Animal

by Lisa Taddeo

  I smiled, trying to act normal.

  —I was asking if he knew where you were. You know what’s crazy is that I know River. From my yoga class.

  —Small canyon, I said.

  Alice turned toward Eleanor.

  —Hi, she said, I’m Alice.

  —This is my friend Eleanor, I said. I bought my car from her. She was the first person in LA who asked me how I was.

  Was Alice smart enough to know that Eleanor was Vic’s daughter? I hadn’t told her the girl’s name.

  —Nice to meet you, Eleanor. Joan and I were just about to go on a mini road trip.

  I was pregnant and standing before a young woman who wanted to kill me and yet all I could think about was Alice inside River’s doorframe. The way his arm was arched over her head.

  Eleanor seemed on the verge of tears. God, how she looked like her father, especially when her expression was one of pain. Vic was either jovial or in pain, but toward the end it was almost always pain, and then rage. Eleanor was infinitely more attractive than her father, but the night he killed himself he looked better than he ever had.

  When Vic shot himself, all the servers stopped in their places like they were playing a game of freeze tag. His large body slid down the wall. A few droplets of blood got on our table, landing specifically in the folds of the bufala mozzarella that Big Sky and I were sharing. It looked like a bit of berry compote. Every time we ate together, the food was perfect, the drinks were perfect. I had so much to give. His wife had scarves, so what.

  And that night it had been so long since we’d seen each other. I could tell he had missed me. More accurately he had completely forgotten about me and now, seeing me again, he was confused and captivated. I was distant. My dress was not revealing at all. In the past I’d always dressed too seductively. But now I understood what a man like him wanted.

  I took a bite of bufala just before Vic came in, and Big Sky watched me eat it like I was a curiosity. He watched me with his face in his palm, shaking his head.

  —Who are you? he asked in that roping-steer accent.

  It was the same question he’d asked me at the very beginning of us. But this time it had a positive connotation. I didn’t smile. The cheese felt like chilled silk in my mouth. I was the loveliest I had ever looked. That was the moment I felt something good might happen to me.

  And that was the same moment Vic walked in. Oftentimes I would see him in the streets, either the real him, trailing me, or the wraith of him I saw in every man with a combover in a nice suit. For several months I’d been worried he would kill me. My building had a small but well-appointed gym with Woodways and the latest ellipticals. They all faced the giant bay window where you could look out at the glassy buildings shimmering in the sun. My back would be to the door, so I’d find myself turning around all the time. Each time I heard someone enter the room, I’d whip my head around to see if it was Vic.

  Now here he was. The gun appeared like a magician’s trick. The more I think of it, the more certain I am that it was for me. But he couldn’t kill me and stay alive. He could not, in every sense, live without me.

  He said nothing. His eyes were wet, he smelled good and wore a pin-striped suit I’d never seen before. He looked at me in a way I’ll never forget.

  Then he turned the gun to the side of his head, blinked, and pulled the trigger. Pink brain and sharp bits of skull went flying. Big Sky did not jump back. He held his arm in front of me like a gentleman. He tried to cover my eyes, but I wanted to look. I wanted to look at the next man who had come along to ruin my life. I wanted to see him bleed.

  —I don’t think Joan is going anymore, Eleanor said to Alice.

  22

  THE NIGHT MY FATHER LEFT us in the Poconos, my mother slept with her arms folded in an X across her chest, her hands gripping the opposite shoulders. She was protecting herself from everything, it seemed, including the blind-vole need of her only child.

  I was angry with her, but God how I loved her. My need and hate were twins in my nervous belly. I stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched her back and the digital clock that read 11:47 in electric red. It felt like the latest and most terrifying hour. Maybe she knew I was in there. Little by little I inched toward the bed. I can still recall the way I did it. There could be nothing worse in the world than being rejected by her, than her telling me I couldn’t sleep beside her.

  It took perhaps three minutes for me to reach the bed. During that time I concentrated on the ridges of stucco in the ceiling. I gasped when I spotted a spiderweb in one corner. I was shocked my mother had missed it. She didn’t miss anything. She was the most diligent cleaner. The most observant woman in the world.

