Large Animals in Everyday Life

by Wendy Brenner

  • • •

  I remind myself of this as I pull off of I-75, finally, safely into Georgia, at a stop called Arabi, which I know only because it’s written on the rusted pay phone in front of the gas station. Beyond the station there’s just an empty road curving away into the high tree line. “I’m coming home,” I tell my mother. “I’m on my way right now.”

  “That’s odd,” she says. “I mean, not strange that you’re coming, but Charlie just telephoned for you here.” She and Charlie have never met, but they know each other’s phone voices.

  “I didn’t tell him I was leaving,” I say. “He’s the reason I’m coming.”

  My mother doesn’t say anything for a moment. Finally she says, “Well, I told him I didn’t know anything about where you were, since of course I didn’t. What time will you be here?”

  “Late,” I say. “Or in the morning.”

  “Wake me up if you want,” she says.

  I fix my hair for a minute in the silver reflection on the phone’s coin box before walking over to the little cinder-block building to pay for my gas. Inside, a large man with a face the color and texture of stone sits behind the counter, watching a newscast on a black-and-white wall television. He nods and takes my money. On the TV a man is speaking in Chinese, and a translation appears beneath him: “We couldn’t determine whether here is a detective.”

  “They’re everywhere,” the man says to me, sliding me my change. “When you least expect it, expect it.” He might be talking about detectives, communists, the Chinese—it’s impossible to tell. “You traveling alone?” he says.

  “Not far,” I lie.

  “Be careful, that’s all I’m saying,” he says. I thank him and back out, keeping my eyes on a spot on his shirt.

  Georgia is a lengthy drive, south to north, and it keeps getting foggier and hillier. I listen to all-talk radio and learn unlikely things, that “alfalfa” is Arabic for “father of all foods,” that racehorses aren’t allowed more than seventeen letters in their names, and that in Tokyo lonely old people rent actors to play visiting sons and daughters, actors who are trained how to laugh and how to say goodbye. These all seem like fine things to know for now—if nothing else, they are things I didn’t know while I was with Charlie. They make as much sense as anything. Life, I think, is like one of those games where everyone sits in a circle and each person must, in turn, remember one more item in a series. You have to remember the whole series each time, in order, or else you are out.

  Early this morning I tiptoed out of the bedroom, my smallest muscles tensed. But Charlie didn’t wake up; his face remained puffy and unmenacing in sleep. I went out to my car, expecting determent: slashed tires, a dead battery, anything. I remembered once when I was a child and my mother had planned a driving trip, packing up the car the night before, as I had now. In the morning when she opened the driver’s side door, a kinglet flew out—the tiniest, most perfect bird I’d ever seen. This morning, now that I was finally leaving, I expected and even hoped for something like that to happen, but there was nothing to stop me, to make me think. The best I could come up with was the raspberry Danish someone had splattered all over my windshield a few days earlier, when I’d been withdrawing my savings from the bank. I hadn’t taken it personally, because the parking lot was crowded and I was inside for half an hour, but when I mentioned it to Charlie, leaving out the part about my savings, of course, he said a woman had probably done it. He said a man wouldn’t mess with something as petty as a sweet roll. “A man would’ve bent your rearview or broken off your antenna,” he said.

  I told him he was wrong, that women had respect for things like Danishes, and men didn’t. He just laughed, the way he kept me from ever being right about anything. I remember still thinking stubbornly: A woman wouldn’t do that to a Danish.

  What I can’t remember is when I got used to being wrong so often. It started with such minor things—what kind of dish drainer we should own, whether to keep his clock radio or mine by the bed, which was the superior brand of corn flakes. I had no experience with bullies. We’d met at someone’s backyard party by a kudzu-covered wall where I’d chosen to drink, and his awful confidence had probably only seemed wholesome, as solid and natural a part of my happy evening as the beautiful green-and-rock wall. I don’t even remember when we began to speak, or what was said. It didn’t seem like an event, which was probably why I trusted it. I knew if something seemed too good to be true, it probably was, and I put no stock in Princes Charming. My life was solitary and easy then. I was stagnating happily in a futureless position as a keyliner for a commercial line of do-it-yourself books, walking home from work each night with bits of sentences and diagrams stuck in my hair. I still grinned at geckos and cypress trees, even though I’d lived in the South for the three years since college and those things should have been routine. I would sit and watch my lionhead goldfish for ninety minutes at a stretch, talking out loud to him and feeling every bit as satisfied as I would if he had understood me. I had peace and I trusted in it.

