No Animals We Could Name

by Ted Sanders

  “I drove her here. She was in my car.”

  “Did she have a carseat?” Ernest says. I don’t tell him about the airbag thing—about how she’s so small it could kill her—even though I’d like to tell someone.

  Tom spots Dorlene. He spreads his arms out wide as he walks up to her, but they don’t hug. It’s quite a sight, him towering over her, like a circus bear. Until now it’s been Dorlene who looks not really real, or real in a different way—synthesized, maybe. But now it’s Tom who seems make-believe. Kind of an absurd hulk of a thing, a monster. Next to him, Dorlene looks practically like a perfection.

  “Holy lord,” Ernest says.

  Dorlene starts wagging her finger at Tom. You can tell she’d have it in his face if she could. She points at the brushpile, the bottle of lighter fluid in his hand, scolding. But Tom just laughs and shrugs, shakes his head. I can imagine his protest even from here.

  Ernest turns and looks me up and down. He sighs. “So Dave, how are you?”

  “Pretty good,” I say. I add, “Hanging in there,” and right off wish I hadn’t.

  “And how’s Lisa?” Ernest slaps the newspaper against his knee—whack, whack, whack.

  My head clouds over. They’re still neighbors, and he’s asking me. “She seems good.”

  “She’s lost weight.”

  “Yes.”

  “A lot of weight.”

  “Thirty-five pounds,” I tell him.

  Ernest nods. “So, you’re still talking, then. I see.”

  How much Lisa and I talk these days is no business of his, so I don’t say more. I’ve been out of the house for almost a year and have barely seen Ernest since. I’m realizing right now that he’s not a friend, not so much. Proximity might’ve been all we had going for us back when we used to talk more, when we were neighbors still. But maybe proximity is all any relationship has going for it. I try to think of something to say, and then Ernest murmurs, “Look at that, look at that now.” But all he means is just Dorlene down there, still talking to Tom. Meanwhile, the kids bomb the brushpile with lit matches.

  I ask Ernest how Brenda is, trying to rile him. It’s been years, and we didn’t know her long—she moved out several months after we moved in—but we were friendly for a while, the four of us. Afterward she was always coming by to take or leave the kids, and out in the driveway you’d see her and Ernest sometimes, stilted and smoldering. We didn’t keep in touch.

  Ernest scoffs. “Yes, how is Brenda.” He lifts his rolled-up paper like a sword. He goes into a fighting stance, and he starts on like he’s fencing or something, stabbing and parrying out at nothing, the whole bit. His shoes scuffle across the driveway stones. “From what I hear?” he says, and then he kind of lunges and stabs down toward the ground, throwing his back hand up over his head like he’s in Shakespeare or whatever. “Sluttish.”

  All at once there’s a flash from below, and the thump of tearing air. A big fantail of fire, all orange and black, blooms from the brushpile. Me and Ernest both startle. Ernest jerks up erect and steps back beside me. Down below, Dorlene’s been knocked off her feet, almost lost in the grass. Tom bends and scoops her up with one hand—under her belly, like he’s scooping up a cat—and he trundles toward us with her under his arm. I find I’m walking down to meet them but I don’t know why. I leave Ernest standing there.

  “I am serious to fucking god, Mr. Shamblin.” Dorlene is stiff as a stick, her hip pressed against Tom’s. Her dress hangs down between her legs. “Put me the fuck down.” Behind them, the flash of fire has vanished to black and smoke. Nothing’s caught. The kids chatter and whoop.

  Tom comes up grinning, hanging on to her. “You’ve met Dorlene.” He’s wearing a long pink polo that’s tucked I don’t know how far down into his pants. His pants always ride low, and with Dorlene on his hip, they’re sliding into a dangerous zone, but the polo stays tucked.

  “David,” Dorlene says to me. She’s managed to cross her arms. “David, please tell this man to put me down.”

  “What, you’re friends or something now?” Tom rumbles. “A little time in the car, and now this?” I don’t know if he’s talking to both of us or just Dorlene. He hitches her up against his hip again, re-getting his grip.

  “Mr. Shamblin,” says Dorlene. “David.” She hooks her eyes on mine.

  Ernest speaks, right behind me—practically in my ear, close enough so I can feel his breath on my neck and smell the dim piss-taint of wine. “Tom, Tom, Tom. This hardly becomes you.”

