“So,” I said, “are you going to do any filming here? I’ve always wanted to be in the movies!”
He laughed. “This place? If it was in the film, it’d be as an example of out-of-date technology and practices. Nowadays it’s all indoors, they never set foot outside. Free-roaming in the shed with on-demand robot milking when the cow wants it, automatic latch-on, computer monitoring of each one’s daily output and milk fat content. Hormones to stimulate lactation.” He gazed along the row of bovine back ridges, then tipped his head. “But to give my folks credit, the hygiene is pretty good, given the limitations of the equipment. That’s mainly my mother’s doing. Runs a tight ship. Gotta keep things neat, ‘respectable.’ Work herself into an early grave.”
For a while, we kept on in silence, and it occurred to me that we’d spent many hours doing chores together over the past few weeks, but I couldn’t think of one personal topic, aside from his job, that he’d revealed.
So I asked him. “So, are you married?”
He blew out air between his teeth. “Right now I don’t exactly have a wife, but I do exactly have a divorce. I also do exactly have a daughter, along with custody issues.”
“I’m sorry. That must be tough.”
“Actually, the divorce—it’s not much fun, about like getting a root canal, but it’s long overdue. The hardest part is my daughter.”
“How old?”
“Six. Temporary arrangement is, I can see her several times a week. Problem is, with my work, I’m gone so often. Messes up the schedule.”
I expected him to reciprocate with comparable questions, but he was, as Earnest had said, “reticent.”
Both bored with our roles, we switched positions, Will going into the pit as I managed cow flow. It was quiet again but for the dull thump of hooves, the huff of the great bellows of their lungs. Bright yellow ear tags gave each cow a numerical identity, but, like Queenie, some stood out as individuals and had acquired names. The next group included a skittish cow named Twiggy, who was sometimes reluctant to enter the parlor and whose restlessness could infect the others. I was firmer with her, sweet-talking but also prodding with hips, elbows, or a two-handed shove here or there to keep her moving.
Will observed my management technique and said, “You’re getting good at this!” And I felt quite flattered.
That morning, when we’d finished and had cleaned up the parlor, he swatted my many-layered shoulder in a comradely way as we headed back toward our respective quarters, a casual affirmation: Good on us, huh, one more damn milking out of the way.
I can tell you about this now only because I have the security of retrospect and have forgiven myself for my pitiful state at the time. That night, after Will clapped me on the shoulder, I remembered that casual, unconscious touch for hours. My response was another demonstration of the drift of my heart and body. Back at Larson Middle School, before my apocalypse, my colleagues and I had routinely shared that kind of touch, men and women alike, an affirmation that we were fellow soldiers fighting on behalf of a good cause. But when Will tagged my shoulder, he brought back full force the longing that had been growing in me.
I knew, or should have known, where I stood on this stuff, and it should not have caused any particular disturbance: I was and am heterosexual, and I had pretty well justified Cinderella by acknowledging that I was and am sentimental, full of romantic longings. I also knew that I was instinctively or fundamentally monogamous, always, even when it wasn’t fashionable. One at a time is all I can manage.
And when it’s with someone I like a lot, someone who intrigues or attracts the whole of me, I love sex. My liberal humanistic parents, coming of age in the sixties, raised me to accept and celebrate my body, my sexuality, to forgo the puritanical shame paradigm. They liked my high school boyfriends and allowed us time alone at the house. I may be ashamed of other things, but my body and its yearnings have never been among them.
So, sex: That night, my response showed me that I had a backlog of figuring out to do. I wondered whether it was a factor of my age—when I was younger, I sometimes went a year or two without a boyfriend. Was it so difficult? Actually, that night I couldn’t remember. And I knew it didn’t matter anyway. That was the moment I was living, and now is always now.
Cat was not as monogamously inclined as I was. She did get into the recreational aspect of sex more than I did, but she agreed with me that it wasn’t just about arousal and the mating dance, so much of which is pretense anyway and, eventually, rather too predictable. It wasn’t just about fucking. No: There’s the whole swirl of physical contact, the mammal need for touch, for rubbing up against a warm, receptive fellow creature. I remember how my father and Erik and I used to wrestle on the living room floor, how Pop would grab my mother’s ankle and pull her into the tangle and we’d squirm and tickle and throttle each other and laugh and finally just lie there in a heap, flushed, momentarily exhausted.
My father called it “the mammal pile”—it’s just what mammals do, he said, and thank the gods. Erik
