The Wilds

by Julia Elliott

  “Tell her, Caroline. Tell her that what she’s eating isn’t good for her.”

  You begin your diatribe with the salmon.

  “Consider the salmon,” you actually say, though there are no hip, clever people around to get your allusion. “Farmraised, of course. If their feed were not laced with toxic dye, their meat would be the unappetizing color of a maggot.”

  Your father, who is squeamish, retches into his napkin.

  “Please,” he says.

  But you have no mercy. Trotting out Deadly Harvest, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Fast Food Nation, you present the grim facts about the agri-industrial complex. You touch upon monocropping, genetic modification, the specious differences between artificial and so-called “natural” flavors, after which you provide a brief aside on the heated debate surrounding the controversial issue of saturated fats, which have, perhaps, been unfairly demonized. You bemoan the planet’s dying oceans. You describe the melancholy lowing of diseased cattle crammed cheek to jowl in a concrete feed lot. You depict corn syrup as though it is some kind of evil ectoplasm that possesses the food system, haunting cereal boxes and jars of juice. You pick flecks of flesh from your salmon and pop them into your mouth. You wince, for effect, each time you swallow. And when you are done covering every nook and cranny of the thoroughly corrupt contemporary food system, your cheeks are flushed with elation.

  “Food is food,” your father says. “One of the few pleasures in life.”

  “You are what you eat,” you say. “And you, dear Father, are not eating a duck but a brutal duck-raising technology.”

  Your father rolls his eyes.

  So you take it upon yourself to make him understand the true nature of the food system in which he is complicit. You discuss antibiotics, hormones, lice medicine. You evoke the pale winter light that once played upon the cold bars of this duck’s (you point for emphasis) cramped prison cell. You hypothesize about the nature of duck depression. You want your father to taste the despair of the cage. The sad duck restlessness. The bleak duck sighs. Bleeding cankers of the flipper, cloacal tumors, swollen feather follicles. You ask your father to imagine the vitamin-deficient creature’s cloudy eyes, its scaly beak, its tongue, dry as a biscuit, feebly protruding to taste an anemic crumb of genetically modified Roundup Ready corn.

  You do not feel satisfied until your father puts down his fork.

  “Nevertheless,” you say, “you might as well eat it. Not waste it, you know. After all it went through.”

  “Caroline, why don’t you eat something?” says your mother. She’s standing up, half-empty plate in hand. “There are all kinds of fruits and vegetables. And it’s all natural, natural, natural.”

  She skips off into the labyrinth of troughs, wedges herself between two wheelchair-bound senior citizens, heaps her plate with desserts, and returns to the table.

  “Want some?” she asks.

  You shake your head.

  You imagine your husband weeding his vegetable garden. You left on a bad note two days ago, after a long and tedious fight that ended only when you walked out the door. In fact, the reason you decided, at the last minute, to join your parents for a cut-rate vacation in nightmarish Orlando was to get a break from what you call the husband situation. And while your angry side still wants to double-slap the self-righteous prick across his smug face, the loving and sensitive soul deep within you, gagged and strait-jacketed by bitterness, misses him.

  “Whew,” says your mother, putting down a Pepto-Bismol-pink spoonful of M&M-studded pudding. “I ate too much” (she always says this). “I won’t have to eat a bite of supper” (she always does).

  Though her smile is huge, she looks uncomfortable and hypertensive. In the spasmodic light of the fluorescent chandeliers, her face looks alarmingly flushed. And you think you see a hint of wildness in her eyes.

  The condo balcony overlooks a parking lot. A dumpster swells like an island amid the glittering sea of SUVs.

  “Great view,” you say, and your father sneers into his gin and tonic, wondering, you suspect, why he invited you along.

  “It’s beautiful,” your mother says, her smile rapturous.

  “What a sunset.” Your father takes your mother’s tiny restless hand, caging it in both palms as though he’s trapped a wily songbird.

