Ashley Hand is a service academy graduate and spent her career as a military officer deploying all over the world. She is now an MFA candidate at Cornell. Her newest stories are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Harpur Palate, and Blue Mesa Review.
I showed up barefoot on Gloria’s doorstep, a towel wrapped around my body and cinched under my armpits, my hair dripping down my back. The hairs on my arms and legs needled into cactus silk in the anemic sunlight. It was the day of the summer equinox. The air was bright and cold. Shadows had begun to stretch by mid-afternoon. I could see Gloria through the screen door of her cabin. She was curled up on the sofa, her feet tucked underneath her, watching I Love Lucy.
The sound of canned laughter drifted outside. I rapped on the siding under her porchlight. Would she let me use her tub please. My propane tank was out. I normally wouldn’t bother, I said. But my stitches. I could feel them swelling between my legs.
Our cabins adjoined one another. The layout was the same, one big open room, a bed in one corner, a bathroom in the other, a galley kitchen, a sofa upholstered in thick tapestry printed with bears and wolves and trees. Our cabins were built from the same materials, rough-hewn logs and hurricane joists, steel purlin and cedar timbers. They looked like they could have been manufactured from kits ordered out of a Sears & Roebuck catalogue. Gloria nodded at the bathroom door, said I could go ahead. The bath was made out of ribbed aluminum, like an old-fashioned washtub pioneers might have used for their clothes. An embroidered muslin canvas hung over the toilet. Someone had stitched a needlepoint bluejay on a twig. I closed the door and let my towel fall to the floor.
The surgeon said I was allowed to take baths after a week had passed, and that in fact, baths would help the stitches dissolve properly. They were catgut sutures, clear like fishing line. I rented the cabin for two weeks, to recuperate off the grid. I bathed once, twice, five times a day. I sank into the tub and let my hair drift around me, suspended until my fingertips pruned and the water cooled and my nipples hardened in the air. I drained my propane tank this way.
To get to the cabins, I had to drive past oil drilling, through the fume and fetor of dryland farming into the bowels of New Mexico. The leasing office was annexed to a gas station, right off the last exit of Highway 54. I wasn’t supposed to drive after the surgery, but the roads were so open and flat and straight, nothing to hit. A woman gave me a set of keys and assigned me a cabin number. There were groceries for sale at the gas station. I bought cigarettes and a case of water and a pack of cards, then drove ten minutes up a gravel road to the cabins. I’d been there for three days before Gloria showed up. We were aware of each other’s presence. I’d seen her clipping clothes to a line in the yard, the breeze blowing her hair around her face, strands sticking to her lips. She looked to be about my age. People came here to write or to dry out or to grieve or to hide. I didn’t know her story. When I emerged from her bath, Gloria was still on the sofa. I said, would you like to come to dinner at my cabin tonight. What I didn’t say, I’m so lonely. Please come eat with me.
I heated cans of Campbell’s soup in a saucepan on the Coleman stove and we ate at a folding card table. I lit candlesticks. Days before, the generator had gone out. I missed its thrumming and buckling and groaning. It coaxed me to sleep in the afternoons, when my head was aswim with wine and oxy. The sound comforted me. We had generators attached to our canvas tents when I was deployed to Africa during an Ebola outbreak. They cooled off the tent and drowned out the noises of the other women.
After the generator kicked off in the cabin, I could hear the sound of blood in my ears. The air was still, except for when the Apaches from the nearby Air Force base pulsed into the empty blue sky and shook the cedar timbers. I couldn’t charge my laptop without the generator, or my cell phone. I let them die. I listened to ballad music through a solar-powered radio and looked out the window at the Guadalupe Mountains. In the evenings I climbed on the roof. I could see the edge of the salt basin dunes, where the rose-colored desert swept up against the white sands. I told time off a sundial. Mostly I slept.
Gloria stayed for a nightcap. I found out that she was a beekeeper. She was also a scholar attached to some university and had a paper under revision with a fancy science journal. She’d come here for peace and quiet. She told me how some bees were thrillseekers, while others preferred to hang around the hive. How different bees have different personalities, and how some got a rush by becoming nest scouts, vanguards looking for new places to live when the colony outgrew its hive. She told me how she was studying their neurological reward systems, how they were wired to respond to novel experiences. She spoke with great emotion about her bees. She told me how vast populations were dying off and how in China they were already pollinating their crops by hand.
It was eleven before she left, and the cabin had grown cold. I struck a match to a nest of kindling in the woodstove and stoked and blew until the logs snapped and caught. I was used to the cold, in fact preferred it. Mac pushed me away in the night, said he was red-blooded, ran hot. He said could I please not take this personally. He said could I please just give him space. But how to explain to this man that I wanted to wear him around me like a bearskin, that I wanted to helix my legs around his and sleep half-atop him, melted into his bodyweight. I would crack the windows to try and freeze him out.
