Large Animals in Everyday Life (20 page)

So I could understand how the model might feel. I could see how, from looking at me, the miserable, small-minded Winn-Dixie manager would believe I had no business comparing myself to her, but, not being a bear himself, he did not understand that appearances meant nothing. I was a beast, yes, but I also had something like x-ray vision; I was able, as a bear, to see through beauty and ugliness to the true, desperate and disillusioned hearts of all men.

• • •

It was not difficult to figure out where she lived. She had been profiled earlier that month on “Entertainment Tonight” along with her sister, who at twelve was also a model, and the two girls were shown rollerblading around their cul-de-sac, and I knew all the cul-de-sacs in town from having driven the bus. So, a few days after I was fired, I drove to the house. To be a bear was to be impulsive.

It had been a record-hot, record-dry July, and the joke topic of the radio call-in show I listened to as I drove was “What have we done to antagonize God?” Callers were citing recent sad and farcical events from around the world in excited, tentative voices, as though the jovial DJ would really give them the answer, or as though they might win something. Only a few callers took the
question personally, confessing small acts of betrayal and deception, but the DJ cut these people off. “Well, heh heh, we all do the best we can,” he said, fading their voices out so it would not sound as though he were hanging up on them in mid-sentence.
Asshole
, I thought, and I made a mental note to stop at the radio station sometime and do something about him.

The model's house was made of a special, straw-colored kind of brick, rare in the South, or so “ET” had said. I saw the model's mother step out onto the front steps, holding a canister of Love My Carpet, but when she saw my car she stepped quickly back inside. The model's sister answered the door. She was a double of the model, only reduced in size by a third and missing the model's poignance. Her face was beautiful but entirely devoid of expression or history; her small smooth features did not look capable of being shaped by loss or longing, not even the honest longing of children. This would be an asset for a model, I imagined, and I could see where the mother's Buddha-nature had been translated, in her younger daughter, into perfection: desire had not just been eliminated, but seemed never to have existed in the first place.

“I am a fan,” I said, and, perhaps because I was a girl, showered and combed and smiling, I was let in. I had also brought, as props, a couple of magazines which I held in front of me like a shield, but I was not nervous at all. I understood that I had nothing to lose, that none of us, in fact, had as much to lose as we believed. I sensed other bears out there, too—my fierce brothers, stalking through woods and villages, streams and lots, sometimes upright and sometimes on all fours, looking straight ahead and feeling the world pass beneath their heavy, sensitive paws.

The model's sister led me past ascending carpeted stairs and a wall of framed photos to the back of the house, where the model's bright bedroom overlooked a patio crowded by palmetto and bougainvillea, visible through sliding glass doors. A tiny motion sensor stuck to the wall above the glass blinked its red light as I entered. The model was bent over her single bed, taking small
towels of all colors and patterns from a laundry basket, folding them, and placing them in piles. “Fan,” the little sister said, and the model straightened and smiled and came forward, her perfume surrounding me and sending a surge of bear power through me, a boiling sheet of red up before my eyes. For just a moment as we shook hands I was sure she would know, she would remember the feel of my paw. But then she stepped back and my face cooled.

“I'm a huge fan,” I said.

“Well thanks, that's so sweet,” she said. She had taken the magazines from me automatically, just as her mother had taken the ice cream at the store, and was already scribbling across the shiny likeness of her face. “Should I make it out to anyone?” she said.

“My boyfriend,” I said, and I told her the stockbroker's name.

“You're so lucky you're so tall,” she said, handing the magazines back. “That's my biggest liability, I can't do runway. Well, thanks for coming by.”

I looked around at the white dressers, the mirrored vanity, not ready to leave, and was shocked by a short row of stuffed bears set up on a shelf on the wall behind me. They were just regular brown teddy bears with ribbon bows at their necks, no pandas or polar bears, but they stared back at me with identical shocked expressions, another motion sensor glowing on the wall over their heads, unblinking. “Nice bears,” I finally said, forcing myself to turn away.

