Jack Ketchum - I'm Not Sam

Is it?

I put the pages down and cover them over.

“Let’s go see about dinner. What do you say?”

Dinner is hot dogs and French fries. Her choice. What did I expect? I zap some beans and sauerkraut in the microwave too but she doesn’t touch either one, just slathers her dog and fries with ketchup. I’ve never seen her use ketchup on a hot dog before. Hitherto she’s always been a Gulden’s mustard girl.

Around a mouthful of fries she says, “it’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair?”

“You’ve got toys.”

“They’re not really toys. They’re just for show.”

She’s pouting. “They’re toys,” she says. “And all I’ve got is Teddy and some stupid dolls.”

“I thought you liked those dolls.”

“They’re okay, I guess…”

But. I’m not stupid. I get it.

“You want some other stuff, right? Some of the stuff you saw on TV, maybe?”

She brightens right away.

“Yeah!”

“Okay. After we eat we’ll go on the net and see what we can find. How’s that?”

“The net?”

No memory of the net either. Sam has sites and files saved by the dozens.

“You’ll see.”

She’s fascinated by the computer. I remember reading somewhere that all kids are. At least at first.

We hit the merchandise sites. She’s standing behind me pointing out what she likes while I’m punching in the site addresses and clicking on the items. During the next half hour we purchase an Abby Cadabby Bendable Plush Doll, a Once Upon a Monster video game, a knot-a-quilt package, a Teeny Medley bead set, a Stablemate Deluxe Animal Hospital — complete with quarter horse, foal, donkey, goat, resident cat and border collie, operating table and bandage box — and a pair of Curious George pajamas. The pajamas come in kids’ and moms’ sizes so I’ve bought the latter. By the time we get to the Easy Bake Oven and Super Pack, she’s leaning on my shoulders.

She smells of fresh soap and traces of hot dog.

The Oven and Super Pack alone set me back a hundred dollars but who’s counting.

The plush Clifford the Big Red Dog another forty-five. I buy them all and arrange for overnight express delivery.

She yawns. She’s having fun of course but for her, maybe, it’s getting near bedtime.

She’s tired. So she walks around and proceeds to sit on my lap.

“Uh, not a good idea, Lily.”

“Why not?” She points at the screen. “I want that,” she says.

And I’m not sure I like either of these developments.

What she’s pointing to is a Baby Alive Doll. At forty bucks a Baby Alive Doll speaks thirty phrases and comes complete with a dress, a bib, a bowl, a spoon, a bottle, diapers, doll-food products — whatever the hell they might be — and instructions.

I imagine the instructions are useful.

The doll says, “I love you, Mommy,” and “kiss me, Mommy,” among other things. Eats, drinks, and wets its diaper.

I’m not sure I like that. I’m also not sure it’s wise to have her on my lap. I might have been better off when she distrusted me. Because right now this warm woman’s body, my wife’s body, is in serious danger of giving me a hard-on.

And this body thinks it’s about five or six years old.

“You’re too heavy,” I tell her.

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“Am not.”

To prove it, I guess, she wriggles on me. Bumps gently up and down.

“Off,” I tell her. “You want me to buy this or not?”

“Oh, okay.” I’m a grouch. A spoil-sport.

She gets up. I buy the fucking doll.

I’m sitting in the chair in our guestroom watching her sleep. The moon is nearly full and through the window behind me it bathes her face in slants of milky white. The night’s unseasonably warm so she’s pulled the covers down to just below her waist and I can see her belly between her pajama top and bottom, her navel like a tiny pale button pressing up and down against the mattress cover.

My wife’s an outie.

I’m thinking about how we met, eight and half years ago. I’d just landed my first job in the publishing business, as a colorist for Arriveste Ventures — garish, primary-color-only work on their Blazeman line. Nights I was brushing up on my anatomy at the adult ed department at Tulsa Community College and Sam, who already had four years under her belt in the coroner’s office, was guest lecturer. Her subject that night, the integumentary system. Skin.

A lot was familiar to me. That skin was the largest organ in the body. That skin was waterproofing, insulation, protection, temperature control, guard against pathogens, all rolled up into one. That skin was the organ of sensation. But there was something she said that I’d never considered before, at least not in the way she put it.

She said that skin permits us access to the outside world.

“All the orifices in our bodies,” she said, “our eyes, noses, ear canals, mouths, anuses, penises, vaginas, nipples — they’re all there and function as they do because skin, by not covering them, allows them free communication with the world which is not us. Even our pores exist where they do and where they don’t, solely by permission of our skin. Pretty smart stuff, skin is.”

That got a laugh. But I thought that this Samantha Martin person was pretty smart stuff too.

And I was already thinking about her own skin,

It had been a year and a half since Linda had e-mailed me from New York saying — apologetically but baldly — that she’d fallen out of love with me. She didn’t know why.

Was there another man? No. Something I did or said? No. It just happened. She’d been meaning to tell me for a while now but hadn’t gotten up the courage. I was twenty-four years old and we’d been lovers for four of those years. I was still completely crazy over her. Those seven stages of grief they talk about? I went through all seven at once I think, rattling from one to the other like a game of bumper-pool gone berserk. At the end of it, I more or less vowed that love and even sex could wait. Until I was thirty, maybe.

But then here was Sam’s skin. The complexion of her face, her bare arms in the sleeveless blouse, her long graceful neck.

It’s always been one of her loveliest features. Arguably her best. Winter-pale or summer-tan, it’s always seemed to smolder with some warm inner glow, an even interior lighting. There are tiny dances of freckles across her shoulders, hands and forearms. And one beautiful dark mole just to the left of the small of her back.

I didn’t get to see the mole that day. But from my desk in the second row of our classroom the rest was pretty clear to me. That she was smart and she was lovely. Neither fact was lost on anybody in the classroom. Especially the guys.

So while I listened carefully to what she had to say about parting epidermis, dermis and hypodermis, about scalpels, about where and how to cut in order to get at all that good stuff inside, I was doing some fantasizing too. About what it would be like to touch her.

I hadn’t done that in a long time. Touch a woman.

And when her lecture and the Q&A were over I did.

It’s always amazed me to hear beautiful women — actresses or models — say that they hardly ever get asked out, that most men are intimidated by them, tongue-tied by their beauty. Me, I just don’t get it. That’s never been my problem. Maybe it’s this artist’s eye of mine that just can’t help being drawn to beauty, to want to be in its presence as much as humanly possible. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a pretty secure family.

Maybe I just don’t know any better. Fools do rush in.

But as the class filed out Sam was talking with our teacher, Mrs. Senner. She stood with her back to me, and that gave me all the excuse I needed. I touched her lightly just beneath the shoulder and said excuse me? and the smooth warm softness of her skin and firmness within hurtled straight to my brain like a flaming trail of gasoline.