He moonlighted as a paramedic and eventually moved into the other bedroom so he could focus on sleep. I got a dog and started needing less from him. The dog was only ten pounds. She had wiry fur and bright white teeth, smooth and small like tic-tacs. Eventually I moved to the couch so I could fall asleep with the TV on. I liked to stay tuned to QVC. I was mesmerized by the women, their stenciled eyebrows and fluffy groomed hair. They could talk for ten minutes about a vacuum. They would dump little pots of dirt on clean white carpet, rub it into the fibers with their bejeweled fingers, then run the Hoover suction hose over the soiled swatch. I liked the pristine line that was left behind. I liked how the salesladies could work up enthusiasm for a Sham-wow. They would spill a puddle of orange juice and then use the Sham-wow to wipe it up, hold the sodden fabric up in the air so you could see that it was pregnant with orange juice but not dripping at all. Then they would wring the Sham-wow out The Summer the Bees are Gone 07 into a clear bowl, ogle over the volume of orange juice it held. My goodness, they would say, would you look at this magical Sham-wow. How in the world could such a small thin piece of cloth absorb so much? You would never know how much it was carrying just by looking at it.
We spent a lot of time in ski towns then. We were living in Albuquerque and would drive up into the mountains, to old-school resorts in southern Colorado with big wooden lodges that sold packets of Carnation hot chocolate for a dollar, PBRs for two. We would get styrofoam cups of chili and share a bean burrito. The cafeterias looked like the kind you’d eat at in a camp in the woods as a kid. There were stackable chairs and rows and rows of tables. I learned to ski. Mac loved to ski, loved to be thrilled. He loved to go winter camping and skin up snowy basins, feel the supple and silk of the powder under his skis. He would continue up and down and up and down until nightfall. We would sleep in a bright yellow pup tent, hang a lantern in the center so we were illuminated in the night against the snow like the exoskeleton of some exotic lit-up beetle. I slept bravely and dreamt about drifts of snow calving off the flank of the mountain and burying us in an avalanche. I turned toward him on these nights and he held me.
I touched two fingers between my legs. The stitches felt like the tracks on a zipper. Bits of flesh swelled between the sutures. My outer lips now completely enclosed my labia. When I looked at myself front-ways in a mirror, my vagina looked like a fortune cookie, two pincers meeting together and enclosing some secret. Before, my labia used to hang below my lips like a wrinkled earlobe.
When my dog was spayed, they shaved a square patch of fur along her underbelly. Her skin was so soft. She moaned through the night, though I set her up on a plug-in heating pad and snapped baby aspirin in half to feed her every two hours. I cried at her pain, just this tiny little dog that now had a seam in her skin and no uterus. I knew it was normal to spay an animal but I curled myself around her body and thought what have I done, what have I done to my poor sweet little girl. It took months for her fur to grow back. I thought about that after I had my surgery. They had not stripped my entire pelt, only what was needed to get a clear hold of my labia. I had a bald strip in the center now. I thought about being wheeled into the operating room, about counting to ten while the anesthesia kicked in, about a nurse shaving me with a Bic while I was passed out, so they could clamp onto the folds of skin, aim the light laser on the parts we had agreed they ought to cut off. I thought, how extraordinary to be able to buy a pretty vagina these days. I thought, what an extraordinary use of light.
The next morning, I walked over to Gloria’s cabin on a carpet of dried needles. A row of spindly alpines divided each plot of land. We watched the local news together on her TV set and drank coffee and shared a cigarette. I asked her had she climbed on her roof yet. I showed her the metal set of stairs that had been mounted to the logs. She brought her bee papers up there and I brought a book. I watched in the distance as people undulated along the sand dunes with big colorful kites. From where I sat, they looked like bizarre beautiful butterflies on strings. It reminded me how in Africa, we would stand on top of our war planes and watch windsurfers less than a mile away billowing along the coastline. I felt safe at altitude. I felt like I knew where I was, like I could see. I liked this about New Mexico. You could see forever and ever. You could see a storm coming at you from miles away.
I wound up telling Gloria about Mac. How we met in Africa when we were both in the Air Force. How he had ripped me open. How I thought maybe he left because my body wasn’t right. How I thought I had to do something about it. How it felt like maybe I would die from the ache in my chest.
Listen, she said to me, the night before I went home and we were saying our goodbyes. She gripped my shoulders. The stars are dying, she said. The oceans are heating up. The summer the bees are gone, you won’t remember him at all.
