Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

Mowgli belonged to Akela. He has taught me everything, this dog, that a young creature must know to stay alive in the forest. From him I have learned to be still and to be silent, and to move with the forest instead of through or against it. I have watched him and seen how well he fills the niche that nature has allotted to him. I, too, will be as he is, perfect in my place.

      We follow Pan, Rinky and I, and he leads us down the slough. We walk in the flat troughs that meander between the hummocks of grass. Short weeks ago, water flowed where our feet walk now. We flow as it did, silent and seeking our level. Pan has neither hips nor buttocks, but only the sleek flanks of an animal and the restless tail of the deer kind. His cloven hooves leave more of a mark than Rinky’s wolf feet, and my sneakers leave the least discernible track of all. Insects chirr around us, and the air is heavy with pollen and sleep. I can believe that, save for us, nothing larger than a shrew is stirring in the forest at this hour.

      Then the duck explodes in front of me, right before my feet, her brown pinions slashing my face as she rises on her battering wings. Her nerve has been shattered; she withstood the passing of Pan and Rinky so close to her nest, but I, a human, am too totally foreign to her experience. I fall back with an incoherent cry, my hands rising to protect my face, but she is already gone. My eyes tear from the slapping they have taken, but that is the sole extent of their damage. When I lower my hands and blink my eyes clear of tears, they are laughing at me.

      Rinky’s pink tongue does loll now, mockingly, dangling over his picket fence of white teeth and his smooth black doggy lips. Pan is worse. He clutches his belly, bends over it, brown curls falling into his eyes as he shakes with silent hilarity. His teeth are very white, his mouth is wide with mirth. Miffed, I ignore both of them, and crouch to examine the nest.

      The nest is a late one, probably the duck’s second effort this year. To the casual eye, it is empty. But with thumb and forefinger I lift the soft blanket of down that covers the fourteen pale turquoise eggs. The eggs are not much larger than grade-AA chicken eggs from the store, but they are much more real. Eggs from the store are cold and bony white, their surfaces dry and chalky, trapped in cardboardy trays. These eggs are warm, and smooth, almost waxy to the touch. I take two and Pan takes one, and we carry them off with us, leaving the duck free to return to her brooding.

      We go back to the sunny bank of the dried-up slough and sit on the moss and eat our eggs. Pan and I bite the ends off ours and spit the crumpled bits of shell aside before we suck out the warm white and the sudden glop of the yolk. Rinky puts his between his front paws and delicately breaks it with his teeth so that he can lap up the egg and eat the shell that held it.

      And that is all that there is to this day, but it needs nothing more. It is complete, like the scene trapped inside a glass paperweight, a whole sufficient to itself. I am eleven and lying there between a dog and a faun. We three make a circle, from human to beast and back again. I love them as I love my hands or my hair, unthinking, totally accepting. They are the two most important creatures in my life and always will be. When we grow up, I will be Pan’s mate and we will live and hunt in these woods and Rinky will always run beside us. I know these things as well as I know that the summer sky is blue and permafrost is cold.

       THREE

      Tacoma

      May 1976

      I hate to shop for clothing. I hate to try things on. I hate the cramped dressing rooms with curtains that gape at the sides, with their floors littered with straight pins and tags. I hate pulling stiff, unfamiliar clothes on over my head, clothing ensorcelled with hidden pins and buttoned buttons that snare me inside their unyielding depths. I hate standing nine inches from a full-length mirror trying to see what I look like in this foreign garment, my hair mussed and my makeup smeared by my struggle to get into it. It makes me sweat.

      Stupid. Stupid is how I look. The bosom gapes hungrily for my nonexistent cleavage. My socks-and-sneakered feet stick out the bottom where sheer-stockinged calves and slender ankles and chic white sandals should be. I smooth the dappled-leaf muteness of the fabric, loving it, wishing I could look as if I belonged in it. But I cannot. I look like a homely carnival Kewpie doll stuffed into Barbie’s prom dress. Ken would be horrified. I claw and fumble the buttons open, begin an attempt to slither out the bottom of the dress. It jams on my too-wide shoulders.

      A saleslady whisks the curtain open. My olivine eyes peer at her from the dress bodice, my pale thighs goosebump in the sudden draft. “Oh, dear,” she says, and I am sure her sympathy is for the dress, not me. “You didn’t like it. Can I bring you a different size, perhaps? Would you like to try it in another color?”

      Another body, I think. Another face. Bring me those, and I’ll try the dress again. “No, thank you,” I say aloud, and her eyes narrow with disapproval. She must be on commission. Mother Maurie and Steffie trip merrily past my compartment. They are having a wonderful time. Both my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law love the gay whirl of shopping, adore endlessly trying on clothes, just for the fun of seeing what they will look like. I, exposed still, shiver as they pass. Another saleslady trails them, her arms heavy with bright garments. “Evelyn,” Steffie calls without pausing. “We are absolutely starved! We’re going to that restaurant, you know, the one down near Fredericks? Okay?”

      “Okay,” I mutter. I don’t know the restaurant, having never been there. I am not even absolutely sure where Fredericks is. It doesn’t matter. I’ll cope. The dress has a half nelson on me. My saleslady sighs and whisks herself off to another dressing compartment. She peeks into that one, exclaims delightedly, “Not everyone can wear that look, but, oh, on you!” She clasps her hands delightedly.

      I free a hand and arm somehow, and tug the curtain back so that it gapes no more than three inches on each side. I inch painstakingly out of the dress, making a sincere effort not to tear the shoulder seams. I shiver in my underwear as I wrestle it back onto its hanger and suspend it from the hook in the dressing room. Once on its hanger, it resumes its original gentle lines, looks beckoningly lovely as it never will on my frame. I snarl at it as I stoop for my jeans and shirt, catch the snarl reflected in the mirror. For a brief instant I am eye to eye, fang to fang, with myself. It is not a pleasant experience.

      Someone who once said he loved me compared me to a stag. An odd compliment, and not one that reassures one’s femininity. But a compliment, nonetheless, to be collected and clung to. I straighten and look at myself in the mirror, trying to find the stag he saw. I see only pieces of myself, I cannot perceive myself as a whole. Sensible cotton panties that magically guard me from yeast infections. Legs that remind me of the dark, footed legs of my great-grandmother’s piano bench. I can see the lines of my ribs. There are muscles in my belly, good, that is good. I think. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it isn’t feminine. How do you get rid of muscles on your belly? I wonder idly. My stubborn breasts have refused to follow me into womanhood. They are a seventh-grader’s breasts, their disgrace hidden inside smooth cups of foam-lined nylon that bring them almost to woman size. My collarbones stand out, my shoulders are wide, my neck is long and graceful. Is this the stag he saw? I roll my shoulders, watch the smooth muscles move under the skin. My face. I cannot see my face. I see the lines in my forehead, I see my wide cheeks, I should have plucked my eyebrows, the lipstick looks silly on me, not a clown’s mouth, no, more like I have eaten something unwholesome and it has stained my mouth this wretched color.

      “Can I show you anything else?” It is the saleslady, peering in at me. She can show me nothing that I have not already seen. I clutch my jeans and shirt to myself.

      “No,” I mutter. “Thank you, no, not today. Thank you.”

      She leaves again. I wonder if someone is waiting for this dressing room. A tall, elegant woman, garments draped gracefully over her arm, folded money inside her pocketbook. Her high cheeks smooth as polished wood, salesladies never wrench her curtains open. Things like that are reserved only for those like myself.

      Stop making yourself miserable, I scold myself. Why stop, I respond, when I do it so well? Everyone should be good at something. I pull on my jeans. Wranglers, size nine, as familiar as my own skin