  But the sky is beautiful, you admit, scarlet with particulates and smeared with clumps of glowing smog. You mention the role of pollution in what you call the apocalyptic beauty of the postmodern sunset. And yes, you do feel pretentious for using the term postmodern, particularly in the presence of your quaint, modern parents with their atomic-age notions of human progress. You actually wince before turning back to the screenplay you’ve been working on for a year, a sci-fi satire that you secretly hope will release you from your peonage as an adjunct instructor of English composition with a course load of five/five. You are a debt prisoner struggling to pay off student loans, teaching future debt prisoners whose student loans are three times as usurious as yours. But you have promised yourself that you will not think about your students during spring break. You will focus on your neglected screenplay. And you actually feel inspired by the ridiculous sunset. Riding the crisp, optimistic wave of a chardonnay buzz, you tap laptop keys.

  Dusk. The sky in pink turmoil, a froth of toxic clouds. Cars cruise the city grid. Behind an abandoned strip mall, on cracked blacktop, in the sultry haze of perpetual summer, two black sedans approach each other. Each vehicle emits a pink plume of exhaust. They drive in circles, assessing pheromones. The male organ emerges slowly, like an expanding telescope, to the pulsing throb of bleak techno music. And then the cars copulate, bumper to bumper, like cockroaches.

  You laugh at the exquisite absurdity of the scene. Your screenplay, a dystopian satire, depicts a world in which humans have become so obese and car-dependent that they have grown into their vehicles. Their blobby, boneless bodies, filling every inch of their cars’ interiors, have fused with their automobiles’ exoskeletons. Nothing but cyborg arthropods cruise the hot, barren planet, tanking up at automated gas stations and feeding through tubes at robot-run drive-thrus. The creatures mate like insects. The females lay eggs that resemble tiny Volkswagen Beetles. You still get chills when you imagine the opening credits rolling to the provocative tune of Gary Numan’s “Cars,” its optimistic melody undercut by a sinister undertow that slowly becomes apparent when the viewer realizes that there are no human beings in the scene.

  “Caroline,” says your mother, “you ought to plan your baby for the summer.”

  Your mother counts on her fingers: “September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April, May.”

  And then she winks suggestively at you, as though she has somehow been reading your mind, following the grotesque sex scene you’ve been tinkering with. You wonder how you can engage your audience emotionally with scene after scene of soulless, car-human hybrids, cruising and eating and fucking and crashing. You wonder if you should have an archetypal rebel character who, unlike the other automatons, sees what grim conditions humanity has been reduced to and longs to break out into a more vital form of “reality.” You chuckle to yourself as you imagine two cyborg arthropods falling so deeply in love that they want to burst their carapaces and embrace each other flesh to flesh.

  “You and Tim would have the most beautiful baby in the world,” your mother says, forcing you to think about the husband situation again, perhaps reading your mind again, for it was the very subject of reproduction that prompted your three-day argument.

  And you do want a baby. But not right this minute. You want to wait until you are ready (financially, emotionally, physically). Your schedule is too crazy. You are too nervous. You drink too much wine. You have not published an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal. The ramshackle cabin you bought five years ago is only half-renovated. And, perhaps most importantly, the planet you happen to live on is a polluted ball of shit overrun with an insane and rapacious species of a
bsurdly successful ape that will probably destroy itself within a decade.

  “But you’re not getting any younger.”

  Four days ago, your husband actually uttered this vile cliché. And that’s when you lost it, reminding him that sperm quality also suffers as men age, that men over forty are more likely to spawn autistic children and schizophrenics and mentally sluggish offspring with emotional issues, and that everything is not always the mother’s fault.

  Your own mother, for instance, had three children whom she smothered with obsessive love, not because she was a bad person, but because her entire identity revolved around being a mother, which was partially your father’s fault and partially society’s.

  “Of course, it’s difficult to disentangle the roles of individual men and those of the patriarchy,” you actually said, wincing as your husband smirked at your choice of terminology.

