The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  The second house she visited was empty, and its complete vacancy seemed to watch her and follow her as she invaded each room, opened every door, every cupboard and closet, only to find more emptiness, which entered her as easily as she had entered that house, and left her feeling spooked and agitated, especially when she discovered in an unguarded instant someone else at the end of the dark hall, clearly odious, staring at Leah, poised as if to attack, and who turned out to be, as she saw in the next instant, merely herself in a full-length mirror. Even once she had locked the front door and rounded the corner at the end of the street, Leah couldn’t shake the surprise of that odd ambush and the spookiness of that place.

  As soon as she opened the door to the next house, she heard a measured, unsettling beeping. Because it sounded like a microwave, she hurried into the kitchen, only to see the blank face of a convection oven, eerily silent and giving her the time—7:38, it said—in green digits. When she discovered the code on a slip of paper in her envelope, the alarm had already begun screaming. Every light seemed to be flashing, and the electric pulsating howl seemed to come from the house itself, the walls, ceilings, stairs, planks, boards, the slow liquid of the windows, the plaster, the wiring hidden beneath it, the electricity that flowed through that wiring. But she didn’t feel the thrill, the vigor, the good and vital urgency of panic and danger until she began running, until she fled down the hall, out the entryway, leapt through the front door without closing it, and began her sprint toward home. She sprinted one, two, then three blocks, right past the police department on Huron Street, where a cop car just then pulled out, its lights flashing and siren whirring, and she hoped it was heading to that house. How good it felt to have escaped, to still be fleeing, how good the burn in her legs and lungs, how good—so suddenly and remarkably good—everything had become, everything still was, until she reached her front porch, unlocked then locked the door behind her, and found her own home as strange, empty, and quiet as any she had seen that night.

  Leah had not given up on Max—on catching his eye, on showing him she was more than his disturbed young charity case. So she did the obvious: She put an end to her self-imposed ugliness. She dispensed with the baggy boy’s jeans and the extra-large T-shirts, which, untucked, reached nearly to her knees and took on a floppy, pajamalike appearance. Franklin too eagerly gave her cash when Leah told him she needed new clothes. “Of course,” he said with an enthusiasm and a smile that stung her, that made her feel she had lost a struggle they’d been engaged in for some time.

  In less than an hour at the mall, Leah reoutfitted herself with khaki pants, a few blouses, colored T-shirts, a few sundresses and skirts, all of which fit her. In the mirror at J.Crew, she discovered that she was not at all bad-looking. Her hips and thighs were fuller than she might have liked, but her breasts were prominent and shapely, where before, in her frumpy drapes, they had appeared matronly and fat. So surprised was she by her body that it did not seem at all hers. She recognized it, though. It was her mother’s. Franklin had been right—Leah did resemble her. Thighs, hips, breasts: all her mother’s. Her mother’s, that is, before she’d had Leah, before she’d put on what she’d called an extra layer over her hips and tummy. “You don’t get rid of that,” she’d told Leah. “That’s from you. That’s what I got for bringing you into the world.” It had never been an easy body to have, too pronounced and curvaceous. In the fifties, it would have been fashionable. But not now. And Leah’s mother had always treated it as an adversary, glaring at it in the mirror, struggling with diets, losing ten pounds in a few months and gaining it all back in a few weeks. In the end, it had betrayed her. Her blood had turned mean, self-destructive. She lost her appetite. The bones surfaced in her face, her arms and legs. And because the treatment was usually ineffective and often worse than the disease, she just waited for the leukemia to take her. In her overcheerful manner, she tried to be funny about it. “I finally lost that weight, didn’t I?” But Leah and Franklin couldn’t laugh, and in the final month her mother was frightened. She was afraid to be alone and needed constant company. “Tell me something, anything. Let’s talk,” she’d say. And when they ran out of things to talk about, Leah read Gone with the Wind, her mother’s favorite novel, out loud to her. “Scarlett is such a beautiful little bitch, isn’t she?” her mother said one day, interrupting Leah’s reading. Leah had never heard her mother swear before. She’d been a sweet woman, someone who almost never showed anger, who became quiet when annoyed. “I swore,” she said, laughing uncomfortably. “It felt good to swear. I’m going to swear some more, if you don’t mind.” Leah put the book in her lap. It was late on a cloudy afternoon and white, sunless light fell in through the window. “Goddamn it,” she said experimentally. “Shit, shit,” she said again. “Bastard, goddamn bastard.” Her voice had turned angry now, angrier than Leah had ever heard it. “Fuck, goddamn fuck shit!” Her mother sat up, closed her eyes, and put a hand firmly over her mouth. When she took her hand away, she breathed in deeply. She was crying. “Sorry, sweetheart,” she said, her voice warm again, recognizable. “Please read some more.”

