by Rachel Toor
I didn’t feel like I could take another step. I barely had the energy to raise the bottle to my mouth. I was breathing hard, just sitting and not moving.
I thought about Joan, and about Miles, and about that runner Pre, their hero, who said he could take more pain than anyone.
I drank another bottle, more slowly so I didn’t cough.
I got up and forced myself to run.
10
I usually just picked my way through dinner and then went right up to the guest room. Mom had tried to find ways to keep me around after we’d finished eating, like asking me questions.
You can imagine how well that worked.
But after dinner one night Dad called out, “What’s a three-letter word for goof?”
“Err,” I said, without really thinking.
He nodded. “Six letters for ‘It has eyes that can’t see’?”
I thought a minute. “Potato.”
“Right-o.”
“‘Derisive look,’ begins with sn?”
“Sneer.”
Mom had settled on the couch with a copy of Vogue. The TV was on PBS, and a show started that I couldn’t help but watch. It was called What Are Animals Thinking?
It profiled a bunch of scientists working on animal cognition. Researchers in Germany did a cool and simple experiment to find out whether dogs cared about fairness. A guy asked a dog for her paw. She gave it to him. He asked her about thirty times and each time, she gave it to him. Then they brought in another dog and the guy asked that dog for his paw. The second dog gave the guy his paw and the guy said, “Good dog!” and gave him a treat. Then he asked the first dog, and when she gave him her paw, he didn’t say anything or give her a treat.
They went back and forth like this for a while. The second dog got props and treats every time he gave his paw, and the first dog, sitting right next to him, doing the same work, had to watch and get nothing. After a short while, the first dog went on strike. If she could talk, she would have used the rallying cry of kids everywhere: “It isn’t fair.”
I hadn’t meant to stay downstairs, but this show was really interesting.
There was also a segment about bonobos, which are like small chimps. The guy who talked about the experiment was a professor at Duke, and he seemed super-young and had crazy hair and I thought for a minute maybe I should have gone back on my anti-Duke stance and applied there, because I could totally imagine myself being his star student.
As soon as they heard the word Duke, both my parents looked up and started watching. Mom said something about the Lemur Center at Duke being the home of the largest collection of prosimian primates anywhere in the world. I knew this because I did a report on lemurs in middle school. I resisted the urge to say, No shit.
The absolute best part of the show was about rats. At the University of Chicago, researchers did a study that showed rats have empathy. On the one hand, my response to this was: Duh. Anyone who’s ever spent time with a rat knows that. But they were looking at it scientifically.
They set up an experiment where two rats, cage-mates, were put into a bigger cage—they called it an arena. One of them was free to roam and the other was put into a clear plastic tube. The rat in the tube was not happy, and the other guy could tell. Once the free rat got comfortable in the arena, he learned how to open the door to let the “restrained” rat out. Then the scientists put a bunch of chocolate chips in the arena. The free rat had to decide whether to release the tubed rat or to chow down. Most of the time, he would release his friend. When he ate the chips, he left some for the other guy.
When the restrained rat got free, the rescuer would chase him around the cage, jumping on him and doing a victory dance.
The woman who did the experiment watched a video of the rats with the TV host and you could see on her face how proud the researcher was when the free guy opened the door for his imprisoned friend. She practically did a fist pump.
My mom said, “I never realized.”
Dad reached over and rubbed my shoulder. “I miss him too,” he said.
11
I continued to refuse to discuss my college plans with anyone. My teachers, especially Ms. Chan and Mr. Bergmann, asked what I was going to do, but I said I didn’t know.
Sam Malouf, who won a scholarship to Northwestern, kept saying, “Where’d you get in, Rat Girl? Going to pahk your cah in Hah-vid yahd?” He was mad that I had beat him out for valedictorian.
I caught my mother and Jenni whispering together a bunch of times. I heard “her” and “she” and “decision” leak out from around corners and under closed doors and I knew they were talking about me.
Since that run to the far bridge, I had been running every day. But if I didn’t go really fast, if I allowed my mind to wander, I would get upset.
So I ran until it hurt, and then kept going.
12
On a warm Sunday in mid-April, Walter-the-Man came into the house and hollered for me.
“Alice,” he bellowed. I didn’t respond.
After he called for me six more times I came downstairs. “What?”
“Let’s go,” he said.
“No.”
“You don’t even know where we’re going.”
“Don’t care. Don’t want to go anywhere.”
“Not acceptable. Get a sweater and come on. And don’t look at me in that tone of voice.”
Mom was standing in the entryway watching us. He looked at her and said, “Basement?”
She nodded.
He disappeared down the stairs.
WTF?
I glanced at my mother. She shrugged and went into the kitchen.
When he came back Walter-the-Man was carrying one of my mother’s golf clubs. I knew it was hers because it was wearing a hat Jenni had made for it.
“No way,” I said.
“Way,” Walter-the-Man said.
“I am not playing golf.”
“No, you’re not. You don’t know how to play golf. We’re going to the driving range because I still have until midnight tomorrow to submit my taxes. Procrastination is a time-honored American tradition.”
