If You're Not Yet Like Me

by Edan Lepucki

  Dig, dig, dig, said the possum. It came out as a snort.

  Margaret thought she heard a suppressed roar coming from the kitchen. Before the turgid novel, she’d been reading a book about the history of Al-Qaeda; in it, the author told about Taliban members who had broken into an Afghani zoo. One man decreed the bear’s “beard” too short and cut off the animal’s nose; another zealot leapt into the lion’s den yelling, “I am the lion now!” The lion killed him. The noseless bear survived.

  When Margaret had first read that passage, she’d been appalled. Those kinds of men had to be contained. The longer she spent away from the book, though, the more the lesson changed. Now she thought the story meant something else entirely. Such as: Do not underestimate the strength of animals.

  When Margaret was a girl, her father called her mother Mama Bear, as in, Go ask Mama Bear what’s for dinner, or, Mama Bear’s going to tuck you in tonight. Her mother was cornstalk-thin, though, not like a bear at all, and Margaret never followed her father’s lead.

  With oven mitts on his hands, Toby knelt on the floor. “Come here, little possum,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  The possum crouched next to the couch, a few inches from the wall. He sat on his hind legs like the smallest squirrel, his pink nose twitching. The white of his face was heart-shaped.

  “Where’s your mommy?” Toby asked.

  He meant to swipe at the animal, to push it closer to the open door, but the possum only sniffed the oven mitt. Smell, smell, smell!

  “Hey, Buddy,” Toby whispered, something in his chest opening.

  The possum opened its mouth briefly, as if to yawn, or smile. Its tongue was the same shade of pink as its nose. It did not run, nor did it play dead like other possums when afraid. This possum had only been separated from its mother for an hour or so, but it had already forgotten all the ways of its species. It wasn’t afraid.

  Toby leaned forward and picked up the animal, who rolled into a ball in the palm of the oven mitt. “Hi, baby.”

  The possum was two months old. When it was born—hairless, blind, without legs—it was the size of a sugar cube.

  “Hello, hello,” Toby whispered. “Do you need help?”

  The possum emitted a soft sleepy growl.

  Margaret walked into the kitchen wearing her x-large t-shirt, her hair combed and twisted into a bun. She didn’t want to be chasing a wild animal—a beast with rabies, perhaps—in nothing but a towel and a mess of dripping hair. If the animal urinated or spit on the floor, how would they distinguish it from the bathwater?

  She grabbed the broom from the pantry. She would sweep the animal out the front door like so much dust.

  “Ready?” she said.

  But Toby had already swaddled the possum in a dish towel and now cradled the animal in his arms. The oven mitts waited on the counter, next to the two cakes: the edible and the burnt.

  “What are you doing?” Margaret said, opening her hands. The broom fell like a guillotine blade onto the floor, and the sound made the possum tremble.

  Toby hushed the animal. “He’s so sweet and docile.”

  Margaret shook her head. “The human stain, Toby.” She leaned into her husband, peering at the animal before drawing back. “You’ve marked him,” she said. “Now he’ll be shunned by the animal kingdom.”

  “Listen to you,” Toby said, bouncing the possum a little. “The animal kingdom? You sound like a PBS special.” Toby drew his lips down in a pout: a sad clown. “He’s fine, Mar. Aren’t you, little buddy?”

  “No,” Margaret said. “He belongs in nature, not in here.”

  “There was just a fire in the bathroom,” Toby said. “There are no boundaries.”

  “What are you talking about, no boundaries? “

  The possum burrowed into the dish towel. Warmth!

  “Really,” Margaret said. “We have to get it out of here.”

  Toby felt anger fizzing up in him. Sometimes his wife could be so cold. They often joked that once the baby was born, Toby would be the one to comfort it with a lullaby in the middle of the night. Margaret would handle the diapering and the discipline, the driving lessons. What she lacked in tenderness, he knew, she made up for with efficiency. He had accepted her flaws long ago, ever since their second date, when he realized he loved her, right after she’d insisted that he split the chef’s salad with her, two plates please, even though he didn’t feel like a salad.

