Women & Other Animals (7 page)

After she'd walked about two miles, a red Camaro pulled alongside her. "Hey, baby, you need a ride?" the young driver yelled out the window. Bess put her hat back on her head and peered in.

"Um, uh," the guy stammered. "Excuse me, Officer."

"Jimmy Jukes? Is that you?" she asked. "It's Bess, from shop class. I helped you build your mom a bookshelf. What are you doing here?"

"Are you a cop now?" he asked.

"Security guard. My ride didn't pick me up. Can you give me a lift?"

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"Sure." He had a wellfed look, plump arms, a nice hank of whiteblond hair.

She lowered herself into the car, whose passenger seat tilted so far back she could barely see over the dashboard. The front of the car seemed to protrude from their hips. Operating the vehicle and flipping the radio stations absorbed Jimmy entirely as they raced through downtown, past the factories, through their township. The car effortlessly climbed the hill to Bess's house. Hal's Omni wasn't there.

"How can you live right on the tracks?" asked Jimmy. "Don't you get woken up by the trains?"

"I like train whistles."

"Last summer I took a train to Chicago," Jimmy said. "Me and my more and my little sister went to the museums."

"What museums?" Bess turned to him.

"Science Museum, Natural History Museum, Aquarium, Planetarium," said Jimmy. "We slept downtown in a hotel, the Palmer House."

Bess imagined herself and Jimmy walking along a boulevard lined with museums, skyscrapers, and hotels. They'd share the sidewalk with people traveling briskly from their jobs to their homes, neatly dressed, confident that their lives made sense. Those people rode subways and read newspapers along the way, and they arranged their apartments with only a few pieces of simple, attractive, durable furniture. She'd never been to Chicago, but she knew Lake Michigan must glitter in every backdrop, decorated with sailboats and military ships. She leaned toward Jimmy and pressed her lips to his. Jimmy wrapped both arms around her and bent her against the passengerside door, ending on his knees. He kissed with a stiff tongue and sloppy lips. Bess and Hal had taught each other to kiss when they were eleven and twelve. Remembering it now, Bess felt ashamed. She pulled away and mumbled the first part of thanksfortheride, but before she finished Jimmy said, "Oh, yeah," and lunged across the seat for her again. Bess had been reaching for the door handle and the door sprang open. Her upper body fell outside, Jimmy on top of her, kissing toward her neck.

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"Hey!" she shouted. "Cut it out. Let me straighten up."

"Sorry, man." When she sat back up, he put an arm over her shoulders, apparently content just to sit with her. She pulled the door closed. Where was Hal? The house looked emptier and dingier than usual. The fakebrick tarpaper had torn above Aunt Victoria's window and next to the porch door. Bess's mom used to enjoy working on the house, and Victoria had fetched tools for her and held window trim in place while Bess's mom nailed. Her mom used to plant flowers along the foundation in summer. Nobody had wielded a hammer or garden trowel in years.

Jimmy wasn't a badlooking guy, and he did have this nice car. Bess leaned into him and kissed him, and again he jabbed his tongue toward the back of her throat.

Maybe she wasn't going to like kissing men. Bess had kissed a few guys around school, and she especially had liked pressing against Derek Hill under the stairs last year, but Hal said he wasn't good enough for her, and anyway that memory felt distant and uncertain. Maybe she would end up like her mother, sharing a bed with some woman. Bess didn't want to face a life of being different, of being a lesbian. She felt the claustrophobic softness of that word pressing against her like another woman's breasts.

"Jimmy, have you ever had sex in this car?" she asked.

"Huh?"

"I mean, how could you with those bucket seats?" She hoped she was giving the impression she'd done this before. In fact, the few times she'd come close, either Hal had shown up, or she'd stopped herself by thinking about what Hal would say. How could it have been such a short time ago that Hal was always near her?

"Maybe the bback?" suggested Jimmy.

"It's too small." Bess gestured at the abbreviated back seat. The house was out of the question because they'd have to pass Victoria in her chain And anyway, Bess liked her bedroom to be all her own, and she didn't want anybody else in it, not even Hal, who made fun of her neatly made bed and carefully arranged and dusted dresser top. "Maybe on the hood there." She stepped around the wide door and sat herself on the car, facing the house, her back to the tracks. ''This'll work," she said.

