Use Me

  Since my parents’ return, they had contributed handsomely to the ApeWatch fund to preserve the orangutans and their habitat, and had become quite chummy with the slightly mad woman who ran the camp in Borneo. A little political wrangling on the part of my mother swung the decision in the favor of Shackleford. Knowing that she thought zoos were depressing and barbaric, I found it hard to understand why she’d taken on this crusade. My father was likewise perplexed, but as usual he was loath to criticize or even ponder my mother’s intentions. She was above reason.

  “It’s your mother’s decision,” he’d said that morning at breakfast, watching with a kind of sick bemusement as his orange juice sloshed over the rim of the glass he held in his trembling hand.

  “It’s a distraction.” He shrugged.

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “Listen to me, Evelyn, you leave your mother alone,” he said, getting up abruptly from the table. “Do you hear me? You leave her alone.”

  These lightning flashes of anger had become common. They were the weather of our lives. He didn’t lash out at my mother and Dee nearly as much as he snapped at me. He knew I could take it.

  “Your mother has to go to Shackleford,” my very stoned mother said, hanging up the phone in disbelief, her pale blue eyes nearly slits. “Oh my holy, holy, what?” She laughed. “Can you believe it?”

  “Cool,” I said. “We’ll all go. All three, four of us,” I said, and headed upstairs.

  It is an axiom of parenting that one never wakes up a baby. Never.

  But I had no choice. Was I to force my mother out into the cruel, unfriendly, unstoned world with Dee as her navigator? Impossible.

  Thankfully, Annabelle was half awake already, lolling in her crib, sucking her fingers, smelling sweetly of talcum and milk. My little lamb was the poster baby for procreation.

  It wasn’t until I scooped my angel in my arms that she started shrieking.

  “Now, now, little pumpkin, don’t you cry,” I said, embracing her and doing that magical, unique-to-each-child, mother-baby dance, Annabelle’s head bobbling as though she were on a pogo stick, her green eyes squirt guns of tears.

  “Sweet pumpy,” I said. I sniffed her bottom to see if she needed a diaper change. Pumpy? I started to giggle. Shit, I was really baked. God, if Billy were here…I didn’t want to even think about it. I lifted my shirt and nudged her to my breast, but she turned away.

  Then Annabelle started to holler, to really howl. It was so loud, so shocking, I burst out laughing, bad mother that I am, then I got ahold of myself. Remember, babies are as uncomplicated as animals, I told myself. They are ruled by instinct. I ran down the checklist: boob, refused; diaper, clean; hugs and kisses, administered. And still the tyrant sobbed. How could I let this happen, and at a time like this? Then, out of my fog, it occurred to me—the poor lamb was sick. Yes, of course, sick. I salvaged a bottle of red syrup out of my emergency medical kit. A cure-all elixir for babies’ fevers, colds, headaches, teething, runny nose, earaches…I’d discovered it was even good for hangovers. I took out the enclosed dropper, sucked up a good inch of the stuff, pried open my darling’s wee mouth, and pumped it in.

  “Stop screaming, lamby-poo,” I said in the humiliating squeaky-toy singsong genetically programmed into parents because babies respond to the pitch. “Please, peas and carrots, stop all this carrying on, you little monster.”

  Still she cried. Oh, why aren’t babies like tires, something you can submerge in water to determine where the leak is? Then, because some of the medication had dribbled out of her mouth, and because I wanted to be a good mommy, I gave her another dose. Like magic, it shut her up.

  I heap the brightly colored bags of pretzels, chips, Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, and other snack foods ending in ito on the counter along with a six-pack of soda, all the while watching myself in the closed-circuit surveillance camera. My father’s dark blue cardigan is misbuttoned, my high-tops are untied, the collar of my rumpled white oxford is splotched with red baby medicine. I look hunch-shouldered and disreputable, like a shoplifter or a recently paroled substitute teacher. A fever blister, evidence of my toxic nature, is forming on the top of my lip. I run my hand over my short red pixie, the bangs, which I trimmed this morning with a pair of cuticle scissors, are uneven and too short.