  Standing in front of the mirror at J.Crew, Leah felt a tug of the old grief, the force of which had pulled her under and kept her there for years. But it was only a tug, and it didn’t persist as Leah continued to look at herself and as the blond salesgirl, who must have been Leah’s age, stood behind Leah, smiled in the mirror, and said, in her bright voice, “That’s so cute. I think it’s you. I really think it’s you.” Seeing herself, a pretty, if not quite sexy, young woman, Leah understood that she was no longer mercilessly sad, that she no longer had access to the torrent of loss and rage that had been her absent mother. That had been replaced now by a distant ache, a suppressible grief. And so Leah put her mother out of her mind now, faked a smile, and handed over her father’s money.

  On the way home, driving by strip malls and the vast parking lots surrounding them, she realized she had let her mother’s birthday pass last weekend. She had forgotten it, done nothing to mark it. Leah was suddenly agitated, uncomfortable. Where had that storm of feeling gone? And when? How had she failed to notice its departure? Her grief had simply faded. Yet the world had not changed because of it. She noted the remarkable plainness of everything—the streetlamps, the produce market on the corner, the train tracks and the brown, desiccated weeds growing out beneath them. And when she arrived home, she found Noelle as irritatingly nice and accommodating as ever. Noelle asked to see all her purchases and praised each one, praised Leah’s taste. “You look darling,” she said as soon as Leah stepped in the front door. Leah smiled, even as she inwardly cringed. How could she believe this woman? How could she think that Noelle was anything but quietly contemptuous of the dumpy-looking teenage girl who had, for months now, been equally contemptuous of her?

  In fact, Leah was sabotaging Noelle. Over the past week, Leah had been the source of numerous client complaints about Noelle’s irresponsible treatment of their properties. Leah had left lights on, front doors ajar, dirty drinking glasses out on the counter. She’d even heated a frozen pizza in a microwave, left half the pizza uneaten on the dining-room table, and neglected to clean the dishes she’d used. Noelle was perplexed, worried, and, of course, certain of her innocence. She denied everything and, for now, her realty company and most of her clients remained patient, if also suspicious.

  The next day at the lab went poorly. First of all, no one noticed Leah’s transformation: her jeans that fit, her bright red T-shirt and bright red tennis shoes, her lipstick and her hint of eyeliner. Max said nothing as he helped her push one more nervous sheep down the hallway. She wanted to bring it up somehow. Do you notice anything different? But how could she as she squared off with the backside of a farm animal and pushed until exhausted? Nor could she compete with the video graph of the catheter and with Max’s intense focus on the EKG after he’d administered another infarction.

  Later that afternoon someone finally noticed her: Jason Clark, the g
uy who dropped the animals off and took their remains away. Leah had always thought of him as the mortician, the caretaker of the lab, and she shrank from him when he approached her that day, smiling in a way he hadn’t before and putting his hand out to introduce himself for the first time. “Jason,” he said. “I’m the Sanitary Technician. I’m the guy who brings the animals here alive and takes them back …” He’d been about to say dead, but then seemed to realize that he couldn’t. Not as part of a flirtation, anyway. “You know,” he said.

  “I’m Leah. I’m the animal girl,” she said, because she couldn’t come up with anything better to call herself. “I feed and take care of the animals.”

  He must have been eighteen or nineteen. He was tan and muscular, wore a Tigers baseball cap backwards and expensive sunglasses. He’d seemed to Leah a perfect jackass—one of those cool guys—before this afternoon, when he first noticed her.

  In the uncomfortable silence that followed their introduction, Leah asked Jason something she had not, until now, wanted to know. “Where do the animals go? What happens to them?”

  “They go to the incinerator in Detroit.”

  “Incinerator?”

  “A big oven. They burn them there. Dust to dust, you know.”

  Leah nodded. She knew almost nothing about Detroit, although it was only forty-five minutes east of Ann Arbor. Every time she’d been there, its endless blocks of gutted buildings and gray cityscape had frightened her. It seemed like the appropriate place for the animals to be discarded, thrown away. “It’s a bit gloomy there,” he warned. “But you’re welcome to come, if you want.”

  Gloom. For some reason, Leah was drawn to it and wanted to know about it. And because there were no procedures scheduled for that afternoon, Leah cleaned her cages, fed and watered the animals a few hours early, then met Jason Clark in his large white truck out back.

  This trip to the incinerator was the closest Leah had ever come to a real date. With Larry, it had really just been fucking, fucking and casual companionship. She’d go over there in the morning, hang out, talk about jazz, listen to him practice, bang on his drum set, before they eventually got around to doing it in his soundproof practice room in the basement—one, two, sometimes even three times in one day. They’d been active enough for Leah, only ten days after her mother’s death, to suffer her first urinary tract infection. At the time, her house had been full of mourners, friends and relatives, her mother’s brothers Tommy and Eric, both of Leah’s grandmothers, and her one living grandfather. It was crowded—always someone locked in the bathroom, either pissing, shitting, or weeping, though mostly weeping. They’d tell stories about her mother, start laughing, laughing hard, too hard—it wasn’t that damn funny, Leah knew—until everyone was crying. Tommy and Eric had already gotten into a shouting match about which of them had convinced Leah’s mother at age five to press her finger against the red-hot coil of a stovetop burner. And every fight had to end in apologies, repetitive and too intensely honest. Leah’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, cried more than anyone. Every minute of every day, she let you know how unfair it was. Why should she, at seventy, be alive and well and her forty-two-year-old daughter be dead? Why? It was more than a constant irritation. More than too much family in too little space. It was hysteria. It made Leah want to scream.

