Fat Man and Little Boy (20 page)

HIDE AND SEEK

Summer.

Claire rides her new bicycle behind Matthew's old one. He pumps his legs fast, pushing ahead, making her race. Her calves burn, thighs groan, lungs threaten collapse. Does he think girls only like the boys who race them? Boys who can kick up great spurts of mud with their wheels? The feeling of knowing they have a long way to go before they can ride the way you do? The stupid, careless teeter of your careening vehicle's rear end?

She does like it.

He's led her to his home, and now they weave between the cabins, around a tree like a willow, past bemused wives and relaxing husbands, some with lemonades in hand, some eating pastries, bananas, or wedges of orange. They are careful to avoid spraying dirt on the guests, but not too careful. The women love to see children at play. The men love to see their women love to see children at play.

A gust of wind, and Claire clutches her hat, pushing it down with the butt of her fist. The brim obscures the world. When she pushes it back into place, Matthew has swerved out of sight. She slows, braking almost too hard, and searches. He's on her left, at the entrance to a cabin like any other, jumping down from his bicycle's seat in an almost-graceful dismount designed to obscure the difference between the length of his legs and the height of his wheels. The dirt smears his bare ankles—his cuffs pulled up, it seems, for just such an occasion.

He motions her to follow. Her bike stalled, all momentum lost, she climbs off and walks it to the cabin. Matthew takes a brass key from his pocket and opens the door. To her surprise, he wheels the bike in with him, mud and all, tracking smears onto the floor.

She hesitates at the threshold. He comes back to the door and motions her in. “Come on,” he says, in English, ducking back inside. She follows him. She dirties the floor with her bike as well and leans it against the wall beside his.

What a strange place. All the furniture has been pushed up against the walls, creating as much empty floor as possible. The chairs are upside-down on the table the way the staff puts them in restaurants come closing time. The empty floor is, apart from layered, aging bike tracks, scrupulously clean—but less clean than blank, really, because “clean” implies a sort of arrangement, and here there is nothing arranged, there is nothing to
be
arranged.

There is one pillow on the bed, center-mattress. There is one blanket. There is a sack of coal against the wall beside the furnace, only a little used. The furnace is neat, and the floor around it not smudged at all with black, as with other furnaces. There are no hangings on the walls, and the windows are covered with cloth shades, sky blue, to let in a little light. It is very dim.

Matthew sits cross-legged in the middle of the cabin, hands at rest on his knees, breathing deeply. He opens one eye to check on Claire, closes it when he sees she's fine, she's calm too, she's still there.

“It's so quiet here,” says Claire. “Peter would hate it.”

She traces the sky-blue fabric's edges, picks off a fuzzball. She holds it in her fist, loathe to drop it on the pristine floor. “They let you have your own place?”

“No,” he answers, in his slow, cotton-mouthed French, “but we don't have enough guests to fill up. There are a few secret cabins like this one.”

“You speak well when you want to,” says Claire. “You should do it more often.”

“I don't like to,” says Matthew, in English.

“Why not?” says Claire. She sits down with him, facing, their knees touching through her skirt, his pants. “Is it hard for you? I could help. I'm good at talking.”

“This is a quiet place,” says Matthew. “I like to be quiet.”

“It's not a quiet place outside.” Claire leans back, her hand flat on the floor.

“I am a quiet place.”

Claire shrugs it off. If he's got to be quiet then she can love the quiet. She can be a quiet place too. She closes her eyes and imagines a meadow, seeds and spores afloat above the whorls of tall grass, the grass in shades of green, gray, brown, yellow, green. Framed by lovely trees, thin enough that you can see the way their shadows drape each other and make a network on the ground—branches interlocking branches like one thousand elbows, wavering as waver the strands of light that lick the bottom of a water dish laid out in the sun.

“Peter would hate this,” she says. “This quiet. He couldn't stand it. He would have to challenge you, or sing a song, or draw on the walls, mess up the place. My mother says he won't be satisfied until he makes everything look the way he looks, which, according to my mother, is the way that he feels.”

Matthew takes in a long breath. He lets it out on its own schedule. It makes her budding bosoms itch to see the flatness of his boy-bosom. She can spend what seems like an hour pinching and kneading her nipples if there's no one in the house. In the quiet her body is loud.

Matthew says, “What?”

