He has his front hoof raised. A buck, almost twice my size with nearly eight points of antlers, is waiting, his leg raised. The light of the clock reflects dully in the curve of his worn antlers. My front knees loosen and shake. I stumble. My head dips away from him. There is a deer in my bedroom, one besides me, and I am terrified, more terrified than I would be by all the guns in the world. I know what a gun means. I haven’t any idea what a deer means.
I lift my eyes to him. He winces again when we meet. He lowers his hoof down to the rug and, turning his back on me, walks from the bedroom. It is then I pick up his scent. His mother gave birth to him. High school. A tire plant. Akron. Heavy machinery. The dinner I made him just hours ago. Mine.
I follow him out into our living room. “How?” I want to ask him, but we are both deer now and deer cannot speak. His neck is bent and he is maneuvering between his antlers, working on something. He has the front doorknob in his mouth, in his jaws. He twists his head, opening the door as if he’s done this a hundred times before. The door sticks with the humidity but he shoves it open with his neck. He’s really good at opening the door with his mouth, practiced. I feel the night rush in and he stands back from it, looking up at me. I can’t be sure what he is saying. Either “Get out” or “Come on.” His deer eyes are dark and hard to read. But he is waiting for me to do something. I nudge the screen door with my nose. I walk out in front of him, scared to leave because will he follow or simply lock the door behind me, kick me out?
The night is navy blue. Stars and cold. The grass underfoot breaks into a spicy smell, oregano and dirt. Why should anyone be afraid of night? But then there is motion around me like standing in a flooded river and I’m terrified. I am afraid of this night. I stumble back, trying to figure out what I’m looking at, to let the world come into focus. Fur and flanks and pointy hips and rib cages pass slowly before me. Sharp ears that nervously twitch forward and back. Everywhere the warmth of blood. Dark brown eyes lined with white fur and quivering backs that shake an itch. Silence. The road, the yard, the whole county is filled with deer, a calm stampede of them. An ocean of brown fur moving both together and separately, the way a caterpillar’s back will resist and accept the ground at the same time. Some deer going up the road, some going down. They thread one another. Not one of the deer says a word. It’s quiet. Each looks exactly the same, a flood of the ordinary. I am humiliated by their numbers, by the way they clump themselves together desperately like insects.
I turn to go back inside our house, but he is standing on the front step. He stomps his foot. He doesn’t want us to go back in. He curls his spine and jumps, or not jumps but lurches quickly, urging me forward, as if that is where we both belong, as if that is where we’ve both always been. I know where forward is headed. I look out at the passing deer again, trying to pick out just one from the mass. This is hard to do. They are guarding what’s individual by disguising it with what’s not. See one leaf in a forest.
My husband steps forward in front of me. He is staring at the deer, the way a person might stare at the sea—without thought, without time. I catch a scent. What do the deer mean? That is a good question. That is the best question. I think the answer is somewhere nearby. I can smell it. I think I could almost say what the answer is but I am a deer now and deer can’t talk.
My husband steps forward again and I follow him right up to the edge of the deer. His antlers have eight points. I tell myself I’ll remember. I’ll find him or hope he will find me, or maybe being found won’t matter when we are animals. I step forward and then I step forward again, closer to the deer. I feel the warmth of that many living things. I feel their plainness rising up to swallow me. I step forward into the stream of beasts.
THE YELLOW
With his mother and father out of town for the weekend, Roy was left to forage for food in their nearly empty refrigerator. Was he physically or mentally unable to go grocery shopping? To order takeout from a restaurant? No, he wasn’t.
Roy nibbled on a raw-onion-and-Cheddar sandwich. The rattling house unnerved him and the sandwich was too strong. It was an angry sandwich.
What made a house rattle? He couldn’t say. He felt exposed in the kitchen. He abandoned his meal on the countertop and switched on the living room TV. He sat through the evening sitcoms, the late news, the late shows, and the start of a movie he’d not seen since 1985, telling himself that the noises he heard were wires scraping the siding in the wind. Even if they weren’t.
At forty-two, he was living in his parents’ house again, eating their food, driving their car from job interview to job interview.
“A pity,” his grandmother had labeled him at a cookout. They sat alone in weak folding chairs made weaker by the uneven ground. With no one else around to hear her declaration, she’d be able to deny it later. Or perhaps she thought he’d already gone inside. Macular degeneration. He’d walked away silently in case.
Near two in the morning, sick from so much TV, his grandmother’s pronouncement in his head, Roy riled himself into a fury of self-improvement. He spent the early-morning hours in his bedroom tearing down homemade Bevis Frond posters and a paper chain he’d fashioned from gum wrappers. He moved all the furniture—except his bed and his dresser—up to the attic. In the basement, Roy found a half-full can of paint his father had used to mark the curb out front as a no-parking zone. Roy carefully began to paint his walls bright yellow.
He went without sleep. What was sleep to him? And by eleven the next morning his work was done. He sat cross-legged on the floor inhaling heady fumes. Yellow was everywhere. Yellow and calm. Fear and confusion had left. Possibility and sunshine became his friends. In the yellow, he felt himself the newborn child of Patti Smith and Jacques Cousteau. Roy rolled a cigarette and visualized foreign, gentler lands: India, Morocco, Florida.
Eventually, Sunday evening, his parents returned. His father, registering the new color of the walls, asked: “Son, did you turn faggot over the weekend?”
Roy offered no comeback. He held on to the color. He picked a flake of tobacco from his tongue and admired his father’s use of the verb “turn.” Turn was precisely what Roy had done after three days of ripening in silence. He’d turned. He’d fermented into something wonderful and open, something porous and bright yellow.
*
Susanne’s turning, on the other hand, had been far more subtle. Perhaps she didn’t even realize she had turned, or maybe turning comes easier to women, acclimated as they are to miracles and pregnancies. Of which, by the age of thirty-nine, she’d had three.