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Habeas Corpus, installment 5

Posted on December 4, 2007
Filed Under Habeas corpus | 5 Comments

I wish I could regale you all with tales of my weekend in Florida but, having returned to a snow storm, my segue back to the real world was less manageable than I had planned. Throw in the snow day yesterday and I’m officially off the grid for at least another twenty four hours.
So when in doubt, here’s another bit of the novel I’m brewing. For those of you just tuning in, you can plug in to excerpts 1-4 earlier last month.

For the most part, Mom has suffered her parental void stoically. She lets slip her longing only occasionally.

I can remember a time when she dressed me for Christmas Eve in a tartan plaid dress and shiny Mary Janes. I was seven, trying my best to be comfort to a lonely woman missing family and tradition, suffering the sting of having been slighted.

“If only your Grandmother could see my pretty girl,” she’d said. “Her loss though, right Claire Bear?” And I had nodded and moved off to admire myself in her dressing table mirror. I can remember thinking that they weren’t missing anything special.

Despite her half hearted attempts to talk me out of the same mistake she had made at my age, I went to Grafton with my Mom’s reluctant blessing. I guess she had spent too much time pondering the concept of forgiveness and the dangers of enduring grudges to allow history to repeat itself.

And, at first there were nuances about Grafton I found romantic – its running streams and dirt roads and old village center where townspeople meet for coffee at The Peavine Diner each noon after the livestock have been watered and fed and turned out to pasture. There is something undeniably story book quaint, something Hans Christian Anderson, so Little House in the Big Woods, about the place.

Having made such literary comparisons, I was briefly content with the simple and rural rhythms of hamlet living.
But Chad was gone from Grafton for weeks at a time, guiding school age boys through the motions of self discovery and forced communion with nature. While Chad was gone, I spent my days working at The Peavine with the wide pine floors and wooden screened door that closed slowly enough to allow house flies to congregate on counter tops and on the edge of coffee cups. After a few months of sameness serving berry pancakes and rescuing donuts from the fryer, I began walking out most afternoons with a slightly unkempt man, a man of appetites and strong smells and big ideas.

My afternoon trysts were big entertainment for the people of Grafton, one thousand practical and the weathered citizens who care little for things considered needless luxury, things like diplomas, cable television, cell phones, matching china and adulterous sex.

In Chad’s absence, I got myself a mean dog named Goliath and made attempts to be domestically responsible, trying to make capital improvements to the double-wide Chad and I had rented high on the North Hollow Road where the wind blows steady enough to knock a grown man over. I even called the landlord about fixing the trailer’s rusted-out siding. It didn’t occur to me that the neighbors littered in their own yards and put tires on their roofs in order to prevent its blowing off in powerful weather. Who was I kidding? What’s a little rusted metal in a setting like that?

Goliath and James were my collective answer to loneliness and both started off nice and got a little meaner as time went on. The Rutland shelter advertised Goliath as a fine house pet despite his size. I secured a chain to the ancient Silver Maple just West of the front door – the last tree in Grafton to lose its leaves in autumn. (When the whole valley finishes flushing out in all manner of brilliance, that maple will be holding on to every leaf, curled and brittle, waiting for the last shudder of November before coming down in great drifts. All at once, like sudden rain, they will fall.)

And with James, after the first few times, it became easy; such a separate diversion, this sleeping with a man fifteen years my senior, earnest and handsome and married.

It began as certain proximity, his hanging about at the lunch counter, ordering slices of Maple Sugar pie, pretending to read while his blue, blue eyes watched me wipe down the counters and shoo flies from the syrup containers. He followed me out one late afternoon, after I’d hung my apron on the peg behind the door.

I suppose I was an easy target, transparent with loneliness, agreeable to a long walk up through the meadow and into the woods. We picked our way up the crude trails that climb Mount Bethel, hoofing it almost to the top of the peak. We stopped to rest on an outcrop bordered by a tangle of poison ivy and delicate throated wild flowers. James leaned into me and untangled a twig caught in my dark curls.

“Let me guess. You’ve got a guy. Someone worth your wasting time up here at the top of the world.” he whispered, pressing his lips to the top of my ear.

“Something like that,” I mumbled, aware of his breath on my neck, liking the brush of his hair on my cheek.

“What about you? Not too many Proust readers come into the The Peavine and spend all afternoon over a cup of coffee,” I said.

“I’m married,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with my being in Grafton. And it doesn’t have anything to do with you and I, or Proust, or my needing a cup of coffee every now and then.”

“You and I? Is there a You and I?” I said, something coquettish and wanting having taken over for caution and propriety.

“Let’s see about that.” He touched the side of my face, which felt a minor triumph, his saying he found me adequately attractive.
His mouth covered mine, completely, confidently, as if he did this often, seduce young women on mountain tops in summer.

He spread his jacket on the smooth surface of the outcropping, making space for our groping. And after a few short minutes of rubbing up against one another, he came all over the inside of my thigh. The salt semen dripped down and stained the inside of his hunt jacket, light splotches of our sex leaving indelible markings on the green lining.

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