Quah, Oklahoma
I SECRETLY WATCHED VIN HOFF for months before I ever met him. I’m not kidding. This was not love—let me be clear on that, though I had an immediate attraction to him. The attraction was really quite strong. There was also the fact that Vin was in his early twenties, and I was thirty-one. I have always liked younger men.
The public library downtown where I worked had a comfortable shaded area beside the south entrance where I parked my bicycle. After work, sometimes, I sat on the steps by the entrance and observed Vin playing with his son in their yard across the street. I’m aware how strange it looks for a woman to ride a bicycle to work, but I never liked to drive. I was, in fact, the only woman who parked a bicycle at the library. All the other bicycles belonged to kids.
Vin looked rough around the edges, drove both a car and a motorcycle, and was a single dad. I loved hearing the sound of his laughter. He was a musician who played guitar in a David Bowie tribute band downtown at the Branch, a local bar near the university in town. He was broad-shouldered, with the short, unkempt hair of a fashionable young man. He looked young in a sort of James Dean way, usually dressed in blue jeans and T-shirts.
His son was a boy of seven or eight named Luka. I learned this one afternoon as I watched Vin and Luka play from the library steps. “Luka, Luka!” Vin would say. Luka flapped his arms like a bird. He ran across the lawn and fell down. He jumped and pointed to the sky. I watched from afar and clapped for him. Overhead, clouds darkened from an approaching storm. When it started raining, Vin and Luka went inside, but I stood under the awning of the library, waiting for the rain to let up, thinking they might come back. I pulled out my sack lunch and ate cold pasta from a plastic container. I stomped on the ants with my old black boots. The people who came in and out of the library must’ve thought I was homeless.
For months I watched them and never saw the boy’s mother. Vin and Luka came and went frequently. When they weren’t home, I sat on the steps playing on my phone or reading the novels of Colette, which I had checked out from the library. With every passing week I grew more comfortable with what I was doing, sitting on the steps and reading and watching this younger man and his son.
The first time I was close to Vin was when he took Luka for a walk and I followed them a few blocks to a diner on Main Street. Inside the diner I stood behind them in line, so close I could see the creases on the back of Vin’s neck. Luka wore a red T-shirt and blue jeans. His arms were well-tanned, his hands small. He had light-brown hair trimmed short on the sides. Had I actually reached out and touched him that day, tapped him on the back with a finger or nudged him on the shoulder, had I met them in that moment, I wonder if things would’ve been different. As it was, though, the waitress seated them at a small table near the window, and I didn’t have any money, so I left.
Another time I rode my bicycle to the liquor store, and by coincidence, Vin was there. He was buying a bottle of wine. He paid with cash and said something that made the girl at the register laugh. Did he know her, I wondered, and what exactly did he say to her? I turned away so he couldn’t see my face. After he left, I asked the girl at the counter what he had said, and she looked confused. “Do you know him?” I asked.
“A little,” she said. “He comes in every now and then. I think his name is Vin.”
“I know his name,” I said, and left. But the truth was that I didn’t know his name, and now I did, so I was quite happy.
WHEN I WAS YOUNG, Papa told me to watch out for boys. They’re like snakes, he said. They will creep up on you and trick you when you’re vulnerable. My mother laughed at Papa anytime he said things like this, and I didn’t believe him. Once there was a boy I liked in school who didn’t like me back. His name was Thomas and we were in sixth grade. I sat behind him and stared at the back of his head. I liked something about the way his hair was unkempt, the way he slouched in his desk, the sneakers he wore. His blue jeans, his collared shirts. His small, delicate hands. I remember thinking I wanted to go swimming with him, envisioning us playing in a pool somewhere, splashing around. We would wrestle and I would dunk him and hold him underwater. He would spring up out of the water and kiss me. It was a fantasy I enjoyed. At school, some of the boys liked to say that Thomas had once peed in the bed during a sleepover. One day they were laughing about it. Thomas was trying not to cry, but I could see his eyes fill with tears. He was so cute it didn’t matter to me whether he cried at school or peed the bed in sixth grade. But he never paid any attention to me. One day I approached him on the playground, grabbed his finger, and twisted his hand. I felt sure that if I could just get him to talk to me, he would like me. Thomas pulled his hand away and yelled at me to stop. He looked at me with this sad look, and I started laughing, happy I got his attention. Then he walked away and never talked to me again.
* * *
On my day off, I rode my bicycle to the library. Even when I wasn’t working, I would often come in to use the computer, since I didn’t have one at home and mainly used my phone online. At the computer I watched a video of a tiny coconut octopus underwater, enclosing itself in a clamshell. The tiny octopus moved slowly across the floor of the ocean, unraveling its tentacles around the clam and climbing into it before closing it.
“The shells serve as a shelter for these octopuses off the coast of Indonesia,” the narrator said.
I watched the video over and over. I don’t know why I was so captivated. It might’ve been the gracefulness with which the octopus enclosed itself, the way it moved so slowly, so certain of its goal. In a way I found it soothing, almost meditative. I wanted to believe that my goals were as important and necessary as this task seemed for the octopus. Why did it need shelter at that moment? Was there a predator lurking nearby, or did it simply feel the need for privacy and isolation, the way we humans need our privacy?
When I got off the computer, I headed downstairs to the basement and saw an old Native man, probably in his seventies or so. He wore a sleeveless shirt and baggy pants and had a cane with him. His hair was mostly gray and hung down to his waist. He was filling up his thermos at the water fountain. Something about him caused me to stop; perhaps it was that he looked a little like my grandfather, but this man had scars on his cheek, and I found myself staring at them.
“A bear cub scratched me a few weeks back,” he said, noticing me. “I was in the Rockies when I saw the bear. It looked peaceful, harmless, calling for me to reach out for it, to help it. But when I bent over to pick it up, it slashed me across the face. I didn’t get angry. What good is anger? What good is vengeance?”
“You look like my grandpa,” I said. “He lived to be one hundred and three.”
His gaze was intense. “My brother always wanted to live to be one hundred. The other day I visited him at the cemetery on the hill.”
“I have a brother there, too.”
“Buried?”
“Yes.”
He finished filling his thermos and turned to me. “I saw a young man walking around by himself. Maybe it was your brother’s ghost.”
He laughed at himself, took a drink from his thermos. But his face held a sadness, somewhere between longing and pain.
“I’m Sonja,” I said.
“Wado, Sonja,” he said. He nodded and wished me a good day, limping away with his cane.