Large Animals in Everyday Life Page 7

  Claire came down inscrutably the next morning, carrying sweet rolls, and I couldn’t tell if she was spying, consoling, or just visiting. Her knock gave me a small fit of remembering: Dale flexing his wrists like a weight lifter just before he took my face in his hands to kiss me; the lazy, satisfied way he stepped from my shower stall, male pride itself. “Don’t give me any more coffee,” Claire said. “My heart’s about to explode. I just stopped in to ask a favor for Dale.”

  Favor, I thought, means she probably doesn’t know, whatever that means. There were going to be rules now, and I was sure I didn’t know them.

  “Needs you to drive him to pick up his truck, if you’re feeling up to it,” she said.

  “Oh, fine, fine,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. She was in no hurry. She bent her long legs and sat in my armchair. I tried to think of what to say.

  “So, do horses ever bite you?” I said.

  “That ugly pony we had bit a baby,” she said. “But that was because he knew we were trying to get rid of him. Or maybe the baby told him something terrible, I don’t know. I do believe animals sense things, though. You know how they lie down on the ground when an earthquake is coming? I have a book about it. There was a chrysanthemum that could start a car! You can borrow that book if you want. Do you have a boyfriend?”

  I had been wondering if she was trying to tell me in a veiled way that the chestnut had crushed me on purpose, perhaps for wanting Dale, for being a coward, or for something worse which only she and the horse were sensitive enough to see.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said. She looked sorry. She divided a Danish the size of her face into two parts and offered me one. “I don’t mean to give you a hard time,” she said, “but I think he likes you. He may ask you out. He’s been very touchy. The last time he liked someone he punched me.”

  “He punched you?” I repeated.

  “I told him his sweetheart Gabrielle was a spoiled brat,” she said. “She was born without sweat glands. She was a big star on the horse show circuit and her mother followed her around with ice packs all the time. All I said was that he could do a lot better.”

  “Was she pretty?” I said. I was encouraged, thinking that with her birth defect she couldn’t have been beautiful, at least not hopelessly so. The punching still loomed, but it was secondary. “Could you tell what was wrong with her?”

  “Well, she was thin, but that could have been anything,” Claire said. “And then her eyes looked wrong, like her lids were inside out, and then she had scaly arms and scaly patches on her face.”

  “Actual scales?” I said.

  “Hey, maybe that’s why he was so crazy for her,” Claire said. “Like a snake—ha!” We both laughed, but I thought she herself looked like a snake—a happy snake, with her wide, pretty mouth, her eyes narrowed against the morning sun. I told her I found it hard to believe Dale would punch her.

  “Well, he didn’t actually hit me,” she said. “But he wanted to, I could see it. He was right up in my face. I said, ‘Dale, what difference does my opinion make?’ He said, ‘You just don’t understand her. You don’t understand anyone who hasn’t had it easy.’ I said, ‘Dale, tell me one thing that hasn’t come easy for you. Name one thing.’” She stopped there and shook her head. I waited to hear Dale’s answer, but she just sat there in the light, chewing her Danish, giving away nothing. When she left my place, she warned me that he might ask me “for a date,” and she spoke to my Hondecoeter with what could only be innocence. She touched her finger to the fallen crow as if it were some cute calendar puppy. “Bye, birdies,” she said.

  That same day I had to take my cartons in to the warehouse, and the traffic and scenery on the way were suddenly extraordinary, unpredictable. I passed what I thought was a bearded lady at a bus stop, but when I did a doubletake it turned out to be an Amish man. Then, at the warehouse, after I’d done my business and loaded my car, I caught myself getting in through my passenger door, as if I were my own guest. The snakes were what I kept thinking about, because I hadn’t managed to ask him about them. We had, in fact, barely spoken—I remembered him saying only my name into my shoulder—and I hadn’t wanted to ruin it with questions. Now, though, I was already longing for something else from him, wanting to see bearded ladies the way he saw snakes, wanting to know more than I knew. I didn’t want to sit around forever with an envelope full of chest hairs.

  I was expecting a phone call when it was time for me to go to the stables, but instead an angry-looking wrecker driver knocked on my windowpane, catching me doing nothing, lying with my head on a stack of incorrectly assembled brochures. I met him on the lawn, blushing, and said, “I don’t understand.”

