You’re here, he said, smiling, though I knew his pleasure would be short-lived.
It’s not as easy as you think, I said. You herald the natural world, then dismiss the power of biology over our bodies and minds.
Lauren, he said, you’re a smart girl. You can control your biological urge.
I don’t want to, I said.
Take a step back, he said, smiling. You can live without this.
What are you going to do, Malachi? I said. Die forty years from now with a smug grin and the satisfaction of knowing you convinced twenty people not to breed?
Your carbon footprint will be hard to live with, he said. Trust me.
His once appealing certitude was ugly, a barrier to my happiness. Malachi cleared his throat and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
I pictured the mother whale, exhausted from labor, pushing her calf up to the skin of the water. The miracle of breath in the face of predation, life in the wake of whaling ships.
I know what I want to do, I said. I looked down and saw the hope within my body as I began to explain, my raw and stupid hope.
Another Story She Won’t Believe
We are the bad mothers, the moose and I—me for drinking, the moose for abandoning her yearling to attend her newborn.
I’m reading about moose in a coffee-table book someone gave me last Christmas. I ogle the pictures of moose racks, felt peeling off the antlers like downy rags. Beware the behavior of yearling moose freshly abandoned by their mothers, the book warns.
The storm of the decade rages outside. Four inches of snow top the previous night’s frozen rain. It’s too much for skinny pines and sandy soil. The trees bend and snap and fall down across the roads, ice needles shattering like glass. I suppose the barometric pressure will put women in labor across the South, jump-start a run on milk, bottled water, chicken pot pies.
My television flickers. I have it on because I’m lonely and like noise. I’ve forgotten what I’m watching. A tampon commercial comes on. Girls in high heels. Girls on Vespas. Menstruation is fun, the commercial seems to say. I haven’t menstruated in seven years.
The power goes out. 4:43 is a long minute; I watch it on a battery-powered clock bought when I could still afford frivolity. 443 began my first phone number, a number I memorized with pride, a number that belonged to a brick ranch in a new neighborhood that abutted an old farm. A number I wish I could call now and hear my mother on the other end. I can still feel the fat of my lip tucking beneath my adolescent buck teeth when I mouth the number four.
I call my daughter, Leslie. She doesn’t answer. I guess I called knowing she wouldn’t.
Leslie believes the world will end in one year. She lives with a man with no education who wears work boots and stiff canvas pants. They live in his parents’ basement and watch informational videos about the apocalypse online. His mother bakes herself in a tanning bed in her garage, right next to her husband’s rusted-out Chevrolet. She’s the color of red clay.
I tell the girls at work that Leslie’s boyfriend, Zach, is like the stud pony they use to get the mares going at the reproduction barns—all prance, five hands short his filly.
Leslie’s like a yearling moose, all legs, ungulate eyes with too much hope in them. Beautiful, well bred, wasting away. Hard to find.
I’m leaving school, she told me this fall. There’s no point. What else have you given up on? I’d asked. Do you still brush your teeth?
The phone rings. I don’t answer. Suddenly I’m not in the mood to talk to Leslie anymore. I don’t know what to say. The machine picks up.
Suzanne? a voice says. This is the Lemur Center calling. You’re a volunteer with us?
I pick up. The answering machine screams like a banshee.
You live within walking distance of the center, correct? she says. I need you there now. Our power is out and it’s too cold for the lemurs. The aye-aye, too.
I’m in my pajamas, I say.
The anxiety in her voice worries me. She’s going to involve me in a desperate act. I can feel it.
This is a life-or-death situation, she says. With the ice and trees on the road it will be hours before we can get there.
I’m sorry, I say.
Call me when you get there, she says. I’ll walk you through what to do.
