Honeycomb
By Evelyn Hale
Copyright 2012 Evelyn Hale
Smashwords Edition
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Honeycomb
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My father was not a complicated man. That made lying to him complicated. You had to tell the truth with false words. He would sit at the kitchen table, or in the wicker chair on the porch, sitting there in the forge-light of the evening, looking at you, eyes uncomplicated, without artifice or guile, and you would stand there, telling your quaint little lies, your half-clever half-truths, until—suddenly—you realized you were crying. That was how he got you.
I did my best to make the truth a habit; I really did. But I was eighteen.
This is the story of the time I got a lie passed him. And I suppose it is the story of a few other things as well.
I was shucking corn with my mother the first time I saw Simon Mallister. We were sitting under the big willow in the backyard, caught in its ropy net of shadows, my mother on the white barstool she carried in those days from chore to chore, me on the bare red earth with my back against the tree. I was sweating in a way that was more cleansing than irritating. I tugged at the neck of my blouse, my hands stringy with the yellow hair of the corn.
Simon passed us by without a glance. In a way he came from nowhere; we figured my father would hire a boy for the summer, as he did most years since the accident, but he had mentioned nothing of it, either in general or at breakfast this morning. Yet here was this man walking by with our filly Helen’s saddle and bridle over his shoulder, the dusty flap on his prodigious bicep. The reins and the billet strap were slapping against the tectonic muscles of his back. He walked in a way that might be called plodding but gave the distinct impression of deliberation and purpose. He did not look at us, though I felt he wanted to. And then he was out of sight, in the barn, the bit and rigging-dee chiming thinly in his wake like tiny Spanish bells.
My mother drew the coat from a cob. She did so with great tranquility. She said:
Well.
And that is a better description of Simon Mallister than I could ever give. He was the type of man that could make your mother say: Well.
I think you know exactly what I mean. You were there too, weren’t you? Eighteen or close enough to it and under your own tree that maybe wasn’t a tree and seeing him, whoever he might be, and feeling what you felt, whatever that might be. All our pasts are pretty much interchangeable. You felt what I felt: a throbbing ache, but not entirely unpleasant, an exquisite agony, maddening, wet-hot.
Did you burn in your bed as I did? The sweet chaos of it, all the hormones going off like the Fourth of July. I was young and finally blooming, still a virgin, still pretty issue-burdened by a rough stint in high school. It all seems so absurd, now; or maybe it’s just that over the years I have lost a bit of compassion for my younger self. I don’t think that’s fair to her, that girl who could still hear the echoes of the laughter and the cruel jokes in the hallways, the overheard comments—but even louder, amplified. What a curious creature an eighteen year old girl is. Her claws can grow inward, cutting herself.
I had been gawky, long-limbed: an understuffed scarecrow spilling yellow straw from the top of its head. I was a marvel of hormonal mismanagement. I didn’t have it the worst, but I had it in my own way, and maybe I still have a little bit of it, a cold silver needle of embarrassment that pushes into my neck when I remember a few key events. Of them all, the one that remains the clearest is the fall dance of my senior year. I remember, so crystal-clearly, sitting on the black foldingchair in the gymnasium, in the darkness outside of the unreal aquarium-light of the dance floor, alone, wondering furiously why I had let them talk me into coming, why I was so stupid, and all of them, as they danced, looking at me with such joyful scorn. They called me the usual names. They pointed out my home-stitched dress. They revolved so elegantly on the scuffed floor, swarming in and out of the darkness.
They wanted me to cry. In a way they almost needed it. If I cried it would have been perfect for them. But I didn’t cry. Not then, at least. I sat in my chair with my makeup mask and my piled up hair and I listened to the fucking music and I watched them fucking dance, number after number, like marionettes.
I like to think it was inside me, even then. At that exact, specific moment. There within, coiled up in my genome, the biochemical expression of my prettiness-to-be, there like a poem buried deep in a vast anthology. Or like a sprout, bright and nub-leafed, growing in the rich soil of me while their youthful beauty was already beginning to wither on the vine.
Sometimes, when I see one of them at the supermarket with early hag-lines blown across their once cheerleader-grade faces, I smile to myself all afternoon. I know that isn’t nice; but, sometimes, nice isn’t so nice.
By the time Simon started working for my father, the sprout inside me had grown into a veritable sapling. Everything in me was green and vital and juicy and burgeoning. I had filled in—my thighs and my breasts and my rump—and I felt pliant, springy; metabolic. Like I could breathe hot steam. When I went around braless the fabric of my top or nightgown would rub my nipples raw in an instant, making them sore and hard, bringing a heat to my brow and a flush to my face; I would think frenzied formless thoughts about skin and lips and musky sweat and get warmly damp and have to sequester myself in my bedroom or the bathroom and either wait it out or do something about it.
