Poppy on the Mountain
There was snow even though Poppy’s handheld radio said there wouldn’t be. My phone had no reception on the mountain and there was no Wi-Fi and I hated the basement with its cold porcelain tiles where the 2005 Dell lived with its whirring slab of hardware right in between the washing machine and the stationary bike, so I sat down in the kitchen, exposed beams twenty feet overhead, and opened the copy of the Boston Globe with which Poppy had just returned from the general store. I sipped at a cup of Poppy and Grandma’s coffee, which they made from a mixture of dark beans and light beans for reasons I have never understood. In the fridge were three cartons of 1% milk. You could take your toast with butter or Promise margarine.
“I can’t believe you eat that stuff,” I said to Poppy, a piece of bread thick with margarine halfway to his mouth. He did not look up from the business section, but his features rippled with tension. I imagined that he’d made that same face when he read my letter, his silver-stubbled cheeks and his laugh lines going taut as he tried to make sense of what I meant by “pronouns”, of how a single person could be referred to as “they”, of where I had gotten lost in a paradigm so simple as gender. In fear of how he’d treat me in the aftermath of the letter I’d packed my bag only from the more traditionally masculine stock in my closet, a pair of jeans and a couple of sweaters, though I had come with my fingernails painted in a minty green and there was no hiding the length of my hair. Poppy either did not notice the nails or chose to ignore them entirely. I had not shaved for several days, and hadn't brought a razor with me, and my facial hair was already turning my face rugged and my thoughts towards self-loathing.
I had no plans for those two days, knowing that Grandma would come up with a couple of activities for the two of us to do together, and I would take myself on a hike around the mountain one day or the other, and with the rest of my time I could lay around and read a book in their bright renovated farmhouse that always smelled like wood. I would not ski, even though the resorts were open and I usually went at least once during a visit if I could. The thought of riding a chairlift with Poppy was giving me vertigo. I could smell his aftershave from across the table.
Poppy gestured towards the style section of the newspaper, which lay in front of me on the table, and held out his hand. “Could you pass me that, kind sir?”
I handed him the paper.
It was this house in the crystal evergreen winter, it was the house on Cape Cod that Poppy’s father had built with a team of carpenters in the 1950s by the greasy seafood diner that baked bread loaves the size and shape of a human head in the muggy New England summers. Behind the Cape house (the “cottage”, Grandma called it, which she drove to for two weeks every spring to “open” and for two weeks every fall to “close”, besides her trips in the summer with Poppy to join us after the long drive from Maryland or alone to host her six friends from nursing school: “the ladies”) was a narrow public beach where you could stand and watch the train bridge creep down and up across the bay. Once every trip on a hot summer day my dad’s friend from college visited the cottage with his wife and their kids, always the same chaos, the same weird injuries, my little brother in the hospital because one of the kids dropped a horseshoe crab on his foot and it came out the other end like a bloodied alien finger, my mom too tipsy to drive because she had half of one cocktail, my dad too tipsy to drive because he’d had nine cans of beer, my mom ending up behind the wheel with my dad in the passenger seat, the friend’s wife taking care of me on the couch because I’d fainted on the beach, my little brother in the hospital again another summer because another one of the kids cracked him in the forehead with a baseball bat.
Another summer, and the friends came again. Their curly haired toddler was old enough to fixate on me by then, chasing me around the cottage; I recently rediscovered this person on Instagram and saw from their bio that they were using gender-neutral pronouns: a kindred spirit, someone who recognized a thread between us in their toddlerhood wisdom.
There was a July fourth in the cottage, years earlier, before my little brother could even speak, where I’d crept down the creaking basement stairs, an exposed lightbulb covered in spider webbing and casting a warm yellow mist all around me, to locate the source of the shouting I’d heard from my bedroom. It’s the only time I can remember seeing my older brother cry, bent over in the basement garage, Poppy wailing away at his buttocks with his open hand after an unsuccessful trip to the beach to watch the fireworks. The noises, it seemed, had been too loud for my brother, who as an adult continues to be extremely sensitive to sound and who also owns two handguns.
It was at my nuclear family’s home in Maryland beneath the dogwood tree in the front yard, its flurry of white petals always fooling my brain for a moment into thinking it was snowing, that I stomped on a hornet’s nest in the mulch and collapsed in the grass as I was stung twenty-five times, and it was in the clawfoot tub that Grandma soaked my wounded body in warm and soapy water. It was in the same front yard ten years later where I vomited, hammered on cheap vodka and inexperience, and the same bathroom where Grandma caught me blacked-out on the floor bleeding from my right elbow, having managed to tear the metal toilet paper rod out of the wall when I fell.