I pull jeans over my pajamas and a hat over my uncombed hair. Over that, an old Burberry trench given to me by my ex-husband when I was in what I call my Gene Tierney stage—good cheekbones, groomed eyebrows. I grab sheets and towels from my linen closet and wrap an afghan around my neck like a scarf. The truth is, I have nothing better to do.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays I run the Feed an Aye-Aye a Raisin program at the Lemur Center. Every recovering alcoholic knows it’s best to live within walking distance of work; it’s easier to assume one morning I’ll be too tanked to drive. My sobriety is fragile. I’ve been sober going on forty-six days, but it’s not the first time, or the longest. Sobriety, like parenting, is something I’m good at screwing up.
I’d found the Lemur Center position listed in the paper after moving to Virginia to be closer to Leslie. Calling All Animal Lovers, it said. Work with endangered lemurs, aye-ayes, and bush babies.
Who doesn’t love animals? I’d thought. Animals I could do. And I figured that when you worked with animals, especially endangered ones, the focus was on them, not you.
I’ve come to find that the people at the Lemur Center are good people. People who donate to food banks, adopt incontinent Australian shepherds with epilepsy, bake casseroles for sick coworkers. People whose husbands work jobs they love, rewilding toxic meadows for a paycheck that puts them just above the poverty line.
I figure sooner or later they’ll realize I’m not one of them, that I’m not good the way they are. I’m unreliable. I even surprise myself with the shitty things I’m capable of. The only time I took the high road was when I was pregnant with Leslie. I was sober and scared and for the first time I knew I was doing something that mattered.
My doctor had told me that my child was comforted by my voice, could hear everything I said. Your bones are conductors, he’d said. The mother’s voice rises above the carpet of sound in utero. When I sang it was often “Edelweiss,” sometimes “Rainy Night in Georgia,” things my father had sung to me.
My father also taught me to love movies. I loved National Velvet, he Cleopatra. My father said he liked to lose himself in film. He went to the cinema every weekend, alone if he had to, and was always happier afterward. He spoke about the heroines at the dinner table as if they were real, as if he’d like to have supper with them, give them advice, help them find a happy ending—save them from their heartless husbands or neighborhood racketeers. He’d been working on his own script since college; every few years he sent it off to an agent or studio, but nothing ever came of it. I think its failure to sell was his greatest disappointment.
I liked the starlets in old movies—their neatly nipped waists, thick lipstick, and cherry-pie sopranos. I liked the way they looked when they drank, their red nails on the crystal highball. In old movies, America was beautiful, women could still feign naïveté, men worked one job their entire lives, and everyone could carry a tune. Who didn’t want to live in an old movie?
I walk along a worn path to the Lemur Center. The greenway was built in the sixties, and in winter you can see the remains of purple plaster bears—stolen and deposited here by vandals who’d raided a closed Yogi’s Fried Chicken in the late seventies.
The icy snow has muted everything except the birds and my footsteps. The pines are crystallized. Tufts of snow blow from the trees into the sheets I’m carrying for the lemurs. I ball up the sheets as much as I can and hunch over to keep them dry.
Walking in the snow, I feel one part home and one part stranger, an exotic escapee. I’ve read that when separated from native flocks, birds often attempt to join others. There are flocks of red-crowned parrots in Southern California, yellow-chevroned parakeets in San Francisc
o. There are dogs nursing fawns down the road. Hell—I’ve seen polar bears in the Bronx Zoo, soot on their white coats.
I hum a Brook Benton tune. My song is my own off-key timbre in the woods, my call.
It occurs to me that sometimes we make homes where we do not belong.
I probably lost Leslie when she was thirteen. It was the year I embraced my alcoholism. My ex-husband, Ryan—Leslie’s father—had moved us to Winston-Salem for a job. I wanted to improve my tennis game, so I spent afternoons at the club. I began interviewing nannies; I wanted someone to be there for Leslie when she got home from school. I also started an outpatient rehab program and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Or I almost started.
Rehab was a condition for keeping my marriage together. You go, Ryan said, and I’ll stay.
He was optimistic. I was scared. Ryan was beautiful then. Think Paul Newman in The Young Philadelphians.
That first day I was nervous and I sat in my parked car, engine running, outside the Presbyterian church where the AA meetings were held. I was used to drinking when I was nervous, and part of me had already made a mental U-turn for the nearest bar. But I got out, and the first person I saw was a nanny I’d interviewed two days before. She didn’t have her teeth in. Her face was drawn, pallid, sad.