  From this insanity, mild-mannered, sweet, and horny Larry, with his long, narrow face, his beaked nose and dazzling hazel eyes, was her only release. She woke every day around eleven, showered, and went to Larry’s for more fucking, though, in truth, mostly they’d just talked and listened to music together, music Leah had never heard before: Miles, Art Tatum, Coltrane, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Jelly Roll Morton, Coleman Hawkins. She’d liked the music more than anything else, more than Larry’s company, more even than the sex. She liked it despite the fact that she heard the same emotion in just about everything Larry played for her: anger, laid-back, just behind the beat, dark and seething, pounding, blasting, soft, tender, sad, bluesy, fast and slow, loving, passionate, ecstatic anger. In every note, she heard it. While Larry commented on the phrasing, this or that solo, the allusions, the staccato style of Sonny Rollins, the hypersonic energy of Dizzy Gillespie, Leah was in awe at how much rage this music could convey. How could it possibly hold so much of that one emotion? In song after song, musician after musician, in all volumes and tempos and tonal colors. Anger, wrath, fury. How beautiful that music was, more beautiful than Leah could remember anything ever being.

  Larry was nice about it. He kept saying it was his fault that Leah’s crotch hurt, which struck Leah as sweet, if somehow cowardly and unfair to her. She wanted it to be her fault. She wanted to feel the burden, the shame. Both of them were sexual dolts and had no idea what could be wrong with her. They assumed it was a venereal disease, never mind that neither of them had had sex before. Leah found the physical pain a relief, real and undeniable. She sat at home crying, and everyone thought she was thinking of her mother when in fact she could think of nothing else than the pain in her crotch. Larry wanted to drive her to Planned Parenthood, but Leah refused. She took the city bus. She sat hunched over while her crotch pounded, while she felt the constant, burning urge to pee and yet could not. In the clinic, surrounded by pamphlets on AIDS, gonorrhea, herpes, and genital warts, Leah felt she was being punished. She had fucked too much and indiscriminately, not more than a week after her mother had died. She was being punished, and the simplicity and rightness of it was satisfying. Then, after she took the prescribed antibiotics, the pain left, as did her relatives and Larry. She was suddenly alone. No longer a virgin, though not diseased, not doomed. And when the grief came, it was more forceful than she had expected. Leah saw quite clearly that it would never leave. It would always be with her. It would always crush her.

  But it was no longer what it had been, no longer all-encompassing, as Leah had noticed only yesterday. And now she had caught the eye of another boy, Jason Clark, and was sitting in a big white flatbed truck that carried two dumpsters, a red one and a black one, which held dead animals. On the way out of Ann Arbor, Leah sat up high in the truck, above the small cars and their smaller drivers. She felt the rumble of the engine in her thighs and torso. And she felt surprised to be thinking to herself that this was it—her first real date.

  “That’s Category One and Two,” Jason Clark said as they barreled down 23. He was talking about the dumpsters chained to the flatbed behind them. “It’s all regulated by the government, by the USDA. Category One is the classification for the small stuff—rats, mice, bats, birds, reptiles—stuff that’s not protected under the Animal Welfare Act. Two is larger mammals—cats, primates, the sheep and dogs you work with. The black container is for One, the red’s for Two. We keep them separate—when they’re alive and when they’re dead. It’s all regulated. As is incineration. You can’t just dump them in a landfill.”

  Jason was doing, Leah guessed, what guys did to impress girls. He was telling her what he knew—the facts, the tidbits, the plain, uninteresting stuff in his head. “We pay the incinerator by volume. The university buys the right to dump fifty thousand gallons of medical waste in Detroit every year.” Jason drove the huge truck with one hand on the wheel. “Can you imagine?”

  “Nope. I can’t,” Leah said. The truth was she didn’t want to know any more about the dead things that were their cargo. What was she to make of what she knew, anyway? She knew, for instance, that the dead sheep behind them had had their hearts removed, cut out of them and refrigerated, and the dogs had had their gallbladders destroyed. Fifty thousand gallons of medical waste per year. She knew that now. Category One and Category Two. Small animals and big animals. It added up to nothing. So why know it? “Let’s not talk about this anymore.”

  He nodded. “No problem.” He turned and looked at her then. “You look … better … different. I mean, you did something to yourself. You look good, really good.”

  In the instant that he began to appreciate
her, Jason Clark became annoying. It wasn’t, it seemed, that he was unhandsome (in fact, he was handsome), nor was it that he was a showoff. It was, as near as Leah could tell, that he liked her. Now that she saw this, his sleek, equine face—the long nose and narrow cheekbones—became horsy, just right for a bit and bridal. His ears seemed cartoonishly large. His teeth stuck out too much. His arms and shoulders were too buff. He was all wrong.