  Two years ago, when you were finishing your dissertation on female monsters in 1970s cinema, your mother would call twice a week and say, “Caroline, have you finished your dissertation?” And now that you have finished your dissertation (which ended up taking several years), your mother prods you to take the next step in your long, arduous journey to adulthood.

  “I can’t wait until you have a baby, Caroline,” she says now, firing up a Camel Light, looking like a hoodlum child because she is only five feet tall. And this image makes you fondly remember your own first cigarette. You and your best friend, Squank, had kept a stash of cigs in the shed, a dim moldy space where you also experimented with French kissing. You still recall the clammy warmth of Squank’s perpetually sweating hands. His hysterical laughter. His neurotic habit of pinching his arms black and blue every time he committed a “sin.”

  “Mom,” you say, “do you remember Squank?”

  “Squank,” she says. “That rings a bell. James, who’s Squank?”

  “You remember Squank,” says your father. “Odd fellow. Weird laugh. Caroline’s boyfriend.”

  “I wouldn’t call him a boyfriend,” you say. “Just a friend.”

  “I’m having some memory problems,” your mother says.

  You feel sick to your stomach, because your mother has always kept track of your childhood friends, obsessively, in fact, just as she tracked your progress with your dissertation.

  “Mom,” you say, “who’s George Bush?”

  “George Bush,” she says. “That rings a bell. James, who’s George Bush?”

  “Our idiotic president,” you say. And your father winces, as he usually does at your political leanings. But this time he holds back from saying anything and, instead, sinks, as though from exhaustion, deeper into his chair.

  Raiding the junk rooms of your brain, you call out names: Osama bin Laden, Charles Manson, Michael Jackson. And your mother has no idea who they are.

  “What’s a shovel?” you cry.

  “Scooper,” she says.

  “What are these?” Making a peace sign, you point two fingers at your nostrils.

  “Nose holes.”

  “How about a tampon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s a dragon?”

  “A long short crawler.” She smirks sagely, as though answering some ancient riddle.

  Your father, his face obliterated by shadows, sips silently. You spend the next hour subjecting your mother to demented quizzes, a panic rising within you like a locust swarm, a thousand tiny beating wings.

  “Who’s Jesus?” you ask.

  “He was on the cross.”

  Why do people eat? What’s electricity? What’s the difference between plants and animals?

  Cancer, tulips, radon, Slim Jims. Moonbeam, Bee Gees, Kleenex, rain. Tadpoles, Teletubbies, Rasputin, Atari. Tupperware. Lizards. Dinosaurs. Ice.

  What is love? Where do babies come from? What happens when you die?

  Sometimes your mother answers correctly. Sometimes her face goes blank. Sometimes she says something nonsensical yet poetic, cryptic even, her face serene and wizened like Yoda’s. As darkness closes in on the balcony, you feel the world shrinking to nothing but you and your aging parents. You hear the clink of your father’s ice. You hear a roar that might be the ocean or it might be traffic or it might be something inside your own head.

  “Mom, what’s the ocean?” you ask.

  “It’s big,” she says. “It’s made of something. What do you call it, James?”

  “Water,” your father says.

  That night, you have nightmares. You are on a vast, dilapidated spaceship that reeks of leaking gas. You move down endless corridors, trip over clusters of ripped-out wiring. You discover a medical area, dim yet stark with flickering fluorescent light. Among the rows of sick and dying, you find your mother, tucked into a corner, hooked up to a mess of dirty tubes. Before your eyes, she shrinks into the bedding until there is nothing left but a small spot of grease. And when that vanishes, you are aware that the earth no longer exists.

  You wake in the throes of a panic attack. Something is rustling beneath your bed. A small head pops up. You recognize the impish grin, the electric hair rollers.

  “Good morning.” Your mother stands up, spreads a crumpled garment: a vintage sundress, purple butterflies and ivy.

  “This is darling,” she says. “Let me press it.”

  Before you can stop her, she’s scurried from the room.