  “Nothing to worry about, miss,” he said. We were eye to eye, the same height, only his legs seemed to start much lower than mine—he stood anchored and dungareed, a step too close to me. “As I understand it,” he said, “Dale didn’t want you to put yourself out, since we take him out to the garage anyway. Since I was on a call in your neighborhood, our dispatch said to swing around for you, as a favor, and you’ll meet him at the garage.” He spoke reasonably, but he really did appear to be furious about something, so I didn’t ask questions.

  His double-parked truck was not a glorified pickup but the big kind, the back of it loaded with mean-looking wheels and cogs and cables; stepping up into it was like getting on The Spider or The Crazy Zipper at a fair. Inside were empty apple-juice cans, dirty socks and sweatshirts, a tuna smell, and short white hairs stuck to the velour seats—it looked like small children lived there. “Don’t mind the mess,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “I mean I don’t,” he said.

  We roared off down the highway that led out of town, passing the stables and everything else I was familiar with, and hit a stretch of neatly spaced longleaf pines that went on indefinitely on both sides of the road. It seemed impolite to ask how far away the garage was.

  “What are you, an artist?” the driver said. He was looking sideways at my ripped T-shirt, my ink-spotted jeans.

  “No, I’m in direct-mail advertising for a number of different firms,” I said.

  “Oh, I know all about that,” he said. “You ever go to conventions? We hit ’em all the time, believe it or not. Tow-truck conventions. I was up in Chicago just last month, in fact. Got a ticket for doing eighty on the Dan Ryan.”

  The pines whipped by more rapidly and the pile of socks under my feet seemed to expand and shift, which I took to be another hallucination. The driver’s stubbly face, lit through the windshield, was scornful. “Those boys up there,” he said, shaking his head, “they stopped me and told me I was driving like I wanted to kill someone. ‘You’ll get yourself killed,’ they told me, but I said, Nope, I can’t be kilt.”

  Something that I thought might be a rolled sock nudged my ankle—it was a kitten, the source of the white hairs. The kitten and I both cried out at the same moment, making the driver turn his head. “Can’t train that thing to save my life,” he said.

  The kitten fawned and slithered absurdly around my legs. “Can you train cats?” I said, a little angry, wondering if the kitten got any water or anything decent to eat.

  “No, that’s what I’m saying,” said the driver, sounding even angrier. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes. “They should have someone like that English dog lady, only for these damned cats,” he grumbled, and we fell into more angry silence, me watching the kitten, the driver not looking my way again. Finally he said, “Well, we’re almost there, you might as well sit back and enjoy the rest of the duration.”

  There was something bothering me, something I wanted to ask Dale, and I wanted to hear his side on the sweat gland girl—but when we pulled up to the garage, the sight of his broad back blotted everything out. He was in the driveway, relaxing against his truck and talking to a couple of garage men, the group of them shaded by a row of young pines. Behind the building tall thick trees went back in levels, with no g
aps for houses or roads or electrical lines. The men, including Dale, all stood like the tow-truck driver: casual, anchored. I thought how attractive scorn could be, and took some reassurance in the way they all stood—Dale might not be the only source of what I wanted. “Thanks for the lift,” I told the driver. He nodded and spat on the ground.

  “Sweetheart,” Dale said, and held out his arm, and I was helpless again, so close to his unshaven cheek. The other men lowered their eyes politely. “You look happy,” he said. “You been hanging around my sister?”

  In his truck I stopped comparing him to the garage driver and compared him to Claire, whose light eyes and airy profile he shared. From the side, you could actually see through their irises, but you couldn’t tell a thing from looking at either one of them. I imagined any of the pretty stable girls would have given him a ride. “Where are we going?” I said.

  We were heading deeper into the layers of trees, which turned out to have a gravel road cutting through them after all. Rocks and acorns popped under us, startling me, and the damp afternoon heat buzzed in through the cabin’s open windows. I waited, sweating and vibrating. It was beginning to hurt to take deep breaths.

  “You ever hear about the poisoned oak?” Dale said.

  “Poison oak?” I said.

  “No, that old live oak some loony tried to kill. It was in the paper, maybe you missed it.”

