The Hole

I am lying on the gray couch in our living room.I have permission to watch television, but am really watching my own reflection in the T.V. screen.Saturday morning cartoons shift in silhouettes behind the image of my leg thrown up against the back of the couch.Behind me, there is a greenhouse attached to the living room.Through this small, glass room a panorama of the pond can be seen, framed by a veil of trees.In the foreground is a stone birdbath, and a strip of lawn that slopes sharply toward the water, becoming a brown snarl of prickers, leaves, and fallen branches.Sunlight floods through the greenhouse.It crashes against the back of the couch, spraying the television with radiance, as well as the old Singer sewing machine that it sits on, and a few hearty plants, illuminating each with a faint halo of dust and swirling motes.

My mother hates this couch.She calls it ugly, but I have no system for gauging the beauty of furniture; there is only comfort.The gray couch is comfortable, a manatee of a couch.Sinking into its lap, I am craving something.I can’t figure out what.There is an open box of Honey-Nut Cheerios on the floor beside me, which is as sweet as it gets in our kitchen.So it isn’t sweetness.If I wanted to, I could draw the curtains on the greenhouse and watch cartoons properly, but it’s been a few hours already and I’ve lost interest.Normally, it’s PBS or nothing, and never more than an hour at a time, so I have a low tolerance, and quickly become cranky and exhausted.I have read everything of interest on both my bookshelves and my parents’, so it can’t be that either.

It feels like a hole.I can picture it—my craving—a smudgy, black spot behind my solar plexus.Its gravity tugs on the rest of my body; I can feel the pressure in my arms, my legs, my neck.I silently travel up and down the list of things that might fit: food, fantasies, forbidden things, approval, secrets, the attention of a certain classmate.Sometimes I try to fill it with these, but they are never enough.Still I hoard them, attempt to stockpile the brief satisfaction they afford.

My mother has moved to a shingled house across town, near a harbor.The refrigerator there is divided into four sections, with a name taped on the shelf of each.Nancy, hers says, and on the shelf above it is the same box of soy milk, the same yogurt and juice that I have always known.She will stay there until my father ships out, and leave again when he returns.I call her in secret (to protect him).Her voice helps some, but to hear the small sadness in it is painful.My homesickness has always been for her.

The ship changes my father, the way a uniform does a man.As captain, he has power and purpose; there is a right way to do everything.At sea, he navigates the only solid thing for miles, and the beds are nailed to the floor.He speaks a different language there, has names for things that do not exist in our world.There, the stars map the infinity he floats in; they know where he is, where he is going, and they are never wrong.At home, he wakes up screaming from dreams.In the first weeks back, he is part stranger.Over time, something slips away from him; his outline softens, his gaze drifts.

With a metal rake, my dad clears a path in the pond muck that leads up to our beach.He spends hours down there, raking.I watch the bow of his shoulders through the greenhouse, his flannel shirt bobbing in and out of view as he works.For long pauses he stares out across the pond, motionless. I come home from school to find him with sweat stains yawning underneath his arms as he turns the compost pile with a pitchfork, or wrestles with brambles in the woods.Nights, he takes my brother and me out for pizza.We sit in the same booth we always did with my mom, and order the same whole wheat pizza she insisted on.My brother and I beg quarters for the pinball machine, and I sometimes use them to get neon-colored, or chocolate flavored condoms from the machine in the ladies’ room.Novelty Items Only they read in tiny print on the side of their individual boxes.I never open, but hide them in the secret drawer of my jewelry box.My dad sits in the booth and stares at nothing.He barely speaks, and stops listening before we’ve finished talking.He takes long trips to the restroom, where I suspect he cries.

My friend Ariel lives a quarter-mile down the road, on the same pond.Her father stays in his room all day, and we steal his unfiltered Camel butts out of the ashtray to go smoke on the grassy hill behind her house.Tall and blond, she has broad shoulders, like me, round features, and the giant blue eyes of a doll.She craves too.We pass the wrinkled nubs between us, and cough toward the pond below us, a rippling mirror of the sky framed by upside-down pine trees.Falling onto our backs, we close our eyes and laugh, the world spinning around us like a carousel.

On Saturdays she comes to find me sinking into the grey couch, and we ride our bikes east, past the crimson paddies of cranberry bogs, pebbles peppering the backs of our calves.The ache in my thighs feels good, and the wind that beats against my bare limbs as we fly downhill.At eleven, I already have breasts: two sore mounds of flesh that I alternately wrap with an Ace Bandage under sweatshirts, and leave naked, peeking out of my wide-armed undershirts.At the comic book store on the east side, we buy candy for handfuls of change, powders and jellies that stain our mouths shades of color not found in New England of any season.At nightfall, we slink home sick and heavy, passing only a silent wave between us as we part at the top of her street.

One Saturday, Ariel’s bike gets a flat on Route 151.With a surge of gleeful recklessness, we drop our bikes over the embankment and decide to hitchhike. We have both read enough books to know how this is done.In cut-off jeans and t-shirts worn opaque, we jut our thumbs out over our hips and bat our eyes at passing cars. We are alternately pleading with, and daring them to pick us up.Pickups whoosh by with a great suction of air, whipping our hair against our cheeks, and spraying our ankles with sand.We squeeze our eyes shut in the swirl of their wake, and the highway disappears; there is only the roaring vacuum of engines and wind, and the salt smell of nearby ocean.

