The Fate of Mice (5 page)

“She’s a dog,” Jonathan says.

“If she’s a dog,” the vet says, “may I ask why you haven’t had her spayed?”

Jonathan splutters. “Excuse me?”

“You got her from the pound. Do you know how animals wind up at the pound, Mr. Argent? They land there because people breed them and then don’t want to take care of all those puppies or kittens. They land there-”

“We’re here for a rabies shot,” Jonathan says. “Can we get our rabies shot, please?”

“Mr. Argent, there are regulations about breeding endangered species — ”

“I understand that,” Jonathan says. “There are also regulations about rabies shots. If you don’t give my
dog
her rabies shot — ”

The vet shakes her head, but she gives you the rabies shot, and then Jonathan gets you out of there, fast. “Bitch,” he says on the way home. He’s shaking. “Animal-rights fascist bitch! Who the hell does she think she is?”

She thinks she’s a vet. She thinks she’s somebody who’s supposed to take care of animals. You can’t say any of this, because you’re on four legs. You lie in the back seat of the car, on the special sheepskin cover Jonathan bought to protect the upholstery from your fur, and whine. You’re scared. You liked the vet, but you’re afraid of what she might do. She doesn’t understand your condition; how could she?

The following week, after you’re fully changed back, there’s a knock at the door while Jonathan’s at work. You put down your copy of
Elle
and pad, bare-footed, over to the door. You open it to find a woman in uniform; a white truck with “Animal Control” written on it is parked in the driveway.

“Good morning,” the officer says. “We’ve received a report that there may be an exotic animal on this property. May I come in, please?”

“Of course,” you tell her. You let her in. You offer her coffee, which she doesn’t want, and you tell her that there aren’t any exotic animals here. You invite her to look around and see for herself.

Of course there’s no sign of a dog, but she’s not satisfied. “According to our records, Jonathan Argent of this address had a dog vaccinated last Saturday. We’ve been told that the dog looked very much like a wolf. Can you tell me where that dog is now?”

“We don’t have her anymore,” you say. “She got loose and jumped the fence on Monday. It’s a shame: she was a lovely animal.”

The animal-control lady scowls. “Did she have
ID?”

“Of course,” you say. “A collar with tags. If you find her, you’ll call us, won’t you?”

She’s looking at you, hard, as hard as the vet did. “Of course. We recommend that you check the pound at least every few days, too. And you might want to put up flyers, put an ad in the paper.”

“Thank you,” you tell her. “We’ll do that.” She leaves; you go back to reading
Elle
, secure in the knowledge that your collar’s tucked into your underwear drawer upstairs and that Jessie will never show up at the pound.

Jonathan’s incensed when he hears about this. He reels off a string of curses about the vet. “Do you think you could rip her throat out?” he asks.

“No,” you say, annoyed. “I don’t want to, Jonathan. I liked her. She’s doing her job. Wolves don’t just attack people: you know better than that. And it wouldn’t be smart even if I wanted to, it would just mean people would have to track me down and kill me. Now look, relax. We’ll go to a different vet next time, that’s all.”

“We’ll do better than that,” Jonathan says. “We’ll move.”

So you move to the next county over, to a larger house with a larger yard. There’s even some wild land nearby, forest and meadows, and that’s where you and Jonathan go for walks now. When it’s time for your rabies shot the following year, you go to a male vet, an older man who’s been recommended by some friends of friends of Jonathan’s, people who do a lot of hunting. This vet raises his eyebrows when he sees you. “She’s quite large,” he says pleasantly. “Fish and Wildlife might be interested in such a large dog. Her size will add another, oh, hundred dollars to the bill, Johnny.”

“I see.” Jonathan’s voice is icy. You growl, and the vet laughs.

“Loyal, isn’t she? You’re planning to breed her, of course.”

“Of course,” Jonathan snaps.

“Lucrative business, that. Her pups will pay for her rabies shot, believe me. Do you have a sire lined up?”

“Not yet.” Jonathan sounds like he’s strangling.

The vet strokes your shoulders. You don’t like his hands. You don’t like the way he touches you. You growl again, and again the vet laughs. “Well, give me a call when she goes into heat. I know some people who might be interested.”