There was an old song Poppy would sing as he puttered around any of these various homes. When I was in a production of Guys & Dolls in high school, I was shocked to walk into a rehearsal to hear the chorus girls singing it:
I love you
a bushel and a peck
a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck
a hug around the neck and a barrel and a heap
a barrel and a heap and I’m talking in my sleep
about you!
I was startled by a knock on the front door; I had not known about the hunters before that trip. They would drop by in their flannel shirts, always sweating and a bit unsteady, to let Grandma and Poppy know as a courtesy that they’d be out there in the woods with their equipment. Poppy would talk to them briefly about philosophical concepts like the circle of life and thinning the herd. Poppy was not a hunter, was never a hunter (and in fact I once watched him turn and walk away from a parade on a trip to Italy because a horse broke their leg and officials arrived to kill the animal) and he did not own a gun or even consume red meat.
I planted myself half in view. I wanted to watch the visitor, constantly shifting his weight not side to side but front to back as if he were about to dive from a great height, with an expression that said he knew he could only win bronze at best. Poppy made no attempt to introduce me, but the man acknowledged me with a quick wave. To express my displeasure, I crossed the foyer without returning the gesture until we could barely see each other behind the heavy wooden front door. I could see the man’s white pickup truck parked where the road stopped in a massive bank of mud-speckled snow. Beyond this mound the road technically continued, but the next house was miles off on another face of the mountain and accessible by a much more serviceable road, so the town plowed TR-88 only as far as my grandparents’ house. The white pickup’s passenger-side mirror was smashed and dangling loose from a cable.
The man on the doorstep rubbed his right eyeball. Poppy would never have let him in the house; Grandma told me later in the car that she would have preferred that the land was posted, but Poppy would not hear it for a political reason they apparently had not discussed in detail. Poppy shook the man’s hand. This apparently was not taken as a cue that the conversation was over; rather, it seemed to invigorate our newest friend, who spoke next about a bridge over in nearby Bellow’s Falls which neither the residents on the Vermont or New Hampshire side of the river wanted to claim as their own.
Poppy happened to be well-versed on the subject, and cheerfully corrected the man’s details: “Not at all! You’re thinking of the two hundred thousand dollars of taxpayer money that the council spent just to measure the darn thing,” and so on. The man left shortly thereafter, hiccuping. I watched him return to his truck from the kitchen window; he took a rifle from the backseat, pulled on a backpack, and set out into the woods.
Grandma did have a plan for us that day; we toured the nearby village’s Makers Day, where fifty or so artists and craftsfolk would open their homes and studio spaces to visitors for tours, demonstrations, sales. We bundled up, Grandma in a black turtleneck and a vermillion jacket made from that awful plasticky stuff reserved only for deep winter apparel and myself in a thick black peacoat and fluffy pink scarf (“sherpa”, I think the style is called, which smacks of colonialism to me), and stepped outside into the crisp mountain air. The snow drifted towards the Earth, consistent but unintrusive, cold and soft and friendly. We climbed the hill to the short red barn: I knew from experience that there were bats in the rafters, that if you snuck out there in the middle of the night with your brothers just to poke around in Poppy’s forestry equipment you could see their brown eyes blinking overhead. We clambered into Grandma’s Jeep in front of the building. I turned the radio on, at which she rolled her eyes, at which I started fiddling through the stations and then gave up and turned it back off, dissatisfied with my options. She asked me about Kathryn, who I’d broken up with a year and a half prior but still spoke to on the phone every month or so. We drove down the hill, across the winding mountain paths, through the town with the church and the post office and the general store and one restaurant and nothing else, not even a gas station, chatting about local politics, the crux of which always seemed to center on which streets would be registered as incorporated town roads and therefore receive services such as snowplowing and pothole filling. Grandma and Poppy went to town meetings and Poppy sometimes spoke, because the road leading to their house had been contested twice in the fifteen years they’d been living there. They’d had no such concerns in the affluent Philadelphia neighborhood of their middle age, in the six-story townhouse where they’d had a grand piano and a private elevator.
Grandma looked like my mother behind the wheel: the same high cheekbones, the same washed-out freckles beneath the same hazel eyes, the same milky skin with the same glacial blue undertone, the same thin hair cut in the same boyish style that got them both looks from other women which they never noticed. I wondered if I would look like her someday, aware that the older I got the more and more I looked like Poppy.
