Buck Scrape

They took their honeymoon a month before the shotgun wedding. A long weekend in the Poconos. His coworkers winked and goose-laughed and wished him luck when he told them he wouldn’t be there that Friday. She’d always wanted to see one of those Valentine tubs up close. In the morning, they applied for a marriage license at the county courthouse, and in the afternoon his truck wound up through old coal country.

She’d always imagined that a honeymoon served as a portal to a new world. One where her heart would be like pretty cloth stretched and staple-gunned tight to a wood frame. She bought a special lace babydoll slip that parted for her round belly. She would surprise him with it. Marriage would adjust what had always been slightly askew inside her. In its place: a radiant, faced-forward woman. 

They pulled into the lot. A sign read the land of love.

November in northeastern Pennsylvania turned the mountains dull and dirty. Leaves had left their trees weeks ago. The lack of color hollowed her bones. In their little suite, the tub was candy-apple red and the walls were peach. She sucked all the sweetness she could from those colors and carried them with her when they walked across the grounds to the dining hall. 

They were the youngest couple there by at least thirty years. They sat at a corner booth and watched other couples scoop chickpeas onto their salads. The booths were plush and swoopy, painted in pastel colors, relics of the 1980s. Tropical plants were placed in each corner. Dinner was served on plain melamine plates. Carrots were boiled soft and everything seasoned only with salt and pepper. She dressed for dinner in a sweater and long skirt that showed off her belly. Some of the other couples stared and smiled, silently sending them luck.

He seemed so happy to take her to this place, to show her a good time, so she didn’t want to say how on edge she felt. There was a strangeness, though, and she had never been good about keeping things to herself. He was relieved, he said, to hear her name the strangeness, and she was relieved to have said it. 

He held her and fell asleep. She stayed awake thinking about how the dining hall reminded her of the nursing home where she’d waited tables as a teenager. She hoped the stale air and sadness would not needle into her bones. She didn’t want them to contaminate things inside her, to change her feelings for him or to touch her baby. 

She’d always imagined that a honeymoon served as a portal to a new world. One where her heart would be like pretty cloth stretched and staple-gunned tight to a wood frame. Marriage would adjust what had always been slightly askew inside her. In its place: a radiant, faced-forward woman.

The next day they made their way around. The activity hall had a few miniature-golf holes and a pool table. They played these games, even though it felt odd to do so at eleven in the morning. The day felt all wrong and all the objects around them seemed sick. Plastic rock formations lined the hot tub and small pool. She could have stood there all day sniffing the chlorine smell. It seemed the only pure thing. Everything else gleamed synthetic and cheap. She had never been to a resort before. She wondered if they were all this way, no matter where in the world you were. 

He wanted to walk the short hiking trail behind the resort. 

The trail started with a steep incline. She clasped her belly in her hands and stopped to catch her breath. He pointed to rough patches on young trees. He explained how the bucks scrape their antlers against the bark and how it leaves a wound in the tree’s skin. She listened and asked questions. She didn’t feign interest for him. She didn’t feign anything for him. He drew the good, sweet things from her. 

Then it was dinnertime again. They talked about how the meals there made them sad and reminded them of microwaved TV dinners. Summer, they decided, was probably a much better time to visit. At least then there would be a green lushness to counteract the nauseating feeling of the things there. By Saturday night she was homesick and ready to leave. 

Epsom salts swirled in the heart-shaped tub. She soaked in it for a while, careful to keep cool enough for her baby. She stepped from the tub and he patted her dry. She lay on her side while the baby kicked hard. He was focused on the light switch. There were tiny lightbulbs in the ceiling meant to imitate the night sky. He flipped switches so that the room was pitch-dark except for the fake stars, which she could see reflected in the mirror behind the tub. It reminded her of a diorama at the state museum. A buffalo stands alone on a snow-covered hill, and the starry sky stretches behind him. The diorama is meant to depict a Pennsylvania night in the 1700s. 

She did not feel that she had entered the new world. Instead, with their own miniature sky and her baby’s rolling kicks, she felt connected to something vast and old. 

Sunday morning, they skipped breakfast and started south. At a little gas station, they bought apple-cider donuts and hot coffee. An hour into the drive, they stopped at the country’s largest Cabela’s store. The store housed several two-story taxidermy dioramas. There was an Arctic scene with polar bears and foxes and powdered snow. An African safari with lions, zebras, and meerkats. He was mainly interested in the big room with what seemed to be miles of mounted buck heads. He pointed out the ones with the nontypical, gnarled antlers. Beneath each prize winner, there were newspaper clippings with stories of how each head had been acquired. 

She spent fifteen minutes in front of a world-record buck reading about the hunt and the head’s subsequent attic storage until its discovery at a garage sale decades later. 

Recently, she had noticed a new interest in the slow, deliberate lives of the animals around her. Her mother had always sat in their sunroom, watching the birds and squirrels with such intensity, tossing them peanuts. Her grandmothers on both sides were the same way. For the longest time, when she was younger, she had been bored by everything but her own violent emotions and couldn’t understand the fascination. But now, she was beginning to glimpse it. All the ways of being on the Earth that she had once believed had nothing to do with her.