Larger Than Life (Novella) (12 page)

Read on for an excerpt …

Some people used to believe that there was an elephant graveyard—a place that sick
and old elephants would travel to die. They’d slip away from their herds and would
lumber across the dusty landscape, like the titans we read about in seventh grade
in Greek Mythology. Legend said the spot was in Saudi Arabia, that it was the source
of a supernatural force, that it contained a book of spells to bring about world peace.

Explorers who went in search of the graveyard would follow dying elephants for weeks,
only to realize they’d been led in circles. Some of these voyagers disappeared completely.
Some could not remember what they had seen, and not a single explorer who claimed
to have found the graveyard could ever locate it again.

Here’s why: The elephant graveyard is a myth.

True, researchers have found groups of elephants that died in the same vicinity, many
over a short period of time. My mother, Alice, would have said there’s a perfectly
logical reason for a mass burial site: a group of elephants who died all at once due
to lack of food or water, a slaughter by ivory hunters. It’s even possible that the
strong winds in Africa could blow a scattering of bones into a concentrated pile.
Jenna
, she would have told me,
there’s an explanation for everything you see
.

There is plenty of information about elephants and death that is not fable but instead
cold, hard science. My mother would have been able to tell me that, too. We would
have sat, shoulder to shoulder, beneath the massive oak where Maura liked to shade
herself, watching the elephant pick up acorns with her trunk and pitch them. My mother
would rate each toss like an Olympic judge:
8.5
 … 
7.9. Ooh! A perfect 10
.

Maybe I would have listened. But maybe, too, I would have just closed my eyes. Maybe
I would have tried to memorize the smell of bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the
way she absentmindedly braided my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of green
grass.

Maybe the whole time I would have been wishing there really
was
an elephant graveyard, except not just for elephants. Because then I’d be able to
find her.

When I was nine—before I grew up and became a scientist—I thought I knew everything,
or at least I wanted to know everything, and in my mind there was no difference between
the two. At that age, I was obsessed with animals. I knew that a group of tigers was
called a streak. I knew that dolphins were carnivores. I knew that giraffes had four
stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were a thousand times more powerful
than the same weight of human muscle. I knew that white polar bears had black skin
beneath their fur, and that jellyfish had no brains. I knew all these facts from the
Time-Life monthly animal fact cards that I had received as a birthday gift from my
pseudo-stepfather, who had moved out a year ago and now lived in San Francisco with
his best friend, Frank, whom my mother called the other woman when she thought I wasn’t
listening.

Every month new cards arrived in the mail, and then one day, in October 1977, the
best card of all arrived: the one about elephants. I cannot tell you why they were
my favorite animals. Maybe it was my bedroom, with its green shag jungle carpet and
the wallpaper border of cartoon pachyderms dancing across the walls. Maybe it was
the fact that the first movie I’d ever seen, as a toddler, was
Dumbo
. Maybe it was because the silk lining inside my mother’s fur coat, the one she had
inherited from her own mother, was made from an Indian sari and printed with elephants.

From that Time-Life card, I learned the basics about elephants. They were the largest
land animals on the planet, sometimes weighing more than six tons. They ate three
to four hundred pounds of food each day. They had the longest pregnancy of any land
mammal—twenty-two months. They lived in breeding herds, led by a female matriarch,
often the oldest member of the group. She was the one who decided where the group
went every day, when they took a rest, where they ate and where they drank. Babies
were raised and protected by all the female relatives in the herd, and traveled with
them, but when males were about thirteen years old, they left—sometimes preferring
to wander on their own and sometimes gathering with other males in a bull group.

But those were facts that
everyone
knew. I, on the other hand, became obsessed and dug a little deeper, trying to find
out everything I could at the school library and from my teachers and books. So I
also could tell you that elephants got sunburned, which is why they would toss dirt
on their backs and roll in the mud. Their closest living relative was the rock hyrax,
a tiny, furry thing that looked like a guinea pig. I knew that just like a human baby
sucks its thumb to calm itself down, an elephant calf might sometimes suck its trunk.
I knew that in 1916, in Erwin, Tennessee, an elephant named Mary was tried and hanged
for murder.

In retrospect I am sure my mother got tired of hearing about elephants. Maybe that
is why, one Saturday morning, she woke me before the sun came up and told me we were
going on an adventure. There were no zoos near where we lived in Connecticut, but
the Forest Park Zoo in Springfield, Massachusetts, had a real, live elephant—and we
were going to see her.

To say I was excited would be an understatement. I peppered my mother with elephant
jokes for hours:

What’s beautiful, gray, and wears glass slippers? Cinderelephant
.

Why are elephants wrinkled? They don’t fit on the ironing board
.

How do you get down from an elephant? You don’t. You get down from a goose
.

Why do elephants have trunks? Because they’d look funny with glove compartments
.

When we got to the zoo, I raced along the paths until I found myself standing in front
of Morganetta the elephant.

Who looked nothing like what I had imagined.

This was not the majestic animal featured on my Time-Life card, or in the books I
had studied. For one thing, she was chained to a giant cement block in the center
of her enclosure, so that she couldn’t walk very far in any direction. There were
sores on her hind legs from the shackles. She was missing one eye, and she wouldn’t
look at me with the other. I was just another person who had come to stare at her,
in her prison.