Our first stop was at the house of an abstract painter. She didn’t have a separate studio- just a living room with all of the furniture covered in transparent plastic, a workstation in the corner, and paintings with price tags lined up around the perimeter. In the corner by the entrance was a table with a coffee pot and a tray of cookies. I ate a cookie, and the taste of manufactured lemon shortbread lingered in my mouth as the painter showed us her technique, Grandma cooing affirmations while the woman poured paint from a cup onto a canvas, her right arm dancing to make the colors splash and swirl.
“This is the fun bit,” the painter said, her apron splattered with turquoise dots, the smell of her sweat rich in the air, and lifted a gun-like power tool connected to an outlet via orange cable. She lowered the instrument over her painting and waves of heat pressed down against the acrylic goop, spreading and drying it into textured patterns and subtle gradients of blue-green. Grandma was transfixed, her eyes glued to the painter’s sturdy hands, the painter’s close-trimmed fingernails, the painter’s bicep straining with the weight of the heat gun.
The door clattered open and the spell broke, the painter stepping away from her work to greet a new group of visitors. We circled the room, pointing out our favorite pieces to each other (and I silently cataloguing my least favorites, as well), and left without purchasing anything.
In the car, Grandma offered me a Mento. I ate three. There were always Mentos in Grandma’s car, just as Poppy always ordered one glass of Sprite and one glass of merlot at restaurants and insisted on talking to strangers in elevators. I opened the map which detailed the location of each artisan and navigated Grandma to a house tucked into a valley of pine trees. There were roads not identified on the map, and we took a wrong turn that brought us to a low metal gate that said NO MOTORIZED VEHICLES above a blocky drawing of a snowmobile crossed out with a scarlet X. We doubled back, and confirmed we were on the right track when we spotted a line of cars parked along the side of the road. At the end of the road was a fairytale house with a thatched roof and cobblestone and an adjacent hut with a chimney and a swirling cloud of smoke.
We were greeted by a dog in the yard between the buildings. I gasped and bent to the spotted brown mutt, scratching their head with one hand and pressing the other to their chest to keep them from licking my face. Grandma stood behind me, frozen. The dog’s tail wagged and I am sure that if I had my own tail it would have been wagging, too. Still, no matter how often I wake already craving coffee and sunlight from a dream where I have a big fuzzy rear extension and no matter how much the new deposits of estrogen in my machinery have moved my fat around in ways that bring me such great joy, the closest I can get to a tail is a buttplug I sometimes wear when I play with my lover, Kirk, which has a soft swaying imitation that trails along the floor when I get to my knees and lick peanut butter from Kirk’s fingers.
This way is probably for the best. I would not want, actually, to be a dog. I just want to be loved on like a dog, cuddled like a dog, scratched between the ears, to know where I stand and who I can trust and to be given unguarded affection, and these desires I am beginning to see as attainable inside my human frame. The dog wandered back towards the pyramid of firewood stacked against the side of the hut, and I stood, feeling sturdy and grounded and refreshed in my heavy winter boots. There were two signs in the yard: one pointing to the hut which read “Thomas Fulton, Glassblower”, and the other pointing towards the house itself, which read “Buck Fulton, Ceramics”.
We entered the hut and stepped into a material wall of heat. There was a small crowd ringed around a line of blue tape on the floor, and a man in corduroys and suspenders with a potbelly and a thick white beard sat in a chair within the tape, spinning a molten ball on the end of a metal pole at least as long as he was tall. The pale skin of his face was coated with soot, and his blue eyes reflected the plasmic tangerine glow of the hot glass.
What he was making was a vase: a skinny, curvy shape, twisting the pole and lifting it and popping it into a furnace and holding the glass down with tongs and spinning the pole and placing his lips to a mouthpiece at the end. I pictured his lips melting and fusing to the metal, which they did not. He told us they were having problems keeping the ovens hot enough as he fiddled with a dial on the wall, that all week he’d been getting up every two hours at night to make sure the pieces weren’t cracking on the metal racks.
His wife circled the room, passing out homemade snickerdoodles and apple cider from a tray. I took a cider and a cookie, and Grandma took a cider.
“I love this stuff,” Grandma murmured, her nose buried in the paper cup. It was true: she could be found sniffing out apple cider in the corners of every festival and coffee shop and roadside stand. The cookie was too stiff, in my opinion. A snickerdoodle ought to have a hearty chew.
In the other building, which was dark and cramped where the studio had been bright and loud and spacious, the glassblower’s adult son sat perched on a stool in the kitchen between two tables of unimpressive ceramic mugs and bowls. He did not seem interested in speaking to us, simply watching us with his lips pressed together and his right hand picking at the fingernails of his left. We departed quickly, the dog sleeping on a pile of burlap sacks beside the firewood in the yard.
