by Alison Lurie
“What awful, awful traffic!” Susy said. They had got to a break in the Santa Monica cliffs where the canyon opens out onto the beach. On both roads, cars stood jammed together in the hot sun. The sidewalks were crowded with muscular people in bathing suits and sunglasses and beach robes, most of them burned to the color of furniture. They crossed the highway in front of the stopped cars, carrying canvas umbrellas, surfboards, portable radios, towels, and bottles of Coke, under a banner of red and green spangled letters two feet high: MERRY CHRISTMAS. The lunch counter on the corner repeated this theme: two nearly naked boys stood eating popsicles behind a window painted with white, metallic snow and ice. In the window of the bar next door the snow was solid Styrofoam, strong enough to support a cardboard sleigh and plastic reindeer. The glittering sun made Katherine’s sinuses hurt, and she squinted her eyes.
“Want to go to the beach, Mommy,” Mark said.
“Some other day, honey. Today we’re going to the zoo, and see all the animals.”
“Honestly,” Susy added, as the lights changed and then changed back without their having moved more than a few feet. “You’d think everybody in L.A. was trying to get to the beach today.” She started forward as the lights changed, then put on the brakes sharply and blew the horn at a bunch of high-school kids who had begun to cross in front of her. Honk! One of the boys turned and made a face at her over the hood, putting his thumbs in his ears, waggling his fingers vulgarly, and sticking out his tongue. In the rear-view mirror, Katherine was surprised to see Viola imitating him, white gloves and all.
“The way some people bring up their children,” Susy said, glancing round as if with some sixth sense; but Viola had returned her hands to her lap.
“When are we going to get to the zoo, Mommy?”
“We’re nearly there, love.”
Again on their right the cliffs rose up sheer, a high wall of pale dried mud, eaten by the wind into uneven patterns like giant ants’ nests. Presently Susy pulled off the highway and stopped in front of an iron gate which was wedged into a break in the cliff. She got out of the car, rang a bell, and spoke into a box. A buzzer sounded, the gate opened, and they drove in. As soon as the tail of the station wagon was through, the gate swung shut behind them with a loud iron clang.
“They’re locking us in, Mommy,” Viola exclaimed. “They’re locking us into the zoo!”
“It’s all right, lovey. They’re not locking us in. They’re just shutting the gate again, in case some bad men wanted to get in and steal something.”
They started uphill on a narrow road crowded by dark trees, crowded in turn by the steep sides of the canyon. High above, shreds of bright blue sky appeared and disappeared. From somewhere not too far off came the sound of a machine or carnivorous animal roaring and grinding its teeth.
“What’s that, Mommy?” Mark asked. “What’s that noise?”
“I think I want to go home, Mommy,” Viola announced.
Round a last bend the gully opened out into a shallow landscaped basin: a circular sweep of drive, massed trees and flowers, and a long stone villa. “Here we are, kids!” Susy said.
At first sight the effect was European—Sussex or the Île-de-France; but the trees were too tall and of strange shapes, Katherine thought; the flowers were too large, and the hills behind the house were much too near: they looked dry and flat, like the canvas backdrop of a stage.
Susy parked the car, and they got out next to an orchard: rows of pruned trees, the ground beneath them littered with huge, heavy yellow oranges—Why no, they must be grapefruit; hundreds of grapefruit lay here, ripe and over-ripe, rotting in conspicuous waste.
They walked towards the house. About two hundred flower bushes were growing beside the drive, and both the bushes and the earth beneath were covered with burning scarlet and crimson blossoms. “Camellias—those are all camellias!” Katherine exclaimed; the camellias she knew always came in groups of one or two from florists’ shops.
“Golly, yeah. And look over there on the lawn,” Susy said. “Peacocks. See the peacocks, Markie, the pretty birds ... No, honey, we’ll go over that way later. Come on, now.”
