The Melting Season (10 page)

“You and your money more likely,” I said.

“A woman,” he said.

Do not do it, I thought. Do not. Do it.

“Who is not a freak of nature inside. Who is a whole woman. A whole body, a whole woman.”

“Shut up, Thomas,” I said.

“All this time I was thinking it was me, that I wasn’t man enough, and it was you. You weren’t woman enough, Moonie.”

Oh, I was feeling something now. I was feeling something fierce. This was not my fault. A hot bubble of spit in my mouth. I was cursing into the phone. I cannot even repeat it now, the cruel and vile things that came out of me. I will leave it to the imagination. Imagine hate, imagine hurt, imagine humiliation. Imagine months of being alone in your head thinking awful thoughts and then saying it all at once. I was only getting started though. I had so much more to do.

Valka had moved across the room. I was calling my husband a whore, I remember that. It did not make any sense to call him that, but it was how I felt. I wanted someone to strike him down. An evil whore. Valka stood there quietly watching me, her arms at her sides. It was like she had seen a ghost, or maybe she was just seeing me for the first time. She did not know. Nobody knew. Everything I knew was destroyed. I was a tree after a hurricane, roots up. Could she see my roots? At last could she see?

There was me making quiet noises at the end, and crying, and Thomas telling me not to bother using the credit cards, it was all over, they were shut off. I had better get back to town with that money, and fast. And when I got there, I had better be ready to sign divorce papers.

Like I am signing divorce papers, I thought.

“I don’t have much use for you anymore,” he said. “But I want to get going on this next marriage. There’s legal terms for what’s wrong with you. I got a lawyer from Omaha and he says he can make it stick.”

I could feel my insides crushing, like he had reached in there with his hand and was just squeezing me. My heart was nothing but a bunch of straw to him. I dropped the phone. Valka walked over and turned off the power. She sat and held me as I wept. I was curled as tight as I could be. I was shrinking into myself.

“Tell me,” said Valka. “Do you want to tell me? You don’t have to. But maybe I can help.”

“I need help,” I said.

“I will help you,” she said. “But you have to tell me the truth.”

I looked at her. She was the first person in a long time who did not need a thing from me. She did not need my help, she did not need my sympathy, she did not need my silence. She was pure in her intent.

So I opened my mouth and told her the truth.

I
t started, as most bad ideas did around our home, with a TV show. Thomas and I were watching it on a Sunday afternoon, back home on the couch after our usual breakfast at the diner downstairs: eggs, bacon, white toast buttered on both sides. Our friend from high school, Timber, worked the grill and always waved at me from the rear of the diner. The place was empty. Most of the town was at church. The rest of them would be sleeping off the night before. Sometimes my parents would come and join us, my dad somber and stiff, his handsome face grayed by decades of working indoors, and my mother talking a mile a minute about nothing in particular, secretly mourning the days when she found her life more interesting. I took great comfort in these breakfasts, knowing we would never be like my mother and father. Thomas and I were in love, our marriage was ripe and new, and we did not understand yet that it could be possible to hate each other.

This was when we still lived in town. Before Thomas’s father died and left him all that money and we moved back to the farm he had grown up on. Before he had his surgery. Before everything went sour. Thomas had a hand around my neck and he would tickle it when he laughed. I looked at him with love. He had a glint in his green eyes and his baby-soft hair was sticking up in the back, and he was nice and tan from working in the fields all those years. We both had our legs stretched out on the glass coffee table. Underneath, my magazines were stacked neatly by name and by month, the magazines that would tell me how to be a better woman, lover, and wife. The remote control rested between us. It all felt nice, like we were matching parts that together formed one big piece of something. What something, I do not know, but something. It was special, the two of us together. This was when I felt him most, his insides and outsides next to me.

