Be Mine Read Free Page A

I?
    Of course they wouldn't recognize me now.
    ***
    S AME handwriting, same yellow paper, and, again, in a red pen, today, in my box:
    Sherry, I hope you have a great weekend. I'll be thinking of you. I'm always thinking of you...
     
    A SLATE gray February day, Saturday, today. From my study I can see a hawk circling the bird feeder—Mr. Death, waiting for something smaller, and also feathered, to land there. Last night I woke up at least twice to the sound of something in the walls. Mice, or a squirrel, squirreling things away, making itself a nest out of the cold—nuts, pinecones, candy bar wrappers. Jon wants to shoot it, if it's a squirrel. He claims they'll chew the wiring in the walls and burn the whole house down, but I say how likely is that. The house is nearly two hundred years old, and the squirrels have been nesting in it longer than we have, and when the cold weather lifts, they'll find another place to live.
    Oh, dear, the hawk just got what it was waiting for. Happened so fast it took me a minute to realize what had happened, looking up from this page to the bird feeder, and seeing something small and gray flustering there, and then the cold swiftness passing over it—a shadow with wings, and then in a heartbeat, both of them were gone.
     
    Be Mine.
    Who would send me that first valentine, and then the second, and why?
    Have I ever said that to anyone,
Be mine?
    If I ever did, I can only imagine it would have been to Reggie Black, the summer I was seventeen.
    But I never really wanted him to be
mine.
I wanted to be
his.
To be claimed by him. It was the ambition we all had, we girls, back then. Some guy's enormous class ring on a chain around your neck. Some guy's letter jacket. To come to school wearing his T-shirt, his ball cap. To have a bracelet with your name and his name and a + sign engraved on it. To show it to all the other girls, gathered around in the hallway.
Look.
    With Reggie Black, I wanted desperately for him to stake such a claim, but he never did. Reggie was shy. Every day that summer he'd come over while my parents were at work and the house was a small, dark possibility behind us. We'd kiss on the porch. We'd sit on the swinging chair. Eventually we'd go behind the garage, and his hands might find their way to my breasts, but I waited all summer for him to say,
Let's go inside.
He didn't.
    Has anyone ever said to me, anonymously or not, "Be mine"?
    It took this long to be claimed, finally, and by a complete stranger!
     
    B OUGHT a new dress today at the mall. Silk, with pink flowers, a plunging neckline, very sheer. I'll have to wear, always, a slip under it, and a sweater over it for the next five months. But I love it. At the department store I stood in front of the three-way mirror for a long time and looked at myself in it, and thought,
Well, not bad for her age.
    I owe it all, I suppose, to the elliptical machine at the gym. I swear, it is the fountain of youth. It's restored to me the figure of my girlhood. Or better. Back then, I ate too much. Especially in college, as an undergrad in the dorms. All the pizza, and the popcorn, the cafeteria—the meat and potatoes heaped on my plate. And I can still remember the cheese soufflé, exactly the kind of thing my mother would never have made, so rich that it made the air inside it seem heavy.
    And the heft of those white plates, and standing hungrily in a line at the steamed glass windows, and how even the wan green beans, the sliced carrots, pooled and slippery with melted butter in a silver trough, called out to me. These things which, at home, I would have refused to eat—suddenly, now that I had nothing but choices, became what I wanted. Now, when I see myself in photographs from those days, I realize that, although I felt incredibly sexy every minute of every day—braless, in short skirts, no makeup, my dark hair so long it was a hazard around candles and revolving doors—I was, frankly, fat.
    Then, graduate school, I learned to