  What that even means, I’d like to know. But Tom laughs and sets Dorlene down. She alights like a dandelion tuft, starts smoothing her dress again. We all watch and then Tom turns to me. “Triti,” he says.

  For just a second I don’t even recognize the word, and when I do I blink and shake my head. “I haven’t seen her. We just got here.”

  “I need to find her.”

  “I haven’t seen her,” I say again, shrugging, and fuck if my face doesn’t burn.

  “Well.” Tom turns and considers the brushpile. He drops a two-handed wave of resignation toward the kids still there, then smiles down to Dorlene. “You wanna see the house?”

  We head up and in through the back porch, the four of us. The house smells like food and age and Triti. The adults have gathered in the warm kitchen: Martin and Clara, red-faced Bob Everitt, a handful of faculty I know by sight but not right off by name. Fat Susan—partly here on neighbor credentials, like me, but also because she’s co-owner of a gallery in town—has the back seat at the table alone, her mitts around a wineglass as big as a melon. She waggles her fingers at me. Little kids yammer somewhere back deeper in the house, a sound that takes me stupidly by surprise. Triti is here too, standing with her back to the sink, facing us and holding wet hands in the air like she’s prepping for surgery. Water piddles off her elbows. She’s cut her hair a little shorter, and the inside curtain of it, hanging to her shoulders, has been dyed pink. I haven’t even decided yet what I’ll say to her. Looking at her now, standing here, I realize I’ve pretended I might say nothing.

  Triti doesn’t snag on Dorlene at all. Her eyes slide up over Dorlene and onto me, right behind. I mean, everyone looks first at and then away from Dorlene, but only Triti seems not to notice her. A small but detectable hit ripples around the rest of the room as people spot her. They fix their faces as far from surprise as they can, most of them mustering up something like a happy expectancy, some of them checking Tom, all of them careful not to stare. But nobody manages to keep their conversation up; only the kids’ voices from the other room keep the moment from sinking all the way down to silence. It’s awful, and I wonder if this is how it always is for poor Dorlene. But she just stands there right out in the middle, hands slid inside her pockets like paper in envelopes.

  Tom waits another beat or two and then says, his voice all girled-up with glee, “Now that’s how you silence the rabble.” Everyone waits for him to go on, to flood the uncertain space that’s bubbled up. He steps in behind Dorlene, his face thoughtful and impish, and I can see he’s either working up his joke or already has it and is just weighing the delivery. At last, he dangles a hand low over Dorlene’s head. He booms, “Everyone, this is Dorlene. I know she only comes up to here on most of you”—and he shifts and curls his hand so that he’s making a vaguely lewd gesture of height just at the level of his own crotch—“but don’t think that means she’s going to do you any favors.”

  Grumbles and titters sprout up all around. Fat Susan lets out a loud puff of air—whuh! Bob Everitt squawks and Ernest chuckles low. Triti’s eyes roll faintly and she shakes her head. Tom shrugs for everyone, turning and grinning. “What?” he says. “What?”

  Dorlene raises her arms. She holds them up like some little prophet or something, and everybody quiets and looks at her—I sure do. Tom stops mugging and beams down at her. She lifts her voice, and it hums so high it sounds like a ringing that’s just in my own ears. “That’s good advice I hope you didn’t need,” s
he says. “But I am Dorlene.”

  And just like that she pretty much has the whole room. Laughter and friendly voices—relieved voices—rise. And I try to think if in my whole life I have ever said the words “I am David,” or if I ever would, and I try to imagine what kind of thread of connection somebody would have to have with themselves to be able to say such a thing and to find that it’s not just received but received well. And while I’m thinking this, I realize that someone in the room is clapping, and it hasn’t seemed inappropriate, and for a split second I worry it might be me.

  “She is Dorlene,” I say to Ernest.

  “Mm,” he says.

  Triti’s eyes are on me. She still has her forearms up in the air, her hands like mittens. “Tom took all my towels,” she says across to me, and her voice rattles me, but I’m distracted by the sight of Clara Pope shaking Dorlene’s hand. It occurs to me that this is a thing I myself did not do. I’m not sure I regret it; Clara has bent herself into a captivating, awful shape, clearly unsure how to handle the mechanics of the act. She looks like she’s just barely overriding the instinct—a maternal one, maybe—to squat down to Dorlene’s level. The effort does regrettable things to her ass. I’m embarrassed for them both.