My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged down a zookeeper, who said
that Morganetta had once been in local parades, and had done stunts like competing
against undergrads in a tug-o-war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten
unpredictable and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visitors with her trunk
if they came too close to her cage. She had broken a caretaker’s wrist.

I started to cry.

My mother bundled me back to the car for the four-hour drive home, although we had
been at the zoo for only ten minutes.

“Can’t we help her?” I asked.

This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After a trip to the library,
I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote to the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts,
asking him to give Morganetta more space, and more freedom.

He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response to
The Boston Globe
, which published it, and then a reporter called to do a story on the nine-year-old
who had convinced the mayor to move Morganetta into the much larger buffalo enclosure
at the zoo. I was given a special Concerned Citizen award at my elementary school
assembly. I was invited back to the zoo for the grand opening to cut the red ribbon
with the mayor. Flashbulbs went off in my face, blinding me, as Morganetta roamed
behind us. This time, she looked at me with her good eye. And I knew, I just
knew
, she was still miserable. The things that had happened to her—the chains and the
shackles, the cage and the beatings, maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken
out of Africa—all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and it took up
all the extra space.

For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make life better for Morganetta.
In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resident polar bear, the facility closed
and Morganetta was moved to the Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It
had a pool, and toys, and two older elephants.

If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the mayor that just sticking
elephants in proximity with others does not mean they will form friendships. Elephants
are as unique in their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not assume
that two random humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two
elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants. Morganetta continued to
spiral deeper into depression, losing weight and deteriorating. Approximately one
year after she arrived in L.A., she was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s
pool.

The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the
difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve.

The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want
it … some stories just don’t have a happy ending.

When it comes to memory, I’m kind of a pro. I may be only thirteen, but I’ve studied
it the way other kids my age devour fashion magazines. There’s the kind of memory
you have about the world, like knowing that stoves are hot and that if you don’t wear
shoes outside in the winter you’ll get frostbite. There’s the kind you get from your
senses—that staring at the sun makes you squint and that worms aren’t the best choice
of meal. There are the dates you can recall from history class and spew back on your
final exam, because they matter (or so I’m told) in the grand scheme of the universe.
And there are personal details you remember, like the high spikes on a graph of your
own life, which matter to nobody but yourself. Last year at school, my science teacher
let me do a whole independent study on memory. Most of my teachers let me do independent
studies, because they know I get bored in class and, frankly, I think they’re a little
scared that I know more than they do and they don’t want to have to admit it.

My first memory is white at the edges, like a photo with too bright a flash. My mother
is holding spun sugar on a cone, cotton candy. She raises her finger to her lips—
This is our secret
—and then tears off a tiny piece. When she touches it to my lips, the sugar dissolves.
My tongue curls around her finger and sucks hard.
Iswidi
, she tells me. Sweet. This is not my bottle; it’s not a taste I know, but it’s a
good one. Then she leans down and kisses my forehead.
Uswidi
, she says. Sweetheart.

I can’t be more than nine months old.

This is pretty amazing, really, because most kids trace their first memories to somewhere
between the ages of two and five. That doesn’t mean that babies are little amnesiacs—they
have memories long before they have language but, weirdly, can’t access them once
they start talking. Maybe the reason I remember the cotton candy episode is because
my mother was speaking Xhosa, which isn’t our language but one she picked up when
she was working on her doctorate in South Africa. Or maybe the reason I have this
random memory is as a trade-off my brain made—because I
can’t
remember what I desperately wish I could: details of the night my mother disappeared.

My mother was a scientist, and for a span of time, she even studied memory. It was
part of her work on post-traumatic stress and elephants. You know the old adage that
elephants never forget? Well, it’s fact. I could give you all my mother’s data, if
you want the proof. I’ve practically got it memorized, no pun intended. Her official
published findings were that memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative
moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain. But there’s
a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered.
Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they
turn into the big, bleak, white
nothing
I get in my head when I try to focus on that night.

Here’s what I know:

Sometimes I think of my life as two train cars hitched together at the moment of my
mom’s disappearance—but when I try to see how they connect there’s a jarring on the
track that jerks my head back around. I know that I used to be a girl whose hair was
strawberry blond, who ran around like a wild thing while my mother took endless notes
about the elephants. Now I’m a kid who is too serious for her age and too smart for
her own good. And yet as impressive as I am with scientific statistics, I fail miserably
when it comes to real-life facts, like knowing that Wanelo is a website and not a
hot new band. If eighth grade is a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the human
adolescent (and to my
mother, it certainly would have been), then reciting fifty named elephant herds in
the Tuli Block of Botswana cannot compete with identifying all the members of One
Direction.

It’s not like I don’t fit in at school because I’m the only kid without a mother.
There are lots of kids missing parents, or kids who don’t talk about their parents,
or kids whose parents are now living with new spouses and new kids. Still, I don’t
really have friends at school. I sit at the lunch table on the far end, eating whatever
my grandmother’s packed me, while the cool girls—who, I swear to God, call themselves
the Icicles—chatter about how they are going to grow up and work for OPI and make
up nail-polish color names based on famous movies: Magent-lemen Prefer Blondes; A
Fuchsia Good Men. Maybe I’ve tried to join the conversation once or twice, but when
I do, they usually look at me as if they’ve smelled something bad coming from my direction,
their little button noses wrinkled, and then go back to whatever they were talking
about. I can’t say I’m devastated by the way I’m ignored. I guess I have more important
things on my mind.