Large Animals in Everyday Life (10 page)

• • •

There was a time, just after my father's death, that my mother would never have let me get this far out of her sight. I was just starting first grade, so she took a job serving food in my school cafeteria. She may have been possessive, even compulsive, but I loved that it was my own mother's hand placing the extra cookies on my tray. Lunch was like a daily personal gift, somehow connected to my father, whom I couldn't exactly remember. I knew that she was there
for
me, but
because
of him, and I sometimes wondered if he had actually told her to give me the cookies. She stayed on for eight years, and because she was younger than the rest of the cafeteria staff and served with a mild, surprised look on her face, while the other women scowled and had drawn-on eyebrows, my mother was popular. She knew every kid's name and she made jokes about the food she served. She could afford to; she had chosen to be there.

When I went off to high school we thought our arrangement had ended: the high school cafeteria workers had a union and wouldn't even accept my mother's application. But then she found out the company that serviced the school's vending machines was hiring, so she became the new candy bar lady. Now only the greasers joked with her, the guys in navy tanker jackets who hung out by her machines talking about Auto Mechanics Lab and looking too old to be in high school. They were shiny-faced, actually greasy, and often red-eyed, and they clomped around the halls in black lace-up boots, jingling large bunches of keys that were attached to their belts with heavy link chains. Their girlfriends looked cleaner but wore clunky wooden sandals that made as much noise as the boys' boots and keys, and they went around with giant combs sticking out of their back pockets. They all looked shrewd and unhappy, as though they expected to hear bad news at any moment, and my mother would tell me stories. “Kimmy Forsythe is not as dumb as she looks,” she would say to me at home. “She is the sole guardian of her four little brothers, not one but
two
of whom are diagnosed hyperactive.” Or she might say, “You should be nice to the Mazzetti boys. They don't even hear how they sound to others, and they have a terrible time of it at home.” By now I felt I was indulging my mother, that her job was a way of ensuring that
she
was okay. One of us needed to feel that one of us was safe, but the roles had grown hazy, as roles will do.

Occasionally some guy I'd never spoken a word to would bump into me in one of my classes and say, “You got a nice ma.” This always embarrassed me—I had it easier than the Mazzetti boys and I knew it. I wasn't jealous of my mother's attentions to them, and I didn't secretly want to run away with them, or marry them, or be them. My friends and I ignored the greasers and laughed a little at their girlfriends' clothes, but mostly we did our homework and went to movies and our boring jobs. I was a weekend hatcheck girl at a Holiday Inn and was already
thinking of going on in art, not for the rebellion or the romance, but because of how simple my mother made ceramics look. I was never one to look for trouble.

• • •

I remind myself of this as I pull off of I-75, finally, safely into Georgia, at a stop called Arabi, which I know only because it's written on the rusted pay phone in front of the gas station. Beyond the station there's just an empty road curving away into the high tree line. “I'm coming home,” I tell my mother. “I'm on my way right now.”

“That's odd,” she says. “I mean, not strange that you're coming, but Charlie just telephoned for you here.” She and Charlie have never met, but they know each other's phone voices.

“I didn't tell him I was leaving,” I say. “He's the reason I'm coming.”

My mother doesn't say anything for a moment. Finally she says, “Well, I told him I didn't know anything about where you were, since of course I didn't. What time will you be here?”

“Late,” I say. “Or in the morning.”

“Wake me up if you want,” she says.

I fix my hair for a minute in the silver reflection on the phone's coin box before walking over to the little cinder-block building to pay for my gas. Inside, a large man with a face the color and texture of stone sits behind the counter, watching a newscast on a black-and-white wall television. He nods and takes my money. On the TV a man is speaking in Chinese, and a translation appears beneath him: “We couldn't determine whether here is a detective.”

“They're everywhere,” the man says to me, sliding me my change. “When you least expect it, expect it.” He might be talking about detectives, communists, the Chinese—it's impossible to tell. “You traveling alone?” he says.

“Not far,” I lie.

“Be careful, that's all I'm saying,” he says. I thank him and back out, keeping my eyes on a spot on his shirt.

