Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  —I think I know the reason, I said.

  —What reason is that?

  —I came to California to tell you.

  —What? she asked.

  —I just want to say. I felt so bad when you left. I loved. I love you.

  I worried she wouldn’t say it back.

  —I would have come back. But then you fucked him.

  —That was disgusting of me.

  —I thought I loved him, she said.

  —But he’s very stupid.

  We laughed. She took my hand and held it tight. She drove with her right hand on my left knee.

  —Joan, I love you, too.

  We looked at each other; the car almost went off the road. Another contraction split me down the back. We had so much to talk about that we didn’t pay much heed to the fact that I was in labor.

  —Do you want to know something crazy? I asked after it passed. She nodded and said of course she did and I started with how Vic had cheated with someone before me. And she laughed for a long time. She said, Now do you see how I was right?

  Then I told her I killed Lenny. I asked her please not to leave me again, because of that. I told her how I did it, that it was practically an accident. After the shock wore off, she told me it sounded like a true accident and that I should think of it as such. Then she said, It’s all right, Joan. Honestly, sometimes I think it’s the only recourse. Killing men in times like these.

  She said it destroyed her that she’d never met our father and she wanted me to tell her all about him. Her mother had told her some, they would sit and drink PG Tips and look at the cows in the pasture across the road and talk about his swagger, how he saved lives. Her mother told her how once he’d brought her soup when she was sick with a cold, he’d brought her chicken soup from the drugstore reps, he’d specifically requested they bring the best chicken soup in the world and he arrived at her little place above the oven in a white lab coat and she was delirious with a fever and she felt like she was in heaven and he was God. That’s how society makes us look at doctors, I said. But there were also the nights our father kept her waiting. The nights he never showed up, because of his wife. It was strange to think about where we’d been those nights. Had we been at Maggie’s Pub?

  Another contraction tore through my bowels.

  —There was one night, she continued, one night in particular my mother told me about. She’d made this soup, this pistou. She spent the whole day. She used the basil she was growing in a little clay pot against the window. And our father never came. He never called. She smashed the pot of basil against the windowsill. Her whole hand was cut up. She told me she went to bed without cleaning it. When she woke up the next morning, she swore she would never be hurt by him again. She swore she would not pass that pain along to her child.

  I laid my head against the cool window. Who knew how Alice’s mother might have acted had my father done to her what he did to mine. I’d come to learn, in any case, that it wasn’t my mother who was weak. It was my father who was weak to his own trivial needs. It was my father who had driven my mother mad. But once again, mad is not right. The world had set me up to believe that it was women who went mad. It was simply women’s pain that manifested as madness.

  Staring straight ahead at the road, wavy with heat, I spoke very quietly.

  —Do you want to know how our father died? I asked.

  —What do you mean? she said.

  —He didn’t die of cancer.

  —How did he die, then?

  —My mother killed him. She stabbed him many times with a regular kitchen knife. And then she slit her wrists in the bathtub. It looked like every movie you’ve ever seen and yet it was my mother. And our father was on the bed. He was in the pajamas I gave him for Christmas. They were wool and brown with four-leaf clovers. Nobody in my family was Irish.

  —Why!

  —Because of your mother and you.

  She was shaking and asked me to please God tell her that wasn’t true and she was carrying on in a way my mother would have found hyperbolic. Another contraction. Alice became more hysterical. I worried about her ability to drive. But I’d been waiting to get to this point for many months. I’d been waiting to tell her. She was the only person who could make me feel less alone. Along the way I worried it was possible he loved her mother more than he loved mine. But that was not the right thing to wonder. The right thing was, Did my father love me as much as I thought he did?

  That was why my mother killed him. Not because he cheated, not because he fathered a child with his mistress, not even because she believed he wanted his second family more. Men love a second chance, Gosia told me. They don’t deserve it, not at a woman’s expense.

  The reason my mother killed my father was because he didn’t love her—or me—as much as he claimed to. I remember that time we visited Los Angeles and my father bought me that dress with the Peter Pan collar. I saw it in the store and loved it and my mother said I couldn’t have it and then later that night at dinner he passed a shopping bag across the table. The bottom of the bag dipped into the juices of my mother’s pollo alla Valdostana. The coveted dress was inside. I cried with love. When he got up to use the bathroom—perhaps to call his lover—my mother said to me, You love your father better, and that is all right. I thought she was being petty, but suddenly I could call up the pain in her eyes. The unfairness that I thought he was the better of the two of them.

  My father did not love one family more than the other. It was that he didn’t care about either more than he cared about himself. And just like that, I understood why my mother did it.

  And here was Alice, my younger sister, who of course knew nothing. I’d imbued her with a sorcerer’s wisdom and she was only a child. All she knew was happiness, the gift of a mother’s love that had never spoiled. I wanted to give you that. I wanted to be good. I knew at the very least that I would be better.

  —Did she plan it?

  —No, I said. I don’t think so. I also don’t think she planned on killing herself. She probably just hated herself as much as someone could hate herself.