Thomas switched channels like he was shooting off a machine gun. They sped by with hardly a second to know what was playing, but I guess he knew what he was looking for. It was not a sports show, he did not like sports. He had never been able to play any in high school. Some people are not meant for athletics. It was not the news. We had both given up on the news. There were too many wars. Once Thomas had threatened to join the army when we had started a new war. That was years before, right after we graduated from high school, a few months before we got married. “I should sign up,” he said. “Serve my country. Do my time.” I did not even want him to go down to the recruiting office. I was worried they would laugh at him when he walked in the door. It is not going to make you taller, I thought. There is nothing you can do to make you a bigger man than you already are.

I saw flashes of color while he flipped, the peach of a swatch of skin, the turquoise of a gigantic swimming pool, the almost-white of a perfect beach, the green of a stack of twenties (or maybe they were fifties), and on and on, like playing the slots at the casino, only it was in your head. There were little matching blips of sounds: music and conversation and laughter. Screams and moans and yells. The TV rolled onward, and I just sat there with my legs stretched out, and let Thomas barrel on. It went on like this for a while, I can’t say how long. Five minutes? Ten? I looked at Thomas, and he had a grim set to his face. I could tell he was clenching his teeth, and his lips were puckered together. His eyes were holed out, and his eyebrows stuck out in long sprouts near the center. Right then I began to feel separate from him, and I put my hand on his arm and quietly said his name. He did not hear me, he could not hear anything. I said his name louder, and I told him to stop.

“Huh?” he said. He sounded just like he did when I woke him up in the morning to tell him coffee was ready, just the way he liked it. Milk, with lots of sugar. He drank coffee all day long to keep him going.

“Just pick a channel and stay there,” I said.

He looked confused.

“It’s all the same anyway, right, honey?” I wanted him to know I was not picking a fight.

“Yeah, of course,” he said, and he sat up straight and pulled his arm from around me and put it in his lap. He stretched. “I don’t know where I went there for a second, Moonie.”

I wanted him to put his arm back around me but he did not. He had left me, at least for the moment. He was always leaving and then coming back to me. I scooted closer to him and put my head on his shoulder, and hoped my hair felt nice on his neck, and that the scent of it would drift up to his nose.

I turned my head to the TV. It was one of those make-over shows: extreme, incredible, outrageous. People were always getting new body parts, or moving them around from one end of their body to the other. Injections of flesh, or sometimes there was a giant sucking sound.

The show host appeared. It was Rio DeCarlo, in a bathing suit. She stretched her hands in the air and her whole body stretched with her, her suctioned stomach, her poked-out ribs, the low tide of flesh on her hips. She welcomed us to the show.

“I used to have such a boner for Rio DeCarlo,” said Thomas. “Look at her now. Ain’t nothing real on her. I like my woman all natural, thank you very much.”

That was right, he did not even like it when I wore makeup. “Stay real,” he always said to me.

“I guess she got old,” he said. He put his head on his hand and puffed his lower lip out under his upper lip.

“She is not even that old,” I said.

There was a shot of a man lying in bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, above the covers, arms above his head. He was a little older than Thomas and me, and he looked sad. He had pretty green eyes with long eyelashes, and his hair was cut short, not even an inch above his scalp, like he was ready to go off to war. “I have a lot to offer a woman,” he said. “But I’m still missing the most important thing.” He unfolded his hands and one traveled down to his boxers. He lifted up the waistband and peered down his shorts. “Yup,” he said. The screen froze him. He was captured forever looking down his shorts sadly, and then Rio’s voice came on: “Today Larry Stoneman will be having penile enlargement surgery.”

Thomas’s jaw dropped. “Moonie—” He pointed at the screen. “Moonie, watch.”

“I’m watching,” I said. I pulled away from him, just a scootch, but I hoped he noticed.

“The wonders of modern technology,” he said, and I could tell he was truly amazed. “This is it. This is what I need. This is me.”

Thomas Madison was a small man in many ways, but still I loved him. He was short, just sixty-five inches high (we said sixty-five inches because it sounded more impressive than five-foot-five), and his arms and legs dangled from his body like a puppet held up by strings.

