The Animal Girl (2 page)

“Field dressing?” she asked.

“Gutting them, removing the organs. You need to do that soon after a kill, before you cure and slaughter it. It's a real mess. I used to hunt large game as a boy with my dad. It's not for me anymore.” He shook his head in a way that allowed Kate to picture this mess: the blood, the entrails, the carcass. “I just hunt upland birds now: pheasant, woodcocks, grouse. It's not so much the killing as it is the stalk, the chase. Being out in the open air, seeing the land.”

“But you do kill them?”

He nodded. “I suppose you're against that sort of thing.”

Kate thought about it a moment. “Not really. Though I'd say I'm not for it either. I find it odd.”

Two hours later, when they walked out of the café, a hot wind was blowing down Washington Street, and the concrete beneath her felt as if it were baking through her thin-soled shoes. She felt lightheaded, buzzed from three cups of coffee, and nervous about what would happen next, how they'd say good-bye. Would they kiss? She couldn't imagine it and was relieved when he reached out with his sweaty hand and shook hers softly. “I enjoyed meeting you,” he said. A train of running children shot between them, and they both took a step back. She half thought he'd turn away then and walk off, and she'd have to wonder why he put her through two hours of conversation about his divorce, his son, about slaughtering and field dressing deer. But then he asked her if he could call again, and she couldn't—hard as she tried—suppress a smile and the obvious eagerness in her voice when she said, “I'd like that.”

* * *

Kate didn't feel sick yet. She'd felt healthy now for months, light of body, energetic, strong. She tried not to think of the fatigue and pain to come. But the week the heat wave lifted and the first cooler days of fall arrived, Kate succumbed to fear.

She'd been approving a loan for a pregnant couple when it happened. The woman wore a purple maternity dress that said “Mommy” at the place where her belly showed most. She carried her weight with an intimidating, ungraceful physicality, and her face glowed with acne and oil and a smile that was almost aggressive. The woman's scent of flowers and sweat filled Kate's small office, the air suddenly feeling close and tropical. She kept saying “we” in a way that left Kate feeling bereft and excluded. “
We're
looking forward to our first home. This is just what
we
need right now.” The woman looked down at the roundness where she had just placed her hands. “Three more months,” she said. The thoughts came to Kate before she could anticipate them. Would she be bedridden by then? Would she be gone? Could she already feel the beginning of fatigue? Would the symptoms she'd experienced last time—the headaches, the facial paralysis, the double vision—begin that very day?

Claiming illness, she left work early that afternoon only to discover Melissa and Mark in her bathroom. The shower had been on, which was no doubt why they hadn't heard Kate climbing the stairs. When she walked into her room, Kate saw steam curling out the open bathroom door before she saw her sixteen-year-old daughter, naked save for the pink strip of her Calvin Klein panties, balancing on her knees and giving pleasure with too much skill, too much expertise, to her standing boyfriend. She took it in for a moment: the bodies moving together in practiced motion, the flayed brown and white of tan lines, her daughter's breasts, mouth, and hands, the curve of her back. “Melissa,” Kate said.

Melissa stopped, and Mark grabbed his crotch and turned his shuddering backside to Kate. “Mom!” Melissa's naked body lunged at the door and slammed it in Kate's face. “I can't believe you, Mom!”

“Put your clothes on now!” Kate shouted at the door.

“We can't,” Melissa said. “Our clothes are all out there.”

Kate turned then and noticed the storm-strewn boxer shorts, Levi's, soiled white socks, Melissa's blouse and bra, even her pink Keds. Why were Melissa's shoes on Kate's bed? She picked them up, tossed them to the floor, and then started crying. She hardly knew why, though it had something to do with the pregnant woman and the surprise of her daughter, her body so womanly, full in the hips and breasts, more beautiful than Kate had ever been, engaged, absorbed in what Kate could only think of now as an adult activity. Her loss of control left her feeling even angrier at Melissa. “I want to talk to you both downstairs in five minutes!” she shouted.