  Alice was crying so much that she had to pull over. I knew it wasn’t good for the labor. But I couldn’t stop her. She fell against me and I held her. She cried and clutched me. I said, Shh, shh, and I told her it was all right. Now we had each other. I told her I had always felt her beside me, that it was one of the things that had sustained me. That, starting the week after my parents’ deaths, I felt her in my bed snuggling against me. Tugging on my leg as I got up to use the bathroom, smiling while she listened to me pee, trailing me into closets as I dressed. Following me up the stairs and down the stairs. Later, borrowing my jeans, all my old slutty dresses. Reading beside me. Asking me to help her with makeup. Asking about boys. Gosia making barszcz with uszkami, these terrible dumplings in beet broth, and us pretending to eat them but instead snapping them into the dog’s mouth. Our beet-stained hands. Then the two of us under the covers in my bed with a little pink flashlight, talking about our father. And we’d both look up at the canopy of our bedsheets like it was the galaxy and I would tell her fairy tales. The ruby slippers he stayed up all night making. I told her he would have loved her so much. More than you? she would ask, because she was only a little girl. Yes, I would say, more than me. I am absolutely sure of it.

  37

  I WANT TO TELL YOU about Big Sky’s wife, who, one Thanksgiving, right before all their guests arrived, dropped the carving knife on her foot and it went right through the nail of her big toe. Theatrical blood, blooming across the slate. I tried to think of what my mother would have said. She would have said slate was impossible to clean, that it would always be filthy. Big Sky told me the story, how he asked his wife if she thought she definitely needed to go to the hospital. He’d just had his first martini, the nice one before everyone gets there, and this was Montana, where you don’t want to leave your house unless it’s to go to the river or the mountain. I remember thinking, You are not a good
man, thank God. But I only thought it then. It went away when he made love to me and I didn’t think of the story again until years later.

  In the hospital Alice wrote herself into the intake sheet as my emergency contact. In the car on the way to the hospital she’d asked me who the father was this time. I told her the truth. I thought she might turn from me, once more and forever. But she didn’t. Look at you, she said. You thought you were barren, but you could barely last a month before you got knocked up again. Slut.

  While we waited, I asked Alice to show me a picture of her mother. She pulled one from her wallet. Her mother—Francesca—had thick caramel hair like Alice’s. She was leaning against a stone rail, off the side of a Tuscan motorway, in a green wool sweater and a corduroy skirt. She was not more beautiful than my mother. They were both beautiful.

  In triage my stomach felt like it was going to come out of me. Like I was going to give birth to all my organs instead of a child. A male nurse took my blood pressure and it became clear that the awful pain was not just part and parcel of back labor. I knew you were too young, but I never expected it to go badly, not again.

  The nurse walked away to get a doctor, but no one came for minutes.

  Alice screamed, My sister is sick!

  When they finally got me into a room, the blood was gushing and the contractions were otherworldly. A mustached doctor came in, seemingly unmoved. He talked to me like I was poor. He wore a wedding ring and a college ring. He asked me who the father was. Why does it matter, I asked. He nodded and told me my child was very young, too young, but that was that. It might be okay, he said. But it might not. The contractions came for many hours, but you wouldn’t come down and I was too ill to wait. Still, they didn’t want to cut you out of me. They said the longer in there, the better. Like you were a piece of undercooked bread and the heat inside of me, even just a contact warmth, was better than your coming out, exposed to the newsprint colors in the air here.

  * * *

  I HAVE SHOWN YOU THE wreckage of my relationships. I know you won’t make the same mistakes. I can feel how strong you are inside of me. I want you to know you were born of a tender union, a short but kind one. It was meaningful in the bedroom if nowhere else. And it was the first time I used a man for something I actually wanted and not for something I thought I needed.

  I heard one of the nurses say, It’s taking too long, we might lose her. I didn’t know if they were talking about me or you. They acted like it was the end of the world, your being so young, but I’d already seen the end of the world and knew better than they did. I knew you would live.

  One nurse, a peaceful woman, cleaned my face with alcohol and smiled at me like she loved me. She pressed a cold cloth over my forehead when the contractions came. Hold on, baby, she said. Hold on a little bit longer for me, baby. She had small elfin ears and a pageboy haircut.

  * * *

  WHEN YOU WERE READY, YOU were so small that I barely had to push. I didn’t catch you in my hands; the peaceful nurse did, while I was off somewhere in my head. I was thinking about Alice, how she would make a good mother. That she would play the right games with you. Hold your head under the bath spigot so that water didn’t get into your eyes. I wasn’t delicate like she was. My mother was not delicate, either, only warm-bodied and withholding.

  —Your daughter, your daughter, they kept saying. Look at your daughter.

  It was a boy, the other one, I won’t call him your brother because I don’t think he was. I like to think it was you—I have to think of it that way because the alternative is hell—that it was a part of you that you didn’t need to bring. And that part of you, like a vestigial organ, was made to disappear. That’s what my father once said of a medical bill. That’s how he met Alice’s mother, by the way. Alice’s mother brought in a Mexican friend of hers who worked in the kitchen. The friend had a growth she needed removed from her neck. They had to work quickly and the surgery cost in the tens of thousands. She was an illegal immigrant. I remember my father coming home that night. I was eight years old. He came through the garage and I clapped for him and over a dinner of pizzaiola he told us about how two unfortunate women came in, two cooks in a kitchen, and one of them had a growth and they saved her in the nick of time and he made the bill disappear. And the other one was so grateful, she cried and cried and said, Bless you! They were each other’s only friends in the world, my father said. Or America, in any case. My father is such a good man, I thought.

