t’s hard to put things in order, you know, to get them straight. It was all rather confused at first. Sometimes I think—
It was like dreams, how they’re fluid and changing. You look at one person and see their face. It’s not really their face, you realize that later, but you know who they are in the dream. Now, I’m so old. It’s hard to remember, to keep straight what I saw and what I thought, and then what I remembered later on.
The important thing is that everything I saw in the mirror is true. That’s what stood out the whole time. Everything that I saw in the mirror was true.
One day, I saw Nanette. I recognized her immediately, even though I thought I had just imagined her. There she was, her straggling blond hair falling down in front of her face, filled with stripes of gray-brown because it was so unwashed. It was long hair, long down past her waist, and she was covered with it as she sat in the middle of the blades of grass. They grew up past her shoulders, thick, strong, wild blades of grass, not like a lawn. They grew up over her, giving her cover. She blended in with the wilderness, her long sheathes of blond and gray hair among the gray-green and yellow-brown grasses, long as swords.
She was eating something. She had something on the ground, and she was eating it in handfuls and fistfuls as she sat on the ground among the blades of grass.
Nanette was born to a country family in France. They had an apple orchard and dairy farm in the region of Normandy. She was small, just a baby, but her first memories were of apples and cream, the tastes blending together, melding, combining. Rich, sweet, full cream and sour-sweet crisp apples. The flavor seemed inherent to Nanette, like mother’s milk.
Something happened, one day, when she was small. Perhaps it was a war. It’s difficult to say. Everything is lost in time. The farm burned to the ground. All that was left of the house was charred wood, standing there, lost. The apple trees stood and grew, because they were apple trees, and what else was there for them to do? The cattle were taken away by other nearby farmers, put into their herds.
Everyone supposed that Nanette was dead, like her family. She was only a baby, barely a child.
There was a cow that wandered off into the woods, though, one that the farmers didn’t catch. The dogs from the farm ran loose and wild. Their pack survived. They didn’t need the farm or the people to make their way in the world.
Nanette was used to being with the dogs. She spent days playing with them in the tall, green grass of the fields. She knew how to get milk out of the cow. She was a baby, but babies know how to eat. As she got older, she would bring milk to the dogs. She would gather apples from the trees. In turn, the dogs shared with her. She was part of their culture, part of their world.
Nanette stayed out of the way of the people in the surrounding areas. The dogs avoided them, so she avoided them. She would stay in the underbrush and in the woods, where she was invisible. Nanette lived the life of a dog. She didn’t know she was a person, and she didn’t know that the other dogs thought differently from her. They did think differently, though. In some inherent way, she would never be quite like those around her. She would never even know it.
She was sixteen when she first was seen by the boy. The boy’s father was the new farmer of the apple orchard. He was building a new house on the foundation of the old one, and he had torn down the old barn, which had decayed. They were clearing out the brush that had grown up in the apple orchard and judging the viability of the trees that remained.
The family was just a man, his wife, and the boy. The boy was also about sixteen, really a man already. He was a farmer, as his father was a farmer. He expected to work the farm. He would marry a wife, and she would come work the farm, too, baking pies and tarts with the apples that grew there with his mother. They would have children, who would grow up on the farm. The children would become farmers, or the wives of farmers. That is how life went, like the apple trees, which moved with calm regularity through the springtime filled with heavily perfumed blossoms; through the summer, when apples grew from small hard knobs to burgeoning balls; through the autumn, filled with succulence as the apples grew full and fell to the ground, surrounded by leaves turning color for the season; through the winter when the apple branches grew barren and dead; and finally into spring again, as small buds turned to flower and leaf. He was in the early summer of his life, young and not yet ripe.
One day, he was out in the apple orchard pruning off branches, when he saw her pass through the edge of his vision. She was quick, and he registered only a motion. He looked into the brush at the edge of the woods to see what it was. He didn’t want anything coming around, eating his apples. He didn’t see it, but—
There was something there, he knew, just outside of his field of vision.
Nanette hovered in the shadows. She was secure in her hiding. She sniffed the air in front of her. She could smell him, a scent of a human. Somehow, today, this human smelled different, familiar. It smelled similar to her own scent. Her scent was different from the smell of the dogs. She wore dog-scent on her every day, but it was a disguise, a mask, a surface scent over her natural scent. This smell, this smell of this boy, bothered her somehow.
He walked over toward the line of the trees. Nanette held perfectly still in the shadows.
He looked around, not seeing her at first. He was just about to turn and go back to the orchard, when he spotted her. Their eyes met. She knew that he saw her. She did not know that she was naked, her long hair not disguising her nakedness.
She stared at him.
“Salut,” he said.
Startled, she turned and ran off, quick on her feet, graceful in her not-quite-human, not-quite-canine movement off into the forest.
The next time he saw her, she did not hide. She was standing at the edge of the woods, watching him, moving gracefully to the left or to the right as he moved through the apple orchard. He watched her, but did not try to approach. She watched him, maintaining her cover in the woods, the feeling of security of the shadows and trees.
They gradually got used to each other, being in the neighborhood of each other, being not too far away from each other. The boy never mentioned her to his father or his mother or anyone he knew. He didn’t quite believe in her. She was not quite real, so far removed was she from his own reality.
One day, he walked up to her. He had a hunk of bread his mother had baked fresh that day. The smell from the bread wafted up to his nose. He knew that she would covet the bread.
He walked up to her as he would walk up to a horse. He tore a piece of the bread out of his hand and held it out in front of him, held it up to her. She sniffed at the air. They shared the scent of fresh-baked, still-warm bread. Nanette was an animal. She was a sensualist. She attacked the bread with her mouth, not her hands, and swallowed it almost whole, like a dog.
She brought out the animal nature in the boy. The two of them shared a purely physical passion there, in the woods, outside, where the wind and the grasses and the trees united around them. He was a man of the land, not far from nature. She existed even closer to nature; she was nature. Together, everything they did was natural.
This union, this oddity, this strange force, in its complete animal naturalness was almost supernatural to the boy. It was madness, apart from and aside from the normalcy of everyday life and the wholesomeness of apples and cream.
It stayed separate and uncanny. It stayed wild and secret. It stayed in the woods.
I could always make things sound true, you know. I could always tell people whatever they wanted to hear, or whatever I wanted them to believe at the moment. Perhaps it was just because I believed it myself. Perhaps. I don’t know.
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