“No,” I said. I could hear my voice saying it. It was a charming voice—I was charmed by it. I could hear myself saying it in the space between the trees. My voice there between those leaves that fretted and shivered.
Then Peter was unzipping my pants and tugging them over my narrow hips. When he got them to my ankles, he realized he had to take my shoes off as well, so he wrenched them off without untying the laces. It was a very awkward process, and I felt sorry for him—and I kept laughing inwardly at the girl whose body was being turned this way and that.
He must have gotten my underpants off, too, because I could feel the reedy grass tickling my bare bottom.
So there it was. The whole thing. The low ceiling of the sky above, the ticklish sumac beneath, and me sandwiched between the two, my bare lower half looking like a ridiculously pale chicken leg, I suppose, one sock tugged partly off my foot like a floppy dog ear.
Peter unbuckled his own pants and took them off. His underpants were plaid. He stood over me.
“Are you going to do it?” I asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“No.”
“It’s happening anyway.”
“Okay.”
He moved my legs apart and kneeled down between them. At first he just examined me with his eyes. Then he fell on me and started moving against my body. His muscles were rigid, his weight on me like a load of lumber pressing me to the ground. They were lurching movements, spasms of anguished effort. He did not kiss me at all. Before there had been lots of kisses and not much else. This was the reverse of that. So maybe kisses were the opposite of sex. Maybe they were the birth of the death of sex.
I thought, It is happening. This is happening, thinking, All our days add up to one day, and then they become something else. The point on the number line where negative becomes positive. The future the mirror image of your past—everything contingent on this moment here, the great, holy zero. My zero to his one. My nothing to his something.
It was happening. I was waiting for it to happen. I could feel his movements, rough, even angry, against the skin of my thighs. There was a certain pleasure in not having to do anything—in having everything done for you while you just waited. He struggled away, and I waited and felt the warm, stinging chafe of his efforts.
I waited. I knew to expect the pressure of him between my legs, but there was no pressure. Then everything stopped.
For a moment there was an expression on his face of physical industry—vulgar, beautiful things flitting through a heated boy-mind. But then his eyes met mine, and that strange violent desire drained out of his gaze. Instead of falling on top of me, he stood back up.
“Never mind,” he said.
I sat up, suddenly embarrassed by my nakedness.
“What happened?” I said. The sky now seemed very far away, measureless compared to how small I felt.
“Nothing happened,” he said. “Never mind. You said no.”
He was shifting nervously.
“You couldn’t do it,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation. It was something I was realizing aloud.
“I could have,” he said. “I didn’t. You said no.”
I reached for my pants, which were all balled up in the weeds. I put them on, and neither of us said anything.
We drove in silence back to where my bike was stashed. He stopped and waited for me to get out. But I didn’t get out.
“You couldn’t do it,” I said. I didn’t want to cry in front of him again, but I could hear the tremor in my voice. “You couldn’t even if you tried. I’m a nun.”
“You’re not a nun.”
“Yes, I am. I’m a nun, and nobody wants a nun. Nobody dreams about nuns.”
“You’re not,” he said, but his voice was tired, unconvincing. He just wanted to be away from me.
It was too late. In the woods, for a moment, he had been an animal, he had functioned by beast logic. Now, again, he was just a boy. Was it just that he wasn’t able to be the bad man, no matter how hard he tried? Or was I the one responsible for his transformation? Was I the antidote for breaching?
Did I ensnare what the breaching set free?
*
When I take my son to preschool, Miss Lily, his teacher, takes me aside and tells me that he has been having discipline issues and that the day before it was necessary to separate him from the other children for a while.
As she speaks, I watch my boy run forward to greet his friends. He seems happy enough. Though I know that signifies nothing. I know how love and hate grow from the same seed.
“I mean,” Miss Lily goes on, “I’m sure it’s not something to worry about. Usually it’s only a form of expression. We just need to work on redirecting it. But, again, I don’t see it as a reason for real concern, Mrs. Borden.”
She knows me as Ann Borden. I used to be Lumen Ann Fowler. Then I left the town where I grew up and I became Ann Fowler to signify that I was a different person. Then I married Jack Borden and became Ann Borden. A life of vestiges.
“Mrs. Borden?” she says again.
“Oh, yes, thank you.”
When I leave, I drive across town to the high school where my husband works. I am a good driver. I obey all the traffic signs. I am always respectful to pedestrians, with their breakable bodies.
I do not use the school parking lot when I arrive. Instead I park around the corner and walk to the side of the main building, where Jack’s office has a window that looks out on a large grassy expanse with trees and benches and fiberglass picnic tables. I sit at one of the benches, where I can see into his window. His back is facing me, and I can see that he is hunched over his desk, scribbling away industriously. The hair on the back of his neck is closely cropped. Sometimes he has me do touch-ups with a pair of clippers after he comes home from the barbershop. The skin of his neck is burned slightly from standing in the hot weekend sun, watering the front lawn.