  “Towels…gone,” Triti says to me. She shakes her wet lifted hands. Triti’s words come through to me like they’re on a wire, through the chatter that’s risen back up. She’s tuning herself to my frequency, throwing a private conversation across a crowded room—a kind of invisibility, a concentration.

  And I’m hearing her, I am, but the fact that I’m hearing her—that she would talk to me this way at all—makes me a little sick, drags me back across the months. I shrug at her and press a smile and shake my head. Triti bends and begins to wipe her hands and forearms on her jeans, leaving dark smudges across her thick thighs. She keeps her big black eyes on me the whole while, her face as blank as an animal’s.

  “Interesting,” Ernest says beside me, but I pretend not to hear him. I let myself get drawn back into Dorlene making the rounds with Tom. Everyone watches, one way or another. The spectacular handshakes, the looks on everybody’s face as they drink in Dorlene, the eager ginger way they bend to and touch her—it’s all fantastic. Dorlene has a whole battery of greetings, all of them old-fashioned and flirtatious. She stands in front of poor giggling Bob Everitt, practically underneath his outrageous potbelly—a fucking alarming sight, I can tell you—and tells him: “I fancy you a troublemaker, Mr. Everitt. I hope you won’t disappoint me.” And somehow even with all her fairylike slurring, she still sounds prim and precise. Bob fans his fingers and flops his wrist and all but whinnies at her.

  Ernest, watching, makes little noises of satisfaction now and then. After a while, Fat Susan hisses at us, trying to get our attention. She tips in toward us, her boobs blobbing over her hands, threatening to snap her wineglass off at the stem.

  “Pssst,” she says again, giving us both the p and the t of it, baring her teeth. Ernest raises an eyebrow, and she pushes a slow slurring whisper at us: “Who—is—that?” She tugs a hand free and points down, again and again, like Dorlene was under the table or something.

  Ernest mimics her, pointing down at the ground, raising his eyebrows even higher. Susan nods. Across the room, Tom is protesting innocence high over Dorlene’s head. A couple of younger guys I don’t know laugh, looking from him to her like autograph hounds. Tom says something about Dorlene’s flat head. “So you can put a drink on it,” he clarifies. Dorlene rocks on her heels.

  Ernest holds his finger and thumb an inch apart for Fat Susan, indicating a tiny thing, a little bit. He makes his face a question.

  “Yes,” Susan hisses, eyes darting. She mouths her question again, giving it no throat but lots of saliva, the words crackling so wetly you don’t even need to read her lips: Who—is—that?

  Ernest whispers crisply back at her. “That’s Dorlene.”

  Across the room, a little snigger pops out of Triti. She’s slipped into the laundry room doorway now, watching us, her hands folded into her armpits. Susan scrutinizes Ernest like he’s a cobweb in a high corner.

  “She’s a student,” I tell Susan. “Of Tom’s. From the summer thing he does in Seattle.”

  Susan leans back and lays her hand flat on the table. “She looks so young.” She slips back into a dead whisper on the word young.

  I check out Dorlene again, how she has her hands locked behind her waist, how she’s so pert and erect and attentive. “She’s not, though. She’s thirty-two.”

  Ernest looks over at me and makes a sound like a detective.

  “That’s still young,” says Fat Susan.

  “Dave likes them young.”

  “How does a person like that even manage on their own?” Susan asks, not seeming to hear him. I’m hardly sure I’ve heard him right myself. “Is she married?”

  “Now that is the question, isn’t it, Dave? Or maybe it isn’t.”

  Triti’s still watching, listening. Her jaw is like stone. I point to a used paper plate on the table in front of Susan. Something red has recently been devoured there, scraped down to its stain. “Where’d you get the food?”

  Fat Susan raises her wine and drops her head, giving me a vampish gaze. She waves a balloon hand toward the dining room. “Oh, honey,” she says.

