Strange Mammals (10 page)

After Kenneth’s death, her personal reserves had dried up completely, though she couldn’t really seem to care. She had tried touching herself a few times, hoping that an orgasm might relax her, make her feel better, but after fifteen minutes of rubbing, all she would be was sore. So she gave it up. Nothing really put her in the mood anymore anyway.

~

“So what happened to that guy you were seeing in high school?” Dale said. “Gary? Geoff?”

“You mean Graham?” Allan said.

“Graham! Right, him.”

“I don’t know. We broke up not long after graduation and haven’t really kept in touch. Why’d you think of him?”

“I don’t know. You don’t really talk about your love life. I was just trying to start the conversation.”

“I don’t really talk about my love life because I don’t have one at present.”

“Do you go to bars or anything?”

Allan chuckled, shaking his head as if at an inside joke. “You know, there’s that stereotype that gay guys do nothing but hang out in bars and clubs, or go to the gym, or suck each other off in public parks or in dark alleyways, because we’re all so sexual that we can’t keep our hands off each other. It’s an idiotic stereotype, and I hate it. Some of us are quiet, like to stay at home, and are just not that interested in dating. Sure, I’d like to meet a nice guy, but I’m just so sick of the fucking meat-market scene. I’d much rather stay home and read a book.”

“Okay, okay, sorry,” Dale said. “Didn’t mean to hit such a nerve.”

“It’s just that this oversexed portrayal of ‘the gay man,’ as if this represented all of us, is everywhere on TV and in the movies, a lot of times created by straight guys who don’t know any better. It really pisses me off.”

“Is that why you work here, so you can be alone with your books?”

“Partially. I also have nothing better to do,” he said. “But hopefully, soon, that’ll change.”

~

Dale had terrible posture. She hunched and slouched and slumped, and her lower back hated her for it. At night, before bed, she would lie flat on the carpet of her condo’s living room and stare at the ceiling while her vertebrae popped and her muscles groaned. The ceiling had been sprayed with that texturalizing material that was the bane of latex balloons everywhere. She couldn’t imagine why someone would have done such a thing. Was a flat ceiling really so bad? Why make it unnecessarily fancy?

As her back relaxed, her eyes unfocused and patterns emerged in the ceiling. Depending on her mood, she saw animals, or handguns, or distorted faces. Tonight, she saw the face of her dead husband with the body of a Land Behemoth. He was wearing that superior smirk, that
I got my Ph.D. at Columbia
expression (despite the fact that he’d only gotten an Associate’s degree from the local community college), the one she had grown to hate, the one that had set off the majority of their marital arguments.

She was surprised when these moments came upon her, the rush of negative emotions. Kenneth could have been a bastard sometimes, but he had also been extremely generous and loving. He brought her flowers at unexpected moments. He always cleaned the dishes, whether she had cooked or he had. He left little notes on the refrigerator if he was leaving for work before she was awake, always signed with a “Love you.”

Kenneth was half-Armenian, and he had been hairy all over. Dale could send him into shivers of ecstasy by combing through the hair on his chest and his back with her fingers. Despite his insecurities, she’d loved his hairy body, loved the feeling of it moving against hers, loved the prickles and tickles it produced on her own skin. It was a built-in layer of fur, and he was always warm. He was her grizzly bear.

The only time they had gone to the beach, a year after they’d been married, he asked her to help him Nair his body. She’d balked for weeks, imagining great clumps of thick black hair clogging the shower drain, the work that would tire her out, the mess that would have to be cleaned up.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I don’t want people to see me like this.”

“But what does it matter? Chances are you’ll never run into those people again.”

“Please, hon. It’s not just for appearances either. Have you ever tried putting suntan lotion on a hairy person? It gets the hair all matted and most of it never ends up on the skin, so you get sunburned anyway. And then the sunburn is all splotchy because each hair casts a tiny little shadow, and then you have to put on aloe and you run into the same damn problem again—”

“All right, okay, I’ll do it.”