“I don’t understand how somebody as smart as Poppy can still watch Fox News,” I said as we got into the car.
Grandma put the car into reverse. “I don’t even go there, hon.”
I did not launch into my semi-prepared speech about how Poppy’s media consumption related to his treatment of me, and why I needed help speaking with him about it.
Our last stop for the day was at the home of a husband and wife who built custom-made bicycles in their garage. According to the husband, their typical build went for $4,000. I thought about Poppy’s father, who made belts and wallets in Boston’s leather district and made a small fortune investing in Tampax in the early 1940s.
We returned home just long enough to shower and change; that evening, we were going to see a folk band play several towns over. As I crouched to lace up my boots, Poppy called me by my legal name- the first time he’d used any name for me in the past twenty-four hours.
“Don’t call me that,” I said, not looking up from my boots. The front door opened in a breath of cold air, then slammed shut. I held back my tears until Grandma showed up in the mudroom a minute later. We headed out the door together, talking about the empty farmhouse in town which used to house a summer stock theatre. Grandma climbed into the passenger seat and I in the back, swallowed up against a wall of leather and upholstery.
The banjo player for the band was a trans woman. Poppy did not notice, but he did comment as we were leaving that she lacked the stage presence of her male collaborators.
By the time I made it downstairs for breakfast the next morning (I could smell the waffles from my room in the attic), there was already a truck parked at the end of the road. I checked right away because I wanted to go for a hike; it was a late morning for me, ten, the sun already shining bright and full against the mountainside. It was a different truck from the previous day, and I asked Grandma if anyone had come to the house.
“No,” she said, stepping out from behind the counter in a coral apron. “He pulled in maybe twenty minutes ago. I’m nervous about you going out.”
After I finished a waffle and a cup of coffee, and after I finished helping Grandma with the dishes, Poppy having left with his skis hours before I woke, I creaked down the steps into the basement. I walked past the washing machine and the computer and Grandma’s rack of dumbbells, the floor oozing coldness into the soles of my feet and up into my brain, and to the closet at the end of the hall. I stopped several paces short at the entrance to Poppy’s office, a little nook with a metal desk and several filing cabinets. This is where I had imagined, for the last six months, Poppy reading my letter, his gold wire-rimmed glasses down at the end of his nose, a checkered button-down beneath a daffodil sweater, a scowl chiseled into his face, the tender little child in his gut crying their eyes out at the whipping end of a belt in a dusty Watertown duplex or perhaps a little later in the darkest corners of the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School or perhaps simply going numb over the course of a lifetime spent stifled by codification, by the messages they’d internalized about which truths were immutable, about what was true to begin with, ripping to shreds four pages of handwritten material wherein I explained to him what “nonbinary” meant and how it applied to me and to him, Grandma leaning against the wall trying only for a moment to convince him not to destroy the letter before she retreated back upstairs.
I stood there, hating myself for failing to push harder, for failing since I’d arrived to look Poppy in the eye and tell him straight up that he would need to buy-in if we were going to have a relationship going forward, wincing every time he referred to me as a “gentleman” (something I couldn’t remember him doing in the past, though perhaps I simply wasn’t paying attention in the past), my mother’s refrain echoing in my head: “In so many ways, he is such a great man.” I didn’t know exactly what she meant by this, though I suspected it had to do with money and how much of it he’d spent to help us get through college, and perhaps other financial maneuvers he’d made that nobody had ever told me about. A couple of years prior on a Christmas break home from college, in my childhood bedroom, against the backdrop of my camouflage wallpaper, my mother told me that Poppy had been diagnosed with lung cancer and that under absolutely no circumstances was I to bring it up when he and Grandma arrived the following day.
I opened the closet at the end of the hall to retrieve every article of reflective or bright winter gear that I could find. I scavenged a neon orange beanie and vest, as well as a pair of reflective yellow gloves. I went upstairs and dumped the haul in the mudroom and stared out at the truck for a while. I went to my attic room and masturbated. I touched myself to the memory of a moment on the side of the mountain three years prior, when I’d brought Kathryn along with me and we’d gone for a hike and done what we’d both been waiting for days to do, maneuvering around our clothes in a snowbank. Grandma and Poppy had been disappointed when Kathryn and I broke up.