  “Let’s see how it goes,” Toby said. “Maybe we can keep him, like a pet?” Even as he said it, he knew how stupid it sounded. But he kept going because there was something, a living creature, at stake. “He’s not like a skunk—you know, that stinks unless you take out that stink organ. Can’t a possum be trained, like a dog?”

  Toby did have a point. Margaret’s grandparents had managed to domesticate a wolf on their farm in upstate New York. They’d found it as a cub, and her grandfather had taught it to howl at the moon. And, in the larger scheme of things, a possum was not a dangerous animal—maybe a little mean, but not dangerous.

  Toby and Margaret were not aware that just a few blocks west, in Little Armenia, a man kept a jaguar caged in his studio apartment. He fed it raw chicken. Or that dogs who had never lived among people did not care for people, and that they ate anything to survive, from cockroaches to half-alive pigeons.

  Margaret imagined walking a leashed possum down the street, or perhaps transporting it in a designer tote. She imagined cuddling with it, washing it in the bathtub. She could do this. Wasn’t caring for animals the precursor to caring for babies?

  But then she remembered the red eyes, and their eerie chortling mating sound. The possum could bite her baby, eat him. She could not underestimate its strength, its animal-ness.

  “You can keep it for one night,” Margaret said. “And then we’ll let it go, or call someone.”

  Toby, surprised, nodded. “We have to find out what it eats.” He grinned. “I’m putting it in the cradle.”

  “This is so bad,” Margaret said. She reached out and touched her husband’s cheek. “You’re so bad.”

  “Let’s have sex,” Toby said.

  The possum, half-asleep in a sleeve of Toby’s sweatshirt, lay in the cradle, which Toby’s mother had purchased online five minutes after she received the news that she would be a grandmother. The cradle now waited solemnly next to the bed, occasionally nudging in the breeze that drifted through the nearby window.

  Margaret and Toby rolled across the bed, naked. Toby wanted to be gentle with his wife, who had already begun to feel different in his arms—a little swollen. But Margaret didn’t feel any different, or she felt different, but certainly not fragile, as Toby’s whispery grasp suggested, and she wanted to prove this to him. She grabbed his waist and thought, I am the lion now.

  From afar they might’ve resembled college wrestlers, negotiating each other’s bodies with warring agility. Except they kept whispering, “I love you,” and kissing. Both were thinking about the possum, but neither mentioned it. It was like their future baby, in the room, but not. There was something sexy about this.

  From the cradle, the possum breathed easily. The figures on the bed could’ve been clouds passing overhead.

  Afterwards, Toby carried the possum to the living room while Margaret scavenged for food for it in the kitchen. There were some raspberries in the fridge, their edges furry with mold. Worrying that the possum wouldn’t take to these, Margaret also grabbed the milk, and the turkey baster. She left the cakes for fear that the sugar content, and the chocolate, would be deadly.

  Toby rocked the possum back and forth as it batted at his chest. He already loved this animal, but he didn’t say it out loud.

  Margaret screamed when she entered the room. Just behind the screen door watched a possum the size of an overweight cat, with long, guitar-string whiskers and a deranged grimace. Atop its back, her back, Margaret now realized, hung three babies. Siblings.

  Before this moment, Toby’s back had been
to the door, but now he turned to reveal the baby possum to its mother. She opened her mouth to flash rows of sharp teeth. She hissed. This meant: Don’t.

  Toby felt like he’d been caught shoplifting.

  “Hurry up,” Margaret whispered, “before she attacks!”

  Toby hugged the possum tighter, and it squirmed in his arms. The animal had begun to understand the difference between itself and the figure holding it.

  “Give the baby back,” Margaret said, her heart rate rising.