He stripped and stood in the shower. She slathered the depilatory cream over a patch of his back, waited five minutes, then rubbed away the cream and the accompanying hair with a damp washcloth. The washcloth was rinsed under the tap, and a small pile of thick blackish hair started to accumulate at the drain. She repeated this over and over, making her way slowly across and down his back, then to his shoulders, his upper arms, parts of his chest, his legs above the knee, his ass. The bathroom was pervaded with the chemical cucumber smell of the cream. It took a long time. They worked together, with him applying to one section as she was wiping away another.

They talked about Wrightsville Beach and the stretches of shops there, about body image, about her parents and his, about their plans for the future. Halfway through, she noticed he had an erection, and she asked how this could possibly be turning him on.

“All the touching, I guess,” he said. “And I am naked here.”

When they were finished, he turned in a circle, modeling his newly bare skin. She gathered all the discarded hair in a paper towel, and dumped it in the small trash can next to the toilet. It almost looked like a wig. He leaned down, whispered, “Thanks,” and turned on the water to wash away any remnants of the cream still on his skin. Dale shrugged out of her tee shirt, shorts, and underwear, and joined him under the water. She rubbed his skin lightly, the feel of it so strange to her, smooth and a bit pink. Kenneth gasped a few times as her fingers ran over an area of particularly sensitive skin. He caressed her breasts and kissed her neck as she jerked him off, and he quickly came with a shudder and a long moan. She kissed him on the lips and stepped out of the shower to let him finish cleaning.

When he’d flopped into bed a bit later, and promptly dropped off to sleep, still naked, it had struck her how vulnerable he’d looked in that moment. He had trusted her completely, opening up more than she had ever known. She’d stayed awake for about half an hour more, running her fingertips over his bare arms and back.

She now blinked, and the vision of Kenneth disappeared from the ceiling. It was once again just an assemblage of dots. She turned to look at the clock; forty-five minutes had passed while she’d been entranced by the memory of that day. Dale rolled over onto her side, then up into a sitting position. The blood pounded in her ears, and a little knot lurched under her ribcage, but she didn’t cry. Couldn’t. She stood up, dumped a handful of food into Pepper’s cage, lurched down the hall, stripped to her underwear, and fell into bed. The sheets were at a near-perfect temperature, and she fell asleep in minutes.

~

Dale’s first marriage was to a bass guitar player named Stan who cheated on her with the groupies who attended his concerts. He never even tried to hide it. Six weeks after their wedding in Las Vegas, she filed for divorce.

~

The temperature dropped the night Allan took her to see the Land Behemoths. The dealership was on the edge of town, next to a horse farm, and they had to take a gravel driveway to the front gate. The dealership was closed, but the Behemoths roamed the lot, nudging each other with their large heads. Though they lumbered through the fields on their cloven feet, not a single blade of grass was trampled. Their bodies were vaguely ox-like, but thicker and bigger, and covered in a multitude of iridescent greenish scales, like those of a fish. Their heads were broad, vaguely dog-like, with a double set of stubby horns extending up, and a mane of fiery hair that flowed even in the absence of breeze. Their trumpeted barks echoed throughout the lot.

Allan and Dale approached the fence, breaths clouding in front of their faces. “Go ahead,” he said.

“What?”

“Tell them.”

“Tell them what?”

“All the things you’ve been bottling up since Kenneth died.”

“What? No. No, I’m not going to talk to a bunch of stupid animals.”

“I think it might help.”

“So, what, are you a psychologist now? Did you read that in one of your fucking books?”

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “I just know from experience. You’ll feel better when you let it all out. Look over there. One of those ‘stupid animals’ might have been the one that killed your husband in that accident. Don’t you want to tell it how angry you are?”

“The Behemoth that killed Kenneth was put down,” she said. “I purposely stayed away when they did that.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not like it killed him on purpose, right? It wasn’t malicious, there was no motive. It was just a stupid animal that got spooked by something and its handler lost control of it.”

Allan sighed and looked through the fence. “I’m worried about you, Dale.”

She breathed through her nose and said nothing.

“You can’t seem to move on, and it’s eating you up. I want to help you, and I thought this might be the thing.”

“Just stop it. Stop trying to help me.”

“But I’m your friend.”