“No,” I said, and crossed my arms.
Walter-the-Man opened the door. “Remember the old days when you were nice to me? Remember how you wanted to be the kind of person who would try anything once? Remember how you wanted to be more like Walter?”
I thought that was a low blow.
“Let’s go,” he said, and headed outside.
I sighed loudly, even though no one was there to hear it, and followed him.
“We’re going in the MLC-mobile?” A few years ago Walter-the-Man had bought a red Porsche convertible, which I attributed to a midlife crisis and took every opportunity to point out.
“It’s a chick magnet,” he said, and pushed a button that made the top fold down.
Mom hated riding in the convertible because it messed up her hair. My hair was always messy anyway, so I didn’t care. I could not believe he was kidnapping me like this. I said, “Stranger danger.”
He put his fingers in his ears and said, “Lalalalalalalala.”
We got to the country club, which I had always made fun of for being elitist and tacky, and Walter-the-Man handed me my mom’s golf club.
“We’re going to smack some balls,” he said.
And the only thing I could think of was Walter.
There’s something about rats—about male rats—that’s rather amazing. Well, another thing. It’s that they have the biggest balls you’ve ever seen. Walter’s nutsack was disproportionately large. Like, if he were a man he’d have testicles the size of cantaloupes. Or those award-winning pumpkins people grow for contests. I didn’t think about them much, they were just a part of who he was, like his tiny four-fingered hands, his big pink feet, his dark round eyes.
But everyone who met Walter said something about his package. Having never seen a man’s junk up close and in real life, I pretended it was no big deal.
When Walter-the-Man said, “balls,” I thought of Walter, and I was afraid I was going to start crying. I didn’t want him to see so I walked off toward the clubhouse and muttered something about needing to get a soda.
When I got back, Walter-the-Man had staked out a spot on the driving range and was swinging away but not hitting any balls.
He turned and saw me and said, “Step right up here, missy.”
“Don’t call me missy, bucko.”
“Alice, get your club. Please.”
I plucked Jenni’s knitted hat, yellow with a black smiley face, off the club and held it like a baseball bat.
“Okay. Take your left arm, let it hang down naturally, and then take hold of the club by the grip. Let your right arm hang loose and put your hand on the club. Good, good. Put the little finger of your right hand between the index and middle fingers of your left.”
“That baseball hat is probably older than I am,” I said, raising my chin toward his head. The hat, naturally, said Duke.
“Don’t worry about that. Now, the stance. You want an athletic posture with a slight bend at the knees, a slight forward tilt at the waist, and your weight primarily on the balls of your feet.
“Put your left foot in line with the ball.” He stuck a fluorescent orange tee into the ground in front of me and topped it with a new white ball. “The backswing,” he said, and stepped away and did a slow and exaggerated motion with the club.
“When you pull the club back, it should stay facing the target for a good couple of feet or so.”
“By ‘target,’ I assume you mean the ball?”
“Yes, the ball.”
“Then why didn’t you say ball?”
“The downswing begins with the lower body, not the hands or arms. This is one of the hardest things to groove—”
I snorted when he said, “groove,” and he ignored me.
“—since it feels natural at this point to take a hack at the ball. That will not end well. You rotate, starting with your hips, and then sort of let your shoulders, then your arms, and then finally your hands, catch up.”
“How long will this lecture last?”
“Finally, the follow-through and finish position. Your back foot should come up only after you’ve struck the ball and should end up resting on the toe of your shoe, and your belt buckle needs to be facing the target.”
I told him:
1. “I don’t wear a belt. Ever.
2. “If I did, it wouldn’t have some big old buckle.
3. “Haven’t we already established the target is a ball?”
I said, “Why can’t you just call it a ball, like the way they do in, say, baseball or even basketball or even football where the ball is not even ball-shaped?”
“Alice,” Walter-the-Man said, “just take a goddamn swing.”
I did. I didn’t think of any of the things he’d said, and swatted. I didn’t hit the ball; I whacked a big chunk out of the nicely manicured lawn and ended up spinning myself around and nearly walloping Walter-the-Man with my club.
“Oops.”
“Try again,” he said.
The second time, I dug up another big clump of dirt, but the third time, I smacked the ball with a satisfying thwack, and the sucker soared. It flew up and, like a bird of prey, dove back down.
Walter-the-Man said nothing and put another ball on the tee.
I swung again and hit it again. Not as far, but I hit it.
The next time I took a swing, I whacked the tee right out from under the ball. The tee went sailing and the ball just plopped down two inches so that it was sitting on the ground and not the tee.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that,” Walter-the-Man said.
I picked up the broken tee. “You’ve never played golf with me before.”
“We’re not playing golf,” he said.
There were so many things to think about, big things, like how to maintain your body position, and small things, like keeping your eye on the tee and not looking up to see where the ball goes—assuming it actually goes somewhere—that I didn’t think of anything else for three whole hours. Every time I connected with the ball felt like a triumph.
Hearing that thwack never got old.
