Hayloft Confessions

I was fifty-two miles from my old life, which is a long way to drive with a bruised heart and a cooler full of gas station lemonade, when the gravel road spat me out at the bottom of Vivian Heywood's driveway. I'm Roxy Greenwood, sixty-two years old, and six months ago I walked out of a twenty-five-year relationship with a man who had stopped looking at me somewhere around the Obama administration, though I try not to say that out loud because it makes me sound bitter and I am only bitter on Tuesdays. Vivian is sixty-one, my best friend since we met in a ceramics class thirty years ago and made matching ashtrays neither of us ever used, and when I pulled up to her house she was already crossing the yard with her hands on her hips, a woman who had been waiting for an excuse all week.

"You look terrible," she said, hugging me hard enough to make a point. "Not emotionally. Emotionally you look fine. Physically you look as if you drove here in air conditioning and think you're on vacation. Get in the barn."

"Hello to you too," I said, but she was already towing me by the elbow across the dust toward the big pole barn with the sagging roof, the one that overlooks the hayloft, the sheep, the whole golden flat world of her property in eastern Oregon. It was hot, windless, the kind of late summer afternoon where the cicadas do all the talking and the sheep in the south pasture bleat like they're filing complaints with management. I smelled hay and alfalfa and hot wood, and something in my chest loosened for the first time in half a year.

Here is what you need to know about Vivian, because it matters for everything that came after. She has never once in thirty years of friendship let me sit still when she thought I was wallowing, and she had decided, before I even arrived, that this weekend would be about work and sweat and reminding my body it still belonged to me and not to a man who wore cargo shorts to funerals. She took one look at my city blouse, a nice pale thing I'd bought for the trip, and made a face like I'd brought a live chicken into her kitchen.

"Take it off," she said. "You're baling hay, not going to brunch. There's a work shirt on the hook."

So I stripped my blouse off right there in the yard, standing in my bra in broad daylight with the barn at my back, and I need to be honest with you, which I never am, that little moment stirred something in me I hadn't felt since before the breakup. Nobody was watching. I checked. But the air on my skin felt loud, if that makes sense, like the whole afternoon had turned its head.

The work was brutal and wonderful. We hauled bales for two hours, and my arms shook, and my hair stuck to my neck, and Vivian talked the entire time about her ewes and her leaky roof and a man she'd dated briefly named Hollis who had cried at a car commercial, and by the time we broke for water I had sweated out enough salt to float a boat. We sat in the shade of the barn with our boots off, and that's when she got the look. I know that look. That look has gotten us thrown out of a casino in Reno and a potter's studio in Bend, and I should have seen it coming from the driveway.

"Look east," she said, low, like she was telling me a secret about somebody's marriage.

I looked. Up on the east ridge, two figures were working the fence line, and Vivian named them for me: Dalton Granger, forty-four, her farmhand of twelve years, a quiet man who fixed things without being asked twice, and Garth Ortega, fifty-two, her neighbor, a widower who farmed the adjacent property and had been her platonic friend for six years, ever since he helped her pull a calf at two in the morning and they became the kind of friends who borrow chain saws and never borrow anything else.

"So?" I said. "Two men fixing a fence. Riveting."

"Roxy." She leaned closer, and her voice dropped into the register she uses when she's about to ruin me. "We can show them whatever we want to show them. And they can watch. That's the entire game. We look, they look, nobody touches, nobody owes anybody a thing. We're sixty-one and sixty-two years old and we're still standing out here in the sun, and I don't know about you, but I would like somebody to look at me again before I die."

I should tell you plainly, because this story is what it is, that what happened that afternoon was a game of showing and watching, exhibition and voyeurism, two old friends daring each other to be seen by two men who had agreed to nothing more than being present, and every piece of it was asked about and agreed to out loud. I had not been looked at in a year. I had not been looked at the way I wanted since before the breakup. The want in me was old and dry as the alfalfa and it went up like a match.

"You've talked to them about this," I said. It wasn't a question, because of course she had. Vivian never leaves anything to chance except her hair.

"Last week, over pie. Dalton said, and I quote, that's their business, I'll keep working unless somebody wants me to look. Garth turned red as a beet and then said he'd be respectful about it, which in Garth means he'll take his hat off. And I told Dalton flat out that he works for me and none of this touches that: his job is his whether he watches, walks off the ridge, or never speaks of it again. Same for Garth and the friendship." She grinned at me, that crooked grin that got us both in trouble for thirty years. "Nobody's drunk, nobody's tricked, and either of us can call it off with one word. So. Do you want to?"

My hands were shaking. Not from fear. I thought about the man I'd left, and how the last year of us had been two people occupying the same house like polite tenants, and I thought about how long it had been since anyone's eyes had moved over me like a hand.

"Yes," I said. "God help me, yes!"

We walked out into the open, into the full flat light between the barn and the ridge, where two men with binocular vision could see every inch of us if they chose to look up from the fence. Vivian stood beside me with her arms folded, calm as a bank teller, and I heard her call out, easy and friendly, "Ladies working over here, boys, don't mind us," and Dalton straightened up and looked, and Garth took his hat off, which told me everything I needed to know about how this was going to go.

I stood there in my bra and my jeans with my heart hammering and the sun on my shoulders, and I reached for the button of my jeans, and I stopped, because Vivian had told me the rule and I wanted to hear it in the open air.

"Roxy," she said. "Say what you're doing, so it's ours and not an accident."

"I'm unbuttoning my jeans," I said, loud enough to carry, "because I want to be seen, and if anybody wants me to stop, say so now."

Silence on the ridge. A cicada sawing away. Then Dalton's voice, plain and kind: "Nobody wants you to stop, ma'am!"

So I unbuttoned them, one button, then the next, and I let my jeans fall to my knees, and I stood there in the hot golden afternoon in nothing but my bra and my plain cotton underwear, fifty-two miles from my old life, feeling the air touch me everywhere at once. And then Vivian, who never does anything halfway, stepped behind me and murmured, "May I?" and at my nod cupped my breast through the bra with both hands and laughed out loud, a real laugh, deep and delighted, and up on the east ridge both men stopped working entirely, and Dalton sat down slowly on the fence post like his legs had resigned, and Garth stood there hatless with his mouth open like a fish in a shallow tank.

"Atta girl," Vivian said into my ear. "You still got it. You always had it. He was just blind."

And I laughed too, standing there half undressed in a sheep pasture with my best friend's hands on me and two grown men gaping from a hundred yards, and for the first time in six months I did not feel like something that had been put away. I felt like something that had been waiting.

* * *

"Your turn," I said to Vivian, when I could talk again.

I don't remember exactly who laughed first, but I know Vivian took her time about it, the way she does everything, folding her shirt over the fence rail, pushing her jeans down to her thighs to match mine, and standing there in her own bra with her white stomach and her spread of freckles like a dropped pepper shaker, and Garth made a small strangled sound and put his hat back on and took it off again, which was the most agitated I had ever seen the man in six years of borrowing chain saws.

"All right," Vivian said, and she took my hand, and her hand was sweating, which pleased me more than I can say, because it meant she was as nervous as I was and covering it with ranch-wife swagger. "Loft. The light's better up there and my knees are done with gravel for the day."

We crossed to the barn with our jeans still down around our thighs, which meant we walked like penguins for forty feet, and I laughed so hard I had to stop and lean on the gate, and Dalton laughed too, up on the ridge, a real laugh, and that broke something loose in the whole afternoon. The men came down off the ridge while we climbed the ladder, and by the time we got to the top and shoved the loft door open onto the gold glare of the south pasture, they had settled themselves on the old John Deere parked in the