  Charlie, at first, seemed to fit into my life so easily; he kissed me like it was just another way of breathing. He hugged me tightly and with purpose, the way you hold a child who’s just come home from summer camp. We would be kissing and I would open my eyes and his would already be open, as if he were waiting for me. He worked in a distant and glamorous department of my company, in public relations, and when he spoke about us, he spoke with great confidence. He spoke as if it were only a matter of time before most people agreed with him about most things. He laughed at hesitation and uncertainty in any form, and when he talked he made small, finalizing gestures with his large hands. I had been content with the banal—my fish, the Spanish moss, an occasional barbecue—but Charlie brought need, strong desire, and he did it with elegance, with grand finesse. “How this turns out,” he said frequently in his salesman’s voice, “is up to you.” “Whatever you want,” a phrase of indulgence, became, over time, imbued with menace. I wasn’t sure what I wanted, having never wanted much. Now, the more I wanted him, the more inevitable, immutable we seemed. It wasn’t long before I couldn’t remember ever not wanting him, ever being happy without him. Why was I arguing with him, why was I making myself so unhappy?

  On one Sunday morning, the morning after the first really bad time, we sat side by side like peaceful grandparents on the sunny second-floor landing outside our apartment’s back door. I kept getting distracted by the faint humid wind blowing beneath my legs and by my sore scalp, which felt in the sun as though it were heating from within. My whole body felt hungover, though we had not been drunk. Sitting between us on the concrete, like some Martian child, was a small roll-on bottle of Absorbine Jr. which Charlie had gotten from the 7-Eleven after breakfast, when I’d complained. He’d been silent, dabbing the cool medicine on my bare back and arms, the sore places from the night before where he had yanked me or where I’d pulled too hard to get away, and now the sweet minty smell steamed up from me, both foreign and reassuring. I hung onto the smell as though it really were a child, or a gift, as though it were the first thing about us.

  The day wobbled along around us, the fight of the night before looming everywhere and yet seeming unreal, comic, impossible to apprehend, like the balls and blobs of mercury from a broken thermometer, shaken from their context—dangerous, but in a way you could neither believe in nor ignore. We said little, both of us apparently wanting his apologies behind us. I had forgiven him hurriedly, feeling while doing it a rush of instinctive relief not unlike getting my head above water after a long submersion. That anything else lay down there still, beneath my relief, was not a possibility I considered.

  After a while a neighbor’s cat trotted by, carrying in its mouth a women’s pink cardigan sweater, as though this were a sensible thing for it to be doing. A short unnatural laugh came out of me, and the cat’s eyes shifted my way for an instant, then back at the sidewalk, the cat itself never breaking stride, the sweater sleeves swinging on
either side of its stuffed jaws. I put my sore head down and laughed, great gulping laughs like gasping for breath. “You see?” I heard Charlie say. “That’s what I mean.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said. I didn’t sit up.

  “Look at me,” he said, and then I did. His face was awash with sincerity. “The way you see the world,” he said.

  I tensed, my whole body ready for the accusation, for more of the same. But he surprised me.

  “You’re so easy to love,” he said. “It would be so easy for you to find someone else who loved you.”

  His face, without its usual salesman’s varnish, was disconcerting. He was scaring me. “Stop it,” I said. He was reminding me of being alone, answering a question that had not been asked, and now the question, not the easily spoken answer, was what seemed true. The world without him whirled before my eyes, like some terrible rushing tide. There was something wrong with me, something wrong. “Please stop talking,” I said, and held onto him for dear life.