I was not yet very good at doing something about it. I would touch myself over my panties, hesitantly, solemnly, placing my index finger lengthwise down my clitoris, holding it there, almost in an upside down shushing-motion: which is really quite apt, since I was trying to silence it, make it lukewarm and quiet; but it would not consent. I would press down on it, my legs trembling.
Did it ever ache like a glowing coal for you? For me it did, later that day when I was shucking corn with my mother. We were down to the last few when my father came out of the barn with Helen. He watched Simon saddle her; so did I. It was immediately plain that Simon knew his way around a filly. At first she bucked him truculently, sussing him out, but he was gentle with her, confident and unworried. He looped a rein about his fist and eased the horse’s head down so he could tighten the throat-lash and the browband. He stroked and petted her as he did this and I could hear Helen snuffling with pleasure from across the yard. But Helen, Helen of Troy as we called her, wasn’t such an easy sell. She bucked him powerfully one last time. He held her, the muscles in his arm and along his back popping and hardening, standing out in stark anatomic relief like Greek statuary. It was worthy of such.
Texans should sculpt. Virginians should hew the human form from pine. There is tough, raw art in these biblical landscapes.
I studied Simon, husking a corn without thinking. I stripped the hairs from it with a stroke and then it did again, looking at Simon and seeing him picked out in the liquid warble of a humid summer’s day. When I realized the motion I was making, the significance of it, I blushed furiously, the heat lacing my cheeks and neck, knotting in my belly, my loins.
I excused myself and went up to my room. It was scorching in there, grave-quiet and still. Dust motes hung suspended in a shaft of sunlight from the open window where no breeze came. I lay on my bed, yanking down my white cotton panties to my knees. I shushed myself. But I would not be made quiet. So I shushed myself again, and again. My eyes were open. I saw portraits of Simon on the ceiling. His smiling face and dark tussled hair. His arms. Holding me. Granite. Silk. Tan. Pink.
But I did not manage to satisfy myself. I would need some help.
Two days later, I spoke to Simon on the back porch. The previous day he had gone into town with my father to buy tractor parts. He didn’t get back until late, and worked well into the evening in the machine shop. I could hear the clamour of their work in my bedroom, the precise clang of ball-peen hammers and the shrilling of a circular saw and the sharp clatter of a load-chain pulled through eyebolts and over bluntly-toothed sheaves. I could almost see them, in the unearthly surgical blue of the suspended lights.
The next day they were still hard at work on the tractor. In the afternoon Simon emerged from the shop to take the air. His knees were greasy and his hands were greasy. There was a line of grease on his cheek, like warpaint. From the porch I watched him as he cleaned himself with an old rag and I watched him as he stepped from the shade to take full view of the golden sea of the wheatfields as they flowed endlessly to the east. He witnessed it solemnly, and I think that might be when it happened, when I knew it truly.
I called him over. There was a pitcher of lemonade on the table and a few frosted plastic cups. I filled them, the liquid like wet sunlight in the plastic. I was very nervous. I like to think, even now, that I didn’t show it. At least not too much.
Ma’am? he said.
It was the first time anyone had called me ma’am.
I asked him to sit. After a bit of coaxing he did. He was afraid of getting engine grease on the chair. I told him not to worry, inside worrying about how I would clean it off. We tipped our cups to one another and drank deep and tried to keep our eyes from locking. It felt magnetic. We barely spoke, instead relying on a spontaneously understood sub-conversation, with its own shared language of head-tilts and hair-flips and nods and smiles and a hand on the back of your own neck when you’re unsure or embarrassed, arch of the eyebrow, bite of the lower lip. We didn’t kiss, or even touch. But when I took his cup I was very close to him, and our scents mixed, bearing messages.
For the next few days I was utterly electric. I could strike sparks on any surface. At night I squirmed and wriggled in my smouldering bed, wanting and needing but not having and unable to help myself to myself and feeling it pulse under my finger, my shushing librarian’s finger, helpless, incapable of relief. My dreams were like madness, incoherent but awash in lights and shapes, liquid motion.
Finally I found myself alone with him in the barn. My father was in the house, tinkering with our cantankerous washing machine. I found Simon sectioned by shadows as he tended to Helen over the stall door, combing her mane with the old wiry-stiff brush. He was whispering to her, the kind of pleasant nonsense you tell to a horse. It was such a tender moment it made my heart hurt, a subtle, exquisite hairline fracturing. I stopped to take it all in. The portraiture of it, the splintery frame, the earth-tones.
I approached him. I noticed that he sensed me, but, for his own pleasure, did not turn to me, simply accepted my presence there, wordlessly wanted it. We smiled in code at one another. I got very close to him, on the pretext of petting Helen. I looked into the horse’s giant obsidian eye and saw myself in it so far away, and I saw Simon put his hand on my waist, and I turned and placed myself against him and stood on my toes and touched my lips against his. This was my first kiss, slow and sweet and good.