“Oh, I've had those forever,” she said. “See that one in the middle, that looks so sad? I found him in the street when I was six years old! Doesn't he look sad?”

“Yeah, he really does,” I said. The bear was smaller and more lumpish than the other bears, with black felt crescents glued on for eyebrows.

“I used to make them take turns sleeping in the bed with me,” the model said. “But even if it wasn't his turn I let him, just 'cause he looked so sad. Isn't that funny? I used to kiss him thirty-two times every night, right after I said my prayers.”

“Thirty-two,” I said.

“My lucky number,” she said brightly.

“But you don't kiss him anymore,” I said.

She stared at me, frowning. “No,” she said. She stared at me some more and I just stood, my arms hanging, as a bear would stand, waiting. “Well, I better get back to work,” she said.

“On your towels,” I said.

She put her hands on her hips and gazed helplessly at the towels, as though they had betrayed her. “They're dish towels, isn't that queer?” she said. “I got them from a chain letter. My cousin started it, and I was second on the list, so I got, like, seventy-two of them sent from, like, everywhere. Isn't that pathetic—she's, like, twenty, and that's her
hobby
. You can have one, you want one?”

“Seriously?” I said.

“God, take your pick,” she said. “I guess I have to remind myself sometimes that not everyone's as lucky as me, but, like, dish towels, I'm sorry.”

I had to brush past her to get to the bed, the snap on the hip pocket of my jeans rubbing her arm. I took the top towel from the nearest stack, a simple white terrycloth one with an appliqué of a pair of orange and yellow squash. “Thanks, I'll think of you every time I use it,” I said. I held the towel, stroking it. It was not enough, I was thinking.

“Well, thanks for coming by,” she said. She had moved to the doorway and stood looking at me in the same way she had looked at the towels. The row of bears watched from over her shoulder, the slumped, sad one seeming braced by its brethren. I imagined the model and her soulless sister laughing at me after I'd gone, at my terrible size, my obvious lie about a boyfriend.

“I really have to get back to what I was doing …” she said.

“I'm sorry, I was just so nervous about finally meeting you,” I said, and I could see her relax slightly. “I almost forgot to ask, isn't that funny? I hate to ask, but do you by any chance give out photos?”

“No, you'd have to contact the fan club for that,” she said. Her face was final, and I turned, finally, to go. “But actually, wait,” she said. “I do have something, if you want it.”

What happened next was certainly not believable in the real world, but in the just, super-real world of the bear it only confirmed what I had known. She slid an envelope out from beneath the blotter on her white desk, picked through it with her slim graceful fingers, and pulled out a photograph which she passed to me hurriedly, as though it were contaminated. “Here, isn't that cute?” she said, laughing in a forced way, like the DJ.

There we were, her and me, her small, radiant face beside my large, furry, inscrutable one, my paw visible, squeezing her small shoulders together slightly, the flash reflected in the freezer cases behind us, making a white halo around both of our heads. Something seemed to pop then, noiselessly, as though the flash had just gone off around us again in the bedroom. Like a witch or spirit who could be destroyed by having her photo taken, I felt I was no longer the bear. “He's so cute,” I murmured.

She snorted, but it had no heart to it, it sounded like she was imitating someone. Then for a moment she no longer saw me; she just stood there looking at nothing, her dark blue eyes narrowed, the faintest suggestion of creases visible around her mouth.

I had to take a step back, such was the power of her face at that moment. Then she too became herself again, and we were just two sad girls standing there, one of them beautiful and one of them something else. “Well, goodbye,” I said, and she looked relieved that I was leaving—but also, I thought, that it was only me deserting her and not, as before, the heartbreaking, duplicitous bear.