Katherine walked up the drive behind Susy, Mark, and Viola, outlandish figures in their identical tight pants and rubber sandals and butter-colored hair. The flowers seemed to grow larger, their odor thicker, as they approached the house, and she thought with pity of the paintings locked up inside, shut away here at the world’s end among monstrous flora and fauna.
Of course these Los Angeles clothes did not mean what they appeared to mean. At first she had thought Susy’s style of dress a personal aberration, a freak. But when she went to visit her, she saw that most of Susy’s neighbors at Vista Gardens dressed the same way. She began to realize that all the tarts and starlets (in her mind interchangeable terms) whom she had seen in the streets and supermarkets of Mar Vista might be only housewives.
“Golly, will you look at those flowers!” Susy said. “They have so many they’re even throwing some of them away.”
“Where?”
“Right over there.” She pointed to a freshly dug plot at the side of the house. A trash can stood by it, stuffed indiscriminately with roots, branches, leaves, and flowers: pink, scarlet, white.
“Oh, lord,” Katherine sighed. “The waste of it! That’s what’s so terrible. And all those grapefruit, just spoiling down there.”
“Well, I guess Mr. Putty can afford it,” Susy said. “I guess he’s practically the richest man in America.”
“The waste of it!” Katherine repeated. “Those flowers are just going to die.” She began rummaging in the trash can. “I’m going to take them home.”
“Do you think you ought? Maybe they wouldn’t like it,” Susy said, looking around for “they.”
“I don’t care. It isn’t right.” Katherine stood up, her arms full of exotic plants. “I’m going to put them into the car.”
She ran down the drive, trailing roots and leaves, shut the strange flowers safely into the station wagon, and walked back.
“Let’s go see the pictures,” she said. Her sinuses ached more and more. She held her breath, as it were, until they entered the museum; then she looked only at the floor. She shut her eyes to the view through the windows of the hall, waiting for the sane views, miraculously preserved for hundreds of years and greedily transplanted here, that awaited her inside. When they were admitted to the principal gallery she hurried into the room, turned her back to the Skinners, and raised her eyes.
Her first impression was one of behinds. Rose-pink behinds by Boucher; white behinds by Ingres; misty Impressionist behinds and full, fleshy Rubens behinds. Nearly all the paintings in the room were of nudes. They lay spread out on sofas—they lolled half-erect, embracing people or urns; they cast their eyes down provocatively, or looked boldly over their rounded shoulders out of thick, sticky gold frames. At intervals along the walls below them stood antique sofas with the legs of beasts, covered in rose and gold brocades, as if awaiting the convenience of this crowd of whores. Even the few landscapes and still-lifes seemed to ooze a vulgar sensuality: the baskets of ripe, dewy fruit and the sunlit hills repeated the same forms.
Katherine stood in the center of the room and clenched her hands. Meanwhile Susy circumambulated the gallery as if she were in any museum, standing for an equal interval in front of each canvas, seeing nothing, making polite comments, watching the children as they ran about.
“I want to go now. I want to see the animals,” Mark said.
“What’s that lady doing, Mommy?” Viola asked loudly. “Why is she holding that big bird in her lap?” She pointed at a large, darkly varnished Baroque canvas. Varnish-colored female arms and legs were confused with brown clouds and the wings, neck, head, and beak of a whitish bird.
“Well, I don’t know, darling,” Susy replied. “I guess she’s petting him.” She cast Katherine a look of adult conspiracy and suppressed laughter; Katherine did not cast it back.
“I
want to go. I want to see the animals!”
“All right, Markie. I’ll take them outside and let them run around for a while, Katherine. Don’t hurry.”
Katherine walked down the gallery. It occurred to her what a very typical Los Angeles phenomenon it was, one which could be described in letters to acquaintances back East. They would hardly believe her, though; they would think that she was exaggerating. Also, just now there was no acquaintance to whom Katherine owed a letter; they all owed her letters. When she and Paul had been in Europe two summers ago they had got lots of mail, but not now, even in the same country with the same postal system.