  The teenage cashier, his face a buckshot of acne, looks at the junk in awe. “That’ll be twenty-five even,” he says, and as I dig in my pockets for the money my mother gave me—I’m almost thirty and still my mother treats—I say, “I can’t help myself.” He nods sadly, like he understands, and hands me the bags. Our fingers touch for one second, and I want to explain that I have to ensure my good mother wants for nothing, plus my little sister, she’s got the munchies so bad I fear she might start gnawing on her own limbs. I want to tell him this, but instead I grab the bags from him and call out over my shoulder, “Ciao.”

  God, I hate that word.

  In the parking lot I see that my mother is no longer scrunched down in the front seat hiding from the neighbors, but is turned around in the front seat talking to Dee, who is leisurely braiding and unbraiding her hair. She’s nodding. I’m sure they are talking about me, and I pause before opening the door.

  This is why I don’t get high. Paranoia. I always feel like Lassie, a particularly neurotic Lassie, yap-yap-yapping like a maniac, while a malevolent thick-skulled Timmy stares back at me blankly, fighting back laughter.

  What’s that, Lassie? Calm down, girl. Get off the furniture.

  Oh, the baby’s in the well!

  Oh, you think we all want to kill you, how hilarious!

  I yank open the car door, hoping to surprise them, but I need only to hear the words preserve and cowboy hats to know I am safe. My mother is again defending her involvement with the Shackleford Zoo.

  “Unfortunately, people don’t preserve what they don’t understand. People, you know, need to know orangutans don’t just exist in Clint Eastwood movies—they aren’t supposed to ride motorcycles and wear cowboy hats. It’s wrong. Damn it. They belong in the wild. They are wild,” my mother says. When my mother sees the bags in my arms, the anger vanishes from her voice. “Evie, sweetie, tell me you got me a Tab,” she says, reaching for the bags. “Your mother really needs a Tab.”

  “Tab. Mmm, Tab,” Dee says.

  “Unlike human beings, animals kill solely to survive, Dee.” She pops open a soda. “They kill to protect themselves and they kill so they can eat, they take no pleasure in killing, it’s not sport to them the way it is to some humans.” She takes a long sip. “They’re pure.”

  “Wow,” Dee says. “Yeah.”

  I think of my father, who is living on Linzer cookies and painkillers big as Ping-Pong balls. It makes no sense to me.

  “For instance, a lion makes one kill to feed herself and her pride, no more,” my mother says. “One kill. Like Evie here, today at the Wiggly Piggly, or what have you—the Mo-bil.”

  “Is that guy staring at us?” Dee says, and slides down in her seat. “Oh God, we’re dead.”

  I look at Annabelle, slumped in her car seat, her eyelids beginning to flutter. Earlier, after my father forsook my company for the misty privacy of the greenhouse, I’d opened my shirt, thinking it was safe, and started to nurse Annabelle. I’ve gotten used to the feeling of vertigo that comes over me, but I am still eager to stop. I’m shooting for the six-month mark, which is supposed to ensure no earaches, less of a chance that Annabelle will be morbidly obese, and immunity to a host of childhood ailments. It is twice as long as most of my friends—granted, most of them had to go back to real jobs, whereas I am “freelancing” since quitting the craft museum. I’ve picked up some stylist work. One day I spent six hours slathering plums and bananas with Vaseline for a photo shoot at Ladies’ Home Journal on the Wonder of Fruit, and half a day pouring gallons of chocolate syrup into a bathtub to simulate blood for a fashion shoot in Details where the men modeled white Armani suits and wielded chain saws.


  I am a good mother.

  This morning, while I was nursing, Dad slouched into the kitchen and began rooting through a drawer, a small orchid pot in his hand.

  “Ah, jeez,” he said upon spotting me at the table, and turned his head quickly, his ears reddening, as though the sight of my naked breast would incinerate him, biting his lip as if I’d tricked him into witnessing this spectacle.

  I’d seen this before, this desire to flee the room when I had to nurse Annabelle. At first it seemed old-fashioned, sweet, but now he seemed pissed and it infuriated me.

  “You’ve been swimming in shark-infested waters—on purpose—you’ve tramped through jungles full of boom slangs and pit vipers and black mambos, and you’re going to tell me a little boob freaks you out, Daddy? Come on…”

  “Listen, little girl, I’m your father,” he said. “Don’t you talk to me like that. Don’t you ever, ever forget—”

  “You know what? Forget it, just forget it,” I said. I picked up Annabelle, still suckered to my breast, and brushed past him, stomping up to my room as I’d done a hundred times before after fighting about curfews, drinking, and boys.

