Large Animals in Everyday Life (11 page)

It did seem odd that she didn't date, but by the time I noticed,
I
was dating, and much too involved to give my mother's
lack of love life a second thought. And by that time, too, she was busy looking after the greasers. The boys I went out with, of course, weren't nearly as dramatic as the greasers; even then I chose regular boys who wore sweaters and had confidence in their futures, nothing for my mother to worry about. Senior year I went out with a Latvian boy I knew from Art Council who wore five earrings and always had some kind of foreign cigarette going when he came to our front door, but my mother liked him so much she gave him one of her homemade ashtrays for Christmas, a turtle with a sly, flirtatious tilt to its head. “There are worse things than smoking,” she said, and did not elaborate. And the Latvian boy was, after all, harmless.

“Why don't you get a boyfriend?” I asked her finally, my first time home from college on a break.

“I hate old men,” she said, smiling. “You know that.”

I wonder now if she knew something I didn't when she made that remark, if she was trying to tell me something important about us or just making a joke.

• • •

It's well after dark when I stop in Seymour for coffee and mouth-wash. Charlie always insists on Listerine, says it's “superior” even though gargling with it is actually painful, and I wish he could see me buying this tasty, sugary green brand. I want him to see me being kind to myself, and suffer. What I wish for, simply enough, is not his repentance, but his suffering. Memory and grudge are twin swamps to watch out for, I think. Even animals may be susceptible—my goldfish may be swimming in hate right now, wanting to kill me for leaving him alone with nothing but Charlie and a scallop-shaped vacation feeder. But somehow I doubt it, and I can now see why the fish and I always got along so well, the way he went along so easily, pumping waves of unconsciousness through his gills, never knowing or owning up to a thing.

Once, with Charlie, I came close to living in that state forever. While it was happening I was thinking about my Walkman and how it stopped tracking the tape after I dropped it on concrete. I was picturing tiny wires coming apart, shaking loose, picturing this while Charlie held my chin and cracked the back of my head against the floor, over and over. And suddenly all I knew was that I didn't
want
to be unconscious, sunken into myself, my brain a fallen soufflé. At that moment I promised someone, God or Jung or whoever was out there, that I would work harder and be kinder and stop wearing mascara and take more responsibility, whatever it took. It was my fault that this was happening, my fault for loving my lazy, easy life. “You asked for it,” Charlie was probably saying—it was what he always said—and I believed him.

I doze in my car for an hour in the lot of a Hardee's. I dream that I am facing Charlie, just a few feet away from him, and I'm holding a gun. I'm fully dressed and sobbing, but the three women behind Charlie are nude and nonchalant. Charlie laughs, knowing I am afraid to shoot, that I don't even know how. He starts walking toward me, slowly, slowly, smiling, enjoying this.
I have no choice
, I cry at the last possible moment, and fire, falling as he falls, to the ground. Just like that, he's dead. I am crying so hard I can barely see, barely catch my breath. The nude women look on, disinterestedly.
It wouldn't have bothered me to do that
, one of them says.

Rain wakes me—not the noise, but the quality of it. In the South the summer rains are violent, but routinely so; they come down daily in friendly torrents. Up here the storms are more random. The raindrops are smaller and meaner, and they pelt you according to some unseen plan. My windshield looks like it's breathing. It reminds me of
The Last Wave
, where that poor guy discovers he's the harbinger of the apocalyptic tidal wave. Of course, he figures it out too late and it's all inevitable anyway, his image having been carved in stone by aborigines before he was even born. The first sign he gets is the rain,
though, and soon the water is everywhere, surrounding his car and seeping into his home, and when he finally understands, it is both too early and too late for him to do anything.

I am at a Hardee's, I remind myself, a Hardee's in southern Indiana, thinking about the riddle of fate. I turn on my wipers and merge back onto the highway, judging that it will be near dawn by the time I reach my mother's house. The easy authority of the talk-radio host reassures me. “I'm here to tell you: zoning is liquid,” he tells a worried caller, and the caller begins to sound a little less worried.

