Exit Laughing (16 page)

I don’t stop. I am aware that it is neither hygienic nor completely normal to want to examine dead animals. But as I continue down the road, I realize that such conventional concerns haven’t always stopped me. In fact, there was a time—an incident really—when I gave full rein to my interest in dead animals.

It was the year I turned nine, and I had flown with my family from Washington, DC, to Castle Park, Michigan, to spend spring break with my grandfather. He lived in an enormous yellow house that was part of a secluded enclave of palatial “cottages” along the shores of Lake Michigan. It was a lovely, old-fashioned house with multiple staircases, a vast sleeping porch, and a basement that reeked of the oversized rubber
inner tubes that we hauled down to the lake each day. Adding to this exotic splendor was the endless, perfectly maintained lawn, complete with wending stone walls and a white wrought-iron bench around one of the trees.

My grandfather was very particular about his lawn. In fact, unbeknownst to me, he had recently set out several spring-loaded traps to deal with an influx of burrowing moles. Out playing in the garden one afternoon, my sister, Sarah, and I were startled when my grandfather abruptly stepped out of the house, walked quickly across the lawn, and pulled up a trap from a hole in the ground. In its steel maw was a dead, but perfectly intact, baby mole. I asked my grandfather to let me see him and promptly fell in love. He was soft and tiny and utterly perfect, with sleek dark brown fur and a sweet closed-eyed little face.

At this point, my memory grows a bit hazy. How to explain the fact that the dead mole wasn’t whisked away and tossed into the woods, or deposited in some unceremoniously dug shallow grave? All I know is that somehow, once I got my hands on him, he was mine. My only explanation is that it was the late sixties and my parents were “progressive” in their approach to child rearing, believing it was more important that my two sisters and I be interesting rather than conventional.

Eventually, they did insist I put the mole in a plastic bag and stick him in my grandfather’s freezer, but only after promising that I could bring him back to DC when we flew home later that week. In the meantime, I found every excuse to nip into the kitchen and check on him. This usually involved taking
him out of the box and balancing him on the table in a standing position, holding his frozen paws between my fingertips. If the coast was clear and I had time to linger, I would walk him past the sugar bowl and saltshaker, and even have him execute a few turns and pirouettes.

Getting into the kitchen was nerve-wracking, however, because I lived in fear of running into my gruff, stooped, old grandfather. Despite his frail frame, my grandpa had a grumpy, intimidating demeanor. He always seemed to have a cigar in his mouth and, whenever he drove us somewhere in his big shiny Chrysler, he would gesture impatiently at the driver in front of him and mutter, “Tromp on the old mushroom!” And while I loved my mole—despite its being dead—I couldn’t help thinking my grandfather a bit mean for having killed him.

By the time we were ready to fly home, my parents had taken an “Isn’t this hilarious?” attitude toward the whole thing, and my father thought it especially amusing that we had tucked the mole into a box that had “Figgy Pudding” printed on it. Once on the airplane, he asked the stewardess to put it in the refrigerator, which—this
was
the 1960s—she did. He then looked very pleased with himself and made jokes about what might happen if she got hungry and decided to steal some pudding.

Meanwhile, I thought about my dead mole the whole way home, still astonished that I’d been allowed to keep him. As soon as we were in the taxi from the airport, I opened his box and was delighted to find that he had thawed enough for me to take him out and sit him on my lap. I loved that I could
be so close to him (for some reason it never crossed my mind that “he” might have been female) and couldn’t stop looking at his little hands and feet, his tiny black nose.

“You really
are
weird, Zoe,” Sarah said, in her big sister voice. She was only a year older but had given up playing with stuffed animals, so of course she wouldn’t understand. “And that dead animal,” she said, poking at my mole’s flattened ears, “is disgusting.”

“He is not,” I answered indignantly. “It’s not
his
fault he’s dead.”

Actually, while I never would’ve admitted it, being dead was part of what made him so intriguing. The fact that he was a real animal, with fur and bones and blood, meant he was more “real” than my stuffed animals with their plastic eyes and foam insides. But being dead also made him less real than, say, our family dog. And so he existed in this strange middle place—more exciting than a toy, but not as thrilling as a live animal—and yet somehow
more
thrilling, because having him allowed me to quite literally get my hands around death, a topic that had long obsessed me.