The first car that stops is a tan station wagon.On a dusty tributary that feeds onto the highway, it eases to a stop in front of us.From over its fake wooden paneling smiles a man in a red lumberjack’s shirt.He is hunched slightly in the driver’s seat, and has the calloused cheeks of a boatman.He has slid, in his soiled fish of a car, right out from some local stereotype.The type of man who drinks on the harbor at night and never marries.Ariel looks back at me and rolls her eyes.Her face laughs, but I can barely hear my own giggle over the wind.His eyes—pinched at the corners—are both sad and impenetrable, as if he has sunk so far behind them there is only a cloudy blue residue left on the surface.He has thick forearms, and a crumpled mouthful of teeth, yellow as the dice in an old board game.As powerful as we are, we don’t hesitate.

The second station wagon stops just behind his.This one is blue, with the bulbous edges of an inflatable beach toy, like all the new models.Ariel is making her way around the first car, when the driver of the second car rolls down her window.

“Do you girls know that man?”

I am struck dumb momentarily, caught off guard by the address of a stranger.

“Do you girls know that man?”The woman driver wears glasses, and a crease in her brow that is pure determination.

Ariel pulls the handle of the passenger door and the man reaches over to unlock it.

The woman looks at me, her face tensed.I think of the muskrat who lives in the pond behind my home.My own mother has called me to the window to see it through the greenhouse, poised just so on a fallen branch, or the edge of our beached raft.Its furred brown back curved like a bean, it stares out across the water.From the window I can’t see its eyes, but its still form radiates awareness like a pulse through the air, across the mucky carpet of dead leaves, and through the lichen marbled tree trunks; he knows we are watching him, and he is watching us.

I intend to lie, the yes already formed in my throat, but the thought of that muskrat peels the lie away from me, sloughs the bravado of sex from my body.At the sight of that woman’s pointed face, her bristling determination, I am suddenly afraid.

“No.”I say.

“Get in.”She says, and Ariel follows me passed the crusted mudflaps and hot exhaust of the man’s car.He pulls away before we have even opened the doors of the blue station wagon.

The ride is quiet. Bored by my choice, Ariel scratches at the armrest on her rear door, and squints out the window.Shame nibbles at me, but I give in to the relief that billows through me instead, the warmth of sunlight against my limbs through the window.When Ariel gets out a few streets before her own, I pause, and then wave, accepting the ride home.

A few years later, a muskrat drowns in the well of my basement window.My mother has moved back in with us permanently, and my father rents a house by the beach in town.He is at sea for my birthday, and she throws me a surprise party.Ariel’s job is to distract me until everyone arrives, and then deliver me home.

We lie on her grassy hill and share a cigarette, both ravaged by an adolescence spent craving.After years of throwing our burning bodies into anything that resembled water, we have quieted some.It is enough for our mothers to plan birthday parties again.

It is September, and autumn is late.We are still in cut-off shorts and filmy cotton, our backs curved to the ground, bodies soft with warm afternoon and wear.There was a violent rain this morning, and I can feel the damp of the soil with the backs of my legs.The sun hangs low, balancing on the treetops across the pond.It could be a perfect hole torn out of the sky, a glimpse of the fiery infinity behind everything we know.

“I want to tell you something.”Ariel says.

“Okay.”

“Remember when I told you how I was scared?”

“About a baby?”

“Yeah.”She sucks on the cigarette and exhales straight up.The cloud writhes slowly over our faces for a moment before it is swept away.I smell a cool streak of fall in the breeze, and swoon quickly with the memories of every birthday, every autumn before this one.“Well, I was right.”

“You were?”

“Yeah.

It has been some months since she called me, after a long time of not speaking, and wept about her missed period.I haven’t spoken to her since, and it has been too long to ask what she decided.That question and its answer already exist, like the smoke between our faces.I nod at the sky and reach my fingers over her belly for the cigarette.

Back at my house, I am happily surprised.We eat cake with fresh strawberries and real whipped cream, our laughter soft with relief.We are all glad I have survived this long, that my odds seem to have improved.At nightfall, when it cools, I head to my room for a sweater.My brother, passing me in the hall, asks if the muskrat is gone.

“What?”

“Oh, no!”My mother cries, hearing from the kitchen.She joins us, wiping her hands on her apron.

“What muskrat?”I ask her.

After much haranguing, my mother has had a room built for me in our basement.Fully insulated, with its own thermostat, wall-length closet, and blue carpet, it was perfect, though dark as a cave.So my mother had the narrow cellar window removed.A deeper well was dug, the hole in the wall widened, and a real window installed, that I could prop open from the inside.

It was through this window that my mother saw the drowned muskrat.I imagine it floating when she saw it, its form suspended behind the glass as if in soft-lidded sleep, cradled by the warm rainwater.I hope it had not sunk to the bottom yet, its body a limp clump on the dirt floor.To hide it from me, she went outside and fished it out.She bailed the window well with her gardening bucket and buried the dead animal in the yard, near our dog’s grave.

I know that muskrats can swim; I have seen the line they cut across the water, the ripples spreading behind the steady prow of brown head.I cannot fathom what business it had up here by the house, so far from its own burrow.I can barely believe that this animal—with an instinct whose confidence owns everything it touches—was defeated by our home.As I walk out the sliding door of the greenhouse and across the spongy lawn, I appraise the house.Hulking, pitted with treacherous holes, its familiar mass breaks my heart with hate.Crouching down outside my own window, knees wet against the ground, I examine the well.Meant as a basin for sunlight, not water, it is barely more than two feet deep.The inside of the well is lined with aluminum that is ridged but smooth: little waves in the metal.It would have been difficult to get a purchase on when wet, even with sharp claws.I try hard not to picture this.A heaviness descends on me, as if the limp coil of the muskrat’s body is weighing on that spot below my chest.

In the year that follows, Ariel moves farther down the road to live with her mother.They scream at one another, and Ariel tattoos her own arm with a sewing needle before moving off of our peninsula for good.I stay in that white room with the blue rug for a few more seasons, smoking out of that window and kicking away the fat crickets that chirrup outside my door.Then I leave too.