  And even now, a dissonance holds me upright, a faint but draining sense that something, like a tire or fan belt, may not hold. I grasp at things I learned in college, Jung saying when we couldn’t stand to keep going forward we would go backward instead, looking for someone besides ourselves to blame. I remind myself wisely, over and over, that Charlie is the responsible one here—Charlie’s anger, Charlie’s strength, Charlie’s two hands. It is physically impossible to spit in one’s own face, I tell myself cleverly. And: It is part of the syndrome for the woman to feel it is her fault. That there is even a syndrome, that this happens everywhere, without reason, should comfort me, but it doesn’t. The interstate stretches placidly ahead, shaded by a sweep of high clouds. The question sits, motionless, in the back of my mind: why I let this happen, what weakness in me caused this. Or is it something my mother should have seen in me, but forgot to see?

  • • •

  She never had counseling or went to any support groups when my father died, though her friends and relatives all urged her to. “Vocation and avocation,” she said. “That’s all the therapy I need.” Once, in a stack of papers on her nightstand, I found a newspaper clipping about a group for new widows and widowers. The article featured a man who shaved his legs and held them in bed at night, “just to feel some soft skin,” and a woman who wouldn’t throw away her deceased husband’s Jockey shorts. Anything you needed to do was okay, the article said. I was eleven or twelve when I found this, and it became a source of high, secret hilarity for my friends and me. We weren’t laughing at these people’s tragedies, it was just the Jockey shorts, though if my mother had seemed tragic, the article might have struck me differently. But she had begun selling her figurines in shopping centers and plazas, and sometimes taught pottery to small groups of women on our porch. And she laughed with me about the women after they left, saying one looked like she was carved out of a butcher’s block, another should know better than to wear halter tops—these poor women who had nothing better to do than to take her class, these were the ones to feel sorry for.

  It did seem odd that she didn’t date, but by the time I noticed, I was dating, and much too involved to give my mother’s lack of love life a second thought. And by that time, too, she was busy looking after the greasers. The boys I went out with, of course, weren’t nearly as dramatic as the greasers; even then I chose regular boys who wore sweaters and had confidence in their futures, nothing for my mother to worry about. Senior year I went out with a Latvian boy I knew from Art Council who wore five earrings and always had some kind of foreign cigarette going when he came to our front door, but my mother liked him so much she gave him one of her homemade ashtrays for Christmas, a turtle with a sly, flirtatious tilt to its head. “There are worse things than smoking,” she said, and did not elaborate. And the Latvian boy was, after all, harmless.

  “Why don’t you get a boyfriend?” I asked her finally, my first time home from college on a break.

  “I hate old men,” she said, smiling. “You know that.”

  I wonder now if she knew something I didn’t when she made that remark, if she was trying to tell me something important about us or just making a joke.

  • • •

  It’s well after dark when I stop in Seymour for coffee and mouth-wash. Charlie always insists on Listerine, says it’s “superior” even though gargling with it is actually painful, and I wish he could see me buying this tasty, sugary green brand. I want him to see me being kind to myself, and suffer. What I wish for, simply enough, is not his repentance, but his suffering. Memory and grudge are twin swamps to watch out for, I think. Even animals may be susceptible—my goldfish may be swimming in hate right now, wanting to kill me for leaving him alone with nothing but Charlie and a scallop-shaped vacation feeder. But somehow I doubt it, and I can now see why the fish and I always got along so well, the way he went along so easily, pumping waves of unconsciousness through his gills, never knowing or owning up to a thing.

  Once, with Charlie, I came close to living in that state forever. While it was happening I was thinking about my Walkman and how it stopped tracking the tape after I dropped it on concrete. I was picturing tiny wires coming apart, shaking loose, picturing this while Charlie held my chin and cracked the back of my head against the floor, over and over. And suddenly all I knew was that I didn’t want to be unconscious, sunken into myself, my brain a fallen soufflé. At that moment I promised someone, God or Jung or whoever was out there, that I would work harder and be kinder and stop wearing mascara and take more responsibility, whatever it took. It was my fault that this was happening, my fault for loving my lazy, easy life. “You asked for it,” Charlie was probably saying—it was what he always said—and I believed him.