  Gosia never told me anything bad about my father. Nor did she really say good things about my mother. And she rarely said anything about herself. I don’t think anybody could have done a finer job than she did, given the circumstances. I was ten years old and she was an Austrian pessimist, childless by design. She had lovers in stone cities and her husband—my uncle—was inconsequential. She tried to lead by example. But she also left me alone with what to make of my life. She held me when I screamed, but she didn’t tell me how to feel. So that a callus could form over my past. It took meeting Alice to understand the precise ways in which I’d been affected. How the night of the killings informed all that I did with men and all that I didn’t do with women. My mother couldn’t keep my father. Can you imagine that that had once been an actual thought in my head?

  Look at your daughter.

  There was a long period after they died when I could call them up; I could feel like they were holding me in bed. I was able to do this most easily with sleeping pills. When I went to the drugstore with Gosia, she would let me select some off the rack, valerian and passionflower. Vials with beautiful moonlight blooms. Like a scientist, I would make little concoctions out of them, mixing three or more tinctures in one. I used them at night, but sometimes I would drink them very early in the morning to go back to sleep. When I was fifteen and still waking up screaming in the night, Gosia gave me Ambien.

  The Ambien helped, but then the early evenings became worse. You would think the middle of the night would always be the worst, the witching hours, the hours I’d found them dead, but strangely these became the most peaceful hours for me. In any case, the better the sleep, the worse the morning. If I slept soundly, in the morning came the job of reminding myself: Your parents are dead. Here is how they died. You are all alone.

  —She’s very sick, they kept saying. As though I had the flu. I didn’t feel sick. I felt light. I was hemorrhaging. They ran bags of blood into the room.

  Don’t ask men how their day was. If they are tired and look unhappy, say, Oh, too bad, at the very most.

  * * *

  I WILL HAVE THESE FEW minutes with you, they said to me, before they have to take me into the white room.

  Look at your daughter.

  The past was everything to me. For that reason, though not that one alone, I don’t want you to have one. Just these words, a small guide. Here is what will happen. I will watch you play soccer on an emerald field at a boarding school that is more splendid than the one where Big Sky will send his children. You will be running down that field and everyone—other parents, younger siblings, the opposing team’s coach—will be transfixed by you, by your long tan legs, by the winner’s gleam in your eye, by your speed and hair and clavicle. You will be faster than the rest. Having come from nowhere, you will be more surely heading somewhere. You will always sleep on freshly laundered beds. You will eat wedges of lemon cake on English country estates and drink iced tea with woolly leaves of mint. You will vacation in the best places, not just the good names but places even the very wealthy barely know about. You will have enough money for most of your lifetime. You won’t outrun it, as I did.

  My mother left me all her jewelry. She left it for me in her boxes of hair color, which she hid all over the house. Clairol and Wella and some old stained boxes of Féria from Harmon Cosmetics. There were thick gold chains with crucifixes and emerald rings, ruby and platinum bracelets, and the famous thirty-two-diamond ring, which we used to count together, all the diamonds. Later I learned they were just ch
ips. And not very clear. There were also, I remembered, the little rosebud earrings that Alice had, too. I think that was the part that made me feel for my mother the most. That my father bought her and his mistress the same little rosebud earrings. Perhaps they had been on sale. Two for the price of one.

  The whole bounty wasn’t worth too much, but she used to tell me that she’d come back from the grave and bite my feet if I sold it. I didn’t sell it. You may, if you wish. I don’t care if you keep it or not, if you wear it around or never do.

  My mother was too much for me and she didn’t even live past my tenth year. I couldn’t stop thinking about all of her things. All the books she read at the town pool, wimpled from the wetness of my dripping hands when I went to hug her. Romance novels with tiny print crowding the pages. The times we went to Amazing Savings. Cartons of cheap things in dusty plastic packaging. Tulips, God, how my mother loved her tulips, and her copper pots. I polished them for months after she died, until the house was sold. Gosia would have let me keep them, anything I wanted, but in the end what I wanted was all of it gone.

  Look at her. Your daughter.

  They wiped you off and brought you to my breast. You felt vaguely amphibian. I didn’t want to look at you yet. I wanted to savor the feeling. I wanted to delay the gratification because I knew I would keep living until I got it.

  They would need to take you away, put you in an incubator and heat you. They were going to take me away, too. We were going in opposite directions. I want to tell you how bad that was for me. But I can’t describe it.

  They said, Five minutes, take this time. You should have this time.

  Finally I looked at you. And I gasped because I saw that you were her. You were the girl in all of my dreams. You were on the Grecian seaside looking out of portholes, you were in the fast-food parking lot waiting for me to come back. You were two and three and four and five. You were ten. You had been there since the beginning. And since the beginning someone has been trying to take you away.