“Slimy bastard,” Jonathan says when you’re back home again. “You didn’t like him, Jessie, did you? I’m sorry.”

You lick his hand. The important thing is that you have your rabies shot, that your license is up to date, that this vet won’t be reporting you to Animal Control. You’re legal. You’re
a good
dog.

You’re a good wife, too. As Stella, you cook for Jonathan, clean for him, shop. You practice your English while devouring
Cosmopolitan
and
Martha Stewart Living
, in addition to
Elle
. You can’t work or go to school, because the week of the full moon would keep getting in the way, but you keep yourself busy. You learn to drive and you learn to entertain; you learn to shave your legs and pluck your eyebrows, to mask your natural odor with harsh chemicals, to walk in high heels. You learn the artful uses of cosmetics and clothing, so that you’ll be even more beautiful than you are
au naturel
. You’re stunning: everyone says so, tall and slim with long silver hair and pale, piercing blue eyes. Your skin’s smooth, your complexion flawless, your muscles lean and taut: you’re a good cook, a great fuck, the perfect trophy wife. But of course, during that first year, while Jonathan’s thirty-six going on thirty-seven, you’re only twenty-one going on twenty-eight. You can keep the accelerated aging from showing: you eat right, get plenty of exercise, become even more skillful with the cosmetics. You and Jonathan are blissfully happy, and his colleagues, the old fogies in the Anthropology Department, are jealous. They stare at you when they think no one’s looking. “They’d all love to fuck you,” Jonathan gloats after every party, and after every party, he does just that.

Most of Jonathan’s colleagues are men. Most of their wives don’t like you, although a few make resolute efforts to be friendly, to ask you to lunch. Twenty-one going on twenty-eight, you wonder if they somehow sense that you aren’t one of them, that there’s another side to you, one with four feet. Later you’ll realize that even if they knew about Jessie, they couldn’t hate and fear you any more than they already do. They fear you because you’re young, because you’re beautiful and speak English with an exotic accent, because their husbands can’t stop staring at you. They know their husbands want to fuck you. The wives may not be young and beautiful any more, but they’re no fools. They lost the luxury of innocence when they lost their smooth skin and flawless complexions.

The only person who asks you to lunch and seems to mean it is Diane Harvey. She’s forty-five, with thin gray hair and a wide face that’s always smiling. She runs her own computer repair business, and she doesn’t hate you. This may be related to the fact that her husband Glen never stares at you, never gets too close to you during conversation; he seems to have no desire to fuck you at all. He looks at Diane the way all the other men look at you: as if she’s the most desirable creature on earth, as if just being in the same room with her renders him scarcely able to breathe. He adores his wife, even though they’ve been married for fifteen years, even though he’s five years younger than she is and handsome enough to seduce a younger, more beautiful woman. Jonathan says that Glen must stay with Diane for her salary, which is considerably more than his. You think Jonathan’s wrong; you think Glen stays with Diane for herself.

Over lunch, as you gnaw an overcooked steak in a bland fern bar, all glass and wood, Diane asks you kindly when you last saw your family, if you’re homesick, whether you and Jonathan have any plans to visit Europe again soon. These questions bring a lump to your throat, because Diane’s the only one who’s ever asked them. You don’t, in fact, miss your family — the parents who taught you to hunt, who taught you the dangers of continuing the line, or the siblings with whom you tussled and fought over scraps of meat — because you’ve transferred all your loyalty to Jonathan. But two is an awfully small pack, and you’re starting to wish Jonathan hadn’t had that operation. You’re starting to wish you could continue the line, even though you know it would be a foolish thing to do. You wonder if that’s why your parents mated, even though they knew the dangers.

“I miss the smells back home,” you tell Diane, and immediately you blush, because it seems like such a strange thing to say, and you desperately want this kind woman to like you. As much as you love Jonathan, you yearn for someone else to talk to.

But Diane doesn’t think it’s strange. “Yes,” she says, nodding, and tells you about how homesick she still gets for her grandmother’s kitchen, which had a signature smell for each season: basil and tomatoes in the summer, apples in the fall, nutmeg and cinnamon in winter, thyme and lavender in the spring. She tells you that she’s growing thyme and lavender in her own garden; she tells you about her tomatoes.