  Your father sits in the bright kitchenette. His weathered face droops from the sticky architecture of his hair. The ubiquitous comb-over makes you feel guilty now, for you realize that the hairstyle is more than an absurd quirk of vanity. The crisp helmet is order. The crisp helmet is protective armor. No matter how shitty your father feels when he wakes up in the morning, no matter how his hands shake, his hour-long grooming ritual restores some semblance of cozy normalcy. He is ready to face the day.

  When you were a child, and your father was a civics professor at a community college, he’d fish on Saturdays, the only day of the week that had no claim on him. He’d come home drunk and disheveled, as though he’d turned into a beast out in the wild. Sometimes he’d hide behind doors and leap out at your mother—crazy-haired, redeyed—and she’d shriek with laughter as the wild man caught her in his arms.

  “I didn’t realize,” you whisper as you pour coffee. “When did she get this bad?”

  “Just this summer,” your father says. “Though it’s been happening for a while. And now, when I think back, I can see that even a few years ago, she started to say peculiar things.”

  “What does her doctor say?”

  “He calls them ‘senior moments.’ So I’ve made an appointment with a specialist. We’re having some tests done, but I wanted her to have one more vacation. I haven’t told the boys yet, though Jim could tell something was wrong over Christmas.”

  Your mother stands in the living room, smiling uncertainly. You don’t know how long she’s been standing there, holding your dress, which is starched and ironed in random spots. She’s wearing lime shorts and a purple top from the 1980s, with enormous shoulder pads and huge brassy buttons, an outfit that you might have worn ironically a few years ago, when you were still striving to be hip. Now that you think about it, you did notice oddities in her dressing style at Christmas (a holiday sweater with warm-up pants and tiny, gold pumps). Remembering how gleefully you’d described her hideous sweater on your blog, you feel ashamed.

  Your mother drapes your dress over a chair and lights a cigarette.

  “What you want me to fix, honey?” She winks slyly. “Grits and eggs?”

  Normally, you’d have something snide to say about instant grits and battery-hen eggs, but you say nothing. You nod. You take a sip of coffee. And when your mother places the food before you, you eat without complaint, just as you did when you were a child.

  Although you hate smearing potentially carcinogenic sunscreen all over your body, you must prepare for the brutal day. You have the expensive, organic stuff that smells like oatmeal and leaves a sticky f
ilm. You have a wide-brimmed hat and a long-sleeved sun-shirt made of some kind of futuristic, UV-resistant nylon. You have swarms of freckles, and each one is a potential basal-cell carcinoma. As you anoint your spotted body in a ritualistic fashion, you dwell on the sun damage that you suffered summers past, when, young and free and unwisely supervised, you endured at least a half-dozen severe burns, the kind that brought blisters and fever and delirium. You remember moaning in a strange beach house bed, your pale skin scorched, as your dark-skinned brothers howled and scampered through the exotic vegetation outside.

  Your childhood has literally left you scarred, you think as you ignore your mother’s increasingly desperate knock. Scathed, in fact. And you actually say the word aloud for dramatic effect—scathed—even though no one can hear you.

  You find your mother pacing the hall just outside your door, vinyl purse clamped in her armpit.

  “Let’s go,” she says. “Why don’t we go?”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “My husband?”

  “Yes,” you say, feeling confused. “My father. Your husband.”

  “I don’t know.”

  You start to panic, wondering what you’d do if your father disappeared. Would you take your mother back to your house? Would you drop her off at her sister’s place? Just as your heartbeat begins to quicken, your father emerges from the bathroom, his comb-over fortified with an extra gust of Aqua Net.

  “I’m ready,” he announces, patting his helmet of hair, steeling himself for another long day of fun in the sun.

  “I can’t wait to get to Universal Studios,” your mother says. “I can’t wait.”

  And she skips out the door.

  “When are we getting on the boat?” your mother asks for the tenth time, her voice a brass trumpet. Her legs, skinny and sun-damaged, sticking out of the lime-green shorts, make you think of child burn victims. And then you realize that your mother was a child burn victim, scathed by the sun, just as you were, though her olive skin was more resistant.