Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  You must remember that most people don’t like to hear when bad things happen. They can tolerate only a little here and there. The bad things must be comestible. If there are too many bad things, they plug their ears and vilify the victim. But a hundred very bad things happened to me. Am I supposed to be quiet? Bear my pain like a good girl? Or shall I be very bad and take it out on the world? Either way I won’t be loved.

  That was when my phone dinged. My heart jumped. I thought it might be Alice. But it was Mary.

  because of you i held my dead boy in my hands. he was blue he turned blue in my arms! do you know what its like to hold your dead baby in your arms!!!

  Upon reading it, I threw the phone against the wall. It hit the frog vase with my father inside. The vase cracked into several pieces and all of my father’s ashes were lost to the floor, to the grains and crevices of the uncleanable wood. At first I tried to scoop them up. But my hand came back with dust and strands of hair and an uncooked lentil. So I vacuumed the whole area. It was less painful than I would have expected. My mother’s ashes remained intact on the mantel.

  Eleanor walked in from the deck where she’d taken to sunning herself in the early afternoons.

  —I heard a noise. Are you okay?

  Since the miscarriage, she’d been attending to me so kindly. She never asked me about Lenny, about the way it happened. Just like her father, she was careful not to ire. She was a quiet, wonderful listener. In an eerie way, the girl and I loved each other. But that didn’t take away from the prison of it all.

  Now that Lenny was gone, she’d floated the notion that she wouldn’t have to leave until his cousin up in San Francisco sold the place. I worried about the cousin coming for the watch, but I never heard a thing.

  In fact, the only person who said anything, who made me feel culpable, was Kevin. Several days after Lenny’s death, Kevin approached me as I was getting out of my car. We said hello. It was the first time we’d seen each other in a while.

  —I wanted to offer my condolences, he said.

  —What do you mean?

  —Lenny, I mean. Death in your house, Miss Joan.

  He placed one of his elegant hands on my shoulder and looked at me. I willed my body not to tremble. He knew. I knew that he did.

  —Don’t beat yourself up about it.

  —About what?

  —You know, he said. You couldn’t have saved him.

  Later I would sit with that line. I would wonder which man Kevin was talking about. I could swear I’d seen something in his eyes. A flicker of my history.

  —Sorry to know you’re going. I wish we could have gotten to know each other.

  —We kept very different schedules, I said.

  He smiled and regarded me. Since coming to California, I’d known two men—River and Kevin—both of whom looked at me in ways that didn’t repel me; that did, in fact, the opposite. They made me feel girlish and small and protected.

  —You’re pretty, Kevin said. He said it very plainly, like it was an obvious thing but something which needed to be recorded in the atmosphere all the same. I struggled to remember if I had ever been called pretty.

  I smiled and thanked him as though it were no big deal and yet it broke my heart in the holiest of ways. That man did more for me in one line than any man had ever done. The word pretty. That fucking word.

  He nodded and backed away from me slowly, his eyes on me in a hallowed way, until he opened his underground door and disappeared. Three months later a private jet would go down over Musha Cay and I didn’t have to read the story to know that he had been on the flight. I felt that it was my fault, because he had shone a light on me.

  Back in the house, Eleanor was waiting. Likely she’d been looking out the window. I was more frightened of Eleanor than I was of anyone coming after me for murder or, worse, theft. I worried that if I didn’t make a change, she and I would become partners of a sort, which was one of the reasons—besides the death of my child—that I was moving.

  —You have to go home to your mother today, I said.

  —No, Joan, please.

  —Forgive her.

  She began to convulse, saying please over and over again. I didn’t know what to do and so I took the red slip off my body. I stood essentially naked before the girl and took her into my arms, pressing her into my body as she wept. Then I pushed her back and handed my beloved dress to her. She was shocked. The only way I knew how to get people to leave was to give them things that meant something to me. I could afford to give up anything tangible. But I was scared to death to give my time or my heart.

