The next afternoon my brother and I carried the dollhouse on a cart to my father’s lab.
“What do we have here, Jacob?” he said, looking at the dollhouse, then at me. “Think we can get it back together?”
“I hope so,” I said.
“Sure we can.”
He used industrial glue and tiny clamps to repair the broken wall, and when that was done, he bent down with his hands on his knees and peered into the house.
“You know what. I think we should spruce up the old place for your special friend, Hilda.”
“How?”
“I’ve got some ideas.”
He spent the next three hours installing tiny lights, wiring, and a light switch, which Hilda flipped on when we brought it back to her. She stood at the front door laughing as the tiny rooms became illuminated.
Each room of the dollhouse had miniature polished pine furniture. Beds with headboards, rocking chairs, and coffee tables. From one of the bedrooms, I stole a small chest of drawers and kept it hidden under my mattress. At night I’d open and shut the little drawers and imagine Hilda in her house. I’d see her walking from room to room. Taking a snack from the pantry. Reading by a window. Her feet tucked under her legs. Nothing special. Just her going about her day.
I was thinking about the dollhouse while Hilda rode the black-and-white mare, nearing to where I was on the railing. The sun caught her eyes, which were wet from crying.
Without wiping her face, she swung off the horse, removed her helmet, led the horse to the fence I sat on, and tied the rope to the post next to me. I sprang down to stand in front of her.
“Are you okay?”
“We have to sell her,” she said. “The food’s getting too expensive.”
Her cheeks were blotched as crushed roses. The light silvered her upper lip, where tears and snot slicked her skin. She walked up to me, like she was trying to walk through me and tucked her body into mine. I hugged her. She smelled like horse sweat, hay, and Hilda. She always had her own scent, which came off her in waves. Crushed flowers. Soaped hair. The sun. Hilda.
Her shoulders heaved up and down and her hands made one fist at the small of my back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Of course I did. My mantra.
Before she finished crying she tilted her head up, closed her eyes, squeezed me closer, and kissed me on the lips. Her tongue jammed inside my mouth and surprised me. I pushed myself into her. I did not shut my eyes but she did. She kept hers shut as we kissed, even as she loosened her hands from behind my back and pressed her palms and fingers downward flat against my stomach and slid them into my pants.
It was the middle of the day. The sun was on us and I thought, Sweet merciful Christ, finally. She must have felt me swelling when she leaned against me, which was more a bodily reaction than a courageous act on my part, but before I dropped my arms from holding her she had her hand on my half-erect penis. She leaned her forehead into my chest and I looked up at the sky.
There was nothing gentle about what she was doing, and I kept thinking about putting my hands down her pants. Do it. Reach down. Reach down. Grab her there, now, but before I was fully hard, I crumpled over and came into her hand. She still had not opened her eyes or looked up at me.
The sun was on us still. It was the first time a girl had made me come. Though it hurt enough to feel like she’d dismembered me, the whole moment bloomed into a vivid flame and seared itself intact onto the underside of my skull. Always afterward, when the thought of touching anyone arises, it’s Hilda’s hands reaching into my pants. The promise of her touch.
The light caught Hilda’s hands and the pearly sheen on her palm and fingers as she pulled them free. She bent down and wiped her hand on the grass. Then stood up, and still, without looking at me, leaned in again.
I walked her to the barn and held the hand she hadn’t wiped in the grass and rubbed my thumb against her knuckles, noticing how soft her skin was. Back and forth. Back and forth, like I was making sure she was real. In the barn I watched her take off the horse’s saddle and scrub its back and along the sides with a large sponge like it were a final ceremony. I do not recall talking as she did this. I was looking at the corner of the barn as a place for Hilda and me to fall together again. I imagined her bed. My bed with her in it. Us crashing into each other and toppling over again and again. Her hands all over my body. Mine all over hers. The whole world was now a place to be with a girl. The whole world hammered with potential.
Now, I see that what I was witnessing was a sad girl who had to give her horse away. I did not take that in at the time. I did not take in the hurt that made her reach for me.
11
Uncle Martin had arranged for me to help him out on the docks for my own ration card. And he kept appearing with food, money, and supplies that he traded fish for. He started taking me out on his ferry trips between Germany and Holland. Before that, the periphery of my world had been edged by the bend of the ocean in the harbor and the egg-shaped border of the town. Everything beyond that had been too enormous and threatening.
On the docks the wood boards creaked beneath my feet, and guilder-sized wharf spiders climbed up from between the cracks and disappeared between other planks. Uncle Martin taught me how to tie bosun’s and bowline knots. I enjoyed the fresh air from being out on the water. Out there, my mind opened to the grace of seabirds gliding over the rolling water and beating their wings back slightly to rise on the wind. I’d see a glimmer of silver scales tuck and dive headlong beneath the surface.
Thinking I was alone on the deck, I reached for a fish from the aft hold. I pulled out a giant sturgeon by the gills and ran my hand over its rounded nose and down its markings, which looked like fallen leaves and tiny chevrons bleeding into one another.
“Find that one attractive, do ya?” Uncle Martin said.
“What? No. No.” I dropped it back in and he must have known he embarrassed me.
“I’m teasing. I used to do the same thing. Stare at them like that. I’d take them apart too.”
“Filet them?”
“No, like peel the scales off. Carve away the skin and muscle. Try to figure out the bones like I were a surgeon. Teaches you about them. Makes you better at cleaning them.” He knelt down and pulled the sturgeon back out. “Let’s do it to this one.”
He handed me his scrimshaw blade.
“I have my own,” I said and pulled out my camp dagger.
“Go against the grain to take the scales off.”
“Why do you take the scales off?”
“No practical reason. But if you’re a fisherman you should know fish. That’s what I think. My dad once caught me doing this when I was younger than you and smacked me across the deck for wasting a fish. The knife I was using slit my fingertip apart like a snake’s tongue. Look at this.” He held out the tip of his pointer finger and there was a white wedge-shaped scar I’d never noticed before.