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Jimmy got out and walked around to where she sat. "Here on the car?" he asked. "You want to do it here? With me?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Cool." Jimmy was just about her height. He reached under her shirt, and stroked her breasts through her bra like a couple of puppies.

Bess found the sensation annoying, and after she unbuttoned her uniform shirt and unhooked her bra, it still didn't feel right. She pushed his hands around behind her, closed her eyes, and pretended she was with Derek under the stairs. Victoria's bedroom light switched on and then went out. Bess wrapped her legs around Jimmy and pulled him toward her. She wished Hal would pull into the driveway, even though she knew her future as a normal girl depended on going all the way. "You got a condom?" she asked.

"Yeah. Maybe." Jimmy opened the passenger door, and fumbled in the glove compartment while Bess unbuckled her belt and removed her shoes, pants, and panties, then perched on the hood again. Residual engine heat warmed her naked bottom. Jimmy managed to produce a condom, which he held between two fingers, away from himself. He stared at Bess's pubic hair openmouthed. Bess grabbed the condom and tore the plastic package with her teeth.

"Come on," said Bess. "Let's hurry." She reached to unzip him.

"I have to go," he said.

"What do you mean, you have to go?"

"Um, this is my brother's car," he said. "I took it without permission." Jimmy walked around to the driver's side and got in like a robot.

"You're going to leave?" Bess asked. "Right now, you're going to leave?" She slid off the car, disentangled her underwear from the pile of clothes and pulled them on.

She picked up her pants and shoes in one hand, while in the other she still held the condom. Before he closed his door, Bess glimpsed him in the dash light. His face was round and so soft he probably had never shaved. "Let's go get something to eat,'' she suggested through the window.

He revved the engine of the Camaro. "I have to go. I'll see you around." As he backed out of the driveway, Bess tossed the condom Page 44

after him like a little frisbee; it bounced off the car's bumper and landed in the dirt. Jimmy screeched away over the tracks.

Bess dressed and dragged herself up the porch stairs and into the kitchen where she spread margarine across two slices of stale bread from a big restaurant loaf. She wrapped the bread around the last chunk of uncut bologna and leaned against the sink to eat, staring at Victoria's metal cupboard. The strange, sad way Victoria had talked last night made Bess think that all she'd have to do was ask and Victoria would open this cupboard and give her whatever food was in there. Bess felt relieved that Jimmy had taken off, but she knew she was going to have to do it sometime with some guy. Hal always said she should wait because the first time should be special. He'd done it with three girls, as far as Bess knew, but apparently none of them had been special enough.

Bess woke at ten the next morning to discover Hal still wasn't back. On Saturdays, Aunt Victoria was at the Waffle House until noon. Bess wandered outside, climbed up onto the tracks, and looked in both directions along the corridor of steel, stones, and railroad ties. Chicago was 150 miles west, and Detroit was the same distance to the east. Those were places where things happened, places to which people rode trains. Hal always said Chicago didn't have anything that mattered. The Sears Tower is there, Bess had said, and Hal said the Sears Tower was just another tall building. In the direction of Detroit, Bess spotted a brown bag, probably tossed from a passing car. She opened it to find six returnable Natural Lite cans. She balanced atop a straight, shining rail past the scrubby line of sumac and pricker bushes—just beyond which was hidden Hal's marijuana patch—past the septictank pumping company, past the gravel pit. Beyond that were two junkyards and the shredder where people sold truckloads of scrap metal. By then she'd found eight more tencent bottles.

She tightropewalked back toward the township center, past her house, to the Beer Store, where she traded the cans for a singleserving carton of milk and an individual packet of cheese and cracker sticks. A car honked; she didn't recognize the driver, but in case he was honking at her, she waved back to let him know she Page 45

liked guys. On the other side of the tracks, she stopped at the little pond where she and Hal used to sit when they snuck out at night. She thought of throwing her three pennies change into the water, but as she listened to the approaching whistle of a freight train, she changed her mind. She placed the pennies side by side on one rail and ran to safety. As she waited alongside, she saw, for just an instant, the engineer in a John Deere cap and wireframed glasses shake his finger at her, scolding.