Georgia is a lengthy drive, south to north, and it keeps getting foggier and hillier. I listen to all-talk radio and learn unlikely things, that “alfalfa” is Arabic for “father of all foods,” that racehorses aren't allowed more than seventeen letters in their names, and that in Tokyo lonely old people rent actors to play visiting sons and daughters, actors who are trained how to laugh and how to say goodbye. These all seem like fine things to know for now—if nothing else, they are things I didn't know while I was with Charlie. They make as much sense as anything. Life, I think, is like one of those games where everyone sits in a circle and each person must, in turn, remember one more item in a series. You have to remember the whole series each time, in order, or else you are out.

Early this morning I tiptoed out of the bedroom, my smallest muscles tensed. But Charlie didn't wake up; his face remained puffy and unmenacing in sleep. I went out to my car, expecting determent: slashed tires, a dead battery, anything. I remembered once when I was a child and my mother had planned a driving trip, packing up the car the night before, as I had now. In the morning when she opened the driver's side door, a kinglet flew out—the tiniest, most perfect bird I'd ever seen. This morning, now that I was finally leaving, I expected and even hoped for something like that to happen, but there was nothing to stop me, to make me think. The best I could come up with was the raspberry Danish someone had splattered all over my windshield a few days earlier, when I'd been withdrawing my savings from the bank. I hadn't taken it personally, because the parking lot was crowded and I was inside for half an hour, but when I mentioned it to Charlie, leaving out the part about my savings, of course, he said a woman had probably done it. He said a man wouldn't mess with something as petty as a sweet roll. “A man would've bent your rearview or broken off your antenna,” he said.

I told him he was wrong, that women had respect for things like Danishes, and men didn't. He just laughed, the way he kept me from ever being right about anything. I remember still thinking stubbornly: A woman wouldn't do that to a Danish.

What I can't remember is when I got used to being wrong so often. It started with such minor things—what kind of dish drainer we should own, whether to keep his clock radio or mine by the bed, which was the superior brand of corn flakes. I had no experience with bullies. We'd met at someone's backyard party by a kudzu-covered wall where I'd chosen to drink, and his awful confidence had probably only seemed wholesome, as solid and natural a part of my happy evening as the beautiful green-and-rock wall. I don't even remember when we began to speak, or what was said. It didn't seem like an event, which was probably why I trusted it. I knew if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was, and I put no stock in Princes Charming. My life was solitary and easy then. I was stagnating happily in a futureless position as a keyliner for a commercial line of do-it-yourself books, walking home from work each night with bits of sentences and diagrams stuck in my hair. I still grinned at geckos and cypress trees, even though I'd lived in the South for the three years since college and those things should have been routine. I would sit and watch my lionhead goldfish for ninety minutes at a stretch, talking out loud to him and feeling every bit as satisfied as I would if he had understood me. I had peace and I trusted in it.

Charlie, at first, seemed to fit into my life so easily; he kissed me like it was just another way of breathing. He hugged me tightly and with purpose, the way you hold a child who's just come home from summer camp. We would be kissing and I would open my eyes and his would already be open, as if he were waiting for me. He worked in a distant and glamorous department of my company, in public relations, and when he spoke about us, he spoke with great confidence. He spoke as if it were only a matter of time before most people agreed with
him about most things. He laughed at hesitation and uncertainty in any form, and when he talked he made small, finalizing gestures with his large hands. I had been content with the banal—my fish, the Spanish moss, an occasional barbecue—but Charlie brought need, strong desire, and he did it with elegance, with grand finesse. “How this turns out,” he said frequently in his salesman's voice, “is up to you.” “Whatever you want,” a phrase of indulgence, became, over time, imbued with menace. I wasn't sure
what
I wanted, having never wanted much. Now, the more I wanted him, the more inevitable, immutable we seemed. It wasn't long before I couldn't remember ever
not
wanting him, ever being happy without him. Why was I arguing with him, why was I making myself so unhappy?

