Hall of Small Mammals (15 page)

The next morning, amazingly, she spots Randolph at the bottom of a slope. She taps him on the shoulder and says, “Good morning, seatmate.”

“What are the chances?” he says. “I'm surprised you recognized me in this getup.”

His sunglasses are up high on his forehead. He wants to catch the next lift with her: then, he says, they can be
liftmates
too. The joke seems to embarrass him. Beth doesn't know where Amy is, but they don't have plans to meet up, until later at the lodge for lunch. “Sure,” she says, “why not? I can do another run.”

They ride the lift together to the top of the mountain, the metal parts creaking, their legs dangling over the white. “See you at the bottom,” he says at the top and shoves off with his poles. He skis very fast. He might be showing off for her. She has trouble keeping up with him on the snowboard, cutting back and forth through the powdery snow, but she tries her best. She's moving faster than she ever has before.
I'm a gazelle,
she thinks.
I'm a gazelle gazelle gazelle . . .
She's moving so fast she can hardly hold on to that one simple thought. She almost collides with another snowboarder but she doesn't fall on the slope.

Her fall comes later in the evening as she and Randolph—still together—are descending a short wooden staircase outside one of his favorite restaurants in town. The steps are icy. She comes down on her right knee and right side. Her jeans are wet and grimy now. Possibly her foot is broken. As Randolph helps her stand, his arm under her arm, she sees a kid across the street in a lime green parka, his cell phone's camera eye aimed directly at her.

“Try walking on it,” Randolph says. “Just walk a little.”

She hobbles around in a circle. It's not as bad as she thought it was. It might just be a sprain. She has her arm draped over his shoulder now. They go inside together. He's made a reservation for two. After sharing a dessert, both of them a little tipsy from the wine, he confesses that Randolph is actually his
middle
name, and if she'd rather, she can call him Arnie.

“Hello, Arnie,” she says, and giggles again. “I'm sorry. I don't know why I'm laughing. I'm not usually like this. I'm not. I think it's possible that I've been overserved. Is that possible? I've lost track.”

Funniest Thing You Ever Seen—Drunk Guy in Convenience Store

Lots of people fall down drunk.

Marshall, the cellist, is in the 7-Eleven next door to the stationery shop that he manages. It's a little after midnight. The bump on his forehead healed a few days ago, but his wife, Susan, hasn't been home in all that time. She won't even return his calls about the missing money. He roams the aisles in search of snacks and cheap wine, dragging his feet, in a daze. He slips in front of the fridges.

“You all right?” the cashier asks, worried he might have left a puddle with the mop, worried about a lawsuit.

The cellist grabs the fridge door and pulls himself off the sticky floor.

“Where's the Big League Chew?” he asks.

The cashier points to the next aisle. Marshall hasn't chewed
any Big League chewing gum since he was in grade school. He buys two pouches of it and takes it home. He sits at the kitchen table alone, tucking grape strands between his gums and bottom lip. He puts on a record.

The gum doesn't taste at all like he remembers it, and Susan is never coming back home. He drags all her clothes out of their closet, wire hangers bouncing across the carpet, and dumps them on the bed with the intention of bagging them for donation. Near midnight he wakes up, sprawled across a mountain of her dresses and sweaters, his lower back throbbing. He swallows a few chalky white ibuprofens in front of the bathroom mirror and calls Susan's sister again.

“Stop leaving messages here,” she says. “I refuse to be a part of this. I refuse to be the go-between.”

“Just put her on the phone,” he says. “Please.”

“I'm not going in there. No way.”

“Going in where? Is she with someone?”

She takes a deep breath. “Marshall, let's not do this. Besides, it was more hers than yours anyway, wasn't it?”

“What was more hers?” he asks—the money or the marriage? But she's hung up. Marshall, groggy, digs for his pants under all Susan's clothes. He grabs his fat wallet off the dresser. He's halfway down the block when he realizes he's forgotten his keys and locked himself out.

Funny Blooper TV News

A reporter for CNA29 News stands in front of the camera with her microphone, preparing for a live stand-up. Her bangs are
like cartoon puffs of blond smoke, and she's wearing a teal jacket with brass buttons and monstrous shoulder pads. Behind her, across the street, is a blue two-story house. All around it a maze of yellow police tape wraps through the lean pine trees.

