Large Animals in Everyday Life

by Wendy Brenner

  “Well, it’s funny,” he said. “I had a funny feeling. I got all the way over to Epcot, got in my room, got one of them minirefrigerators with one of everything and then some other stuff you get free, fruit and that, and then I go take a look out the window and that big goddam ball is sitting there. It don’t do nothing, you know? It don’t rotate, don’t open up, don’t take off, nothing. Gave me a bad feeling, just knowing it was out there. And then my legs was acting up, you ever hear of restless legs syndrome? Secretaries get it, from all that sitting, you might know. It’s when your legs, at night, try to do all the running you was supposed to do during the day but you didn’t. Anyway, here I am. How about that, you think I’m crazy?” He stood in front of the open refrigerator, the cold, colorful food steaming behind him.

  “You went to Epcot?” I said.

  “Yeah. Where was I supposed to go? Hey, you don’t have to leave or nothing,” he said.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said.

  “Say, where’s your girlfriend at? Ain’t that her car out front?”

  Our family’s poodle had died like this, when I was a child: she ran out onto the two-lane highway, then froze on the center line when she saw the traffic coming. It was impossible for her to go forward and impossible to go back. She stood there in the wind of rushing cars, turning her curly, quivering head back and forth, looking one way, then the other, until a truck finally clipped her, knocking her sideways into the eastbound lane, where a Chevy got her.

  “I can’t go up there,” I said.

  “Jeannie’s up at your place? Well, tell her to come on down and join the party.”

  “Borden,” I said.

  “Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” He came back over to the sofa and sat, reaching down and lifting my legs by the ankles, before I could stop him, so that my feet rested in his lap. Once they were there, I thought it would be cruel to yank them off; I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. His big thighs felt synthetic, slippery and impersonal as upholstery against my bare heels, and I imagined Jeannie watching from the doorway, the little sarcastic points of her eyes and mouth and naked breasts. “I’ll tell you what,” Borden said. “You’re okay, CeCe. At least you got some integrity, some principles. You’re the first one so far who ain’t tried to get some of the prize for yourself. How about that? You thought I was too big and fat for you before and now that I got the cash, I’m still too big and fat. What do you know?”

  “Hello, Tom, it’s me again.” He gazed, confused, at the wall telephone instead of at the whirring machine, where the woman’s voice was coming from. “I don’t want to use up your tape over nothing, but you won’t believe what just happened to me. I was coming out of Winn-Dixie …”

  “I was just at Winn-Dixie!” Borden said.

  “She can’t hear you, why don’t you …”

  “Shh,” he said.

  “… out of collins mix, but I only had one, I said it before I went out, I said, ‘Frieda, tonight you will behave like a lady.’ So I told the officer I was celebrating for you, I said, ‘Officer, I am not in my normal mode,’ but he didn’t even believe I know you! He said, ‘Right, lady,’ and then he grabs my arm real hard, and I told him, ‘Don’t you put your hands on me! When I tell you to put your hands on me, you do so with gusto, but when I say,’ and he says, ‘Oh, the lady’s got rules!’” She paused, swallowing, and the machine cut her off.

  “You can pick up the phone while she’s talking,” I told Borden, but he just sighed, his thighs giving a little under my feet as though some of the air had gone out of them.

  “I know I’m supposed to be celebrating,” he said, “but man, everybody wants something, you know?”

  “Not Frieda,” I said.

  “What do you know about Frieda?” Borden said. He dug his thumb into the soft ball of my foot and I tried to jerk it away from him, but the cushions under me were soft and I couldn’t get any leverage. “A Chinese girl did this to me one time,” Borden said. “Something-su, I forget what it’s called. You’ll like it.”

  “Please quit that,” I said. “All I meant was, Frieda seems to respect and depend on you.”