“Quite a collection, isn’t it?” a voice said immediately behind Katherine. She jumped. No one was there except the museum guard, the usual gray man in a gray uniform. He was looking at her, so he must have spoken.
“Oh, yes,” she replied.
“You should see the upstairs, too.” The guard swayed towards her like a pendulum, from the feet. “Take a look at the bedrooms; see the Amours of the Gods tapestry.”
“Oh yes, well, some other time,” Katherine said. She began walking away backwards, smiling nervously, and did not stop until she had left the building.
Susy was watching the children in the courtyard. They returned to the car and drove on up the canyon to where the animals were kept. Here a more respectable aspect of Mr. Putty was displayed, insofar as it is respectable to keep wild animals in one’s back yard. The bear, the deer, the Rocky Mountain goats, the bobcat; all were housed in large outdoor pens; they did not appear especially unhealthy or ill cared-for, but they seemed discouraged and bored. They stood under the eucalyptus trees or lay about on the ground with the air of creatures who have been forcibly torn from their natural habitat, and wish and hope only to return to it. They did not have the hysterical stared-at gaze of animals in public zoos, but they looked at Katherine, she felt, as if they blamed her, along with all humans, for their being there—not realizing that she was their fellow.
“That’s everything,” Susy said. “Except the buffaloes. Do you want to see the buffaloes before we go?” Viola and Mark shouted that they did. “All right. But it’s a long walk. Let’s go in the car.”
She turned up a dirt road marked TO THE BUFFALO. “It won’t take long,” she told Katherine. “There’s not much to see, they keep them in a big field and last time they were way over at the other side of it.”
The eucalyptus ended; they were now in an orchard of young citrus trees, five to six feet high, set out in rows. The road grew dustier and more irregular, and then came to a dead end in front of a high cyclone fence. “Caution,” read a metal sign. “Do Not Feed or Annoy the Buffalo.”
As Susy had said, there was nothing much to see: a few large dark-brown shapes could be made out, motionless in the dry grass, about a hundred feet farther up the hill. Mark was disappointed, and banged on the fence, while Viola shouted: “Buffaloes! Nice buffaloes! Come here!”
The sun was falling, and it seemed pointless to stay. They all got back into the car. Susy started the engine and began to back down the narrow road, scraping the fenders against first one and then the other of its banks.
“Ouch! I’ll scratch the car all up this way; Fred’ll kill me.”
She drove forward again to the fence. “I’m going to turn round here in the orchard. Hold tight.” Susy pulled the wheel to the left. The station wagon leaped up off the road on to the soft dirt. “There. Now.” She put it into reverse, and stepped on the gas.
The engine roared, but nothing else happened; the station wagon remained stationary. “Oh, golly,” Susy said. She pumped the gas harder, and manipulated the wheel.
“Oh, golly,” she repeated finally, and got out to look.
“What’s the matter, Mommy?”
“Stay in the car, children.” Viola and Mark did not obey her.
“Are we stuck, Mommy? Mommy, are we stuck?”
“No, darling. Get back in the car.”
They did not, so Katherine got out too. She walked back and joined the Skinners in the contemplation of a rear wheel half-buried in loose, sandy earth.
“Stand back, kids. Mommy’s going to start the car now. Stay with Mrs. Cattleman. Maybe it’ll go now, without all of you in it.”
Susy got back behind the wheel and started the engine. Nothing happened, except that the rear wheels spun violently.
“I want to go home,” Mark cried.
“Why don’t you try to rock it out?” Katherine called from where she stood with the children. “Put it into forward, and then right back into reverse.” Susy nodded. “And give it plenty of gas.”
“Okay.” With a shudder, the car leapt forward, but only a couple of feet, and stopped with a crunch, its nose buried in one of the young orange trees, which now stuck out ahead of the hood at an angle.
“We hit the tree,” Susy said, in a voice that was beginning to show hysteria. “Do you think we killed it?”
“Mommy, let’s go back!”