“I was just saying how Peter doesn't like some things that we like. You don't like some of the things me and Peter like, too, but I was thinking how what he doesn't like, that you and I do like, is quiet, and being quiet together.”

Matthew unfolds his legs and stands up. “This is no good.” English again. “You're not quiet.”

“I'm sorry,” says Claire. “I'll do better.”

“We'll go out and play,” says Matthew, in French. “We'll play until you're tired and out of breath. Then we'll come back and try it again.”

“I'm sorry. You know how I get.” She doesn't know what this means, but Matthew nods, so apparently he does know how she gets; apparently, she gets some way.

He leads her back into the day. The sun is falling in increments, but the hotel people are still about, some of them playing horseshoes, lawn darts, and badminton, while others sleep or lounge. Gay colors, light dresses, low necklines, suit pants without jackets, slacks, comfortable shoes, slippers worn out-of-doors.

“Why are there so many now?” says Claire.

“Babies,” says Matthew, in his clumsy French. “A young couple lives here. She got a baby even though they didn't think she could.” He motions at the rest of them. “Their friends, and the friends' friends. They want to get babies too. But it takes a little while.”

One of the wives sits in a cane chair, rubbing her small tummy through a baggy maternity dress, while her husband pours her a glass of slightly brown-tinged water from a bottle.

“How does it happen?” asks Claire.

The woman drinks the water, screwing up her eyes as she glugs. She shivers once in her neck and shoulders as the last drop disappears.

Matthew shrugs. “No one's sure. The water,” pointing to the wife in the maternity dress. “The air. The mud. The food. The ghosts. Could be anything.”

“Ghosts?”

“Dead Jews,” says Matthew. “Come on. I want to do something.”

“Something in particular?”

He shakes his head, waving his hands, offended by her misunderstanding or his own communication. “No, no. Just something.”

“Maybe I could meet your uncle,” says Claire. “I never got to yet.”

Matthew takes tentative steps in what Claire immediately knows to be the opposite direction of where he might find his uncle. “I never met your mother.”

Claire's mother is busy. She puts on the face that she wears when she says that her mother is busy. “My mother is busy,” she says, and that's that.

“My uncle is busy.”

“Busy with what?”

Matthew shrugs. He begins to walk again, snapping his fingers as if she is a pet that follows.

“Are you ashamed of me?” says Claire.

“What?” says Matthew. “Why should I be? Come on. Meet my uncle. You won't like him.”

 

He takes her to the kitchen cabin. Claire feels the thirsty eyes of husbands and wives on their bodies like so many tongues. They aren't babies, but can pass given sufficient need. If they stopped someone would offer her a candy. They pass a young couple—newlyweds, perhaps—walking side by side under a similar collec­tive gaze, arm in arm, their other hands cupping the young wife's swollen belly as if it is a tenuous thing and not the hard bubble, the bulgy sun, at the center of her body, at the center of their lives.

“She could burst any day now,” whispers Claire to Matthew, though loud enough for the couple to hear—she has grasped their promenade and its purpose, the way it thrills them to hear the coming mother spoken of as if she was not there.

When they enter the kitchen, they find a monstrously fat man and a pretty-if-strange woman. Claire deduces that she is American because of her ankles; Americans' ankles are always red knobs sheathed in watery, bluish skin. Together they work a large collection of pots, some steaming, some rattling on the several stoves, some outright bubbling over. Some finished and waiting. The fat man—Matthew's uncle, apparently—and the woman—the widow, Claire guesses—work with few words, if not smoothly then at least directly, grunting cooking times at each other and reaching out with sauce-sodden spoons for a wipe clean from the other, using a towel held out backward, neither watching the operation, only trusting it to happen. They drip with sweat. It's sort of cute.

Matthew waits to be noticed.

“Hello,” says Claire, offering a curtsy. “Are you Matthew's uncle? He doesn't seem to want to tell me for himself.”

The fat man and the pretty-if-strange widow turn to her. Their aprons are identically stained, carbon streaks and old butter, crusted flour, tomato, and several grease burns.

“Hello,” says the fat one. “My name is John. I am indeed his uncle. And who is the little lady?”

What lovely French, thinks Claire. “Claire Lambert.” Another curtsy. “Matthew's friend.”