  “Naw, she don’t love me. She just wants attention, you know? Her old man’s in jail, over in Starke, HRS got her kids, and she ain’t even allowed in half the bars in the county, because she’s always looking at someone’s husband and licking her straw. I seen her get a black eye for doing that. That’s why she comes by here, because she don’t got nowhere else to go, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I don’t want to know about Frieda,” I said. “Maybe she likes her life, maybe she likes not having any responsibility, not having to worry about anything …”

  “Naw, she don’t,” Borden said. “No one wants everything taken from them. Everyone wants some give.” Frieda had come back on, meanwhile, saying something about Weight Watchers, but Borden spoke right over her—rudely, I thought, even if she did want something from him. “You want to hear something nuts?” he said. “When I got this thing confirmed, that I really hit it big, what’s the first thing popped into my head? Breeder tank. Number one, my breeding females been dying, I gotta get some more, and a breeder tank. Number two, this tie I saw on TV, one of them shopping shows, some kind of a silk weave. I mean, does a Porsche occur to me? No. Yacht? No. Paris, France? Forget it. Girl I took out in high school whose old man was a commie, he was always asking me what was my ambition, because he knew. He knew I didn’t have none. He told me, he said, ‘This is how they keep you down—whatever you got, you think that’s all you deserve.’ You get so you only see one inch in front of your own face, he said.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” I said.

  Borden took his damp hands off my feet and pressed them over his eyes, then combed them back through his thin hair over and over again. He stared across the room at the hovering mollies. “You know what?” he finally said. “I just want to think about it tomorrow.”

  “Borden, I need to ask you a favor,” I said. “Only certain things need to be clear up front. It’s not money or anything …”

  “You can stay here, just go on back to sleep, don’t worry about it,” he said, before I could go on. He stood up and walked with his hands in his pockets over to the window. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. He cupped his hands like blinders against the glass to block out the reflection of the lamp and sighed, making a small patch of steam. “I’m a perfect gentleman,” he said.

  • • •

  In the morning he was gone. A note taped on the aquarium glass said: I went back to You Know Where. I don’t want to disturb your beauty sleep. Please feed the fish, O.K.? I found my boots in the kitchen and left, shutting the door quickly and quietly, as though someone were still in the apartment, sleeping.

  I got Jeannie out of my bed and we sat at my kitchen table, smoking cigarettes over plates of eggs. The professor had left right after I’d gone back downstairs to Borden’s, she said. She suggested we spend the day together, go to a street fair or maybe go see the royal stallions that walked around on their hind legs. “Or how about that Wet Water place you applied at?” she said.

  “We’re too old for that shit,” I said. “People have heart attacks there.”

  “Well, I’m paying,” she said, “so decide.”

  At the dog track, where we ended up, she bought me some popcorn and then ran off to the clubhouse to say hello to a jai-alai player she knew. I stayed in the stands, trying to understand the loud announcer, the endless blur of greyhounds whipping by behind their strange fuzzy lure, but after Jeannie had been gone a while I gave up and stared at the crowd instead. An unexpected hot wind had come up off the Gulf, and people were sitting on their wadded-up jackets and mopping their foreheads with concession napkins. So many of them resembled Borden, I thought—so many lumpy bodies and damp, hungry-looking faces. Right in front of me a man who could have been Borden had stood up and was unzipping and peeling off one sweatshirt after another like a birthday party magic
ian pulling scarves out of a sleeve. Maybe it was an effect of the sun, or the pony sofa smell steaming off my hair, but each time he got another sweatshirt off and revealed yet another one underneath, my scalp prickled with anticipation, as though we were all there to bet on sweatshirts instead of dogs. I thought of the real Borden wistfully, as though it had been a long time since we had seen each other, and I wished he were there with me, watching; I imagined his damp, gentlemanly face happy for once, laughing, finally, at his own good fortune.