• • •

It isn't light yet after all, when I get there, but it's not quite dark either. When I drive around the cul-de-sac the neighbors' security bulb flashes on, as it has for years. Somebody must be landscaping the copse in the center of the cul-de-sac, I notice, because it doesn't look any thicker. My mother's miniature pickup truck is parked in the center of the driveway. As I pull up I realize my big old Chevy will fit neither behind it nor beside it. “No problem,” I say aloud. I know the hiding place for her truck keys. I stop where I am, in the street, and turn off the ignition. It still feels like something is running underneath me when I get out. The pavement feels like it might have a motor in it, vibrating slightly against the soles of my shoes. An early morning redwing sounds a single hoarse note. I slide my mother's truck keys out from beneath a clay pot of marigolds that sits beside the front steps.

The problem, once I'm in her truck, is that it's a stick shift, something I've never learned to do, and I can barely keep my eyes from blurring into sleep. I fumble with the clutch uncertainly, then fit my hand around the heavy grip and move it in a direction that feels right. The truck coughs and dies and rolls backward and I jerk my left leg up in surprise, banging my bruise against the dash. I brake hard and too late, and the truck's
back end slams the side of my car with a final, metallic jolt. And that, apparently, is as much as I can take—my tears come boiling up, and I wrap my arms around the steering wheel and press myself into it, sobbing, sobbing. And then my mother is there, barefoot in her old Lanz nightgown, smelling of bacon, clay, and lotion soap, reaching in for me. “Oh, honey,” she is saying. A long time goes by before I'm ready to go inside, but when I do finally look up the sky has begun to lighten, the house has begun to take on tentative colors.

At the last minute there is something that makes her hesitate. We'll look at the dent later, she says; first things first. But as we're walking up the driveway she looks quickly back over her shoulder at the truck. “What is it?” I say.

“Nope,” she says, shaking her head. “Nothing.”

“Mom,” I say. “What?”

She looks at me closely for a moment and moves a lock of my hair. “Nothing,” she says finally. “I just left a couple of new bud vases in the back. But it doesn't matter, honey—they weren't anything special.”

“Mom,” I say. “Come on. Let's go see how bad it is.” I head back to the truck and she hurries up behind me.

“Honey,” she says, “it really doesn't matter. I can always do those little bud vases. I'll clean it up later.”

I put my foot on the bumper and hoist myself up into the back of the truck. The vases are wrapped in a canvas tarpaulin, and the bundle has slid to one end of the truck bed—it's smashed up next to a box of gardening tools. I open the canvas gingerly, expecting a mess, but the bud vases, for whatever they're worth, are still in one piece. I look up, relieved, but she has already turned her back. I can see the blond hairs on her arms lit up by the sun as she moves evenly toward the house, and I marvel at how young she looks still, as though nothing bad has ever happened to her.

Dallas's dream was to someday live in an apartment large enough for him and his dearest friends to whip through it on roller skates, screaming, “It's happening! It's happening!” at the moment of his triumph, but he was already thirty, lived alone on a waiter's salary, and had neither triumphs nor dear friends. His last friend had been his nearly silent college roommate, Chune Pei Liu, but Chune had gone to jail one night for uprooting and dragging a small holly tree across campus and then threatening the officers who tried to arrest him with kitchen knives, and he moved out without warning soon after that. He did not contact Dallas again, even though he left behind half his clothes and twenty Ramen Dinners and his Daisy Seal-A-Meal and a hairbrush full of hair. He must have undergone some sort of spiritual revelation or transformation, Dallas figured. He was mildly envious.

Dallas knew he should have a plan, but he didn't have one. He loved music but had never laid his hands on a single musical instrument
of any kind. Still, he often stayed up late at night listening to his old clock-radio, watching the flapping digits until they blurred and picturing his own hidden talent someday shooting out of him like staples from a gun. “This could use an arpeggio,” he liked to say, with authority, when listening. He loved arpeggios. He loved arpeggios and he adored the phrase
WIDE LOAD
. “
WIDE LOAD
, coming through!” he shouted whenever he had to carry a tray with more than three items on it out of the kitchen at the restaurant at which he worked. The restaurant was quite busy and so this happened several times each night, causing Dallas's coworkers to treat him as though he were a moron. He knew they thought he was a moron and yet he couldn't help himself.