And he was short between his legs, too. His penis was just a little nub, three inches, if that. Thomas had measured it before but I ignored him when he did it, which was usually when we were in bed together. He stalked into the bedroom, ruler in hand, shutting the door behind him noisily, and then he would jump into bed. This was after he had gone on some sort of quick-growth plan, usually some new vitamin system he picked up at the health food store in Lincoln. After thirty days, it was time to measure. All I knew was I did not want to be there when it happened, so it was: I have to go to the bathroom, I have to call my mother, Did you close the windows on the back balcony because it sure looks like rain out there. I would wait it out for a few minutes out back until I would hear something, usually a sigh of disappointment.

I remember once waiting outside another minute after that sigh, instead of rushing to my gloomy husband. I heard the back door open at the diner down below, and saw that it was Timber. Depending on the day of the week, it was either Timber or the man he switched off shifts with, an older Mexican man everyone called Papi. He and Timber got along great. They went to the movie theater across the street together on Sunday nights after the restaurant closed early. They saw the same movie over and over again, they did not care. It was their one night they could hang out.

I leaned over the balcony and said, “Evening, sir.”

“Mrs. Madison,” he said, and tipped his hand at me.

“What’s looking good today?” I said.

“Why, everything, ma’am,” he said.

And then we both laughed, even though I did not know what was so funny about it, maybe just that I was up so high, and he was down below, and we used to sit right next to each other in algebra class, not too long ago. We were playing at our grown-up lives, even though there was not much difference between now and then. We were still there, in the same town, just different locations.

Timber’s folks owned the restaurant, and one day he would take it over. He had done his time in the military and then gone to school in Iowa for a year but had been drinking too much, so he came back. Now he was taking night courses in business over in Lincoln and starting from the ground up, back in the kitchen.

I appreciated that small exchange between Timber and myself while my husband measured his tiny penis in the bedroom. I forgot for a moment what was going on in there, that the man I loved was so dissatisfied with himself. I had been numbing myself for years against his pain. It was something I was good at. I had been doing it for so long, what with my mother always squawking like a wounded bird herself. I numbed myself on everyone else’s behalf.

I had even tried to get him off the Internet, all those terrible e-mails in his spam folder talking about things he could do to make himself a bigger man. Every time he got online, he ended up in tears afterward. I said,
What do you need a computer for? You’re a farmer.
He said, “You’re right, Moonpie, the Internet rots your brain anyway.” And then I bought him an Xbox for Christmas.

I did not care about size! I told him that a million times. I loved our sex. I loved the way he kissed me, the way he would lick and bite my lips, turning a million nerve endings into molten gold. He would pinch my nipples and the flesh around my hips and press his hands on my belly. The sticky sweet would start to churn inside me and then spread down and around me. I could even smell it, and so could Thomas, and he would get excited by the smell, his little nub would press up against my leg, like a skipping stone in a pocket. He would kiss all the parts of me he had just pinched and then he would keep on kissing, on the bones that stuck out of me, on the insides of my thighs. “Oh, I can smell you, you smell so good,” he would say, and he was frenzied then, and warm. The temperature on his hands shot up and I would wonder if he would leave behind burn marks on my skin, an imprint of his fingertips on my flesh forever. I would not mind that, as long as they were his.

“Moonie, my moon,” he would say, and then he would dive into the wetness with his tongue, and it was electric. It did, it felt that way, like he had just plugged me into something. And then there were ripples of everything, every area he had pinched and licked on the outside came alive, like he had left a trail of dynamite behind my body, and with one lick, he could set it on fire. Me and Thomas, parts fitting together, moon and stars in one big sky. And by the time he was ready to slide his penis inside me, him letting out a long, satisfied sigh, the breath coming out blowing back my hair from my face, I did not care that I could not feel a thing. A slight pressure around the thighs, but that was just from the weight of him on top of me. But nothing else. I clenched, and then I was numb. And he knew it, too, that it was just numb in there. And I did not care, but he did.