He happened when she was still a girl, just turned fifteen. He was probably twenty-one. He came to work on the farm for a summer. He said he wanted to milk cows and write poetry. His hair was thick and curly, the color of cherry cola, and he wore it in a bi-level hair cut that made her think of clubbing and cities and anywhere but the dairy farm.
He told her he loved this green country. She called it Bumfuck. He told her those words didn't sound right coming out of her mouth, so she said, okay, Pumpkinuts. Pumpkinuts, Nowhere.
She thought he'd take her to someplace off campus, and she could cook all his cool friends big spaghetti dinners and they'd drink wine out of chipped coffee cups from the dining hall. Then she could audit classes and then maybe some professor with those corduroy shirts - those shirts with patches at the elbows - would notice her sitting in the corner, and he'd ask to see one of her papers and then she'd get a scholarship and she could marry her poet. They'd move to a little college town. They'd live a stone cottage climbing with soft green ivy. She looked at pictures from the L.L. Bean catalog. She wondered if that was where professors shopped. Her guy just wore jeans and tattered t-shirts.
When he kissed her, his breath tasted of something strong, like licorice. Years later she'd recognize that taste - Altoids. Once they got stoned in the barn and she prayed for forgiveness. She knew to say no to drugs. Her grandfather had been a junkie, he'd left home with the bank account, his guitar, and some other junkies and disgraced the family.
Her grandmother told her that marijuana was the gateway drug. There were stacks of brochures on the coffee table all about it. About STDs. About AIDS. Her grandma would put on the kettle for hot cocoa. She'd make it with Carnation powdered milk. Then she'd open the brochures she'd collected. I surely wouldn't want to be a teenager in these days, she'd say. You stay clear of this, you be a good girl.
She'd gone through fifteen years with her father and her grandmother telling her what was wrong and right. Sometimes she just knew they were two sweet fools, fools she'd like to protect from fancy boys like her college boy. And sometimes she thought they were right about the world, that her grandmother's visions were as real as lightning striking a pole, and then she'd look down at some part of her body the boy had kissed and shiver.
She wondered if she loved him. Can you love someone for their parts? Each part separate. Some parts were more beloved than others. She loved his russety brown hair, and the rough way it felt under her fingers. She loved the way he never smelled like a barn, no matter how much time he spent in one.
There was something he'd do to her breast, when they had sex. It was the way he moved his tongue, his lips on her, it felt as if he were pulling her from the inside out. It made her tremble like the fear of God was shuddering through her body all over again. Once she asked him how he did that and he said, "I'm milking you."
It was disgusting, she decided. How he talked about her as if she were a cow. He'd smiled at her when he said that. She didn't know what to make of it. Besides, he was leaving soon for the fall semester and he hadn't said a thing about coming back to her green country.
That winter she'd cried in the barn, and tried to remember the way he
smelled, and the way his cheek had felt when he hadn't shaved. What she remembered best was the taste of licorice and that thing he did to her breast. He'd never shown her any poetry. He'd never written her any poetry. Her dorky old English teacher, Mrs. Rundequest, who smelled of mothballs and spearmint gum and old-lady perfume, had taught her more about words and poets.
By spring she decided she would cross him out of her diary, with big red Xs.
Now, the girl is grown up, and living in the green country. Her grandmother died years ago. The grown-up woman kept the brochures, at least her favorites, the ones that featured magnified depictions of germs. When she tells stories about her grandmother now, she makes her quaint, wise, warm and soothing as powdered milk. She doesn't talk about what fornication meant, then. She lives in a cold farm house, painted the color of thick cream, not so different from the house her grandmother and her father tried so hard to hang on to. The kitchen is the same harvest gold. Even the stove is ancient. She lights the pilots with kitchen matchsticks.
Her husband Dennis puts the kettle on for hot drinks. He drinks instant coffee, she drinks Ovaltine. She takes the night shift with their new baby, he takes over for a few hours in the mornings. She just started nursing. Her baby boy loves to eat. He latches on and gulps until he passes out across her new mother's chest.
She looks across the table at Dennis. He's got the sort of body her father had, long and strong and sinewy from working outside. His blue eyes are bloodshot. The baby exhausts him.
The baby grasps his mother's boob, digs his little nails into the flesh. She's afraid to trim the little nails, they are so tiny, so paper-thin. She feels her uterus contract. "He's adorable, but sometimes I feel like I'm his chew toy. But the books say to stick with it. You know, nursing. It's supposed to get easier."
Dennis isn't listening, really. He's too sleepy to nod.
There was that one moment, when the baby first latched on, that she felt it. So different, but it was the same moment, the same lapping tongue. So that's what he'd been doing all those years back. Suckling.
It was a flash, like the smell of Altoids, and then she looked down at the little red face, and across the table at the powdered Ovaltine. And she was home again.