  Before Toby could act, his wife pulled open the door with one hand, and with the other, swooped in and grabbed the possum from him. She lifted the animal and launched it into the air. The possum, its four legs splayed out, flew out the door.

  Its mother followed the animal’s trajectory with bright eyes. This was not the animal she’d been after. This was something else. Flight was not something she understood.

  Margaret kicked the screen door closed, then the front door, her heart galloping. The baby inside her sensed this unease, and he fell into it. His nervousness was born.

  “Wow,” Toby said, not sure if he felt relieved or sad.

  With the door closed, they could not see the mother possum turn her back on the baby, which was no longer one of her own, no longer a possum, but meaningless as a bird, a hat, a doll, a pet.

  A few weeks later, Margaret is bigger, and more sensitive to the smell of coffee and charcoal barbecues. The baby inside her has grown eyelids.

  Carrying a bag of groceries, Toby walks home. The sun was setting when he left the market, and by the time he reaches the front door, it’s dark. He’s nearly forgotten the possum, but sometimes he sends out hope that it’s all right. The day after the incident he’d looked up information about possums online. He and Margaret had done everything they weren’t supposed to: touched the animal, talked to it. If Margaret had gone ahead and fed it the milk, it most certainly would’ve died.

  Toby reaches for his keys and the few potted plants by his feet rustle. Toby’s eyes meet the possum’s. It’s certainly the same one, no longer so small, but not yet fully-grown. A teenager now, Toby thinks, smiling.

  “Hey bud—” but he remembers the website’s rule and shuts up.

  The possum glares at him and hisses. I am the lion now.

  Toby hurries with his keys, his hands gone cold. He wrestles the door open and slips into the warm apartment, lit with lamps. He calls out for his wife, and, in his mind, for his child, who can hear him.

  AUTHOR

  INTERVIEW

  Previous Flatmancrooked LAUNCH author, Alyssa Knickerbocker (Your Rightful Home, 2010) interviews Edan Lepucki about craft, creation, and bathtubs.

  Knickerbocker

  The last time I saw you, you were standing on a chair with your arm up a hippopotamus sock puppet, reading one of your fabulous stories to an admiring crowd. You were uncannily good at manipulating the sock puppet while you read—it was almost like the hippo was reading the story. You accomplish a similar feat in If You’re Not Yet Like Me with the narrator, Joellyn, whose voice—hilarious, sarcastic, endearingly self-conscious—was so strong that I could still hear her long after I put the book down. Is voice the most important aspect of craft for you?

  Lepucki

  Firstly: thank you! You aren’t so bad with a puppet yourself.

  I’m not sure any one craft element trumps the rest, but voice and language are very important to me, especially with a first person narrator. I love the first person for the way it allows me to discover and inhabit a character through speech, and I’m particularly interested in characters like Joellyn, whose strategies of self-representation are so barbed, intricate and weird. And with this story, Joellyn’s voice was the first thing that came to me—all I did, in the beginning, was listen. I had a good time with her formal speech and snobbery, and I loved how shocking she was.

  Knickerbocker

  Some writers say that they don’t start a story until they have the last line, others that they would never limit themselves in that way. Did you begin this novella with an idea of its trajectory, or did Joellyn take you places you didn’t expect?

  Lepucki

  My process is halfway between those two extremes. I usually write a bit, then map out the next part, then write some more, then map the next part, and so on. I like to leave a little to be discovered, so that my experience writing the narrative to some degree mirrors the reader’s experience. If I know too much, I’m bored, and it’s predictable.

  With this novella, my initial goal, story-wise, was to write about a failed romance; I knew Zachary and Joellyn would not end up together. That’s about all I knew. Many things surprised me along the way: Zachary’s piñatas, Joellyn’s occupation, Dickens’ importance in the story, and even the baby’s existence. What surprised me most about Joellyn’s trajectory was her vulnerability. I do love the girl, as flawed as she is.