  She drove her body back into my arms and I stroked her hair and whispered in her ear, Eleanor. Do you hear me? I’d give the world to have my mother back. And she was a real cunt.

  35

  I FOUND A RENTAL IN the Palisades with a terrific view of the ocean. It was white and modern and almost entirely windowed. It was on stilts, hovering high above the houses beneath it. It wasn’t my taste but its clean lines and featureless rooms were blank and I craved blankness. It was preposterously expensive, but once again I had no one for whom to care.

  For several weeks I barely left the place. I walked through the high-ceilinged rooms and opened one box every few days. I would unpack only half the box, get tired, and take a pill. I was terrifically lonely, but it was a familiar emotion. I missed Alice so much that I ached when I woke in the morning, imagining her doing sun salutations in her foul yard.

  One rainy afternoon—God, how I hated that it never rained in Los Angeles—I rented a pickup and drove up to the Canyon to pick up the Ploum. I’d expected to leave it there, for Kevin or River or the new tenant of the hot house, but I had no furniture. And though I could afford to buy some, I felt the piece would work in my new glassy living room. It was garish and I missed it.

  River was playing catch with Kurt when I drove up. He shielded his eyes from the sun and smiled.

  —Joan, he said.

  His smile was so pretty and his demeanor so light that even just being near him made me feel a modicum of peace.

  He helped me load the couch into my truck. It was hotter than ever in the house. Without furniture it looked satanic. It felt like everything that had happened in the house was not real. To see it empty like that, I could talk myself into the idea that I hadn’t lost a child and killed a man in the house.

  River made a big show of carrying the massive Ploum on his back, like Atlas. In the past I might have effusively complimented his strength. But this time I only looked down at my phone, disengaged. When he came back in, I thanked him and he stood there unsurely. I turned and walked to the kitchen window where I’d spent so much time looking to see if the coyotes were prowling.

  Quietly and tentatively, River came up from behind and kissed me on the neck, the way Vic had done in Scotland. But when River did it, it felt cleansing. I didn’t turn around and he gently raised my arms and pressed my palms to the wall over my head. He threaded his fingers through mine. We made love; it was a tender and peaceful closure. When it was over, he held my body, both of us still standing. He had such strong arms. It was a good way to leave the house.

  He wanted to come with me to see my place. I told him maybe next time. He looked a little wounded and I realized that true power came from not caring about anyone. That was the last time I would sleep with a man. I was through with the gender.

  All I wanted was to see Alice, to tell her the way my childhood ended, the way our father met his end. I wanted to tell her why I’d walked through the world in corpse pose. I wanted to know if my mother’s intuition was correct. If my father was going to leave us for the woman over the oven and her unborn child.

  I’d missed her as much as I hated her. I imagined what she would have said if I’d taken her upstairs and showed her the corpse of the old man. I dreamed of her brushing her hand along his cool chest and saying, Honestly, it’s all right. It was your only recourse.

  Deplorably, immaturely, I would have fel
t proud to tell her the way it ended. The way the police came and the ambulance, too, pointlessly. After strangling Lenny, I pushed his body down the spiral staircase. He didn’t go all the way down but landed in the middle, arms hanging between the slats and legs dangling, like a tangled marionette. That was where I left him. I told the police that I’d been sleeping off a miscarriage upstairs, and he must have come in, as he’d done a time or two in the past during one of his episodes, and I woke to feel his erection against my rear and I screamed and he jumped; he turned to run but tripped, because he was old and out of it, and this is where he landed, I said, indifferently pointing to the spot. The air in the house was thick with the smell of old blood. The men just wanted to get out of there. They didn’t question a thing.

  I couldn’t stop thinking how I’d been so needy with Alice. I was disgusted that I had always been the one talking. I was disgusted that I’d felt complete with her and that she didn’t need me.

  36

  MONTHS PASSED AND I GREW less and less human, but in a wondrous way. At least it was wondrous to me.