  I spent another few minutes working up the courage to lift the cover and press one knee on the mattress. Even though I laid my weight down one teaspoon at a time, there was no way to do this perfectly. All of a sudden, she whipped around. I jumped back and nearly wet myself.

  —What are you doing here? she said. I felt like something large and ungainly. My mother had the power to make me feel the opposite of a little girl.

  I said, Mommy, please. I’m certain that I begged. I always begged with her. I felt safe enough to beg. I knew she would always be my mother. It wasn’t like the feeling I’ve had with some men, with ones like Big Sky where I thought any sign of need on my part would send him running in the other direction. But I’ve since realized that such fears stemmed from nights like that one, begging my mother, crying until I was heaving. But she stood her ground. I could not sleep with her that night. She wanted to be alone. And I needed to learn how to sleep by myself. Those were the reasons she gave. I couldn’t argue with the latter, but the former burned a hole in me. When I close my eyes, I can call up the exact pitch of her voice. The way her accent formed the word alone.

  Alunn.

  I was forced to slink back into my room, closest to the stairway. I lay on top of the covers because I still harbored the hope that she would come for me, scoop me into her smooth mother arms and carry me to her bed where we would cuddle and she would kiss my tears away. I would rear my butt back until it was tucked into the curve of her hips and thighs. She would hold me tighter than she ever had before.

  I lay on top of the covers for hours like that. I imagined my grandmother’s rape. I imagined the man ripping her nude pantyhose off. I could hear her scream very clearly in my head.

  By that time I was already obsessed with sex. It would only get worse. But by that evening in the Poconos I was preoccupied with it. Only recently have I been able to trace it back to a fuzzy memory from when I was five or six. I was sleeping in my parents’ bed, as I always did at that age. I had seen a movie about werewolves and was convinced they were going to come for me in my sleep. Every few months my mother tried something. New bedsheets, even a new bed. But nothing could get me into my own room. This one night they tried very hard. They began to prep me at dinner. Over pastina, naturally. My mother made it sound like I would be disappointing her very much if I didn’t at least try. And so I did. I tried for an hour and when I finally fell asleep I dreamed of a plush gray carpet in a room with a mirror, and I was looking in the mirror when suddenly the mirror cracked in half and I saw a stripe of black blood across the carpet. I heard the howl of a wolf. I woke in terror and ran into their room. My mother held me and I fell asleep easily. Hours later I woke again, this time to movement. It was a king-size bed and sometimes I would wake up not knowing where my mother was, and if she was in the bathroom, I would wait restlessly until she returned. This time she was not to my right, but she was on the bed. She was on my father’s side and he was moving on top of her. I turned slowly back to the other side of the bed and saw her bra and underwear and nightgown on the floor. I suppose I lay there until it was over and I fell back asleep, but I can’t remember. I blacked that part out. Though it definitely happened—my parents fucked in bed beside me.

  That night in the Poconos my mother didn’t care if I slept or not. My gr
andmother had been raped and my father had gone home to be with her, perhaps to hunt the rapist in the streets of Orange, New Jersey. Yet there was something else my mother suspected my father of doing that was the reason he didn’t take us with him. Now that I know most of the story, everything makes sense.

  All of that aside, I still don’t understand why my mother wanted to be alone in her bed that night, why my body beside her would be anything but helpful. To this day it’s the same chemical burn in my heart that I cannot cool.

  23

  THE TWO WOMEN SAT QUIETLY at my kitchen table. I asked if anyone wanted an iced tea. I wondered if Alice could tell I was trembling or whether she’d noticed the way the girl was keeping her hands inside the pockets of her pullover. Eleanor, meanwhile, was projecting the same fearful rage that I’d witnessed so many times on her father’s face. He would be angry at me for lying about something, some nascent love affair, but he couldn’t show it. So he had to conceal it through clenched teeth. There was also the fear that I’d see through him, recognize his rage, and leave in disgust.

