STATE REPRESENTATIVE JAMES HOLLINGS TURNED ME every which way that summer. We spent sticky hot July afternoons on the stockroom floor while Leo Roberts napped on the sofa in his office. The old man never suspected how eagerly we awaited his daily siesta. James would send Wanda out for complicated lunch orders from restaurants miles outside of town, and we would practically run to the stockroom as soon as the door closed behind her. We kept a box of condoms hidden in the bottom of the banker’s box labeled “To Scan.” A box Wanda would never deign to investigate.
Sex and laughter, sex and laughter. Some pro forma document filing. And lots of knowing looks, secret signs. I lived fully in the present, no room at all for Andela and her scared, lonely eyes reminding me that everyone leaves us. James could touch me, fuck me, co-opt my thoughts as well as my body, and I could forget the rest. He was a tsunami; I was a twig.
I woke up each morning excited, happy. The days passed by in a haze of sexual exploration so intense it obliterated my nightmares. Finally, for the first time since Paul told me he was too old to have his little sister crawl into bed with him, I had found a solution that let me sleep long and deep into the night.
Harrison’s summer, on the other hand, was taking a different turn. John Joseph’s crew hid Harry’s work boots and replaced them with a pair of clown costume shoes the morning he had to walk three miles along the rocky forest edge to stake out the perimeter for the crew’s next clear-cut. My cousin’s feet were a mess of torn skin and blisters.
“How can you stand it?” I asked him. “The way they treat you is criminal, and that brute who is supposed to be your supervisor doesn’t lift a finger to protect you!”
“Toni, you don’t get it,” Harrison said, once he could speak again after the sting of the antiseptic-soaked cotton I was patting on his raw soles subsided. “This isn’t criminal. Every guy on the crew went through the same hazing their first time on the job site—ouch! Go easy!—It’s normal. How would it look to the men if Mr. Joseph gave me special treatment?”
“Now you’re just quoting your dad. It’s abuse. I don’t care if it’s traditional abuse or brand-new, special Harrison-only abuse. Why does the fact that everyone else suffered make it right?”
I couldn’t help assessing his experience at work from the perspective of my own, secret and illicit though it was. Each day at noon, I found a new angle, a new rhythm, to sate the now-constant pulse of desire that accompanied me everywhere. Rapacious, that’s how I felt. Even after James and I had satisfied my physical needs, I could sense the cycle of want, its slow build starting again almost immediately. I desired desire itself. When I woke each morning hungry for more, I practically wept with gratitude. I slept every night without visits from the past, and a few hours hence, my daily dose of self-medication would happen again.
Although I couldn’t tell my cousin why, I understood the release and the triumph that physical exhaustion could gift a person all too well. I just couldn’t understand enduring it under his circumstances.
“Harry, you’re going back to school in a couple of weeks. Then college. You’re not going to be on their crew ever again, so what are you getting out of all this torment?”
“I’m earning their respect. You’ll see.”
But I couldn’t. Seeing the world through Harrison’s eyes would have pried the lid off the Pandora’s box of perspectives I needed to shut out. My cousin didn’t have enough influence over me that summer to show me what I was avoiding. Or pretending to avoid.
Even my usually oblivious family noticed I was different.
“Aren’t you rosy these days!” Aunt Evelyn said to me one morning about a month in. I was startled that she said anything at all to me about my looks. After years of lame attempts to dress me like her light and lovely Isobel, only to realize that ribbons and lace turned to cobwebs on my bony frame, she wisely chose to ignore my appearance by the time I reached high school. But she caught a glimpse of what was happening to me: for the first time I saw myself through the eyes of someone who found me exciting and intriguing. No surprise—I loved it, and it showed.
Uncle Christopher glanced up from the Thebes Oracle to give me a once-over.
“Hard work,” he said. “Good for the body and the mind.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m working hard. In fact, I’m the queen of the stockroom. You have no idea what I rule over back there in that law office.”
His eyebrows shot up. He sensed I was toying with him somehow but didn’t take it any further. After all, I was out of the house and accounted for every day, which was all he needed to know.
“Well, keep it up,” he said.
“I do,” I replied.
I reported our breakfast conversation to James later that afternoon on the stockroom floor and he shook with laughter.
That’s the memory that sticks with me the most from our summer. Maybe because in retrospect, it embodies the happiness I felt being someone new, someone I chose instead of someone I was pushed and prodded to imitate.
Or maybe because it happened the day before the Oracle’s announcement of the engagement of James Hollings of Thebes, Minnesota, to Denise Juliette Larson of same.
