My husband closes the door of his office and turns to look out the window while he eats the lunch I packed for him in the morning. He rotates his head in a small circle, meditatively, as though working out some stiffness in his neck. When he takes a bite of his sandwich, he leans forward, then leans back again to chew it, his eyes squinting at the sunlight coming through the window. With his empty left hand, he taps his fingertips together in sequence—which makes it look as though he’s counting something, but I don’t think he is. Sometimes, between bites, it’s almost as though he has forgotten entirely what he’s doing. He just sits, his eyes gone far out over the land, his whole body very, very still, until he remembers to take another bite.
I lean back behind the trunk of my tree so that he cannot see me. There’s a sandwich of my own tucked in my purse, and I take it out and eat it along with my husband, taking in the same view he sees. I imagine what it must be like to have an office, a desk, a computer to keep track of your appointments, and people visiting you all day, asking you questions and getting you to put your signature on documents.
A man who works for the school walks by with a rake. He waves at me. I smile at him but make no gesture. It is what a ladybug would do, I imagine, smiling indifferently at the world and continuing on her way.
I peek around the tree trunk, and when it is safe, I continue watching Jack. There’s one young woman who visits him frequently—she looks like a teacher. During dinner, he usually recounts his day to me in some detail, but he has never told me about her. She wears her hair in a ponytail and speaks in a very animated fashion and does a funny thing where she sits on his desk while she talks. I wonder if they have had sex, locked in his office after hours or suddenly, fervently, in her car in the deserted parking lot under the buzzing lamplight. She is very pretty, and she laughs easily.
Later, when I go to pick my son up at school, the children are all running to and fro on the playground. My son is being chased—or he is chasing, it’s impossible to tell—and as I watch, he trips and falls and begins to cry. He sits up and raises his scraped palms to the air. I can see that they are streaked sooty black and pocked with gravel, and they are bleeding a little. Hands are things that never stay undamaged for very long. They go everywhere, and they feel the suffering of all the tactile world. That’s why people use fingerprints to identify you—the scarred record of everything you have touched.
My boy cries, as children do when they are in pain.
His teacher, Miss Lily, is suddenly beside me.
“Mrs. Borden,” she says.
“Yes?”
“Marcus,” she says, pointing. “Your son.”
“Oh, yes,” I say and go to fetch Marcus and tend to his bloody hands. We wash them in cool water, and I tell him about mountain streams and all the animals that cool their paws in them.
He asks me have I ever been to a mountain stream, and I tell him I have.
He asks me have I ever had my hands scraped like his. I tell him I have, indeed, had that—and much, much worse.
*
We all prepare faces to go outside. The world at large does not see us for who we really are, does not see the version of ourselves that’s exposed maybe only in front of mirrors in our tiny bedrooms. So we look out our windows, and we dress ourselves for the day, and we put on our masks, and we become the performance of an hour or two—before we can find a place to be alone and breathe again, just for a moment.
Somewhere along the line, we are taught to restrict ourselves for the benefit of the outside world and to be only truly free behind closed doors. Somehow the outside and the inside reverse themselves.
But what if it didn’t have to be this way? What if upon stepping outside we shed everything that was not ourselves? We might feel our skin pressed up against all other skins. Discover how meager are the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of others, the pulpy flesh of trees, the gritty flesh of soil, the tarry flesh of tarmac cooling after collecting a day’s worth of sunlight. What if we clambered roughshod over the surface of the earth? Wouldn’t the world be our true home?
*
I became, after that first moon, a creature drawn to dark, enclosed spaces. The maps I drew were now heavy with ink, cut through with narrow paths of white. After school, I would sometimes sit in the very back row of the darkened auditorium, watching Mr. Hunter and the drama club rehearse for the school play. I didn’t know what the play was—something about union workers in the oil fields.
Mr. Hunter paced back and forth below the stage, trying to explain the significance of the oil. He spoke of the blood of the land—faces gone black with crude, raised to the grimy rain of the stuff. He urged them to think about their own connection to the land, those reveled-in, mucky parts of themselves.
He always seemed to know I was there. He would come to the back and sit next to me, and we would watch the actors declaiming.
“They don’t get it, do they?” he said to me. “How can they not get it?”
“They might be a lot of different things,” I said, “but they can only be one thing at a time.”
He gazed at me with eyes that were accustomed to the dark, and I looked away, embarrassed.
I found myself returning to the quarry—the place where, two years before, Hondy Pilt was chased from the mouth of the mine by a possum. I liked the definition of the place, the artful ridges, the geometrical clefts, the shaved planes of earth—like God’s precise fingerprint. I bundled myself up against the cold and lay flat on the frozen earth at its very lowest point.
Once I heard the approach of others and fled to the mouth of the mine, where I watched in darkness a boy and a girl kissing each other on the berm, creating little landslides of pebbled stone. It was an hour before they were through. To keep myself occupied, I felt my way deeper into the mine, one hand flat against the wall, one directly in front of me so I wouldn’t run into anything in the pitch black, my feet moving an inch at a time so I wouldn’t tumble into an unseen shaft.
I liked it in there. The closeness. The dark. The feeling of being inside out.