  I push off, leaving Ernest behind, and excuse my way through the kitchen. I don’t watch Triti watch me go. But as I sidle past Tom and Dorlene, Dorlene—I swear—reaches out and briefly snags me, giving my pants a fleeting tweak, like I’ve caught on a bramble. I glance down, and she slims me the corner of a smile. I’ve no idea what kind of look I’m giving her in return, but blood rushes to my face. She opens her mouth and flashes her eyes, and she tells me, thinly but unmistakably: “Hungry.” I nod before I know it. I sort of stumble past Bob and slide through the butler’s pantry into the dining room.

  I find myself almost alone. A couple of students—a guy and a girl—are making their way down Tom’s long homemade table, which is just obliterated by food. Further on, the front parlor is full of kids—faculty offspring, loose and loud, flickering between the dark furniture. They’ve got some game going up on the TV screen. I try to let my head clear. I tell myself Ernest doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does. I wait for him to come slinking out after me, snarking—or maybe Triti—but nobody does. I can still feel that faint tug on my pants, so foreign and low.

  The couple at the table nod and smile at me. I nod and walk on by. I pass the open door to Triti’s room without looking. I know anyway: her bed like a magazine, quilted and trim and square. I wander into the front parlor. Eight or nine kids, half of them rapt before the jangling TV, some clinging to controllers. Every few moments, the room reacts to something that happens on screen, the kids flinching and howling, but all I see are scrolling colors, flashes, shapes shrinking and growing. Tiny figures move. Someone must’ve brought these things here, hooked this stuff up to Triti’s set. Beside me, a couple of the Gottlieb girls—I think—are sitting on a trunk.

  “What is this game?” I ask.

  I get a gangly, one-shouldered shrug in return. Neither of them takes her eyes from the TV. “I dunno.” The TV whistles and bangs.

  I go back to the dining room. I take a paper plate and step in behind the two grazers. The sight of all this food makes me struggle to imagine what kind of thing Dorlene might want to eat. Why she’s hitting me up for it, I don’t know, but I think it over hard. The spread out here is chaotic: Tupperwares, or whatever passes for that these days, and trays and bowls and plates with lids cast aside or foil pulled half off, almost everything inside tan or green. Bags of chips yawn from the back rows like artillery. The food itself is that pretentious mix of the refined and the intentionally lowbrow they always have at these school things: pita triangles and Jell-O salad and stuffed mushroom caps and macaroni salad and Brie, and some kind of little quiche thing maybe, and who knows how many hopeful homemade dips—I see three different guacamoles a
lone, and something that looks like salsa but isn’t. There’s a bowl full of curling red chips that I figure for sweet potato. Despite the extravagance, I don’t find much I’d eat. Besides chips, there’s not much store-bought stuff, stuff you can trust. Voices knife up briefly from the kitchen, sparring good-naturedly.

  On Dorlene’s behalf I reject the smaller-is-better approach right away; I figure it’s probably stupid to imagine that most of the eating mechanics couldn’t be overcome. I’d follow the lead of the two students, but they aren’t so much taking food as they are browsing, pointing and murmuring knowingly to themselves. They nod at a round Corningware thing full of purple spheres, shining in a glaze. Abruptly the one beside me, a tall girl with a sultry swayback and a pooch that pops out from under a braless tank, turns and drapes a slack hand above another dish filled with a brown-and-yellow bubbly crud. It’s been cut into already; the insides look thorny, wet, and coarse. “Try this,” she says to me, her voice like a rumpled bed. “It’s amazing.”

  “All right.” I carve a two-bite spoonful onto my plate. I’ve got no plans to eat it. Experience has taught me that what other people want to eat most is whatever I don’t—not that that’s narrowing it down. But I tell myself this yellow stuff looks promising, not identifiable right off, sophisticated. The girl plucks simple grapes, green and red, from a bowl with her long fingers. I take another half spoon of the yellow stuff. “Did you make this?” I ask her.

  “Oh no. I’m allergic. But T—— made it,”—and here she gives me a name, but it’s a name I’ve never heard, something French or Danish or something, something like Terry but with an n in it, and she pronounces it I’m sure exactly right, and the sudden shift her mouth and tongue make startles me—“and so I know it’s amazing.” She halves a grape with her front teeth. “He’s amazhing.” She reaches out with her hand and actually lays three long fingers against the rim of my plate. She chews. She pats the edge of my plate, real soft, just barely, twice, holding the crown of the bitten grape between that same forefinger and thumb. “Enjoy,” she says, and she drifts away from the table, taking the guy with her.