  guest speaker

  The guest speaker flies in on the last day of July, and you are there to meet him. You watch the speck of his plane approach from behind the terminal’s glass wall, which boils against the palm of your hand as though an invisible fire rages just outside. The sun is so powerful you can see through your thumb, which looks old, though you are young. The jet taxis hugely in, sending its thrilling, screaming roar up through the carpet. When you’re in your windowless office, only a few miles from here, typing memos for Dr. Mime, you never, ever think about this airport, the people strolling through it, the woods and swamps spread out around it, or the enormous blue sky. A massive wooden octagon a few feet from you houses four TVs, each facing in a different direction, each showing Oprah Winfrey, whose upbeat, reproachful gaze addresses those who have not taken sufficient charge of their lives. A woman in Oprah’s audience yells, “Honey, if he did it to me, he’s gonna do it to you!” You put your hand on your shoulder bag, feeling the hard shape of the stolen tape recorder through the corduroy. Actually, it is not exactly stolen, but you cannot help but feel like a criminal. It is an old feeling, the feeling that you are trying to get away with something, something for which you will surely be forced to pay, eventually, though in this case you don’t even have a plan, you’re not even sure what you’re trying to get away with.

  The recorder is Dr. Mime’s; he speaks into it as though he is a secret agent, holding his lips and teeth still so that you cannot make out certain words and have to type blank lines in their place, as he has instructed you to do in such an instance. Cliff and Linda need to help me find my———that I misplaced the middle of last week, you type. My garden? My bargain? My Darlene? It is impossible to tell. To ask Williamson: Were we interested in whether anyone’s been looking at the litigation papers that are filed with———? He uses surveillance equipment on you as well: cameras in the corridors, a computer that keeps track of your phone calls, who knows what else? He sucks Tic-Tacs all day long, keeps cartons of them in your office’s file cabinet—you can even hear them clicking against his teeth on the memo tapes—but he never offers a single Tic-Tac to you or anyone. And although he owns two or three Cessnas, his hobby, he never offers to take anyone for a ride, though he makes the mailroom guy hose down the planes on days like Veterans Day, when there is work but no mail. You yourself have tutored little dyslexic Barry Mime in fractions, though you are a part-time employee, no benefits, and Nancy, a customer service operator, always takes the Mime Mercedeses in for their emissions tests. And now it’s your job to chauffeur the guest speaker, who will speak at an executive function to which you are not invited.

  To all employees, night custodial staff NOT excluded, you typed, earlier this week. Topic: Suspicious individuals in your neighborhood making inquiries of you or your family regarding MimeCo or Dr. Mime. Last night a suspicious individual was making inquiries regarding me at the residences of my neighbors. This is possibly related to the controversial nature of our upcoming visiting guest speaker. Naturally, I followed up as appropriate. If such an individual contacts you by telephone or in person, it would be helpful if you could tell them, “I don’t have time to talk now, but please call me or return tomorrow at this same time.” Thank you for your assistance in this matter. This is the unfortunate side of business and we are going to pursue it in a———fashion. Richard fashion? Bitchier fashion? Denatured fashion? Mature, that was it, you typed it in—and then, without even thinking about it, you switched off the recorder and dropped it into your bag, which sat slumped between your ankles on the floor. When Linda came to the doorway of your office a minute later, your stomach turned over.

  “You are red,” she said. Linda sells Mary Kay and always comments on your appearance, pushing you to let her give you a makeover, but even thinking about confronting your face matter-of-factly like that causes you shame. You purse your lips and duck your head whenever you have to look into a mirror, hanging on to certain illusions. You cry at night, sometimes, like anyone: Oh God, oh God, I’m so lonely, I’m so lonely.

  “Coffee makes me flush,” you told her.

  She gave you a look that said, “You are crazy.” Sometimes she just says it aloud to you, so you know the look. “Well, hand it over,” she said then.

  You just looked at her.

  “Your time card,” she said. “Girl, wake up! It’s Friday!”

  After she walked away you felt the sharp edge of the recorder with your instep, and then you cut it out of your thoughts altogether, as though Mime’s clocks and cameras and computers might pick up its presence there.