A man was murdered in the house last night. Jealous lover situation, one officer said earlier. At this point there is very little to report about the murder but because it occurred in a nice part of town the reporter's producer thought they should probably cover the story anyway. Why she needs to introduce her story live in front of the house, the reporter isn't quite sure. It feels indecent somehow.

She never used to flub her lines but lately she's been having issues—skipping words, mixing up clauses. Once upon a time her producer called her One-Take Tammy, but she's been so distracted recently. She shouldn't even be here, she realizes, but at the hospital with her mother. “I'll haunt you forever if I die in this hospital alone,” her mother said yesterday. Why would any mother say such a thing to her daughter?

When she was growing up, her mother was always bringing around different boyfriends. When Tammy was sixteen, one of the boyfriends lumbered into her room around midnight. He climbed into her bed and grabbed hold of her, and when Tammy squirmed loose and flipped on the lights, the boyfriend pretended to have been confused about which door was which. If Tammy's mother dies, so much will have gone unsaid between them. Tammy should be the one haunting
her
.

Last night Tammy slept in the hideous recliner beside her mother's hospital bed. Around two a.m. her mother turned on the television.

“What are you doing?” Tammy asked. “You need to be sleeping.”

“I would if I could,” her mother said. She flipped through the channels and stopped on a home shopping network. Tammy swiveled her chair toward the television. They watched a woman model some clip-on earrings. The woman looked a little bit like Tammy in the face, her mother pointed out, “Just around the nose. Don't you think?” Tammy didn't answer that. The woman on the television had an ugly little snub nose.

Tammy couldn't get back to sleep after that. They watched prices for more clip-on earrings flash onto the screen, and then they watched a bald man with a thin mustache show off a vacuum that could suck up wet stains.

“That could come in use around here,” Tammy said, and patted the end of the bed.

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” her mother said.

When the nurse came into the room, around four a.m., her mother asked Tammy to leave the room for a minute.

“What for?”

“Because I need to ask the nurse something in private.”

“Mom, don't be silly.”

“You can come back in a few minutes.”

“Fine,” Tammy said, “I need to get going anyway.” She grabbed her overnight bag out of the closet and left the hospital. On the drive home she stopped by a coffee shop for lattes to go. Billy was just waking up when she came into the bedroom and stepped out of her shoes and shimmied out of her underwear in front of the closet. She went into the bathroom for a shower. He
followed her in to sit on the toilet lid and drink the latte she'd brought him.

“You want to talk about it?” he asked.

She said she didn't. The steam curled over the shower curtain rod. The vanilla bar soap, from a farmers' market, turned to goop in her hands. Billy stripped down and stepped into the shower with a hard-on.

“Not now,” she said. “Tonight maybe.”

“Just because I have an erection, doesn't mean I'm asking for sex.”

She laughed and left him in the shower. She got to work early but then fell asleep with her head on her desk. The supervising producer came in to nudge her awake. She'd missed the morning editorial meeting. He gave her the assignment.

“But listen,” he said. “You don't have to go. Take a few more days. Go be with your mother.”

Tammy didn't want to take any more time off from work. She would do the story.

Standing in front of the crime scene, she collects her thoughts and waits for the cue from her cameraman. The air is muggy and her hair frizzy. Their van is parked down the street.

“Details are sparse, Gary, but it's here that—” As she says this, she twists, ever so slightly, to reveal more of the house, and her heel sinks deep into a bed of soft pine needles. She falls, not at all gracefully, her legs opening wide, skirt sliding up toward her waist, her black underwear and panty hose and who knows what else exposed to the camera. The microphone rolls.

The network, thankfully, cuts away to her prerecorded story.

“Are you all right?” the cameraman asks Tammy, extending a hand. He's relatively new to the station. His name is Mike or Mel or Matt maybe. He helps her off the ground and swats away the dirt from her skirt and jacket.

“I'm fine, thank you,” she says, her face flushed red.