  “Fuck you,” I muttered, loud enough for him to hear, but his hearing is shot from all the radiation treatments.

  Given my mother’s orangutan obsession, it makes sense that she would want to do whatever she can to help those apes, I suppose, even if it means preserving them in captivity. Considering the way things are with my father, she’ll probably never ever go back to Borneo, or anywhere else again. So if Mr. Ya Ya and Booster are going to end up behind bars regardless, well, better they be here in Delaware than Ohio.

  What I suppose is most unsettling to me was my mother’s idea that the benefit, in her words, “really show animals being animals.” At $500 a plate, my mother wanted Hunt Night to raise not only capital, but the consciousness of patrons, turning them on to the realities of holding animals captured in the wild. It seemed punishing to me, an impulse bubbling up out of a dark place in my mother I didn’t know existed. Still, I understand it. After all, how surreal it must be for a polar bear to backstroke in a swimming pool, gazing at the tops of buildings, dreaming of arctic skies. How tedious and depressing it must be for a caged snow leopard to meditate daily on the painted scrim of the mysterious and majestic Kilimanjaro hanging behind his cage while dining on boiled chicken and leopard kibble served out of a dog bowl. These wild animals are living life in a diorama. Until Hunt Night. If my mother had been given her way, on Hunt Night the polar bears wouldn’t dine on whole kosher turkeys that had been hidden in the rocks, but instead would fish for salmon and seals; the leopard would have its pick of gourmet gazelles; the anaconda would deep-throat a whole live baby goat; and the African lion, in lieu of chainsawed horse meat, would be loosed to stalk and kill real live free-roaming zebras. It would be a real bloodbath. But as my mother had been quick to point out, with a nod to animal-rights activists (“I am one of you,” she’d said), it would be a choreographed bloodbath—the proposed animals for sacrifice weren’t endangered, and many were older, or diseased. The benefit would be a kind of manufactured natural-selection process. In the zebras’ case, well, there had been a glut of zebra births in the spring, and as with calico kittens, the zoo couldn’t seem to give them away.

  “We’d be doing them a favor,” my mother said.

  But it was too hard a sell. “Nobody wants reality,” my mother sighed. What they wanted was “The Peacable Kingdom.”

  For a while we sit in the parking lot and just feed, silent but for the violent music of mastication, the crunching of chips and the grinding of teeth.

  “Wow, Annabelle loves Yodels,” Dee says. Her finger, coated with chocolate cake and cream, is stuck in my baby’s mouth. “Oh God, did I smoke Thai stick?” she says in a panic. Then she starts to giggle. “Tie stick.” She giggles.

  “Dee!” I mean to sound outraged—Billy and I swore that no white-sugar poison would touch her baby lips until she was three—but I laugh. Annabelle looks hilarious in her white bunny suit, her chin whiskered with chocolate.

  We are a movable feast. My mother pinches the jar of bean dip between her knees, Fritos spilling at her feet, as she weaves into traffic. I turn up the radio and Dee and I sing along with Cheap Trick, Mommy’s all right, Daddy’s all right, they just seem a little weird, surrender, surrender, but don’t give yourself away, as we bob along the highway, my mother the captain of our craft. God, I love that song. I roll the window down all the way. It’s painfully sunny, and the electric-blue sky is hung with banners of cloud. With my mother at the wheel, the world is an ocean in a teacup.

  My mother lifts her tangled mane of blondish-brown curls off her neck. She has started covering the gray. Her nose is sunburned pink from working in my father’s garden. It hurts him to bend over. She pounds out the rhythm on the steering wheel.

  “Oh, this is better, isn’t it?” my mother shouts out the window. “Much, much better!” She turns to me and smiles hopefully. The whites of her eyes are pink, her lips are shiny with coral gloss, but her mouth is open too far, her teeth too visible. I don’t recognize this mother.

  Annabelle yawns widely, then her head droops to the side and she drifts into a deep sleep. A lovely strand of drool unspools itself from her lips. All I want to do is protect my daughter. She’s quiet now, isn’t she? Peaceful? She’s happy, right? Sometimes, like now, when I look at Annabelle, I love her so much I’m afraid it will swallow me whole.

  In the backseat Annabelle snores. Our car gently careens into the median strip, then bounces merrily back into our lane, as though we’re riding a rubber raft.