Hi, she said. Call me.
Depressed, I went back to the car, drove home, and drank a quarter of a fifth of gin in the bathroom. I hid the rest behind a stack of toilet paper. I’m not sad like that, I thought. That’s ugly sad.
How was it? Ryan asked that evening. He didn’t say what “it” was; Leslie sat between us at the dinner table. She’d put glitter in her hair and was singing a pop song.
Revealing, I said.
I’d microwaved French-cut green beans and baked chicken marinated in lemon. Leslie ate a roll and didn’t touch what was on her plate. Our television set was on in the living room: Bogie singing with Chinese orphans in The Left Hand of God.
I’m proud of you for going, Ryan said.
Two months more in Winston-Salem and Leslie had found me out. I’d stopped showing up for my tennis lessons at the club. One day she wrote down the tennis pro’s message and slipped it to me underneath the bathroom door.
Beneath his number she wrote: I love you. Please come out.
I saw the tips of her fingers as she pushed the note underneath the door. I wanted to touch them, but I wasn’t good enough for her. I worried something bad would rub off, that she’d adopt my insecurities and quirks as her own.
Mommy will get better, I said. I promise.
I could hear her listening, her face pressed to the door, her breath whistling through the crack. That soft, hot, anxious breath. She wasn’t fitting in at school after the move. Like me, she didn’t make friends easily. I wanted to hold her tightly, but I knew she’d smell the alcohol on my breath.
Mom’s sick, she told her father that night.
I should’ve told him the truth earlier. I could’ve told him how afraid I was of aging, how incompetent I felt as a mother. I could have gone to rehab. But if there’s one thing I’ve got, it’s a remarkable ability to throw up my hands and self-destruct. Ryan left with Leslie.
I don’t call the head of the Lemur Center when I get to the center’s gates. I can jump the fence, and I know the code to the aye-aye building. That’s the only place I want to go right now, a familiar place. The pressure is getting to me. I can’t look at the other lemur houses; some of these things are the last of their kind. They break my heart on an ordinary day—but today, when it feels postapocalyptic outside, when I’m here by myself—I know I’ll see them as they really are, alone. Finished. Hepburn in On Golden Pond.
Maybe I’ll call the center’s director in an hour, find out what she wants me to do. But right now I’m going to a place I know, so that I can stop being nervous and stop wanting a drink. I punch in my code on the keypad and enter the aye-aye house.
Faye Done Away is the resident Lemur Center aye-aye. Even though I’ve been working with her for a year, we have yet to reach an understanding. She still shirks from my hand when I clean her cage. Four years ago she was found in the back of a pet store after being imported illegally from Madagascar, and the center took her in. She’s the size of a raccoon, with blunt features, rounded ears, and a salt-and-pepper coat.
To me, she looks like the love child of a stray cat and an opossum. Her ears are huge. Her head is mostly bald. Her eyes are yellow and piercing. Her tail is a wild pipe cleaner, her fingers nimble and creepy.
As head volunteer of the Feed an Aye-Aye a Raisin program, I show up twice a week to manage a bucket of mealworms and raisins and a line of squirming kids.
Just push it into her mouth, I say, handing them a sickle-shaped worm.
I shudder every time Faye reaches for a grub with her extended middle digit, slender with a plump pad at the tip. She moves in slow motion, leaning forward on her perch toward the food, blinking as parents fire off rapid shots with their cameras. She trembles when excited kids push a worm at her too fast.
Thanks for visiting, I usually say, quickly ushering the gawkers from the aye-aye enclosure.
The older I get, the more I feel like Agnes Moorehead, a typecast grouch. All the good theater work she did overshadowed by Bewitched. I’d be pissed, too. But I try to be positive. I try to do the right thing, outpace my past. And I always hope something good is going to rub off on me at the center.