  My stomach was still sloped. I wasn’t eating much and yet I had a considerable gut. It seemed I was holding on to the fat, as I’d heard sometimes happened after a miscarriage. Then again, I had become appallingly sedentary. Days went by that I didn’t comb my hair.

  I would never have to work again, or at least not for many years. It turned out Leonard’s watch was worth not only more than his whole life but more than those of his ancestors as well. I took the watch to an appraiser in the Valley. He was so shocked when I laid it on his velvet tray that I thought he might pass out. I could have taken it elsewhere for a second opinion, but I didn’t. He might have ripped me off, but at that price point, it really didn’t matter.

  I thought about moving back to New York, to Charles Street. I could now, impossibly, afford the type of apartment that Big Sky’s friend owned. The one I coveted, with the sauna wood and the thick white towels in the linen closet. But I grew to love my place near the ocean. Love is not the right word.

  Most days I walked along the water, or sat at its edge with my eyes closed, watching films inside my brain. I never wore shoes. I was a cat lady on the sand. Dogs ran past me.

  Eleanor and I texted several times a week. I could manage any relationship over text message. She was back home with her mother, who was on many anti-psychotic drugs. Eleanor told me that Mary watched cartoons all day. Reruns of Three’s Company.

  I wish I didn’t love her, she wrote one day.

  You can’t unlove someone, I wrote. You can only hate them.

  She’s too broken to hate.

  I’m sorry, I wrote.

  I was thinking maybe of coming out there, to say hi. Maybe we could go to Cold Spring…

  She would write something like that and I would avoid her for days. She always understood. She pulled back, but it was only a matter of time before she would pitch forward again. I lived in fear of a knock on my new door. I hadn’t given anyone my new address. I paid for a post office box in town.

  Then one day Eleanor told me she had met someone. A girl with a good family. For girls like us, a good family was something to die for. At length she sent me a picture of herself and a woman in her late thirties outside the Freedom Tower. The two of them holding hands and looking at each other. I was so happy for her that I cried.

  Naturally and daily I thought of killing myself. Not with pills, as I’d always planned, but to drown in the ocean. I felt I was owed that final beauty. But the instinct for survival is tremendous, which is why I felt my mother was stronger than I ever could have imagined.

  * * *

  ONE TYPICALLY CLOUDLESS DAY I was in the Dunkin’ Donuts on La Cienega and there was a woman at the counter, a very tall Black woman with beautiful sneakers and calves that sprang.

  —I want it sweet, sweet, sweet, she said. I thought her voice was magic. She didn’t once look at the man she was ordering from. You hear me? And black. Black like me.

  Seated at two separate tables were a Mexican woman and an old white man with paint-stained carpenter pants and a t-shirt spotted with sweat.

  —Hello, Billy, the Mexican woman said.

  —Hey, Rosita, said the old white man. He never looked at her. You married yet?

  —No. I don’t wantu.

  Billy nodded like he knew she was lying. She had huge breasts with a cavern in between. An old dress with embroidered flowers.

  —How ’bout you, Rosita said. You married yet.

  —Me? Naw.

  —So, Rosita said. See. Why you asking me if I’m married if you ain’t?

  Billy acted like Rosita hadn’t said anything. At the counter the Black lady tested her coffee.

  —Ain’t sweet enough, she bellowed. I said sweet!

  It was that very moment that something hurtled into my body and tried to saw me apart from the inside. I thought I might finally die. But the pain subsided and I could once again hear Rosita and Billy talking about how the one good thing about Los Angeles was that your mailboxes didn’t get crushed by the snowplow and I clocked myself being surprised that either of them had ever lived somewhere other than this Dunkin’ Donuts, and because I needed to be punished for that thought, the pain came again. Something was cracking inside of my rear. Something was whipping me. My body was attacking itself. It got worse quickly until I could no longer stand up.

  I called her. I hadn’t spoken to her since the Santa Monica Pier, but she was all I had left. She had always been the only thing I had left. I’d felt her beside me in bed when she was old enough to be a straight body. I’d felt her little lips against my neck. Her little legs kicking against mine.