Bess counted fortyseven boxcars and no caboose, and afterwards she searched the tracks and found one of the pennies, still warm from the violence. She closed her hand around the coin and noticed that her fingernails were short and ragged—she must have chewed them in her sleep again last night. She didn't see either of the other pennies. Sometimes they were thrown clear or pulverized. Once home, she went upstairs and emptied a tin box of flattened pennies onto her dresser. She hadn't added to the collection in years. Her mother had shown her how to place them on the tracks when she was only five or six and had helped her find them afterwards.

Where had Victoria been? Bess wondered. Had she watched them from a safe place? Each of those old pennies was waferthin with only a ghost of Lincoln's head on one side and the Lincoln Memorial on the other. In a split second each had suffered a century's worth of wear. Each coin represented a hundredton train speeding past, imparting a bit of energy and leaving Bess behind.

Bess sat on the porch to eat her crackers. Over the tracks she could see the tops of cars passing on M98, and she saw right into the cab of a semitruck, saw a man's fat belly pushing against a bright red Tshirt. In a flash he was gone. He was probably hauling that trailer from some other part of the country, the South maybe, or New England. Years ago, Bess and Hal used to pull down their pants and moon the passing Amtraks from this porch, then practically fall down laughing at the shock on the passengers' faces. All her life Bess had felt as though she was going to burst—out of her clothing, out of her desk at school, out of this town, out of her own skin. Maybe Victoria had felt this way once too, but instead she just swelled and stretched.

Finally she heard the sputtering of the Omni, climbing up and

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over the tracks, threatening to stall, then regaining its power at the top. Hal parked in his usual spot, close to the house. He jingled his keys as he sauntered up and stood before her, grinning, eyes bright. "Hi, Bess."

"Thanks a lot for picking me up from work last night."

"Oh, no, Bess. I'm sorry. I totally forgot."

"No shit." She stood up and went into the kitchen, letting the screen door snap behind her. Hal followed, closing the door carefully, and she felt his eyes on her back as she wiped margarine across a piece of bread. She tipped back her head to hold in the tears, and Hal reached around and handed her a lit cigarette. She took a long draw and released it. When she turned, Hal was still smiling as though he were the township idiot.

"What's that on your neck?" asked Bess.

"What?" Hal felt his neck with his hand.

"It's a hickey," she said, leaning closer. "You got a goddamn hickey."

Hal ran his fingers over his neck. Bess imagined the redbellied truck driver kissing Hal's neck. She saw the scolding, wirerimmed engineer with his greencapped head curled on Hal's chest. Bess stuffed some bread into her mouth. "Aren't you hungry?" she asked.

"Someone took me out to breakfast," said Hal.

"Someone a man?"

"Yes."

"So what did you have?"

Hal rolled his eyes, but then complied, counting the items on his fingers. "Scrambled eggs, bacon and sausage, toast, and hash browns."

"Were the eggs fluffy?" she asked.

"Sure, I guess."

"Link sausages or patties?"

"Links."

"Figures." She drew on her cigarette. "Smoky flavored?"

"Kind of smoky." He shrugged.

"I went out with a guy last night, too," said Bess. "He had a Camaro." Her vision blurred. She wasn't ready for Hal to leave her, not for a man or anybody.

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The clock read 12:10, time for the westbound noon train, and neither spoke while the whistle sounded. They felt the usual rumbling in the floor. Hal would make a life for himself, thought Bess, and looking into those bright, laughing eyes, she knew it wouldn't be a sad life like Victoria's. Maybe it would be complicated, but it would be like their mother's life, full of love and fun. Bess didn't know why the thought made her want to cry. Her left hand went slack, and she dropped her halfslice of bread. Just about the time it hit the linoleum, a crash like a dull gray battleship shook their house; metal screamed and tore and gave way in the distance. Hal glanced at his watch, then back at Bess. The two stood dumb, sharing the same thought: Aunt Victoria was returning from work. Bess imagined Victoria's car wrenched in two, her gelatinous body ripped to bits across the tracks, bloody jowls and butt cheeks spread all over the township. They tore outside to see Aunt Victoria pulling safely into the driveway in her modified white Ford. The car tilted toward the driver's side and nearly lifted off the ground on the other. The driver's seat had been moved back to accommodate her size. Bess and Hal watched Victoria extricate herself from behind the steering wheel, her head still attached to her body. The car sprang miraculously to a level position.