  Alice said that she would love a glass. At the beach that magnificent day, I’d told her I didn’t think anything could grow inside of me. She touched my belly and said she was sure I was wrong. I said I didn’t want anything to ever grow inside me.

  —I had a miscarriage once, she told me. I didn’t even know I was pregnant. I’d skipped two periods, but I was an idiot. My boyfriend was French. We were fifteen at a hiking camp in the Dolomites. I told him, I think I’m having a miscarriage. He didn’t know what to do. So he fell asleep. He didn’t sleep on a sleeping bag, or with a cover, and in the morning when it was over and I’d returned from washing myself in a creek, he told me he’d slept uncomfortably all night. That was his gift to me. His night of discomfort.

  —Something came out of you?

  —You don’t have to look at it. I remember how badly I wanted my mother. Do you miss yours?

  —No, I lied. I only wish my aunt were still around.

  —Your aunt raised you? How did your parents die, Joan?

  —Gosia, yes, she raised me. Or she let me raise myself.

  —Tell me about her, Alice said. And happily I described Gosia to her, her smells and clothes and furs. Her large black Mercedes and how, every time she spoke to me from her car phone, I would hear the seatbelt chime and I would say, Gosia, put on your seatbelt, and she would say in her heavy accent, Shut up! Tell me, how you are feeling?

  I explained to Alice how it had been calming that Gosia wasn’t my mother, that I didn’t have to care for her in that way. That I didn’t have to know everything about her. There was no backstory through which I had to sift. Her own history only served as a lesson for me. She mined it when she had to give me advice.

  I thought of Gosia then in my kitchen, what she would tell me to do. What mental strategy she would instruct me to employ. She always thought that anyone who hurt me should be punished severely. She wanted me to destroy Vic’s life, tell his wife. I told her that he had children and Gosia said, I don’t care about this man’s children. You are child. Look what he is doing to you.

  I’d seen pictures of Eleanor. I never wanted another child to hurt the way that I had. The truth is that even then, in my kitchen, I felt sorry for her. I didn’t feel fear. The only fear I felt was that I would lose Alice. Already I had the premonition that Eleanor’s presence would push Alice away.

  Eleanor was what my mother would have called a poor soul. She’d suffered so much. I couldn’t decide which parent had been crueler to her. I thought of her little brother in the tub. The last moments of a child’s life. I pictured him looking at his mother, the only thing in the world he knew to trust, looking at her wild eyes as she made that decision. It was easier for Eleanor to blame me than to blame her parents.

  I took the glass pitcher from the refrigerator. The fragrant mint leaves floated at the top. I selected three wineglasses by the stem and handled all of them with the skills I’d learned as a waitress at an all-glass restaurant on the marina in Jersey City. That terrible winter I slept with two clients, one of whom—the married one, though I didn’t know that at the time—asked if he could fuck me in the ass the very first night he came to my apartment. We had been fucking for barely five minutes when he asked. The next night he came into the restaurant, this time with his wife. I lifted the rubber bar mat and poured the evening’s spillovers into his Long Island iced tea. Then I stirred it with a knife that had just deboned a raw chicken.

  Now I set the glasses on the table and filled Alice’s cup first. As I did so, I saw out of the corner of my eye a blur of activity in Eleanor’s lap. I thought she was going to shoot Alice. I thought of the time her father had me on all fours, going in and out of me, his hands lightly gripping my waist. Not making any noises because he was too happy, too scared it would all end if he made an unpalatable move. I thought of his warm breath in my ear and the glee in his eyes. I thought of what he had done to his daughter and his wife.

  —Eleanor, I said. I said it so calmly and sweetly that it shocked her, that she let the gun drop in her lap.

  Alice realized what had been about to happen, what might, in fact, still happen. She screamed and then she began to cry. I had never seen someone look so beautiful while they cried. But it made her seem immature. It was such a stupid thing. To be afraid of a little girl with a gun that she didn’t know how to use.