For months, I’d been driving my family crazy asking them if they would rather be shot or hanged, burned or drowned, left on a desert island with no food or attacked by a wild animal. I never understood why they would invariably tell me to go away, apparently not as fascinated by these hypothetical scenarios as I was. I think in my own way I was trying to understand death and, at the same time, manage my anxiety about it. Gruesome as my questions were, they assumed that we would have a choice about how we died and that we might even be
able to pick the least painful or distressing option. My dead mole functioned similarly. Intact and seemingly unchanged by death—other than the fact that he couldn’t move on his own, of course—my mole somehow made death
okay
.

By the time we got home, I had named him Moley, in honor of Ratty in
The Wind in the Willows
. Moley went right into the freezer when we arrived, but when Monday morning came, I impulsively decided to take him to school. My friends were always bringing their pets to school for show-and-tell, so I had the brilliant idea of telling my parents that I was taking Moley in for this reason, even though there was no such event that day. I did want to show him off, but I also didn’t want to leave him alone in the freezer all day.

My teacher, Miss Hopper, was a high-strung woman with poppy eyes and a buzzing, nervous energy that always made me feel exhausted. But I liked her and felt that, as one of the few young, unmarried teachers in the school, she wouldn’t mind so much if I brought a dead animal to class. But when I opened up the Figgy Pudding box, she immediately asked if my parents knew what I had brought to school.

“Oh, yes,” I told her confidently. “They told me I could bring him.” I scooped Moley up and—stroking his fur with one hand—held him out to show her. “See how cute he is, Miss Hopper? You can pat him if you want.”

“Oh, sweetie, that’s okay,” she said, her poppy eyes even wider than usual as she stared down at him. “It’s really not hygienic to handle dead animals. In fact, why don’t you go wash your hands? Right now, honey. Just put him right back
into that box and give him to me. You can show him to the class before lunchtime.”

When I returned to my desk a few minutes later, a boy I didn’t like very much said, “Ew, you brought a dead rat to school?”

“Noooo,” I said, angrily. “It’s a
mole
!”

“That’s gross,” he sneered.

Turning my back on him, I tried to focus on my addition worksheet, but I felt a little worried.
Was
Moley gross? I thought about the gingerly way Miss Hopper had carried him across the room and the fact that he was sitting on the very top shelf behind her desk. I also remembered my sister sneering at him in the cab. But then I remembered the way Moley’s fur grew in a perfect little swirl under his arms and the way it looked like he had a potbelly when I made him sit on my lap. I didn’t care what other people thought: Moley was mine and I loved him.

My instinct to stand by my mole paid off when I got to tell the whole class about how my grandfather had killed him and how I had managed to get a hold of him and bring him home on the plane. Miss Hopper looked very solemn and said it was “really, really sad” when something died—even a wild animal. Everyone was quiet and serious-looking as I walked around with him, and a couple of kids looked like they might cry. Even when one of them darted their hand into his box to pat him and was abruptly sent off to the restroom to wash, the atmosphere remained subdued. This only made me feel more important. Other kids talked about going to beaches in Florida or watching TV on their vacation, but no one had a story as interesting as mine.

My exhilaration was only slightly dimmed when, just before I left the room for lunch, Miss Hopper pulled me aside and quietly asked that I
not
bring Moley back to school. “You might want to give him a nice burial in your backyard this afternoon, sweetie,” she said firmly. “I think he’s been through enough.”

Put Moley in the ground? I thought. No way! Obviously, Miss Hopper was just being “conventional.” I wasn’t actually sure what the word meant, but I was pretty sure it explained why she thought I should get rid of Moley.

At lunch, several of the boys wanted to talk to me about “that dead animal you got,” and I found myself showing off a little, referring to Moley the same way and talking about how my parents didn’t mind that I had him. Then, in my group violin class that afternoon, our teacher, Miss Aubrey, who was old and ill-tempered, was late to class, and I slipped Moley out of his box to show everyone. For a few glorious moments, I was surrounded by kids, all of whom had promptly dropped their violins and raced over. As they passed him around, several of the girls cooed, “He’s soooo cute,” and I once again felt proud to have him in my possession. The whole idea that his being dead was disgusting or upsetting was totally forgotten.