She asks you if you garden. You say no. In truth, you’re not a big fan of vegetables, although you enjoy the smell of flowers, because you enjoy the smell of almost anything. Even on two legs, you have a far better sense of smell than most people do; you live in a world rich with aroma, and even the scents most people consider noxious are interesting to you. As you sit in the sterile fern bar, which smells only of burned meat and rancid grease and the harsh chemicals the people around you have put on their skin and hair, you realize that you really do miss the smells of home, where even the gardens smell older and wilder than the woods and meadows here.

You tell Diane, shyly, that you’d like to learn to garden. Could she teach you?

So she does. One Saturday afternoon, much to Jonathan’s bemusement, Diane comes over with topsoil and trowels and flower seeds, and the two of you measure out a plot in the backyard, and plant and water and get dirt under your nails, and it’s quite wonderful, really, about the best fun you’ve had on two legs, aside from sportfucks with Jonathan. Over dinner, after Diane’s left, you try to tell Jonathan how much fun it was, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested. He’s glad you had a good time, but really, he doesn’t want to hear about seeds. He wants to go upstairs and have sex.

So you do.

Afterwards, you go through all of your old issues of
Martha Stewart Living
, looking for gardening tips.

You’re ecstatic. You have a hobby now, something you can talk to the other wives about. Surely some of them garden. Maybe, now, they won’t hate you. So at the next party, you chatter brightly about gardening, but somehow all the wives are still across the room, huddled around a table, occasionally glaring in your direction, while the men cluster around you, their eyes bright, nodding eagerly at your descriptions of weeds and aphids.

You know something’s wrong here. Men don’t like gardening, do they? Jonathan certainly doesn’t. Finally one of the wives, a tall blonde with a tennis tan and good bones, stalks over and pulls her husband away by the sleeve. “Time to go home now,” she tells him, and curls her lip at you.

You know that look. You know a snarl when you see it, even if the wife’s too civilized to produce an actual growl.

You ask Diane about this the following week, while you’re in her garden, admiring her tomato plants. “Why do they hate me?” you ask Diane.

“Oh, Stella,” she says, and sighs. “You really don’t know, do you?” You shake your head, and she goes on. “They hate you because you’re young and beautiful, even though that’s not your fault. The ones who have to work hate you because you don’t, and the ones who don’t have to work, whose husbands support them, hate you because they’re afraid their husbands will leave them for younger, more beautiful women. Do you understand?”

You don’t, not really, even though you’re now twenty-eight going on thirty-five. “Their husbands can’t leave them for me,” you tell Diane. “I’m married to Jonathan. I don’t
want
any of their husbands.” But even as you say it, you know that’s not the point.

A few weeks later, you learn that the tall blonde’s husband has indeed left her, for an aerobics instructor twenty years his junior. “He showed me a picture,” Jonathan says, laughing. “She’s a big-hair bimbo. She’s not
half as
beautiful as you are.”

“What does that have to do with it?” you ask him. You’re angry, and you aren’t sure why. You barely know the blonde, and it’s not as if she’s been nice to you. “His poor wife! That was a terrible thing for him to do!”

“Of course it was,” Jonathan says soothingly.

“Would you leave me if I wasn’t beautiful anymore?” you ask him.

“Nonsense, Stella. You’ll always be beautiful.”

But that’s when Jonathan’s going on thirty-eight and you’re going on thirty-five. The following year, the balance begins to shift. He’s going on thirty-nine; you’re going on forty-two. You take exquisite care of yourself, and really, you’re as beautiful as ever, but there are a few wrinkles now, and it takes hours of crunches to keep your stomach as flat as it used to be.

Doing crunches, weeding in the garden, you have plenty of time to think. In a year, two at the most, you’ll be old enough to be Jonathan’s mother, and you’re starting to think he might not like that. And you’ve already gotten wind of catty faculty-wife gossip about how quickly you’re showing your age. The faculty wives see every wrinkle, even through artfully applied cosmetics.

During that thirty-five to forty-two year, Diane and her husband move away, so now you have no one with whom to discuss your wrinkles or the catty faculty wives. You don’t want to talk to Jonathan about any of it. He still tells you how beautiful you are, and you still have satisfying sportfucks. You don’t want to give him any ideas about declining desirability.