  I had heard about it. People from town had come out with candles and coins, statues of Mary, and cans of soup, which they placed on the ground among the sick tree’s knotty roots. The oak recovered, and the poisoner was nabbed in his trailer. The poison would be what Dale liked, I thought. “It’s something to see,” he said. “Big old thing. I figured you hadn’t been out to it yet.” I glanced at him, expecting scorn, but he looked perfectly involved, perfectly thrilled, steering us over the pitted road with a sure hand.

  He cut the engine in what was barely a clearing, and the sudden silence hurt my ears. From where we were, the low trunk-sized branches of the oak were visible, running along horizontally in the light shade of the younger trees. The trunk itself was farther back, lurking like a great black bear in the brush. Dale jumped out and slammed his door, already gazing at something off beyond the tree. “What is it?” I said, but he didn’t answer. He saw whatever it was he saw, liked what he liked, leaving me to sit there on the creaky truck seat in my own aching, breathing separateness. This may have been selfishness on his part, but it was not deliberate, not tricky, and there was no getting around its appeal. A tiresome wave of my own scheming energy washed back on me. He was right. Where we were was beautiful, and no place I would have driven on my own. I climbed down and went to look at the recovering tree.

  • • •

  I remembered what I wanted to ask, finally, when we were in bed that night. We were flat on our backs, not touching, staring up into the sweet, swampy dark and listening to Claire’s quick footsteps on their linoleum. Breathing still hurt, but being smashed by the horse seemed old and doubtful already. “About the snakes,” I said, “that you used to find?”

  “I can still find ’em,” Dale said. “Got an eye.”

  “How?” I said. “Or I mean why?”

  “It’s just something I know how to do,” he said. “What boy doesn’t like snakes? Well, you don’t have a brother.”

  I considered the dangerous curve of him. What was it about his sure, unquestioning self that went into me like grappling hooks? Even in the heart of fulfilled longing was this anger in me for more, more than him even.

  “You can still find snakes?” I said, not caring but needing to talk.

  “Hell, honey,” he said, “I can show you that, but that’s not the most exciting thing about me.”

  He moved onto me again, and the last thing I thought of was the time I watched that English dog-trainer’s show and saw a tense line of dog owners backing on tiptoe away from a corresponding line of dogs, who were being taught to stay. The people moved silently, their arms outstretched in the stay command, and the dogs seemed unconcerned, and the widening space between them was miraculous, thick with hope. I saw myself like the tiptoeing dog owners, silently retreating from everything that was too easy about my life, hoping nothing would break the spell.

  easy

  I’m not even out of Florida and already thinking of my mother: the sun-bleached billboard for House of Porcelain reminds me of the ceramics she took up after my father died. She called it “mastering an art,” and she did it so that when she looked at me she would not be so distracted by his eyes, his chin; she wanted to make the hard first months easier. She set up shop on our screened porch, replacing my father’s shelves of hardware with ten-pound bags of wet clay and a kiln she assembled from a kit, and soon the porch filled up with coy-faced rabbits and round-limbed, winking frogs. She glazed them conservatively in calm opaques and garnished each with a set of stick-on eyelashes, which she thought was a cute idea and I thought made the animals appear hopeful. When one fell and smashed, with those eyelashes, it was heartbreaking.

  She could probably cut a deal with the House of Porcelain people—their billboards boast of “spirited porcelain children” and “fragile crystal relics from a simpler time”—but I can’t afford to stop and browse. My plan is not to get off the highway until I’m in Georgia, which is not just superstition, though Georgia sounds safe to me with all its bragging about such harmless commodities as peaches and pecans. By the time I reach Georgia, I’ve figured, my mother should be up and eating her Danish, and I can phone her from some anonymous reststop and tell her I’m on my way. Like an athlete, I visualize my successful arrival, picture her spare house key, which sits in the mouth of a ceramic squirrel that’s frozen in an adorable crouch and nailed to the front steps of her Chicago house. She sculpted the squirrel herself, using neither mold nor model. I picture the highway stretching out ahead of me, the squirrel at one end and me, a dot, at the other, like a puzzle in a children’s magazine. But there on my left thigh is a quarter-sized blue bruise from Charlie, and it too is the dot. I whip along, going seventy, my hand resting lightly on the bruise, which also goes seventy.

  • • •

  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.