“Fuck you! Where were you after high school? Where were you when I was getting drunk and taking home a different guy every night? Fuck you, you’re my friend.”

“Don’t tell me,” Allan said quietly. “Tell them.”

Dale screamed and shot both middle fingers at the fence.
“Fuck you, you fucking stupid dinosaurs!”
The nearest Behemoth raised its head and barked its trumpet call in response.

She stomped down the gravel drive back toward the highway, and was nearly to the road before she heard Allan’s car roll up behind her.

~

It had been raining the morning of the car accident, Thanksgiving morning. Unseasonably warm, Dale had left the bedroom window open all night to admit the breeze, and she awoke to the sound of water through the leaves. It was only a half-hour before she’d been planning to get up anyway, so she put on a pot of coffee, and walked out onto the covered porch to watch and listen to the rain.

There was something about the sound that had always soothed her. She felt cleansed somehow, though she was untouched by it physically. It quieted any voices of stress in her head, it relaxed her. It was early enough in the morning that most people in the condo block would not have been awake yet, so it felt as if the rain was just for her, a magical present, and that feeling made her deliriously content.

She had been standing out there for about fifteen minutes before she heard the sliding glass door open behind her, and then Kenneth’s strong arm wrapped around her midsection with a steaming mug in his hand. He lightly kissed the back of her neck, in the spot that always drove her crazy, and she sank back into him. Dale took the cup from his hand.

They stood like that, the apotheosis of the loving couple, for countless minutes, the experience suspended in time, as the rain pattered down around them. Then Kenneth took a deep breath, and the spell was broken.

“We should get cleaned up,” he said. “We’ll need to get to Charlotte by 11:00.”

Dale separated from him and turned. “Why do we need to be there so early?”

“Mom has a whole day of stuff planned for us.”

“But that’s the problem isn’t it? She
always
has stuff planned, and she absolutely expects us to be cheerfully involved. Why can’t we just do a quiet Thanksgiving here this time?”

Kenneth rolled his eyes and slid the door open to step back inside. “We’re not talking about this right now. We said we’d be there, and we need to be there.”

Dale stood outside for a few minutes more as the rain slowed and then tapered to a halt, leaving the trees to drip and glisten. In a couple of hours, the sun would burn away almost all traces of the brief shower, as if it had never happened at all. She took a sip from her coffee, then went inside to get ready for an awkward and uncomfortable day with her in-laws.

Later that week, at the funeral, her mother-in-law approached her during the reception and, in muted whispers, accused Dale of causing the accident just so that Dale wouldn’t have to spend Thanksgiving dinner with her. The bluntness of it shocked Dale into frustrated silence. Instead of retaliating, she stood up, walked out of her mother-in-law’s house, and disappeared down the trail that led into the woods. She sat on a tree stump and screamed herself hoarse, hoping it would help the tears come, but they never did.

~

She worked at the yogurt shop for a week before she saw her first customer. Early November, the weather more appropriate for hot chocolate or apple cider, but in strolled this older Chinese woman, somewhere around sixty, her overcoat pulled tight, her cheeks pinked by the wind. She unbuttoned the coat, then walked directly up to Dale, eyeing her over the counter.

“I shall have the chocolate and vanilla swirl,” she said.

“Waffle cone or regular?”

“Regular, please.”

Dale grabbed a cake cone from the plastic cylinder on the counter, turned, and pulled the middle lever on the yogurt machine. It still amazed her how the machine could perfectly mix the two flavors, equal portions, neither overpowering the other. She oozed the bipartite frozen yogurt into the cone, twisting her wrist like Allan had taught her, not trying to control the flow, but to ease its way into the cone. She traced the spiral up to a point, then lifted the lever to cut off the flow from the machine. It wasn’t perfect, one half was more lopsided than the other, but it was good enough.

She handed the cone over the counter to the Chinese lady, punched in the keys on the register, and said, “A dollar fifty, please.”

The woman reached into her blue and purple brocaded handbag, and extracted six quarters. Dale dumped them in the register’s tray.

“The Qilin was not responsible for your husband’s death,” she said.