Why was he given to such extravagance and exclamation? he wondered. Had he seen something, such as the Space Shuttle, explode when he was a child, and he just didn't remember it? He had read somewhere that the children who witnessed that event were given to conditions like his, a chronic unease with the normal pace and pitch of the world, something like motion sickness. They did things like bite the button eyes off their stuffed rabbits and choke, or grow up and refuse to move out of their parents' houses. But Dallas was sure he hadn't seen anything explode. Well, one time he had seen a potato his mother had failed to puncture explode in the oven but he loved that. “Poomp!” he had shouted at his mother, for weeks afterward.

He didn't know why he was the way he was, but he was beginning to feel like he'd spilled something on his own life, ruining it even before it was fully his. The feeling was familiar; as a child he had accidentally broken almost everything he touched, including most of his own belongings. His mother had referred to him in conversation as Destructo. When he was nine, his new pet guinea pig unexpectedly gave birth one night, all the babies stillborn but one, a brown-haired sleek little thing that hopped around the aquarium just hours after its birth, seemingly unconfused about what was required of it—but Dallas accidentally killed it the next day by dropping it behind a chest of drawers. It
did not die right away but lay in the corner of the cage with its eyes open, sighing, for hours, Dallas watching it desperately through the glass. “I told you not to pick it up,” his mother said, standing behind him. But it was so cute, how could he help himself? Destiny, he had named it, before he dropped it, because the mother had been carrying it around for so long without anyone knowing. And as it flipped out of his hands, behind the dresser, he felt the moment had already come, that it had been written down somewhere to wait for him.

As an adult Dallas still believed in fate, tried to recognize its clues and messages in his life, but he was beginning to see that fate was not, had never been, his friend. The simplest of pleasant events escaped him. He could not even get a girl to go out with him.

Suzanne, the girl he wanted, worked as a server with him at the restaurant, though she also had another duty there which made her seem to Dallas hopelessly, unreachably superior: she described the daily specials to people who called in to place their orders on the telephone. The restaurant, though located near an industrial park in the ugly, empty part of town, offered progressive entrees made up of ingredients one would never expect to find together on the same continent, let alone in the same baking pan, and so Suzanne, using her precise, highly credible voice, would explicate the recipes to the wary. Whenever she was called upon to do this, Dallas managed to stop what he was doing and listen. If he was delivering a tray full of steaming plates he would pause by the front desk where the phone was and pretend to rearrange a fruit garnish. “What would you like described?” Suzanne always said. The sexual innuendoes suggested by this kind of talk were so obvious that no one, not even the giddy waitresses who were Suzanne's buddies, bothered to make them, but Dallas always felt when he heard her that an evil cartoon sex fiend ghost, something like the Tasmanian Devil, was inside of him, trying to punch its way out.

Suzanne, like everyone else, thought Dallas was a fool. When he spoke to her her pretty lips flattened into an impatient line, and twice he'd seen her roll her eyes at the mention of his name. Her boyfriend, a long-haired classical cellist, picked her up each night at closing time, the heroic weight of his instrument hanging all around him like a cloud of scent. He looked like Robin Hood, bounding sensitively in and out of the restaurant. Dallas knew there was no way he could compete.

Once, before Robin Hood had started showing up, Dallas had had Suzanne over to his apartment for pork medallions. He had taken advantage of the fact that she had only been working with him a week, knowing she was bound to fall in with the rest of the staff sooner or later. The knowledge that he'd had to resort to this strategy sat like an undissolved lozenge at the back of his throat the day of their date, and he passed by the shabby Winn-Dixie where he usually shopped and drove four miles across town to Publix, where an amazing thing happened: while he was standing in the checkout line, a bird sailed by overhead, disappearing into the wall of houseplants that fronted the produce section. Dallas looked around, and a few other people looked around with him, blinking in a blank sort of way. A moment later the bird sailed back over their heads, a regular brown bird like you would see outside, and a woman in front of Dallas said, “Whose job is it to take care of that?” Before anyone could answer, the bird sailed over a third time, crashed into the glass wall near the exits, and fell open-winged to the floor. Without thinking about it, Dallas sprinted over to the stunned bird and threw his windbreaker on it and took it outside, where he deposited it under a hedge that bordered the lot. Then he jogged back in and paid for his groceries and went home.