Of course, I didn’t hear it every time. Or even every other time. And I still managed to spin myself around occasionally. I wanted more tips. I wanted to know what I was doing wrong. Walter-the-Man would feed me little things: “Breathe before you swing. Inhale. Then exhale. Then swing.” Mostly he just said, “Nice,” and teed up another ball. When we were finished, the green was more brown than green because I had dug up so much dirt.
“I thought golf was just a bunch of paunchy guys riding around in go-carts,” I said as we walked back to the MLC-mobile. “I’m tired. My arms are sore and so are my legs.”
I knew my parents went to the country club occasionally—less now than they did when I was young—but I never knew what it would be like to play. Walter-the-Man said, “Your mother is an excellent golfer. Your dad’s okay, but he’s not in your mom’s league. Literally. She’s won the women’s title before. She doesn’t like to play because you can’t win at this game.”
“You just said she won.”
“You can never beat the game. It will always beat you. It’s the most frustrating thing in the world. Your mother likes to do things where she’s a clear winner.”
He pulled his hat low on his forehead and added, “You might know something about what that’s like.”
13
After my parents and I watched the TV show about rats, I got a little obsessed and started doing even more rat research. I was supposed to write a final paper for psychology class but realized that I wasn’t all that interested in people.
So I started Googling around for things written by psychologists about rats. I found an article in a scientific journal about this experiment where a researcher learned that if you tickle rats, they laugh. Well, they emit ultrasonic (“at a frequency above human hearing”) chirps.
The experiment seemed obvious to me, though it turned out to be kind of controversial. I found articles about it all over the place—including in People and News of the Weird. Why was this such a big deal? I mean, I couldn’t hear Walter giggle when I tickled him—you needed the special electronic equipment to be able to hear the chirps—but I knew he was laughing. You could see it in his whole body.
From biology class, I learned that about the worst thing you can do in science is commit the “sin” of anthropomorphism. That’s how they talk about it too—as a sin. Like adultery or baby-shaking or swindling old ladies out of their life savings. There are tons of scientists who just plain don’t believe animals have emotions.
I might not be able to prove it scientifically, but with animals, it’s usually easier to know what they’re feeling than it is with people.
When I did some reading on this I found a book by Charles Darwin called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals where he told a whole bunch of stories that show animals have emotions. He said there are universal emotions, expressed across species and cultures, and you could read them in people’s and animals’ faces.
Most nights I can get my homework done quickly. And I always get A’s. But I spent a lot of time on that research paper and it turned out to be three times as long as it was supposed to be.
My psychology teacher, Mr. Krystal, gave me an A+ + + on it and said he thought I’d found my calling.
Even after the paper was finished, I kept researching.
I flashed back to the time I showed Jenni photos of rats and she got all excited by the Dumbos.
“They’re so cute,” she said in a high squeaky voice.
“Cuter than Walt?”
“I mean, look at that round face and those big round ears.”
“Why is that cuter than Walter?”
“Because, oh, I don’t know, it’s just cute.”
I started thinking about what makes something cute. I stumbled on t
his essay by a famous Harvard scientist named Stephen Jay Gould about how originally Mickey Mouse the cartoon character looked more like a rat.
Over the years Mickey’s head got bigger and more childlike, his nose got thicker and less pointy, and his eyes went from being simple black dots to having pupils. His ears moved back on his head, farther from his nose, giving him a rounded rather than a sloped forehead. His former ratlike appearance changed into the bland profile of a little kid.
Gould quoted some German scientist about how animals with baby features—big heads, big eyes, bulging cheeks, pudgy arms and legs, and clumsy movements—triggered adults to want to care for them. In other words, we see those blobby things and it makes us go “awww” and speak in a high voice. Like the noises Jenni made when she saw the Dumbo rats.
Gould’s point about how we are drawn to animals who look like babies explains not only why some people don’t appreciate rats, but also why hamsters, those tiny terrorists, are so popular. They’re fat and round and cute. They also eat their own babies and bite the people who feed them.
14
I uncovered all sorts of rat facts:
1. Queen Victoria loved rats. Jack Black, a famous rat catcher, gave rats to the fancy people of the time. That’s why pet rats are called fancy rats.
2. During the Roman Empire, it was considered good luck for a white rat to cross your path. A black rat, not so much.
3. In rat terminology, bucks and does mate to produce kittens.
4. It is illegal to have pet rats in Billings, Montana. It is also illegal to have a sheep in the cab of your truck without a chaperone, and for married women to go fishing alone on Sundays.
5. One pair of rats can produce 15,000 descendants in a year. Male rats can do it for six hours at a time and most female rats in the wild are continuously pregnant.
6. Rats can squeeze into any hole they can get their head through.
7. Rats don’t pant. They release heat through the bottoms of their (big) feet.
8. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, rats (along with mice and birds) are not considered “animals.” There’s an exception to the Animal Welfare Act, which provides guidelines of care for researchers and farmers, that excludes rats. Un-freaking-believable, but true. Rats, mice, and birds don’t have to be treated in the same humane way as other animals.
