. She turns the pie plate and presses the dough with the tines of a fork, measuring it, making it perfect. She takes a jar of cherries and shakes it gently in her hands, holds it in front of her face. The cherries knock silently against each other, bobbing aimlessly in the hazy liquid. She twists the lid from the bottle, listens to it scrape against the glass and the inside of her skin and then drains the cherries into the sink. They look wilted and sad—given up, she thinks with bitter impatience—in the bottom of the colander. She dumps the cherries into the saucepan. Measures out pectin, water, sugar, a drop of red color. She turns the knob on the stovetop. The gas tick ticks, it seems to take forever, but then the flame catches and the air whooshes toward the blue fire. She turns it down, covers the hotplate with the pan and stirs the cherry mixture, one two three four. Leaves it to boil.

Rose stirs until the heat boils away the clouds and the syrup turns to liquid crystal, the dark cherries to glass beads. She spoons it into the crust, watches it settle into the hollows left by her fingers. It rises, fills the crust, kisses the bottom of the golden, crimped edge. She presses a cherry with the tip of her nail, and pushes it beneath the syrup already starting to gloss over.

*

Sarah feels John behind her. Anne's body disappears beneath her hand and she stares, for a moment, at the oil spot on the cement.

He stands with one foot in front of the other, "Don't touch her," he says.

The wind tosses storm clouds across the moon. "I wasn't."

John shifts his feet, squats next to her. His hair has grown bushy. His face pale. He stretches his hand past Sarah and moves it over the oil spot spreading black as a hole.

"Was she here?" He doesn't look at her. He sits on the cement, pulls his legs into his chest, and wraps his arms around them. He rests his forehead on his knees. "Did you see her?" he says, his voice muffled behind his arms.

Sarah feels, suddenly, an unbearable sadness. It flies up inside her, beating its wings against her ribs. "No," she says.

He nods.

The wind grapples in the trees and dies away. The singing man is closer, his song more melancholy.

John lifts his head and listens. " Harvey ," he says. "Hear him?"

The tune seems familiar, though she can't place it. "What's he singing?"

"I don't know." Harvey 's voice trails away in a gust of wind. The leaves roar. "Gonna rain, though."

"Maybe he'll go home early tonight."

"No," John takes a rock from the cement and tosses it into the grass. "He can't help it." He runs his hand across the crack (hush now) in the cement, searching for another rock. Sarah watches him, sees how his hand stops just before the margin of his mother's body.

If she could, she would take his hand in hers. Open his fingers and guide them over Anne's body. Help him to see.

*

Harvey knew a song once. The perfect song. He can't remember it, exactly.

"Is this it?" he says, but his dog is listening to the trees.

*

Sarah says, "Why were you watching me?"

"I was looking for something."

"What did you see?"

John looks away from her and Sarah knows. Her heart plummets.

"Nothing," he says.

She wraps her hands around her waist. "Don't tell anybody," she says.

He shakes his head. "I won't." He tries to smile, but then gives up and bites his lip.

"You know you scared the crap out of him," she says.

"Good," he says, "did I scare you?"

"No."

"That's good. I didn't want to scare you. I just wanted you to see me."

"I saw you."

He looks her in the face until the sadness inside her threatens to choke her and she looks away. She says, "I'm gonna go home before it starts to rain." He steals a glance at the cement. "See ya," she says.

"You gonna tell your mom?"

Sarah feels a drop of rain on her arm, but when she looks, there's nothing there.

*

The moon trickles through clouds floating belly up in the watery sky. Nightbugs whisper. A firefly flickers—another, another— plotting the dark. A frog croaks as if from the bottom of a deep well and the whisper quickens.

From the woods, Anne watches the moonlight steal the color from her son's hair. Is this what it means to be dead? she whispers. Always watching? Her voice kisses the leaves, the nettle, the pointed tips of poison ivy. She tries to hide in the trees, but the brilliant colors of her dress flicker like fire.

*

Sarah opens the door to her house, steps inside, and closes it soundlessly behind her. The smell of her mother's cooking breathes in and out—sweet, dense, wounded: cooked fruit, sugar melted to glass, pecans burnt bitter beneath the broiler.

Silently, Sarah follows the path of light cast into the hallway. In the kitchen, her mother stands before the stove, her hair caught with a tortoise shell comb at the back of her head. Her wingbones protrude through the thin silk of her shirt. Her feet shift on the tile, tapping the floor next to stacks of pans and stainless bowls loaded with batter-covered spoons and cups and kitchen tools.

She turns with a bowl balanced on her hipbone. Her lips move, sounds but not words, and then give way to humming and she sets the bowl next to the sugar tin. She stirs furiously, flips pages, fumbles through spice jars. When she squats, the hem of her skirt pools around her so that she appears legless, a monstrous torso rummaging through a green ceramic bowl—throwing spoons clattering onto the tile.

She stands, licks her fingers, and pours flour from the bag overflowing the cup and onto the counter. The bag rips, dumping a flurry of white dust to the floor.

Her mother leans against the counter. Bows her head.

Through the window, the world is black. Empty. Her mother's head swings silently, almost imperceptibly, from side to side and it occurs to Sarah that maybe everything else is gone but this place. The world outside fallen away and here they are, floating through a hole in the universe.

Sarah shifts her weight from side to side, matching the movement of her mother's head. Marking time, measuring it with the motion of her body. Trying to keep time from billowing out somewhere in the black and in the steam escaping the oven.

A different moon swings through the black sky, casting a void through the window. An absence of color. Karo syrup, spun sugar.

*

Rose hears the beginnings of a melody. Where is it coming from? She looks out into the night. The trees? The sky? Who's there? Who's there? She turns, looks into the hallway.

She looks and looks, waiting to see…

The song, yes. So familiar.

A shadow moves across the doorway.

Her hands are before her face. Her hands are stained with cherry glaze. How they twitch like wounded birds spilling blood—it seems—into the white bowl of the moon.

© 2006 Traci O. Connor