by Deb Caletti
I knock out of my thoughts the huge cement campuses and pictures of shiny glass buildings and enormous libraries. Enrollment forms, campus tours--out. I knock out the secret thoughts that still visit, even if I know they're illogical. That I really am about to die. That I've been right all along, only no one's discovered what's wrong yet. Desert. Just the dry desert, sprawling and timeless. Creatures evolving and surviving throughout thousands and thousands of years.
Breathe in and out, and the shakiness subsides, and the sense that I can feel and hear my own heartbeat diminishes. In and out, now is all that matters, and now, this minute, everything is okay.
I decide not to have dinner, and then decide to eat a little. If I don't eat, I will certainly feel more nauseous. So, dinner and then my homework while I watch for the boy. I'm guessing this will be a night-visit day, as it was last week.
"You know, you need to be more aggressive out there, Oliver," Dad says at the table. His head is tilted sideways as he bites his taco. Oliver still has his football shoulders on. "You've got to hustle if you want to stay open."
"Bruce," my mom says.
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"What? I don't see the point in us going out there to practice and play if he's going to hang back and not give it everything he's got," Dad says. He eats his taco in twenty seconds flat, which is the way you've got to do it. Still, he ends up with a plate littered with bits of meat and lettuce.
Milo's under the table, wearing his wishing-and-hoping eyes.
"Maybe football's not his thing," Mom says.
"Football's not my thing," Oliver says.
"I don't think basketball's his thing either. Or soccer," I say.
"I'm not going to have my son be one of those kids who sits in front of the TV or computer all day," Dad says. "You guys really have no idea of the importance of athletics." He holds up a finger. "Social skills." A second finger. "Mental well-being." A third. "Physical health."
I take my Kleenex out of my sweatshirt pocket and blow my nose loudly.
"God," Dad says. "You guys don't have a clue."
"Uh-oh. You said 'God,'" I say.
Dad looks at me like I'm nuts.
"I certainly must need some basketball myself, since right now my mental well-being is suffering," Mom says. Her mouth is cinched upward in a sarcastic smile, but her eyes look hurt at the way he included her in the clueless camp. I feel a pang of sadness for her. Sports Dad can be such an asshole. I pet Milo with my foot. Drop him a bit of meat, though I know I shouldn't. I blow my nose again, meanly wishing the germs toward Dad's perfect, athletic, physically and mentally healthy self.
"Sis, you need the Flask of Healing," Oliver says.
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I help Oliver with the dishes and listen to him explain how Asian means lion in Turkish, and how Lucy spends more time in Narnia than any of the other human characters, four hours longer than Edmund. I hear the shi-shu, shi-shu of Dad sawing something downstairs. Mom leaves for a PTA meeting, leaving dueling puffs of perfume and mint in the air. Milo is turning in circles, waiting for the right view before he plops down.
I do my homework, then lie on my bed with the light out, watching the computer. I think about the day, about Jenna and Michael and Hannah, about Mom and Dad and Oliver and anxiety and palm trees and deserts. It seems right then that my world is very small. Small enough to fit inside a cage, small enough that it's as if it has a lock that I cannot see.
The boy finally comes into view on the screen, that known/unknown figure, wrestling with his own questions. I close my eyes, so it feels like we are just two people in a room, thinking quietly together. The sea boy and the desert girl. We both have decisions to make, it seems.
And so I decide something. I decide that I don't want to live in a cage. I decide my world should be bigger than that. That's when I know that after school tomorrow I am going to the elephant house. I am going to go and see what happens if we meet, because I can handle it. I can take any step I want and be okay.
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CHAPTER FOUR
In captivity, an animal will sometimes create unnecessary problems or challenges for himself to solve. A lion will pretend to "chase" its food by throwing it in the air. A raccoon will search for food in a stream, even if he lacks a stream. He'll drop his food in his water bowl, hunt for it as if it is not right there in front of him. Then he'll pummel it, "kill" it, and finally fish it out . . .
--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior
When I get home from school, I whip my shirt off and change. It's a cold, rainy day, and they'd had the heat turned up too high in the building and I feel sweaty and damp. I'm thinking maybe I should just wait and go to the zoo another day. One, it's raining, and by the time I walk over there my hair will look like shit. Two, I still have my cold, and my eyes are hot and tired and I have to blow my nose every two seconds. Three, I have a lot of homework, which isn't unusual, but still. Four, the shirt I just put on looks bad and is wrinkled, and figuring out what else to wear suddenly seems as monumental as a death in the family.