After doing her best to cover up all signs of tears, Kate sat across from Melissa and Mark in the living room. They had a messy, postsex look about them, their hair mussed and their clothes, if secure and in place, somehow looser on their bodies. “I don't know what to say,” Kate began.

“We're being careful,” Melissa said. “I'm on the pill, Mom. I've had my first pelvic exam. We've both been tested. I'm doing everything I should be doing.”

“You were in
my
bathroom,” Kate said. These words made Mark, a tall, good-looking boy, broad in the shoulders and not usually meek, look down at the floor.

“You have the large shower,” Melissa said. “We were going to clean things up. You weren't supposed to be home yet.”

“Your clothes were all over
my
bed. Your shoes were on
my
bed.”

Melissa smirked and flashed her blue eyes at Kate. This was her most charming and practiced gesture, and though it usually made Kate fall instantly in love with her daughter, she resisted it now. “Well,” Melissa said, “we were in a hurry.”

Kate felt her face go red. “You should have been studying.”

“We still have time to study,” Melissa said.

“You need all the time you can get. You have to apply to schools and prepare for the college boards.”

“That's next year,” Melissa said.

Kate took a deep breath. She was about to do something she had been afraid to do for months. “I don't think what you did was wrong. I'm more concerned about the irresponsibility of neglecting the rest
of life so that you could do …” Kate couldn't name what they'd done, nor could she keep pretending to herself that it didn't bother her. How could her child, her teenaged daughter, take on this responsibility? How could she lie on her back in a doctor's office with her legs in stirrups so that she could, as safely as possible, give herself to a boy? A boy who made her lose so much presence of mind that she would throw her dirty shoes on her mother's bed, use her shower, and maybe even afterwards use her bed. Kate had terrifying visions of what would become of these two after she was gone. They'd end up in ten months with a baby and stuck in subsidized housing somewhere. It was possible. But what frightened Kate most was the fact that she herself was responsible for pushing these kids—and they certainly were no more than kids—into each other's arms with her own desperation, her own intensity.

Two years before, the first time Kate thought she was dying, she'd panicked. She couldn't sleep. She couldn't stand the aloneness, the waiting, the nights of insomnia. Kate clung to Melissa and made her go everywhere with her—the doctor's office, the grocery store, the post office, the accountant's. It didn't take long for Melissa to disappear. She joined the swim team, the debate club, and the school newspaper. In the meantime, Kate kept dying. She suffered from headaches, double vision, loss of balance so extreme that she'd have to lean against the nearest wall to stay upright. Kate saw Melissa only in the late evenings when she'd sit at the kitchen table, her hair stringy from chlorine, wolfing down cereal, toast, and cookies. And so when Kate woke at night and the hours alone in the dark became intolerable, she walked down the hallway to her daughter's room, gently moved aside the large stuffed bear her then fourteen-year-old child slept with, and got into her bed. She tried not to cry, but failed. Melissa said nothing, just stiffened and moved to the edge. At first light, Kate quietly got up and returned to her room.

Kate slept with her daughter as often as three times a week. She slept with her until one night she opened the door and saw in the dimness a boy next to Melissa. She had met Mark only once before then and knew that he was on the swim team and played tenor saxophone for Central High's jazz ensemble. His thick curly hair was on
the pillow, his muscular back was turned to her, and his bare arm was wrapped around Melissa, protecting her from her sick mother.

After that, Kate stayed away from her daughter's room. She might have put an end to Mark's sleepovers if she hadn't been sick and, later, if Melissa and Mark hadn't cooled off soon after the cancer disappeared. Mark no longer slept over, so far as Kate knew. But her cancer was back, and she could only expect the worst when her daughter found out. So she was finally going to put her foot down, never mind that what bothered her most was not so much their having sex—she had assumed as much before this afternoon—as her having seen the sex, and having seen Melissa's dirty tennis shoes—that image returned now and made her wince—on her clean bed. Thrown, tossed with no concern whatever for her mother. “You two need to see less of each other,” she said. “It would be better for both of you. You can go out on Friday and Saturday nights. But weekday afternoons and nights are off limits. Got it?”

Melissa looked at Kate with childish fury. “No,” she said.

