by Minrose Gwin
After that we were careful to suggest activities less taxing than sewing. “Pressing Needs” we called them—a leader for our Brownie Scout troop, a mother to go on a field trip to the mill, a church lady to make sloppy joes and hot dogs for Sunday night youth worship, the last a particularly hard sell since our mother never went to church. When we’d present her with one of these opportunities, Mama would smile and roll her eyes and murmur something vaguely indecipherable like “Well, so, I’m . . . well, actually.”
So when she took up bird watching, we were all mightily relieved. Dad built her a dozen feeders and nest boxes. June and I got her the binoculars for her birthday, and she wore them like a heavy necklace around the house as she did her chores, pausing every so often to peer at a passing cardinal or thrasher, her eyes bright and watchful. Over the course of the nesting season, her mood rose and fell with the fate of the birds. She still hadn’t recovered from the latest disaster. Her bluebirds in one of the nest boxes in the front yard had had a successful spring and were on their second set of eggs, which she checked every morning. When we heard her crying out and came running, we found her out front swatting a swarm of wasps whose nest had fallen from the ceiling of the box onto the bluebirds’ nest below. The wasps were stinging Mama all over her arms and face; when we yanked at her dress to pull her away, she hit at us as though we were wasps too. The wasps finally left, but, alarmed by the commotion, the birds abandoned the nest and over the course of the summer, the eggs, shockingly blue, became weightless and faded.
THAT SUNDAY MORNING after the fight I pushed the empty cherry bounce bottles aside and made up a pitcher of orange juice from a box of frozen concentrate. After a while Dad stumbled in, rubbing his eyes. He hadn’t shaved and had on yesterday’s shirt. His face had taken on a bluish cast. He got out cheese and bread for cheese toast, then decided it was too much trouble to turn on the oven and just handed us the loaf and the chunk of sharp cheddar and a knife. As we ate, he poured us a spot of his coffee and filled up our cups with scalded milk. He had two cups black with buckets of sugar and a cig. Then he leaned over the table and told us to get dressed, we were going to see the giraffes. He frowned. “Be quiet about it.”
I was the last one out the front door, and I shut it without a sound, not knowing what I was leaving behind, not calling out to our mother to say goodbye.
The minute we saw the two of them, we knew they would dance, had already been at it long before we arrived. It was a mother and baby, or so we thought at the time—a big baby, almost as tall as the mother but with an open, unmarked face, lacking the bumps on the forehead of the mother and overall lighter in shade, with a blond background, instead of her reddish brown, for its dark swatches of color. They came to the fence, swaying, in perfect step. They flicked their long gray tongues, looking in that moment more like giant anteaters going for flies. When they batted their foot-long eyelashes at us, we froze in place, mesmerized. Then, together, they bowed once, then again, and began to dance.
Their dance had two parts. First, they threw their necks back and forth and smacked at each other with the sides of their heads. It was an impact that would have knocked my father off his feet, maybe broken a bone or two. Back and forth, back and forth, they went at it, whacking each other on the sides and shoulders, their necks looping out and in, as if moving to a slow song only they could hear. All muscle and animal rhythm. Except for the impact, a soft woof, they didn’t make a sound. We knew we were seeing something unbearably private, something meant for only the two of them. Watching them dance, I felt as though a bandage had been peeled off my eyes and I could see prettiness everywhere, in everything. The world seemed suddenly large and open, as if I’d stepped through a door into a field of color that stretched out far as the eye could see.
After this long bit of whapping, they walked over to the fence, eyed us, and bowed. Then they stood before us as if waiting for applause, flicking flies with the Fuller Brush tips of their tails. After that, they walked away in perfect step, mother in the lead, the two of them disappearing into the front part of the zoo enclosure.
June turned to me and grabbed my hand. She didn’t say anything and I didn’t either, but we stood together for a bit, swaying a little from side to side. I could hear Dad inhaling his Camel. In the brush behind me a squirrel was fussing. Then my sister grinned and turned suddenly and whapped me on my shoulder with her head. I hollered and rolled my head around and whapped her back. We started running at each other like little bulls, knocking each other down with our heads. We got up and danced around under the oaks, rolling our heads in circles, emitting strange woofing sounds. Then we collapsed on the grass, flailing about.
Our father coughed. “Grace, pull down your shirt.” He mumbled the words, as if he didn’t want June to hear them. I felt my face flush, and I tugged at my blouse.
Usually the giraffes cheered our father up, but now he rubbed his eyes and looked out over our heads toward the twisted branches of the live oaks. He seemed to be searching for something in particular, as if he had had another child when we came and momentarily had lost sight of it. After a while he heaved a sigh and said, “All right, time to head back.”
The idea of going home to our mother and whatever trouble she was bound to cause stuck in my craw. Something ugly rose in my gorge. “Dad, we want to go to the real zoo. We never get to see the animals in the real zoo.”