So, I plunk on my bed and take my shoes off, and this little feeling of self-disgust starts to creep up my insides. I try to ignore it by popping a few of those miniature Halloween chocolate bars that my Mom has bought early. I'd seen them on the counter and wouldn't have had any without asking,
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except I'd noticed that she'd already poked a hole through the bag herself.
I'm opening up my third baby Snickers and the self-disgust is not drowning out as it's supposed to, but getting worse. It makes me more restless, and damn it, I get my shoes back on. Oh, man, I get up and look in my closet again and try to find something that I don't hate myself in, because I guess I'm going to the zoo after all. Me and myself try to talk I into not going, but uh-uh. Black sweater. Armpits smell fresh. No wrinkles. I look pretty good in it. To the bathroom, brush the chocolate out of my teeth reluctantly. It's tough to go from all of that gooey, chewy comfort to the businesslike sharpness of toothpaste. Comb out my long hair. Pull it back? Keep it down.
Ponytail? I look at myself as if I've never seen me before, or else I try to. Black hair, dark eyes, narrow face. I keep my hair down, as I look older that way. He's got a baby. He might have a wife. Wife is a word that means that all of this dress-up is just teenage playacting. I feel the difference between teen and adult, a difference that usually just seems like an annoying technicality. But now it feels real enough that I get this jolt of stupid-and-ashamed at the fact that I'm putting on lip gloss.
Actually, this is stupid, I'm sure. He's got a baby. What does this mean for his life that he has a baby at his age? And what if he's not as young as he looks? What kind of fool would I be then?
What if he asks me to babysit, like the old Brady Bunch episode where Marsha gets a crush on the dentist?
Mom's downstairs, looking for something in the coat closet. She's got that pissy, can't-find-it distraction.
"Where're you going?" she asks.
"Just the zoo. Fresh air."
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"Drive carefully," she says.
"I'm walking. The zoo." It's two blocks away. I don't know if she wasn't really listening, or if she's doing the suburban thing again. Where we used to live, Sering Island (a suburb of Seattle), people drive their cars everywhere they go. If they have to mail a letter a block away, they drive.
In the city, you walk. In the time it takes to find a parking space, you can go on foot, do whatever you're planning to do, and get home.
I'm not sure my mother has ever forgiven my father for the move from Sering Island, and I'm not sure he's ever forgiven her for not forgiving him. We moved to the city when my father got a new job with Eddie Bauer. It's not like Sering Island is far enough from Seattle to make commuting an issue (it's only a twenty-minute drive in good traffic), but my dad had always wanted to live in the city. He had this idea of us broadening our cultural scope (being buddies with people who have henna tattoos), seeing films (instead o
f just going to the movies), eating fine food (not fast food). This was a way to build a healthy intellect along with our healthy bodies. He wanted it so badly that he pushed the issue hard, and so we moved.
My mother had a full-blown passive-aggressive episode about us going--Sering Island has the best schools in the area, and the only serious crime occurred in 1983, when the ex-Mrs.
Drummond brought home a young drifter she'd met in a bar and ended up getting murdered.
Several decades later, people still talked about it. The only other crime news to gossip about was the two hundred dollars that got stolen from Janey Edwards's BMW, and everyone knew her son Zenith did it anyway. Sering Island was safe. Besides that, Mom had channeled the energy and organizational skills from her left-behind business
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degree and had become PTA vice president at my middle school. A move meant she'd have to build up her reputation from the bottom, the CEO going back to the mailroom, as she put it.
She'd have to attend every poster-making meeting and chaperone every field trip, even the inevitable one to the Puyallup Fair, which she hated. Her friends at school didn't like going in to the city. Besides that, she'd have to find a new post office and craft store. Figure out which grocery store had the best produce. Leave the comfort and reassurance of the suburbs.
Funny thing is, three years after our move, Mom is busier with school projects than ever, and Dad only comes out of the basement for his own or Oliver's sporting events. I don't think he really likes the city. We went to one foreign film, got there late, and had to sit in the back. Dad forgot his glasses, so he couldn't read the subtitles. We went to one Ethiopian restaurant, and Dad seemed vaguely uncomfortable eating with his hands, using up more napkins than the rest of us combined. The food was actually good, even the pile of brown stuff that looked like what Milo used to leave on the carpet when he was a puppy. I think city life just turned out not to be Dad's thing after all, but now he can't admit he was wrong about moving, and Mom can't admit she was wrong about moving either.