Faye is nocturnal. In order to reverse her sleep-wake cycle and keep her awake for the kids, the center illuminates the space at night. With the power down, the sun is streaming in. I don’t see her on the branch, so I figure she is asleep on her nest. The room is cold, so I take one of the pillowcases I’ve brought with me and drape it over her. She doesn’t move—Faye’s a deep sleeper.
I sit in the corner of Faye’s straw-lined room. There’s a large Plexiglas window where kids can watch Faye from the hallway and a long, two-pronged branch that hangs from ceiling chains. The room smells like a compost bin, like damp earth and fermenting fruit. I can’t see trees or the snowy lawn outside.
I cover myself with a sheet and fall asleep. I don’t know what time it is when I wake up. The sun has disappeared behind clouds and Faye’s room is cold and dark. I dig out my phone and try Leslie again.
Mom, she says.
I knew I wanted to call, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. What are you doing? I ask.
Watching television with Zach, she says. Why are you calling so much?
I picture them in bed together, blank-eyed television zombies.
Look, I say. I think you should come home. Live with me for a while. Go back to school.
I need to go, she says. And I’m not going back to school.
Why? I ask.
Why what? she says. Why anything? It’s not worth my time. We have less than a year. . . .
That’s a terrible way to live, I say. Thinking the world will end. You would know, she says.
The line goes dead.
I have a bag of roasted almonds in my coat pocket and I eat them slowly, one by one. Faye has not made a sound since my arrival, so I stand up, brush the hay from my pants, and go over to check on her. I place one hand on her back to feel her body rise and fall with her breath. She’s alive.
At the center, they tell us not to handle the animals more than we have to; it stresses them out. But today, I think, is something different, and all rules are off. No one is watching.
I carefully slide one hand underneath Faye’s body and lift her, gingerly, as if I am lifting someone else’s newborn. Her coat is rough. Her long tail curls around my arm. I take her to my corner of the room. She opens her large eyes, just for a moment, and squirms. I hope she recognizes me. I hope I’m able to comfort her.
I put my back against the wall and slide down, carefully, until I’m sitting with my legs out. I bring my knees up and press Faye against my chest, drawing my coat over half of her body. I can feel her breathing slow, her body warming.
I used to sit like this in my bathroom and smoke cigarettes. I would catch my eyes in the mirror and think: I smoke like Bette Davis. No one could smoke a cigarette sadder than Bette Davis.
I know I should check on the rest of the lemurs. I should call the head of the center. I should distribute blankets and record pulses and press gums and speak soft words of comfort. But here’s what I also know—my heart isn’t big enough. It never has been. If I look at the rest of them, I will break.
I tell the school kids who visit: In Madagascar, aye-ayes are often destroyed on sight. They’re considered an ill omen, death angels. In the wild they are fearless. When their habitat is ruined, they ransack plantations.
The kids say: Why? Why are they deadly?
It’s said they can pierce your aorta with their middle finger, I reply.
This is a showstopping lie, one that has been told for centuries by superstitious villagers. Faye treats the hoopla with nonchalance; after her feeding, the alleged killer sleeps in a knot in her nest like a house cat.
When I first met Faye, her yellow eyes reminded me of one thing—my dying father’s jaundiced eyes, his liver shot from decades of drinking.
Ryan met my father for the first time the month before we were married. He began to worry about my habits.
You’re predisposed, he said, looking at the mountain of beer cans in my father’s trash can. We have to be careful.
How is it that a drinking woman is sexy when she’s twenty, I said, and an alcoholic in her thirties?
I pretended to have learned something from my father, but I knew I was several miles down our shared road, an ugly biochemical pathway.
Even though I knew I would let Ryan down, I tried. We got married, then pregnant. We were happy, mostly. But I think there is a time in every woman’s life, a time in her thirties when she realizes she is past her prime. I’m not talking about the mind. Fuck the mind. The mind grows so sharp that it becomes the problem, sees the problem, sees it in men’s eyes. I’m talking about the legs, and the breasts, and the smile that used to open doors. I’m talking about the half-drunk swagger that could pluck a man from the bar, any man.
Birds of a Lesser Paradise Page 9