The minute I uttered the words they felt freighted with ill intent. An unspoken rule of the trip was that we never talked about the zoo itself; it was as if the giraffes were magically in their natural habitat at the end of Annunciation Street on the edge of the Mississippi River in New Orleans, Louisiana, US of A, a strange savannah of time and space, a gift from our father. I knew I was being a brat; I knew I was spoiling something.
Our father stared down at me, his eyes like the fall light, flicking off the surface of things, making them strange. Then he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and looked inside. “Yeah, okay,” he said, and his voice trailed off. “Yeah, okay, let’s get on over to the real zoo.” He flicked his cigarette butt onto the grass.
June glared at me. “Don’t pay any attention to her, Dad, she was just talking.”
“No, I wasn’t,” I said loud and clear. Then I whispered to her, “Do you really want to go back home?”
Of course, she could have said yes, we should get on home to our mother, but she didn’t. Maybe I’m not the only one to blame for what happened.
DAD HAD ALREADY taken off around to the front of the zoo, toward the river, his hands in his pockets, not waiting for us, not looking back. There was an oddness to our father’s walk, more a flutter than a limp on his right side. He’d lost his big toe in the war and it set him off-kilter. At night, when he walked around the house without his shoes, his sock would flap. We ran after him and when we got to the gate, he bought the tickets and handed them to me. “You’ve got two hours,” he said, “until they start closing down the place.”
Neither of us liked the idea of him dumping us there, not coming in with us. June held back, snatched at Dad’s hand. He shook her loose.
“Go on. You want the real zoo. There’s the real zoo.” He flicked his hand at us as if we were flies.
I looked around. Mothers and fathers and grandparents and aunts and uncles were walking in and out of the gates, laughing and cutting up and calling for boys and girls to wait up. “Where are you going? Why aren’t you coming in with us?” I asked.
“I’m going to take a look at Old Man River,” he said. “I’ll see you at five.” Then he walked away from us, heading into the sun.
We stood there for a minute, uncertain what to do. We made a move to follow him down the path, but a slant of the light through the dark scramble of live oaks made him suddenly unrecognizable, a stick figure.
“Well, let’s go on in,” said June, her voice quavering a little. “You wanted to go to the real zoo. What else are we going to do for the next two hours?”
; We walked down a long winding path and passed the flamingo pond. It was littered with tickets and cups and popcorn containers. I saw some popcorn in one. My mouth watered and I reached down to pick up the container.
“That’s unsanitary,” June said. “Come on.”
We turned a corner and dead ahead was a polar bear sitting on an outcropping of concrete in a cage barely big enough to turn around in. He had positioned himself under a weak stream of water. It fell down the right side of his cage, so that it ran over that side of his head and shoulder. Where the water had trickled down on him days, years on end, his coat was mossy green. Green on that one side a clotted brown on the other, he looked like he’d been split in half. Shoulders slumped and belly loose, he stared out through the bars of his cage as though he could see something that was invisible to us, his only motion an occasional blink. He looked like an old man on a park bench. He did not seem to be breathing.
June and I leaned into each other and began to hum under our breath. My chest crackled the way it sometimes did in the fall. My mother would run hot water and I would kneel beside the tub to breathe in the steam; she would sit on the side of the tub and talk softly to me, running the hot water every so often, calming the flutter of my heart.
I had on shorts and was suddenly cold. (Was this the moment it happened? Was this when we lost our mother?) There were baboons in the next cage. As we backed away from the polar bear and moved in their direction, they seemed to grow unaccountably afraid of us. Their throats ballooned out and they began to make a noise that was something between a laugh and a scream. June put her hands over her ears. I wanted to throw my head back and howl and holler up to the sky too. Instead I started to cry for the poor polar bear, snicking the air, gasping for breath.
“Let’s get out of here,” June said, taking my arm. As we walked away, I felt the empty stare of the polar bear at my back, pushing me forward as though I were the remains of everything he’d ever wanted, winnowed down to a trickle.
We went out the front entrance and plopped ourselves on a bench, hoping Dad would come back early. We sat there a good long time, not talking, swatting at some yellow jackets that lit on us and moved their stingers up and down, testing us to see whether we were worth stinging.
Then a man came up. He was carrying a life-sized stuffed polar bear that looked like a lumpy rug. It was in a lying-down pose and had a frayed bow around its neck. The man had it slung over his shoulder.
He started talking at us before he ever got to the bench where we were sitting. “Hey, little ladies, want to get your picture took with Bernie the Bear? Make your mama and daddy proud and happy to see they pretty girls having such a fine time at the zoo.” He was bowlegged and the late afternoon sun cut a swath between his knees. He pointed at the sign over our heads that read “Audubon Park Zoo. Whites Only. Colored Day Tuesday,” and whipped a Polaroid camera out of his back pocket.
June reached for my hand. I shook my head. “No, sir.” I was polite, I didn’t make a fuss. I’d been taught to respect my elders.
“No obligation at all, little lady girls. You’ll make a pretty picture. Just pose for me with Barry here.”