I wiped myself with my hands, pulled my jeans back up from around my ankles, and made my way down the stairs to the bathroom on the second floor landing, taking care to use my elbows instead of my hands. I washed my hands and brushed my teeth and avoided looking in the mirror. I went downstairs and flipped through Poppy’s National Geographic, fifteen minutes of my attention captured by a full spread showing the progression of their cover art since the publication’s inception until I ran out of patience and looked out the window again.
The truck was gone. I ran upstairs to pull a sweater over my mesh long-sleeved shirt and back down to the mudroom, where I donned my coat and laced up my boots and wriggled into the luminous accessories.
I stepped outside and walked the shoveled path across the front yard, the snow piled up to my waist on either side. I passed the black metal lamppost that always featured in Grandma’s Christmas card and headed up the dirt road, past the barn to where the trails split. The pine trees cut off my view of the horizon from every side, and their scent mingled in the air with the snow and the mud. For the first time since I’d arrived, I could feel my muscles relaxing into gravity and my belly expanding with my breath.
My gut hardened and my muscles clenched their fists only a couple of minutes later at the trailhead. The white snow was dotted with droplets of blood; I knew what I was looking at, and I knew I had two other trails which I could follow to traverse the mountain, but I kept pace with the blood all the same, walking just a foot to the left of it, opposite the fresh bootmarks going in the other direction.
I passed the spot where Kathryn and I had lain down in the snow. I passed the little sled nailed to a tree which denoted a path that, when followed a couple of miles, led to a sugar shack where a small outfit tapped trees on lease from Grandma and Poppy to boil sap for syrup. The sugar shack had its own service road down the other side of the mountain. Kathryn and I had turned off at the sled, and when we reached the sugar shack, steam billowing out from a pipe at the top, we were greeted by a middle-aged man with an unkempt beard who smelled like marijuana. I told him who we were, and he gave us a free tour of the equipment and two enormous jars of thick, brown, nutty maple syrup. We sipped from one of the jars the whole trek back, lips sticky, my skin tingling from various pleasures and Kathryn’s nose pink from the cold.
The blood, sticky in its own right, did not turn off at the sled and neither did I. It wound up the mountainside as a trickle of droplets in some places and splatters in others. I passed an abandoned shed, boarded up with plywood. I crossed a wooden plank atop a frozen stream. The further I followed the spots, the more certain I became that at any moment a bullet would come roaring through the pines and strike me in the neck and I would die in slow agony, and nobody would ever knew which blood was mine and which blood I had been following.
I chewed on an internal monologue: What kind of person would I be if dad was a hunter, if he had insisted on taking me hunting and dressing me up in camo and teaching me how to use a gun instead of simply trying to get me to play baseball for two seasons before giving up, or if he had refused to come to see my high school plays, or if he had complained when I came home from my first semester of college with my ears pierced? Will I inherit my dad’s familial baldness, or the heart problems that took his parents before I’d gotten to know them as an adult? I love you / a bushel and a peck / a bushel and a peck and what had Poppy’s father been like? When and how did he explain menstruation to his son, or did he explain menstruation to his son at all? What is it like for women who hunt when they go to gun shows and hunting clubs?
The droplets took a sharp turn off the trail into the brush. In the jagged landscape, uncleared and otherwise untouched, the trail of blood went chaotic: there were droplets still, but there were also streaks and smears and puddles and places where a bloody carcass had clearly been dragged along the forest floor, bootprints and chunks of flesh and matted bits of fur. I struggled forward, my feet catching and sinking in the snow.
Suddenly the path continued no further; the madness converged on a single point in space and time where a second penetration had occurred: this of a knife instead of a bullet, for at the end of the trail of blood was a mound of entrails, pink and crimson and gray, little wisps of steam curling off into the mountain air. I did not know at the time that gutting a bagged deer and leaving the intestines behind was standard practice.
It was after Grandma dropped me off at a New Hampshire bus stop, pulling away as I got on the bus, leaving the farmhouse for what would turn out to be the last time I saw it for twelve years, that I noticed I was grinding my teeth. I wept on the bus, massaging my jaw, the gray blocks of the Boston skyline looming over me. When the virus hit, I told Grandma that being quarantined with Poppy sounded like a nightmare. She laughed. I could picture her on her stool in the pantry, her spine in alignment and the corded phone against her cheek, surrounded by big glass jars full of flour and oatmeal and chocolate chips and all of her dish-wear, surrounded as well by fragrant sanded walls of cedar, Poppy cross-legged in house shoes on the uncomfortable sofa in the living room reading the National Geographic, neither of them having spoken to each other yet that day.
© Marge J. Buckley, 2020