On the way out I encountered her mother, who had materialized again beside the front door. It was the simple gravity, the solid, matter-of-fact weight of the woman, I decided, that made her silent appearances and disappearances so disconcerting, so breathtaking. Wasn't it more impressive to see a magician produce from the depths of his bag a large, floppy rabbit, to see the
ungraceful weight of the animal dragged up into the light, than to watch him release doves or canaries, already creatures of the air, flashy but in their element? “Goodbye,” I said. “Sorry.”

She smiled and did not step but rather shifted several inches so that I could get past her, and then stood in the open doorway, round and lavender, smiling and watching my retreat. Only when I was halfway down the walk to my car did she say goodbye, and then her voice was so deep and strange and serene that I was not sure if I had really heard it or, if I had, if it had really come from her.

• • •

I did use the towel and sometimes think of the model when I used it. The photo I didn't frame or hide or treat with any ceremony, but I did look at it often, trying to experience again that moment of transformation, that rush of power that had gone through me in the seconds before it was snapped.

But after a few months even the memory of it became weak. I was after all no longer the bear and could no longer remember well what it felt like to be the bear. The animal in the picture appeared only to be a big, awkwardly constructed sham, nothing you could call human. When I looked at it I felt only confusion and shame. How had I become that shaggy, oversized, hollow thing? Once I had been an honest little girl, a girl who had to be dragged away from the object of her love, but somehow, somewhere, everything had changed. How had it happened? I wondered. I studied the photo as though the bear could answer me, but it only stared back with its black fiberglass eyes, its grip on the real human beside it relentless.

The Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

• • •

David Walton,
Evening Out

Leigh Allison Wilson,
From the Bottom Up

Sandra Thompson,
Close-Ups

Susan Neville,
The Invention of Flight

Mary Hood,
How Far She Went

François Camoin,
Why Men Are Afraid of Women

Molly Giles,
Rough Translations

Daniel Curley,
Living with Snakes

Peter Meinke,
The Piano Tuner

Tony Ardizzone,
The Evening News

Salvatore La Puma,
The Boys of Bensonhurst

Melissa Pritchard,
Spirit Seizures

Philip F. Deaver,
Silent Retreats

Gail Galloway Adams,
The Purchase of Order

Carole L. Glickfeld,
Useful Gifts

Antonya Nelson,
The Expendables

Nancy Zafris,
The People I Know

Debra Monroe,
The Source of Trouble

Robert H. Abel,
Ghost Traps

T. M. McNally,
Low Flying Aircraft

Alfred DePew,
The Melancholy of Departure

Dennis Hathaway,
The Consequences of Desire

Rita Ciresi,
Mother Rocket

Dianne Nelson,
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America

Christopher McIlroy,
All My Relations

Alyce Miller,
The Nature of Longing

Carol Lee Lorenzo,
Nervous Dancer

C. M. Mayo,
Sky over El Nido

Wendy Brenner,
Large Animals in Everyday Life

Paul Rawlins,
No Lie Like Love

Harvey Grossinger,
The Quarry

Ha Jin,
Under the Red Flag

Andy Plattner,
Winter Money

Frank Soos,
Unified Field Theory

Mary Clyde,
Survival Rates

Hester Kaplan,
The Edge of Marriage

Darrell Spencer,
CAUTION Men in Trees

Robert Anderson,
Ice Age

Bill Roorbach,
Big Bend

Dana Johnson,
Break Any Woman Down

Gina Ochsner,
The Necessary Grace to Fall

Kellie Wells,
Compression Scars

Eric Shade,
Eyesores

Catherine Brady,
Curled in the Bed of Love

Ed Allen,
Ate It Anyway

Gary Fincke,
Sorry I Worried You

Barbara Sutton,
The Send-Away Girl

David Crouse,
Copy Cats

Randy F. Nelson,
The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men

Greg Downs,
Spit Baths

Peter LaSalle,
Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism

Anne Panning,
Super America

Margot Singer,
The Pale of Settlement

Andrew Porter,
The Theory of Light and Matter

Peter Selgin,
Drowning Lessons