Lydia Millet - Sweet Lamb of Heaven

Lena had said she wanted to grow a beanstalk, so Burke brought her several kinds of beans to plant. He cautioned her the stalk might not be large enough to climb on; it might not reach the sky. She nodded and told him that was just as well, because she didn’t want to meet a giant or a giantess, she didn’t want to hear a cannibal giant say “Fee, fi, fo, fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman.”

She isn’t an Englishman, she said to Burke, but she still thought the giant might want her, even if she’s a girl and an American. She didn’t want to hear that giant talk about smelling blood.

Burke patted her head.

“I promise, sweetie,” he said, “there won’t be any giants speaking to you from this beanstalk.”

As soon as he said it his face went pale. He stood there for a few seconds and sat down heavily on my bed, leaned over and stuck his head between his knees.

I was taken aback — Burke had seemed more solid and self-assured lately, seemed to require less comforting.

“Are you OK?” I asked, leaning over him, laying my hand against his back and taking it off self-consciously.

He looked up and nodded.

“Sorry,” he said. “Panic-attack type. . sorry. I’m fine. Heading back to my room.”

Lena cocked her head, confused; I watched the door close behind him.

“Here,” I said, picking up a library picture book on plants, “let’s read this part about how seeds germinate. Most seeds contain an embryo and food package . .”

IT OCCURRED TO ME, reading about the transmigration of souls, that my early assumption of some kind of nonhuman power or supernatural omniscience had been impressively unfounded. It might have been just a person ’s thoughts that had got loose, the memories or knowledge base of, say, some overeducated, possibly unhinged individual whose stream of consciousness flowed along carrying the debris of a lifetime. Could be that Lena caught the ruminations of a scientist or scholar.

Maybe this is a ghost story after all.

Or maybe the information that’s now carried by so many frequencies just caught in her as it passed, lodged in her body — the live feed of a humble taxpayer somewhere, erudite but alive. Maybe some unseen field around my infant simply filtered particles from the immense cloud of content carried by those millions of waves that pass through us all the time.

THE SISTERS FROM Vermont, it turns out, aren’t sisters from Vermont: I’m bad at pegging guests’ identities. Their teeth aren’t even protruding, just large and blocky, and they’re cousins from somewhere on the mid-Atlantic coast near Baltimore. Both of them are named Linda, a name that’s common in their extended family; they’re in their early fifties, friendly, good-natured and hearty. One is an administrator at a university while the other is retired from her career at a famous aquarium in Florida where marine animals do tricks for crowds.

When the Lindas went to town for groceries today we hitched a ride with them. They dropped us off at the library so Lena could exchange her picture books — one of which is too young for her, about a bear who’s a splendid friend, the other of which turned out to feature cows rising in armed revolt. (They hold roughly drawn Uzis in their hooves; this puzzled Lena’s literal mind due to the cows’ lack of opposable thumbs.) To answer the question of the guests who don’t leave I have to be more outgoing than I have been until now, so I’m trying.

The Lindas, being friendly, are helpful in this chore. Big Linda, as Lena calls her, told us about someone she knew who was bitten by a bull sea lion. “Right on the keester, kiddo. And let me tell you it made a mighty broad target,” she chortled. She told Lena that performing seals at zoos and aquariums are not seals at all but sea lions; that some sea lions work for the U.S. Navy, finding things in the ocean; and that male sea lions can be four times the size of the females — weighing, put in the other Linda, up to one thousand pounds. That’s half a ton.

Lena calls the other one Main Linda because she met her first. Main Linda goes swimming in very cold water, Lena said to me, once every year to help raise money for the Special Olympics. Lena’s resolved to join her in one of these polar bear plunges, as she calls them. I have to restrain her from practicing.

The Lindas have embraced their nicknames.

When the two of us finished at the library we walked over to the local diner to have lunch. A beefy middle-aged man sat down beside us at the counter — beside Lena, I should say, with me on her other side. He ordered a Reuben, introduced himself as John and proceeded to engage her in a conversation about her gold and silver metallic markers. He was inoffensive, on the face of it, a neighborly fellow patron, yet I thought I detected something off-color in his expression as he glanced over the top of her head at me, a hint of a leer, some glint of beady self-interest.

So I hurried Lena at her lunch a bit. We shared a piece of sickly-sweet cherry pie for dessert, leaving bright jelly smears on the plate. Then we left, with the beefy man smiling after us as the door swung to.

Big Linda was waiting for us in her bulky car; Main Linda, who was buying birdseed in the hardware store down the block, remained to be picked up.

“Big Linda?” said Lena hesitantly, as we pulled away from the curb. “Do sea lions have really sharp teeth?”

While we waited in the car again, this time outside the hardware store, the two of them discussed sea lion dentition, a subject that was, to me, of limited interest. I sank into the warm seat in a half-dream, full of the sickly-sweet pie, grown even more sickly in retrospect, and mused on my attraction to the town’s librarian, who seems out of place here. He’s good-looking; his skin is a coffee shade but the geometry of his face seems less African than Eastern, maybe Malaysian or Indian, I don’t know. It’s noteworthy mostly because there aren’t too many colorful immigrants in this part of Maine — in some parts there are Somalis and Asians but around here most everyone I’ve seen is plain old white.

When Mainers rise up against immigration it’s often been Canadians they accuse of stealing jobs; once Maine loggers blockaded the Canadian border.

I stared out the window, which was fogged up and yielded no defined shapes, only hazy panels of white and gray. I realized I was thinking of sex, of the idea of sex or rather, to be precise, the idea of no sex — no sex at all. I mulled over my asexual existence as a mother, gazing at the foggy window, mulled over the asexual existence of many mothers, whose bodies, formerly toasted politely as sex objects when not worshiped outright, had been diverted from the sexual to the post-sexual. In the natural plumpness of motherhood they were summarily dropped by male society like so much fast-food detritus in a mall food court.

I wondered if it was impossible that I would ever be a sex object again, if I should embrace that impossibility or try to reclaim my status as a sex object — by, say, enrolling in pole-dancing classes as one of my old college friends had done after her divorce, enacting a middle-aged crypto-feminist stripper fantasy that seemed to keep her entertained.

I decided I wouldn’t enroll in pole-dancing classes.

After a minute along those lines I gave up thinking. As I swiped at the condensation on the car window I caught sight of the beefy man, John, walking toward us down the sidewalk from the diner. A light snow had just begun to fall and his slab of pink face was a blur, so I couldn’t tell if the small blue eyes were pointed in our direction; before the blur resolved he turned and disappeared through a door.

The falling snow made me want to shore us up snugly for the winter and brought a pang of homesickness for our house in Alaska, which had always been more mine and Lena’s than Ned’s, for all the time he never spent there. Ned should have gone, I thought, Ned should have left.