  Then Alice pitched forward and projectile-vomited onto the girl’s face. The stink was immediate and terrible. Eleanor stood and screamed and the gun dropped to the floor. The vomit—the color and texture of oatmeal—was in the girl’s eyes, coating her eyelashes; it covered her entire nose and mouth, and as she was screaming, the vomit was seeping into her mouth. She tried to wipe the vomit from her eyes and crouched down, blindly grabbing for the gun on the floor. I picked it up like it was nothing and walked into the kitchen. I placed the gun behind the toaster and ran warm water and soaked a rag and came back and knelt beside the girl.

  I noticed then a gold locket around her neck. I didn’t have to open it to know it contained a picture of her little brother, crudely cut into a circle.

  —Oh, Eleanor, I said into her ear. Oh, you poor, poor thing.

  24

  ELEANOR SHOWERED THE VOMIT OFF. When she came out of the bathroom, she looked like the age that I was when I died. The gun hadn’t been loaded after all. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it inside my potbellied stove. I laid it across the crystals. When it became clear the girl was no longer a threat, Alice, in shock, went home. It hurt me that she did but I acted like it didn’t.

  That night the girl and I spoke until the early morning. The guilt I felt was enormous. I did what I had to do. I told her the grand calamity of my childhood. As with her father before her, it bound her to me in a way that erased any hostility. There was no way to hear my story and still hate me. And like her father before her, she was going to keep me company. Alice, I knew, might abandon me at any point, but this girl would never.

  Over the next few weeks she stayed with me. She never left. It happened slowly. Every day I hoped it would end. She slept downstairs on the couch. My parents hadn’t allowed sleepovers. They didn’t think there was any reason for them. For someone to come into our home and in the morning go into our refrigerator for orange juice. They thought it was unseemly. I began to feel the same way and the feeling only deepened over the years.

  Eleanor and I talked every night, late into the night. Sometimes I liked it but mostly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It went on like that for so long that I lost track. Alice called or wrote every few days and I told her the girl was still here. I could tell that she was appalled.

  Thankfully I had a job. I could drop her off in Santa Monica or Zuma Beach and leave her there for the day. But the moment I clocked out, she expected me to collect her. I was in an emotional jail.

  Still, I owed it to this child not to turn her away. Turning her away would have been the
same thing the world had done to me. I needed to be her Gosia. But I couldn’t face the notion that I might have to care for her indefinitely. I knew I would sooner kill her. Because sometimes it’s better to kill someone than to leave them.

  One day, behind her back, I called in sick to work. Eleanor, as though she knew, told me she didn’t want to go anywhere. She was too depressed and wanted to stay in the house. I was terrified that she would hitchhike to the café and find that I wasn’t there. But I had to take the risk because I felt I would otherwise lose Alice. I hated Alice for not wanting to be near the girl. That she thought of me differently now, as one half of a strange couple.

  Two hours later I was in Alice’s car, the air-conditioning blasting wetly. We drove down Abbot Kinney looking for parking. She was taking me to a yoga class that she said would make everything better. Her hair was pulled up into a high, dark bun. She wore no makeup and I wanted to kill her. But first I wanted to put her in a cage, fatten her up, feed her hormones and pig cheeks and Fanta. Knock her teeth out and shave her eyebrows. I wanted her to die ugly.

  She told me she’d missed me, but she didn’t apologize or explain why she hadn’t been in touch.

  Every so often she would look at me, at my belly, and say, I cannot believe you’re fucking pregnant.

  I was terrified that she would leave me. She asked me to tell her everything that had been going on and I explained how I couldn’t do anything just yet, how I had to let her stay. I didn’t say how much I’d begun to feel for the girl, how she was a mirror of me. I couldn’t yet tell Alice about what had happened in my tenth year. She might, at this too early stage, leave me for good.

  Abbot Kinney made me feel old. The girls on the sidewalk in their cowboy hats and the boys in their baseball caps and the skateboards and the surfboards on top of Volkswagens. If you were poor in Venice, you had to be beautiful, and if you were old, you had to be rich.