MY AUNT LEFT THE NEWSPAPER ON THE KITCHEN TABLE that morning, folded open to the Weddings and Engagements section. She marked the announcement with a canary-yellow Post-it Note, my name a curl in her round cursive. News from your office, with a tiny arrow. I picked up the paper and studied the full-color photograph of Denise Juliette Larson that accompanied the article. Of course, she was blond. A homegrown Minnesota state flower, all pink and white like the lady’s slipper itself. Making her the ideal wife for a young, ambitious lawyer-to-be.
Izzy wandered into the kitchen, still sleepy-eyed, in her baby doll pajamas. At almost fourteen, she wore braces on her teeth but had already sprung a set of D-cup breasts that she didn’t yet know what to do with. She peered over my shoulder at the photo.
“Wow, she is so pretty,” my very helpful cousin announced. “I totally want to be her.”
I handed Izzy the paper. “Dream big.”
If I had been the heroine in one of those nineteenth-century Victorian novels that sat on the shelf in my bedroom, I might have fainted delicately. Or, if I were the hardier type, rushed outside and run to some craggy hill, wind whipping my hair around my face, then fallen to my knees and clutched my breast as I cursed the heavens. Instead, I went into the office that morning as usual. I filed and archived and scanned documents for Leo Roberts without comment. And then, at lunchtime when Mr. Roberts shut his office door to take his top-secret nap and Wanda left for her hour-long break that would extend to two hours because her junior boss had a craving for an Orange Julius, obtainable only at the mall on Route 35 but necessary if he was to finish his important work that day, I practically threw James Hollings into the stockroom and straddled him.
A switch had flipped for me. I not only wanted to fuck the living daylights out of this man, I wanted to do it my way. He was startled, to say the least. The first weeks had all been his mastery and my discovery. But that day I was fury and fire. When he tried to initiate any touching or movement, I slapped his hands. All me, all in my control. When I came, it was with a roar.
“Damn,” he said when we finished, both of us rife with sweat and still panting. “What happened to you?”
This was the moment I could have told him about my morning reading the newspaper. When I could have stood up and declared him a cad and a scoundrel and cried and threatened to tell Miss Lady’s Slipper all about her perfect fiancé’s afternoon activities at the office. That’s what a wronged girl was supposed to say. It was even what I rehearsed in my head before lunchtime as I was sorting depositions.
Except that I didn’t want to say any of it.
He was looking up at me from the floor with something more than his usual lust and amusement—he was looking at me with admiration. A new understanding of my own power was dawning on me. Look what I could do to a man like him: more than just lying back and letting him teach me, I could take the lead. And take over. My capacity expanded a hundredfold.
“Nothing happened to me,” I said. “I happened to you. And I’m not done.” I rolled off of him onto the floor, placed my hands behind his head, and guided his face between my legs.
THAT NIGHT THOUGH, ALONE IN MY ROOM, I COULDN’T drift off in the haze of satisfaction I’d grown used to. Sleep wouldn’t come. I threw off the covers and stood under the air conditioning vent to feel the shock of cold on my face and neck.
The rules of Thebesian society dictated that someone like James Hollings must be adorned with a lady’s slipper. Her perfect engagement photo in the Oracle was a reassurance to all that the order of the universe would be preserved. Bosnian orphans who cause upstanding citizens to overdose on opioids by ruining their lives, then hide under sofas instead of helping said citizens, have no place in this picture.
Everybody leaves us, Andela whispered to me again as I began to shiver under my cotton nightshirt. Everybody always will.
A soft rap on my door. I turned to see a creamy envelope slip through the sliver of hallway light that shone below. Heavy paper, with EK in raised letterpress on its back flap. I sat on my bed, turned on the small lamp, and opened the folded notecard to read a quote, copied in in my aunt’s hand, from the book by Willa Cather she named me after fourteen years ago:
This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
On the back she wrote:
Dear Antonia, Keep a brave face. You are destined for more than what is here in Thebes. You won’t need a man to make your way in the world. Yours in confidence, Aunt Evelyn.
I ran my finger over her words.
Aunt Evelyn knew about James. Or at least, she guessed how I felt about James. She left that Oracle article open for me to read as more than a nod to my workplace.
I slid the card back in its envelope. Then I went to my bookshelf, pulled down the leather-bound edition of My Ántonia, inscribed to me from my aunt on my seventh birthday. I inserted the card between its pages, and reshelved the novel in its place.