“It’s only bent,” Katherine said. “It’ll be all right. All you have to do is back up a little.”
“I want to go home, Mommy.”
“I’ll try that. Shush up, children, for heaven’s sake. We are going home, as fast as we can. Stay with Katherine.”
Pulling the shift lever back into reverse, Susy gunned the car: the hood shook, and the engine roared; it also gave out strange pounding and snorting noises. No. That wasn’t coming from the engine; it was something alive—
“Aooh! Aooh!” Mark saw it first, and began to scream; something rushing towards them down the hill, a charging mass of something dark and horrible. It was the buffalo: heads down, feet beating on the ground, like a huge mass of hairy carpet pads charging towards them.
Mark and Viola, screaming, flung themselves into the car; Katherine stood paralyzed. The buffalo rushed towards her and towards the fence—but of course, there was a fence, Katherine remembered with a gasp, seeing it—then they wheeled round without even touching it and stood, pawing the ground.
“You see, it’s all right. They can’t get through the fence!” Katherine shouted, catching her breath. Mark and Viola continued screaming.
“They can’t get out, lovey. Don’t be frightened. There, there, Markie.” Susy gathered a child in each arm. “Lord!” she said to Katherine. “I was terrified, weren’t you? I forgot all about the fence. I honestly thought they were going to attack us. There, there.” She opened the door with which she had shut her children away from the buffalo, and shut Katherine out to be trampled to death. Maternal instinct, Katherine thought.
Behind the cyclone fence, the five buffalo shifted restlessly about, glaring at Katherine. She could see them very well now. They had black, bulging eyes like wet rubber, and satanic horns; their shoulders were hunched and their legs knotted, ending in hooves. In front they were covered with masses of dirty, matted dark brown hair, but their hind-quarters were bare, like those of monstrous poodles. They snorted, and wheeled about, and jostled each other angrily.
“I don’t like those buffaloes, Mommy!” Viola sobbed. “I want to go home right now.”
“All right, darling.” As if she had not tried it before, Susy started the car, shifted into reverse, and stepped on the gas. Awhoor, whoor! Viola, Mark, the engine, and the buffalo roared.
“I can’t get it out.” Susy’s voice trembled. “I just can’t do it!” She burst into sobs, and the children followed her example. “Oh, what’ll we do now?”
“Don’t cry. I’ll walk back to the house and get somebody,” Katherine said. “They must have a truck, or something. You stay there.”
“No, don’t! Please, stop!” Katherine stopped, a few steps from the car. “Don’t do that. They’ll be so angry at us. And then Fred’ll have to find out, and he’ll be furious!”
Her voice rose to a high wail. The buffalo, excited, stamped the ground and butted against the cyclone fence, making a clashing wiry sound. Viola and Mark continued to cry steadily.
“For heaven’s sake,” Katherine said. She looked at the three Skinners as they sat howling hopelessly in their pink station wagon.
“All right,” she called over the noise of them and the buffalo. “You can’t go back, so you’ll have to go forward. At least it’s downhill.”
“But I’ll knock the tree over.”
“You’ll have to knock it over. Unless you want me to go and look for a truck. Just drive straight ahead, and you’ll come out on to the road down there.”
“But—”
“Go on. I’ll hold those other trees out of the way.”
“Okay.”
Susy started the car again, and let out the brake. The station wagon crashed suddenly forward over the tree, on past Katherine, and back on to the road. Katherine ran after it, scrambling over crushed leaves and white, broken wood, the buffalo roaring behind her.
“We made it!” Susy cried happily as she came up. The children had stopped howling, and were talking excitedly.
“We smashed the tree!”
“We’re all right now! We’re all right now!”
“Get in,” Susy said, flinging open the door. “Before they catch us.” She giggled. “Golly, I thought we’d never get out of that.”
They drove downhill away from the house, the Skinners still congratulating themselves. When they arrived at the gate, an electric eye opened it automatically to expel them.