On one Sunday morning, the morning after the first really bad time, we sat side by side like peaceful grandparents on the sunny second-floor landing outside our apartment's back door. I kept getting distracted by the faint humid wind blowing beneath my legs and by my sore scalp, which felt in the sun as though it were heating from within. My whole body felt hungover, though we had not been drunk. Sitting between us on the concrete, like some Martian child, was a small roll-on bottle of Absorbine Jr. which Charlie had gotten from the 7-Eleven after breakfast, when I'd complained. He'd been silent, dabbing the cool medicine on my bare back and arms, the sore places from the night before where he had yanked me or where I'd pulled too hard to get away, and now the sweet minty smell steamed up from me, both foreign and reassuring. I hung onto the smell as though it really were a child, or a gift, as though it were the first thing about us.

The day wobbled along around us, the fight of the night before looming everywhere and yet seeming unreal, comic, impossible to apprehend, like the balls and blobs of mercury from a broken thermometer, shaken from their context—dangerous, but in a way you could neither believe in nor ignore. We said little, both of us apparently wanting his apologies behind us. I
had forgiven him hurriedly, feeling while doing it a rush of instinctive relief not unlike getting my head above water after a long submersion. That anything else lay down there still, beneath my relief, was not a possibility I considered.

After a while a neighbor's cat trotted by, carrying in its mouth a women's pink cardigan sweater, as though this were a sensible thing for it to be doing. A short unnatural laugh came out of me, and the cat's eyes shifted my way for an instant, then back at the sidewalk, the cat itself never breaking stride, the sweater sleeves swinging on either side of its stuffed jaws. I put my sore head down and laughed, great gulping laughs like gasping for breath. “You see?” I heard Charlie say. “That's what I mean.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. I didn't sit up.

“Look at me,” he said, and then I did. His face was awash with sincerity. “The way you see the world,” he said.

I tensed, my whole body ready for the accusation, for more of the same. But he surprised me.

“You're so easy to love,” he said. “It would be so easy for you to find someone else who loved you.”

His face, without its usual salesman's varnish, was disconcerting. He was scaring me. “Stop it,” I said. He was reminding me of being alone, answering a question that had not been asked, and now the question, not the easily spoken answer, was what seemed true. The world without him whirled before my eyes, like some terrible rushing tide. There was something wrong with me, something wrong. “Please stop talking,” I said, and held onto him for dear life.

And even now, a dissonance holds me upright, a faint but draining sense that something, like a tire or fan belt, may not hold. I grasp at things I learned in college, Jung saying when we couldn't stand to keep going forward we would go backward instead, looking for someone besides ourselves to blame. I remind myself wisely, over and over, that
Charlie
is the responsible one here—Charlie's anger, Charlie's strength, Charlie's two
hands. It is physically impossible to spit in one's own face, I tell myself cleverly. And: It is part of the syndrome for the woman to feel it is her fault. That there is even a syndrome, that this happens everywhere, without reason, should comfort me, but it doesn't. The interstate stretches placidly ahead, shaded by a sweep of high clouds. The question sits, motionless, in the back of my mind: why I let this happen, what weakness in me caused this. Or is it something my mother should have seen in me, but forgot to see?

• • •

She never had counseling or went to any support groups when my father died, though her friends and relatives all urged her to. “Vocation and avocation,” she said. “That's all the therapy I need.” Once, in a stack of papers on her nightstand, I found a newspaper clipping about a group for new widows and widowers. The article featured a man who shaved his legs and held them in bed at night, “just to feel some soft skin,” and a woman who wouldn't throw away her deceased husband's Jockey shorts. Anything you needed to do was okay, the article said. I was eleven or twelve when I found this, and it became a source of high, secret hilarity for my friends and me. We weren't laughing at these people's tragedies, it was just the Jockey shorts, though if my mother had seemed tragic, the article might have struck me differently. But she had begun selling her figurines in shopping centers and plazas, and sometimes taught pottery to small groups of women on our porch. And she laughed with me about the women after they left, saying one looked like she was carved out of a butcher's block, another should know better than to wear halter tops—these poor women who had nothing better to do than to take her class, these were the ones to feel sorry for.