“Don't say no to me.” Kate hardly recognized herself. She'd always been tolerant and open with her daughter. She'd always laid out options, pros and cons, and let her daughter make her own decisions.

Melissa shook her head. “No. I'm saying no. We're not going to do it.” She stood, took Mark forcefully by the hand, and led him up to her bedroom, where she slammed the door. Kate should have done something. She should have stood at the foot of the stairs and yelled. She should have gone up there and shouted through the door. But she was too tired to go on playing the role of parent. In any case, she wouldn't be a parent much longer.

Her second meeting with Charles took place at seven in the morning at a small restaurant across from the university hospital's cancer center, where, among other procedures, she'd had her mammogram done seven times in one sitting. Kate had wanted to suggest another breakfast place, but she kept quiet. She didn't want to have to explain herself. Not yet. A line of scarlet sunrise had just begun to wipe out the last few morning stars when they stepped out of the cold. All the same, waiting to be seated, Kate felt the presence of the black glass
façade across the street and couldn't help remembering the pink walls of the waiting booth where she'd spent almost eight hours with plastic pads stuck to her breasts. Only a floor above the mammogram clinic, she would lie on her back weeks later while a physician's assistant slid a needle deep between two upper lumbar vertebrae to draw out the spinal fluid in which, it turned out, carcinoma cells were actively dividing. She was told to expect double vision, speech impairment, dizziness, partial paralysis, and any number of random sensations due to the tumor that was growing in her brain. And then there was the chemotherapy, the woman named Meg who'd died in the waiting room while reading
Vogue.
It was hardly an appropriate magazine for a cancer ward, Kate had been thinking when Meg slumped over in her chair and stopped breathing. Kate was amazed at her calm as she broke Meg's fall, sat her upright, and held her in her chair until someone arrived and took her away.

Once she and Charles sat across from each other in a booth, she was able to forget the hospital. A sheet of Levolor-sliced sun fell over their table, and billows of steam rose from their coffee cups in the brightness. He was jumpy, tapping his fingers against his cup, then running them through his hair. She was already getting used to the angularity of his face and finding it vaguely attractive. His blue eyes she noticed for the first time—faint, shallow—after the waitress set their menus down. “Aren't you nervous?” he asked.

She wasn't, and she told him so.

“I am,” he said, and she could hear it in his voice. “Doesn't it bother you to see a grown man afraid?”

“Apparently not.” She laughed, reached across the table, and took his hand for the first time. But when he didn't loosen to her touch, she let him go.

The next week, she dropped into his furniture store just before closing. Charles seemed to have a great deal more courage as he walked briskly through the endless rows of desks, filing cabinets, and computer tables to meet her. “Welcome,” he said, smiling, at ease in his suit and tie. He led her around and made her sit in multiple styles of waiting-room chairs and ergonomically designed stools for typists and receptionists. The repetition and sameness of objects—chair after
chair after chair—spooked her a little. “You think it's terrible,” he said. “What I do.”

She denied it at first. Then said, “It does seem a little … lonely. All these human objects without the humans.”

“You want to see lonely?” he said. He walked her into the back: a gray, dimly lit storage facility, in the middle of which stood a forklift surrounded by towers of boxes. The place was remarkably vacant of warmth and life, and a soft roar of wind and emptiness seemed to hum at its center.

She admired his comfort here, his sense of dominion. “I don't mind it. It's quiet. It's like going to the park. It's an escape.”

Later that week they strolled through the arboretum, where the trees had begun to turn and where they lingered beside a glassy, shallow stretch of the Huron River, the pink, unmarked evening sky laid out over its mirror. Two hippie kids in loose clothing sat on a log, holding each other, kissing, giggling. A muddy-colored dog with a red handkerchief knotted around its neck leapt into the river and began drinking. When Kate took Charles's hand and pulled herself close to him, he was trembling. And somehow, just after Kate kissed his cheek lightly, she caught it, too; a rush of fear shook her. She was breathing shallowly when Charles bent down and kissed her on the lips. “I hope that was all right,” he said.