  I doze in my car for an hour in the lot of a Hardee’s. I dream that I am facing Charlie, just a few feet away from him, and I’m holding a gun. I’m fully dressed and sobbing, but the three women behind Charlie are nude and nonchalant. Charlie laughs, knowing I am afraid to shoot, that I don’t even know how. He starts walking toward me, slowly, slowly, smiling, enjoying this. I have no choice, I cry at the last possible moment, and fire, falling as he falls, to the ground. Just like that, he’s dead. I am crying so hard I can barely see, barely catch my breath. The nude women look on, disinterestedly. It wouldn’t have bothered me to do that, one of them says.

  Rain wakes me—not the noise, but the quality of it. In the South the summer rains are violent, but routinely so; they come down daily in friendly torrents. Up here the storms are more random. The raindrops are smaller and meaner, and they pelt you according to some unseen plan. My windshield looks like it’s breathing. It reminds me of The Last Wave, where that poor guy discovers he’s the harbinger of the apocalyptic tidal wave. Of course, he figures it out too late and it’s all inevitable anyway, his image having been carved in stone by aborigines before he was even born. The first sign he gets is the rain, though, and soon the water is everywhere, surrounding his car and seeping into his home, and when he finally understands, it is both too early and too late for him to do anything.

  I am at a Hardee’s, I remind myself, a Hardee’s in southern Indiana, thinking about the riddle of fate. I turn on my wipers and merge back onto the highway, judging that it will be near dawn by the time I reach my mother’s house. The easy authority of the talk-radio host reassures me. “I’m here to tell you: zoning is liquid,” he tells a worried caller, and the caller begins to sound a little less worried.

  • • •

  It isn’t light yet after all, when I get there, but it’s not quite dark either. When I drive around the cul-de-sac the neighbors’ security bulb flashes on, as it has for years. Somebody must be landscaping the copse in the center of the cul-de-sac, I notice, because it doesn’t look any thicker. My mother’s miniature pickup truck is parked in the center of the driveway. As I pull up I realize my big old Chevy will fit neither behind it nor beside it. “No problem,” I say aloud. I know the hiding place for her truck ke
ys. I stop where I am, in the street, and turn off the ignition. It still feels like something is running underneath me when I get out. The pavement feels like it might have a motor in it, vibrating slightly against the soles of my shoes. An early morning redwing sounds a single hoarse note. I slide my mother’s truck keys out from beneath a clay pot of marigolds that sits beside the front steps.

  The problem, once I’m in her truck, is that it’s a stick shift, something I’ve never learned to do, and I can barely keep my eyes from blurring into sleep. I fumble with the clutch uncertainly, then fit my hand around the heavy grip and move it in a direction that feels right. The truck coughs and dies and rolls backward and I jerk my left leg up in surprise, banging my bruise against the dash. I brake hard and too late, and the truck’s back end slams the side of my car with a final, metallic jolt. And that, apparently, is as much as I can take—my tears come boiling up, and I wrap my arms around the steering wheel and press myself into it, sobbing, sobbing. And then my mother is there, barefoot in her old Lanz nightgown, smelling of bacon, clay, and lotion soap, reaching in for me. “Oh, honey,” she is saying. A long time goes by before I’m ready to go inside, but when I do finally look up the sky has begun to lighten, the house has begun to take on tentative colors.

  At the last minute there is something that makes her hesitate. We’ll look at the dent later, she says; first things first. But as we’re walking up the driveway she looks quickly back over her shoulder at the truck. “What is it?” I say.

  “Nope,” she says, shaking her head. “Nothing.”

  “Mom,” I say. “What?”

  She looks at me closely for a moment and moves a lock of my hair. “Nothing,” she says finally. “I just left a couple of new bud vases in the back. But it doesn’t matter, honey—they weren’t anything special.”

  “Mom,” I say. “Come on. Let’s go see how bad it is.” I head back to the truck and she hurries up behind me.