  Knickerbocker

  I was struck by the moments when Joellyn breaks out of the narrative to address her audience—her unborn baby—and imagines responses (“I know what you’re thinking: ‘All right, already, Joellyn, I get it’”). Why was it important that this story be written as an address to that imagined audience?

  Lepucki

  My first inspiration for the novella was Russell Banks’s, Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story, a supremely strange and wonderful failed romance narrative. In that story, the narrator, who continually declares how handsome he was when the events he describes happened, falls for an ugly woman for reasons he doesn’t quite understand. That story moves from the first to third person and back again, and I’ve always loved—and been disturbed by—how conscious the narrator is of his own storytelling. His carefully-tailored, hyper-conscious confession is fascinating.

  In “If You’re Not Yet Like Me,” I used the direct address to emphasize that Joellyn’s storytelling is a kind of performance; she’s performing not only the story, but also her identity, and her struggles to understand what happened to her, and why.

  I didn’t realize Joellyn’s audience was her unborn baby until I wrote the line: “That sounds like something a mother would say, doesn’t it?” Once I realized who Joellyn was talking to, the story transformed into this mixture of confession, instruction, defense, and cautionary tale.

  Knickerbocker

  A great line from “I Am the Lion Now”: “All crises, once averted, become jokes.” Talk about the relationships between humor, crisis and insight in your work.

  Lepucki

  With “I am the Lion Now” I wanted to try to write a story that wasn’t quite as dark as my other pieces. I was interested in writing about a happily married couple, probably because I’m happily married. I was also curious about creating a conflict that did not lead to an indelible loss (for the human characters, at least).

  “I am the Lion Now” and “If You’re Not Yet Like Me” are probably my most explicitly comedic narratives. My other work is pretty sad, but humor and irreverence still manage to sneak in. The humor deflects tragedy, while simultaneously emphasizing it. Comedy allows for a slippage and confusion of meaning, and expresses an anxiety about that meaning. I suppose my characters live anxiously in the world.

  Knickerbocker

  “I Am the Lion Now” contains a number of beautifully done, effortless POV switches, from Margaret to Toby, then to the unborn baby and even the possum. Why take on this approach—which can be risky—as opposed to rooting the story in one character’s point of view?

  Lepucki

  I wrote “I am the Lion Now” specifically because I wanted to try an omniscient third person point of view. I’d recently read A Thin Place by Kathryn Davis, whose omniscient narrator bestows thought upon beasts and people alike, and I adored it. I also love The Known World by Edward P. Jones, which is told in this gorgeous, juicy omniscience, and for years I’d wanted to see how that kind of narrative flexibility felt. Now that I’ve read more 19th century novels like Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, I realize that th
e shifting, elevated third person narrator isn’t new at all, just out of fashion. I’m not sure why that is, because it’s just as exhilarating to write as it is to read.

  One difficulty with the omniscience in “I am the Lion Now” was deciding how often people in L.A. have sex. I kept changing the number. They should have asked that question on the census!

  Knickerbocker

  The end of a book is kind of like the end of a movie—the music plays, the credits roll, and the audience, hopefully, feels satisfied, yet sad that it’s all over. Sometimes, though, you’re lucky enough to get a reel of bloopers and deleted scenes—a little peek behind the curtain. I’m hoping you’ll talk about your bloopers and deleted scenes—what was the revision process like for you with these stories?

  Lepucki

  To be honest, I can hardly recall writing “I am the Lion Now”—I think I burned all the discarded reels.

  Writing the end of the novella? Oof. Unfortunately, that process is still vivid in my mind. I rewrote the ending at least four times. On my first draft, I withheld the identity of Joellyn’s imagined listener until the final pages, but it didn’t take long to see that this was a misstep. The rest of the drafts were all about the final scenes—it took me a few tries to nail the right tone, and to sustain the drama and emotion after the major events of the story had happened. My editor Deena Drewis kept my habit for sentimentality in check. She continually urged me to hang onto Joellyn’s essential voice and nature, which was so helpful.