  Driving home you had an itchy scalp, a sign of guilt, your mother would have said, and in fact you also had the sinking sense of inevitable wrongness that you’d always felt around your mother. When you were a child your toys would disappear if you left them lying around on cleaning day; if you asked when you would get them back, she would say, “When I feel like it.” Sometimes when she was out you would visit your Dawn doll in her bottom dresser drawer, but there would have been no pleasure in taking it out and playing with it. And there was a moment that came right after the first chorus of “Killing Me Softly,” a record you’d won at a birthday party, that made your heart jump for years whenever you heard it, ever since the day your mother shouted your name at that moment in the song because she’d just discovered something else you’d done wrong, something you’d thought you’d gotten away with but which she had just then discovered.

  But your mother was, or claimed to be, an unhappy woman, and when you complained as a teenager about how cold she had been, how cruel, she argued that it was only because she felt things so much more deeply than others. “Every morning I used to zip you into your parka and kiss you goodbye,” she said, “but then one day when you were in second grade you pushed me away and told me not to kiss you, and I felt so hurt, so rejected, that I never tried to kiss you again—what else could I have done?” No warmth blossomed between the two of you after that explanation, but at least she had offered one. Mime does not seem to feel that he needs any, and perhaps he doesn’t, being only a boss and not a mother.

  The guest speaker pushes through the turnstile. In person he barely resembles his book jacket photo; he does not appear to be brooding or contemplating danger and loss. His head seems smaller. He wears dark woolen clothes, inappropriate in the heat, and his hand is delicate, scrubbed and vulnerable-looking on the strap of his carry-on bag. You step forward to introduce yourself and, without planning it or even knowing you’re going to do it, you use a fake name. “I’m Alex Trotter,” you say. Alex Trotter is a boy you slept with a few times in college, just after your mother’s death—he is, actually, the last boy you slept with. That was two years ago, and his name bursts out of your mouth as though of its own volition, as though it has waited long enough.

  The guest speaker smiles photogenically and says, “Alex,” and you feel a little dizzied. A memory shoots back to you: when you were seven or eight, just after your father left you and your mother for his girlfriend in Norway, your mother explained to you that in real life princesses did not wear fancy gowns, were not necessarily pretty (Look at Margaret and Anne, she said, who were homely)—princesses looked, she said, like anyone, like everyone. The next morning, without planning it, you told the other children on the bus to school that you were a princess, explaining in the commanding, reasonable tones of your mother that there was no way of knowing a princess by her appearance alone. It was not exactly a lie; if there was no
way of knowing, weren’t you as much a princess as a princess nobody knew was one? And though you remember almost nothing firsthand about your father—just the outlines of his kind blond face, his low voice singing “Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy,” him pressing his handkerchief to your face, saying, “You have a booby in your nose”—you remember the moment after your princess lie as perfectly as though it happened yesterday: you gazed out the smudgy bus window, changed and desperate and ordinary all at once.

  “I’m all yours, Alex,” the guest speaker says. His smallness suddenly seems calculated, fierce, like that of a ferret. He writes about outrages in other countries, chemical leaks and medical scams and robber barons—“America’s angriest writer,” a blurb on one of his book jackets says. His wife has the name of some foreign, toxic flower; you read it in the dedication of his first book and thought, Of course, how perfect.

  In the front seat of your mother’s old Fury the guest speaker asks polite questions about the town. You answer a few truth-fully—“I can drive from one end to the other in eighteen minutes,” you tell him—but then you begin to make things up or steal information from the lives of your friends, who are mostly secretaries or assistants like yourself. You invent and describe ordinary pets and relatives, small adventures and ambitions and defeats. You have two hamsters, Hanky and Panky, you say, and one time you found Siamese twin baby turtles in your backyard; they could only walk in a circle and you named them Yin and Yang. You tell him your mother is still alive, is in fact the most popular dentist in the county, the only female dentist, too, and you mention that you heard that in Japan it only costs fourteen dollars to get a root canal. While you talk, you notice in the rearview that the couple in the car behind yours is having an animated conversation in sign language, and for a moment it seems that you too are making shapes in the air with your words, producing and erasing commonplace things like a magician manipulating scarves and coins and wristwatches. The silver windows of the Hilton flash just off the highway, but you whiz past. “Room’s not ready yet,” you lie.