  As Ted Nugent launches into the electric-guitar assault of “Cat Scratch Fever,” my mother takes a sharp left into the Shackleford Wild Animal Drive and Conservation Park as if she’d forgotten where it was, or maybe we’re just going too fast. A green-uniformed guard waves us through. All is right with the world. We are privileged, we are lucky. The kind of people who beat the odds. There, spread out before us, is the faux Okovanga Delta and the Wild Kingdom game drive—it’s Botswana by way of Delaware. We barrel up Baboon Alley, our car cloaked in clouds of red dust so I can just barely see the baboons crouching up in the trees.

  “Hold on, I’m coming,” my mother sings under her breath, her face dewy with sweat. Speeding is bad karma, but my mother is under the orangutan spell. We’re supposed to amble up the road, ten miles an hour or less, spotting the game, the scarlet macaws, who pair for life, perched in treetops, the troops of white-faced capuchin monkeys frolicking in the shade, and the baboons who stalk around looking as disgruntled and dazed as spurned lovers, their protruding asses and their exposed pink genitals inviting a backdoor assignation.

  “Hello, boys,” I call, waving to them. A branch thrown from the treetops glances off our windshield, like a baton tossed by an attention-hungry twirler, but our mother doesn’t flinch or even slow down.

  “Shit.” I sit back in my seat.

  “Damn baboons,” my mother says. “Dee, is your window up? They’re like little kids—they love junk,” she says, her eyes trained on the dirt road ahead of us.

  Dee locks her door. All of a sudden my mother hits the brakes and the back of the car fishtails, sending a cascade of chips into the front seat, landing in my hair and sliding down my back. The feeling is awful, like roaches. I scream.

  The reason for the sudden stop is a family of four in a truck parked in the middle of the dirt road. The baboons are crawling over the truck like they’ve taken it hostage. Two rakish monkeys sit in the back, lounging like terrorists, their yellow teeth flashing. Then, spotting us, they leap from the truck and sprint toward our car. Someone, me I suppose, yelps.

  My mother honks politely, toot toot, but the truck doesn’t move. They’ve got a video camera trained on us. I can imagine us ending up on one of those true-horror videos exploiting campers decapitated by grizzlies and deep-sea fisherman zapped into comas by nests of electric eels. We will be the co
mic relief, stoned chicks teased to frustration by monkeys.

  It is my mother who starts making faces at the baboons. She takes off her sunglasses, then scrunches up her nose and bares her teeth. “Come on, girls,” she says, sticking out her tongue at a mother baboon with a baby slung across her back like a handbag. I stick out my tongue and let out a halfhearted nyah nyah nyah. It’s a purely defensive taunt, the kind I am most familiar with.

  “Mother,” Dee says in her low and reproachful lawyer voice.

  “You don’t scare me, you big marvelous bully,” my mother coos at the baboon mugging in her window. She raps at the window. “You know what, I could kiss you. I could just kiss you, yes, that’s right,” she says, pressing her lips to the windshield. “Oh, Dee, you aren’t afraid of a little old baboon, are you?” my mother says, and hits the horn again.

  Dee hiccups.

  The biggest male of the troop mounts our front bumper and bounds onto the hood of the car. The Volvo sinks a few inches on its shocks as he marches up the roof. The rest of the troop follows, and in seconds the car is crawling with baboons. Flashes of silver glint in the sun as they rip pieces of chrome from the chassis, stripping the car like chop-shop bandits. Two older capuchin monkeys with faces like Salvation Army nurses peer into the backseat at Dee and Annabelle.

  “Mom,” Dee shrieks. “Mother!” as if our mom can do anything to stop this.

  “Oh God, they’re going to flip us.” Maybe it’s because I’m high, but I swear I can see the future. “They’re going to flip the car,” I repeat louder. It’s apparent that neither Dee nor my mother knows what I know.

  “They want the baby,” I say, smacking my palms on the window glass to chase them away. “Oh my God, they want Annabelle.”

  “Life is just amazing, isn’t it?” my mother says, resting her chin on the steering wheel, her watery blue eyes staring blankly into the treetops. “Did I tell you girls that your father believes this is the most beautiful spring he’s ever seen? Really. Did I tell you about him saying that even the bark on trees is beautiful to him?”