When the door opened and Miss Aubrey walked in, I had to think fast. I knew she was going to have a fit if she saw Moley, so I ducked down, grabbed my violin out of its case, and dropped Moley inside. All the kids laughed as I sat back up and began flipping through my Suzuki book, pretending to tune my violin.

“Children, please! Be quiet!” Miss Aubrey said, looking suspiciously at me over her glasses. “Zoe, is there something you want to share with the rest of us?”

Again, the room erupted into excited whispers and giggles, and I began to sweat, sure that someone was going to let it slip that I had a dead mole in my violin case. And I had another source of worry: Moley had definitely begun to smell. Not bad exactly, but a distinct odor. I hoped it didn’t start to spread around the room, which was already stuffy and overheated. “Oh no, Miss Aubrey. Everything’s fine.” I assumed a bland, disinterested expression and, once she turned away, shot a fierce warning look at the two grinning boys sprawled in the seats behind me. As the class proceeded, I sat in a paroxysm of anxiety that either the smell—or one of my classmates—would give me away.

Back at home that afternoon, my mother insisted Moley go immediately back into the freezer, and by the time I got home the next afternoon I was feeling tired and grouchy and only peeked in on him briefly. While I would never have admitted it, Moley wasn’t looking so cute anymore. Somehow his day at school had leached the gloss from his coat, and he had frozen into a strange shape, with one paw bent at a spastic-looking angle. Another day passed without my taking him out to play, and another after that. By then, my interest in him had definitely begun to wane, although I thought about him often, missing those first exhilarating days after he came into my possession.

Then, a few weeks later, my mother came into my room looking excited. She had been telling her friend, Sally, about “our mole saga,” as she called it, and Sally had suggested we get in touch with Laney Dexter, a teenager who lived a couple of blocks over. Laney was an eccentric girl with glasses and messy hair who always reminded me of Meg Murry in
A Wrinkle in Time
. Just like brainy, odd Meg, Laney had some unusual interests, including, apparently, taxidermy. She had been teaching herself how to dry and stuff animals so as to preserve them and had apparently been practicing on various recently deceased pets from around the neighborhood.

“So I was thinking we could see if Laney could stuff your mole,” my mother said brightly. “That way, you can keep it, but you don’t have to worry about having him … 
decompose
.”

My mother looked so delighted with the idea that I agreed, although I didn’t feel very enthusiastic. I’d been to taxidermy shops up in New England during summer vacations, and the animals there always looked dusty and sad. What I wanted was Moley to be soft and fresh again so I could play with him. I thought about the word
decompose
and suddenly felt like crying. I knew what decompose meant. It was when things turned mushy and moldy, like old fruit when it’s been on the counter too long. I hadn’t minded so much that Moley was dead, as long as he looked alive. But now I realized that, instead of staying the way he’d been at the moment of death, Moley was going to rot and turn into something awful. It was a prospect I didn’t want to contemplate.

That weekend, we took him over to the Dexters’ house, and Laney agreed to work on him. I should have known I was never
going to see Moley again when I caught a glimpse of eight or nine frozen little packages all lined up next to each other in her freezer, but by then it was too late to snatch him back.

And sure enough, I never did get Moley back. Laney must have accrued quite a backlog of dead animals because, over the years, I’ve run into other people from the neighborhood who told me that they, too, handed over their deceased pets, never to see them again. But then, I suppose having my mole stuffed by a self-taught teenage taxidermist might have been worse than having him trapped in her freezer forever. And frankly, I was ready to let him go by then.

What I wasn’t ready to let go of was my interest in death. I continued to back my family into corners to grill them on their preferred way to die, and I found death scenes in movies and books of enormous interest. Like many children, I was curious about death and not sure yet if I should be afraid of it. Even when my grandfather died the following year, I remained more interested than sad. Mainly, I thought a lot about his body and was deeply relieved to hear he’d been embalmed, which apparently meant he wouldn’t decompose. At least for a while.