“You're quite pretty, aren't you?” says the widow. “I'm Rosie.”

“I wouldn't know,” says Claire, covering her mouth and looking at the floor.

“Is she your little girlfriend?” says John.

Matthew twists up his face in anger, but does not answer. Claire only smiles, charming as she can.

“How cute,” says Rosie. “How sweet.” She turns to move something overheating from the range, placing it on one of several counters, where it bubbles, calming.

“Be careful,” says John. “You know how it is here.”

Matthew fumes.

“Are you taking her to your
secret
cabin? Have you shown it to her yet?” says John, grinning sidelong at Rosie, who suppresses her laughter.

“You don't know anything about it,” shouts Matthew.

Everyone stares at everyone else for what seems like, but can't be, a long time. Matthew leaves, slamming the kitchen cabin's door behind him. Rosie guffaws, a throaty bark strange from her small-if-sturdy frame.

Claire hesitates to follow Matthew, looking to his uncle and the woman for help. She's blushing, too, and yes, a little furious, at what they knew, and how they said it now, in front of her, and all that it implies, as if they know—as if they know anything.

“Go on,” says Rosie. “Follow him out. Give chase!”

 

He runs away from her for a long time. He hides at the corners of cabins, behind outhouses, leading her from the hotel's center and into its periphery, where there are fewer guests, some darting wild animals—small mice, black birds, crickets, chipmunks—unchecked weeds, unstable bushes with many yellow blossoms, clover, dandelions, a fuzzy purple plant with a poison-looking sheen, and already withering too-tall blades of grass budding with seeds at their brown, pointed crowns.

Matthew darts through a gap: a dark, small shape against the low sun. He runs behind another cabin. When she chases him around the corner, he's gone. She imagines him running with a full, jangling key ring, unlocking the doors of these outlying cabins, secreting himself in their shadows until she passes by a window, going the wrong way, and he runs out in the other direction, circling at some distance, so as to flit through her vision and be gone.

Just as her lungs are starting to really burn and she's lost herself completely in the identical rows of identical cabins, she hears Matthew yelp a short distance away. Rounding a final corner, she finds him, face-down, sprawled in the grass, and immediately decides he's only pretending. As she approaches, giving her heart a chance to settle and fortify, she prepares for his inevitable launch headlong down the alley, past the middle-aged couple playing cards on a table they brought for that purpose, and perhaps into the hotel's center to start it all again. He'll do it when she's four steps away. She walks softly. He'll do it when she's two steps away. He does not. She kneels and rolls him over; an easy thing, he is so light. His eyes come open. His chest rises and falls as hers rises and falls. They look at each other.

“I fell.”

“Mhm,” says Claire.

“You're breathless,” says Matthew.

“You know the word breathless.”

“Let's find a new cabin.”

Perhaps emboldened by the chase, perhaps knowing how it would sting her lungs to find the air to object, he leads her by the hand. His hands are smaller than hers. She is taller than he. Once inside the cabin, Matthew pushes the table against the wall and stacks the chairs on its top as in the previous secret cabin, which still has their bikes. Claire pushes the sofa against the opposite wall, moving one end and then the other in several seesaw motions.

When they're done they sit in the center of the room, legs folded, and wait for their air to come back, really breathing for the first time in what might be an hour. Claire coughs harshly. Matthew closes his eyes and raises his arms almost parallel to his shoulders, feeling the air.

Feeling the quiet.

A long while later they can speak again.

“See how good it feels?” he asks her.

Claire's been tormented by every second of silence. She hated it. Couldn't he tell? Some of us may not have a lot to say but some of us have ideas. He kisses her. She laughs. He takes it all wrong. She shakes her head no and kisses him. It's fine. They touch each other. She rubs him through his shirt. He touches what there is of her breasts. He's terrifically hungry in his kissing, in his feeling. After every kiss she has the urge to ask him is this what he's wanted—is this why he's pushed her? His breath tastes like fried egg white. He's got gas inside him, waiting to push out, she can tell. Little belches between kisses, facing away. She doesn't mind so much. It can be that way for her too, though today she's almost calm, perhaps because she knows he'll do everything she wants and nothing she doesn't. He runs his hands over her sides. She feels her ribs resist his fingers. She reaches between his legs. Squeezes, her fingers beneath, cupping, her thumb above, pressing.