On the ride back to the station, he sticks out his pinkie. “I pinkie-swear that I'll delete that footage as soon as I get back.” She hooks her pinkie in his, amused by the gesture despite the fact that thousands of viewers already saw her fall.

“Could you see my underwear?” she asks, doing her best to smile.

“Yeah,” he says. “But just a little. Not much. Nothing X-rated.”

Fatty Kids Falling Watch N Laff

A slightly pudgy boy in his white underwear slides across a blue tarp on his belly. Dish soap keeps the tarp slippery. There's a garden hose positioned at the top, the chilly water gurgling out of it and streaming around his small body. The boy, Adam Fitzgerald, has tight curly hair, wet-dark, and he's sliding headfirst. He didn't bring a bathing suit to the party. Nobody told him there would be a Slip 'N Slide! Why didn't anybody tell him? If they had, he would have brought his suit. Back home he's got a blue one with a pocket that has another pocket inside of it. He keeps coins in there, and shells, and sharks' teeth, and his house key.

He's still sliding. The girls at the party in their pink and purple swimsuits, the red coolers with the white tops, the green blanket over the card table, the tall creamy brown birthday cake and the white plastic forks—everything is a colorful blur as he
slides downhill. Time falls away. Space too when he squishes his eyes shut. He imagines himself like a bolt of lightning. Bodiless. An electrical current, sharp and fast. This is his third slide of the day, but it's as glorious as the first. The sunlight warms his back. When it goes cool, he knows he has moved into the second half of his journey, the half under the shadowy cover of the oak trees. Is his heart even beating? Is he breathing?

But then his slide comes to an end. Half of his body goes over the edge of the tarp. His chest and arms land in the scratchy green grass. He stands and wipes his palms across his bare legs. Grass blades stick to his skin like a disease. He picks off each one and flicks it away with his pruned thumb and index finger.

Adam sees Madeline too late. She was next in line, and she's sliding fast. She knocks out his legs. He falls forward and face-plants on the sudsy tarp. Madeline is pinned beneath him. She's kicking and shoving. She's crying. Mr. Bell comes running. Adam rolls over onto his side. Mr. Bell helps up Madeline, his hands under her soapy armpits. Adam can hear other kids laughing behind him. He runs his tongue along the bottom of his teeth. One of his front teeth is chipped, its edge so sharp it slices his tongue.

If you were watching
America's Funniest Home Videos
on October 9, 1993, then you saw Adam Fitzgerald's fall on the Slip 'N Slide at his friend's birthday party. His video was seven seconds long and appeared in a montage of children getting mildly hurt in a variety of ways—on bicycles, on jungle gyms, with hammers, with sprinklers. His friend's father submitted the home video, though Adam's mother had to sign a release form before it could air. She signed the form without really thinking much about it.
She assumed it would be cute. She's always been impulsive that way, and she regrets it.

All grown up now and living in another city, her son doesn't always answer her calls. It rings and rings, and she has to leave two and three messages before he ever calls her back. It's not the worst arrangement. In truth she has an easier time saying I love you to a person's answering machine than she does to the actual person.

SCARY—Elevator FAIL

Adam Fitzgerald shed his baby weight in grade school, and now he runs one of the most influential right-wing Listservs in the country. What he writes in the morning often winds up in the mouths of certain cable news anchors that evening. He keeps an office in an ancient building with ancient elevators.

The elevator doors ding open in the lobby, and a group of people rush inside together, a confluence of hot breath, bad breath, mouthwash breath, wool suits, cotton tops, warm flesh, sweaty flesh, perfumes, and colognes. One of the passengers bundles mortgage-backed securities. Another one believes the Bible should be read literally, that Jonah really did get swallowed by the whale, that there really will be four horsemen with steaming nasty breath at the end of days. A man and woman near the back, both of them married to other people, are in love with each other and sometimes sneak into the out-of-order men's bathroom on the twenty-first floor.

Together, this group weighs 1,922 pounds. “Too many of us,” someone says, but the doors shut, and they are moving. The elevator rises arthritically up the shaft, and they are very quiet until,
just before the sixteenth floor, something overhead pops. They scream, and the elevator plummets, down and down and down, all of them surely about to die, about to collapse into a dense mangled heap of body parts.