  I watched her Prius pull into the parking lot of the worst Dunkin’ Donuts in Los Angeles. I was hunched over a table. Nobody in there cared if I was dying.

  She emerged from her car in a black bodysuit and saw me through the dirty window. It wasn’t her fault that my father had come inside another woman. The next contraction was the worst one yet. The pain started in my rear. If the sound of someone hitting a cymbal could be translated into a physical sensation, that’s what it felt like. It shot up through my stomach and out through my head. I buckled. And then Alice was inside, holding me, and I was screaming.

  —Too much caffeine, Alice called out to the rubbernecking patrons.

  * * *

  SHE DROVE VERY FAST WHILE I stared out the window and occasionally convulsed in pain. I was trying not to look at her. I was trying to be perfect. I was about to have a child and yet I was mostly thinking of not scaring Alice away. She brought one hand to my leg and left it there and I was filled with tremendous gratitude.

  At the base of the canyon I asked her if she knew we were sisters.

  She told me that, at her mother’s funeral, one of her mother’s casual ex-lovers had insinuated something. Alice had asked around, but nobody really knew for sure. Her mother was very private.

  —Have you always known? she asked me.

  —For a long time, yes.

  When Gosia died, I didn’t hear about it for over a week. Even in her death she was uncomplicated. She’d been skiing in Courchevel with someone who wasn’t my uncle. She had a stroke coming down a black. She was rushed to the hospital but gave out in the ambulance. She was sixty-three and well kept. Her platinum hair lush, her neck smooth and mostly unwrinkled. There was no funeral because she hadn’t wanted one, and there was no one stronger than her left standing so nobody went against her wishes. In the end she knew nobody wanted to make a fuss about anything. When someone was gone, there was nothing left to do. The carrying on was exhausting. The attending to tradition when you could be drinking wine and grieving in the sun.

  In addition to several trust documents and her own jewelry collection, Gosia had left me one other item. A slip of paper in a sealed envelope. It was an airmail envelope, but I don’t think that meant anything. The slip of paper was crude, cut off of something larger. It was unlike Gosia, because all of
her gifts, all of her gestures, were grand. She didn’t skimp or try to save money. The information on the slip was meant for a rainy day of sorts and I think it was the only thing in my life that I went after at just the right time. On the outside of the envelope she’d written, Wait until you need.

  And inside the fold it had Alice’s full name. It didn’t say sister, but of course I knew. As for Alice, she knew she was conceived illegitimately. She knew her father had an affair with her mother. But at first she didn’t know there was another child already. Her mother told her that her lover and his wife were childless, that the wife couldn’t have children. But, in addition to the ex-lover’s insinuation, Alice found some letters that alluded to a child. She said that the first time I went to her yoga class, she felt a strange tug. It was like magic, and it frightened her.

  We looked out the windows as we passed the low buildings, the Home Depot I’d gone to several times looking for new flowers for the rusted bathtub. Looking for a thick board to slide underneath the wobbling chairs on my “patio.” Always I left with nothing. I had no money to spend. It was just nice to drive, to waste the gas, to smell the pine in the place.

  Another contraction. A bright scream of pain. I clutched my stomach and bit my lips. She pressed down on my thigh until the pain subsided.

  —Why did you leave me? I asked.

  —I was very upset. You fucked someone to hurt me.

  —I mean the first time.

  —I don’t know.

  —I was too needy.

  —No, she said.

  —But what then?

  —I don’t know. Something. When the girl came and stayed with you, something changed. I felt something I didn’t want to know.

  And then it clicked for me. Eleanor’s presence had kicked up a scent. Alice smelled the past on me. I’d planned on telling her in a way that wouldn’t be off-putting. But when Eleanor arrived, Alice could sense it, the way I was just like the girl. I always knew the right way to deliver information. Everybody else did not.