June scooted toward me; our thighs were touching. Then the man came right up to us on the bench, so close we could see the splotched veins in his cheeks and nose, and plopped the big old stinking thing across our laps, as if he were a waiter at a fancy restaurant and it was our napkin.
“Wonderful,” he said, “wonderful. Smile. No, wait.” He grabbed one of June’s hands and put it on top of the bear’s head. Then he grabbed one of mine and put it on the bear’s back, to make it look like I was petting the thing. We both froze under his touch, sitting woodenly with our hands on the animal. I opened my mouth to ask him to take the thing off us, but by that time he had proceeded to take our picture. As he homed in on us with the camera, the bear settled and became warm and heavy against my chest as though it had suddenly become flesh and blood.
The camera pushed out one picture, then he took another. The man studied them, frowned, came closer. “You ain’t smiling,” he said, with a trace of a threat in his voice. “You got to smile, girls. At least look like you having a good time, for Christ sake.” He touched my cheek, pushed up a corner of my mouth. His fingers smelled like fried eggs.
I jerked my face away, and turned to my sister. Her eyes were wide and scared. I whispered, “Just smile. Get this over with.”
So, when our father arrived, there we were, the two of us, grinning from ear to ear, our hands posed over the animal as if we were blessing it. The man had just reached up to push my bangs out of my eyes and, in the next moment, snapped his third picture.
Dad leapt like a wild thing out of a clump of oleander bushes, waving and shouting. “Get your hands off her. What the hell you think you’re doing?” He grabbed the man by the shoulders and pushed.
“Whoa, buddy,” the man hollered out. “Just taking a picture of these pretty little girls for you and the missus. All I was doing was taking a picture, for Christ sake.”
“Get your slimy hands off of them.” Dad swung, hit the man in the nose.
A lone peacock that had wandered up began to shake itself open and scream.
The man’s nose started pumping blood. He stumbled, barely catching himself from falling flat on his back. His hand went up to his face and came away dripping red. He took one look and started hollering and backing up. “Just trying to make a goddamn living, buddy.”
Dad rushed him and swung again, this time hitting the man on the chin and knocking him to the dust. Dad snatched the bear off of us and threw it down on top of the man. “Get out of here, you pervert.”
The man snatched his camera, grabbed the polar bear, and took off running, hollering that our father was mental. Dad pulled us up off the bench and started feeling around on us as if we might have loose parts. Then he knelt down and gathered us in his arms, and we noticed only then that his khakis were soaked up to the crotch. “Oh my God,” he said and his voice trembled. He held us close for a good long time and said it again and again.
We walked back through the brush behind the zoo to the car, Dad between us, his hands on our shoulders. He parted the brush like it was the Red Sea and he was Moses. I looked over my shoulder to see whether the giraffes had come back, but they were long gone.
I asked him why his pants were all wet, and he said it was from the river. His shoes squeaked as he moved through the brambles. I couldn’t see why anybody in his right mind would wade into the Mississippi River, with its deep currents and murky water. The banks of the river were steep. He could have slipped and been swept under. Then where would we be?
We were quiet in the car on the way home. No hillbilly. No chitchat. Just the croak of frogs from the swamp around us. Every now and again our father would clear his throat, as though he were getting ready to say something. But then he would just rub his mouth and sigh and light up another cigarette.
My sister and I sat in the middle of the back seat, our shoulders and hips pressed tight. She looked out of the window on her side and I looked out of mine on the other. I wondered how we would find Mama. We were two hours late getting home, thanks to me. What had she done all this long lonesome day? Had she missed us? There was no premonition, no thought of something having given way, of something having been lost. A sparrow in the nest, a commotion. As we drove along, the sun went down across the swampland, and the marsh grasses began to glow with an unearthly light, as if they’d been sown in gold. Although home was just across the Rigolets, it felt as though we were beginning a long journey.
Dad cleared his throat. “You girls need to learn to watch out for yourself. Especially you, Grace. You need to watch out for yourself and your sister.”
What he said startled me. I didn’t know then what it meant to watch out for myself. I only knew what it meant to watch the giraffes dance, which was to look for what made the heart leap, to see into the blessed motion of things. I wanted to be inside that motion.
I chewed on my nail. June moved away from me and became deeply interested in something outside her window. Neither of us said anything.
Dad coughed. “Do you hear me? You need to watch out, girls. It’s like building a fence around yourself.”
June stirred. “You mean like a cage?”
“So nobody can hurt you. If somebody tries to reach inside . . .” He made a grabbing motion with his right hand.
“To pet you?” June said, eager to please. Even then she was his favorite.
He coughed again, rubbed his forehead. “Yes, like that. Then you run and scream and get away.”
June leaned forward. I wanted to slap her. “Even if he’s nice?”
“Yeah, especially then. Just think of yourself in that safe cage and no stranger can touch you. Like at school, when they make you crawl under the tables, in case of the Bomb.”