"Take the car," Mom says to the inside of the closet. "It's raining. You don't want to catch pneumonia."
Milo trots to the door, gives me a pleading look. "I'm sorry," I say. Milo's the kind of dog you are always apologizing to. I close the front door behind me, ignore Mom about the car. We live in a brick townhouse built in the 1920s, one of ten joined together in an open oval, which surrounds a center rose garden and fountain. It's smaller than my old house--less 55
modern, but more charming, with its intricate molding around the ceilings and windows, and its elaborate fireplace and stairwell. Everyone knows one another. There are the Chens next door, with little Natalie and the new baby, Sarah; old Mrs. Simpson, with her bird feeders and favorite Energizer Bunny sweatshirt her kids gave her for her eightieth birthday; and Ken Nicholsen, with the perfect house, inside and out. Hank and Sally Berger, who treat their parrot like a kid. It's a comfortable, safe place.
I walk down the porch steps and through the garden. When you leave our enclave, it's city houses and the Union 76 station and Total Vid, the video store where Titus, one of the guys who works there, always tries to rent you his favorite movie, even if you've seen it before. Riding Giants is this surfing movie, and Dad's brought it home three times now because Titus is so convincing, even with his bleach-blond hair and favorite/only attire of jeans and a T-shirt with a large pineapple on it that cryptically reads juicy pineapple. Total Vid has, I swear, a hundred copies of Riding Giants, since Titus tells everyone how gnarly and bitchin' it is. Anyone in Total Vid's radius knows more about surfing history than the average person.
One more block over, and you hit the zoo parking lot. That's how close we are. I walk, counting my steps in groups of eight. I show our family pass to the older lady with the big button that reads ask me about becoming a zoo pal, then push through the revolving metal gates. Someone who had snuck in would have had to climb the stone border around the zoo's perimeter.
My cell phone rings--Jenna--but I ignore it. I'm feeling too nervous to talk. I look at the face of my phone, though, to see
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the time. Three fifteen. He usually appears about three thirty.
I take the path past the giraffes and zebras, around the African savannah. I hear weird bird calls, exotic messages. Hippos, the meanest and most dangerous animals on earth, are off on their own, like we put away prisoners. Down the path a bit farther is the elephant house, and the outdoor enclosure, a large, mostly flat area of bamboo fields with its own "watering hole" and a few trees.
As far as the rain Mom warned me about, it is more of a drizzle, a sprinkle, a mist. We've got a thousand words for rain here, same as Eskimos have for snow.
I duck my chin down and walk fast. The rain means the zoo is nearly empty of visitors, except for this one mother, who looks slightly dazed and is pulling on the hand of her sticky toddler.
God, I'm nervous. I have this wound-up, hyper feeling, energized fear, and I'm thinking this is about the nuttiest thing I've ever done. And stupid. And maybe dangerous. He's a stranger. He has a baby, which makes him seem unlikely as a rapist, but come on. I don't know him and here I am going to meet him, and I barely feel good about talking to guys I don't know at my own school. This could be one of those horrible stories you hear about, where some dumb girl meets some guy she's talked to on the Internet. It's either the bravest thing I have ever done or the most idiotic, and I suddenly realize how hard it is to tell the difference.
There is an overhang by the outdoor viewing area where I can stay dry, and that's where I head. I sit on the bench for a few minutes; I look out at Onyx, an Asian elephant and the only animal I see out there, except for a few pigeons pecking at the ground in a bored, halfhearted manner. My stomach is flopping around in anticipation. I watch Onyx for calm, her 57
swaying body, her trunk that rises to explore the upper leaves of a tree. Onyx isn't the best choice for calm. Onyx is pretty old, I think--at least she looks old and acts old. She moves more slowly than the others, her movements dull and cranky. Her eyes look sad and sweet, dark and down-turned, as if she's asking for something but would refuse it if you offered. She makes me think of those days you have sometimes, when you're pissed off and driving everyone away with your mood, but what you most need is for someone to love you in spite of yourself. I've seen Onyx be aggressive with the others--shoving and nudging with her trunk, refusing to move when it would be the friendly thing to do. I know it sounds silly, like those people who have their dogs analyzed, but she seems depressed.
I'm getting cold just sitting, so I stand and lean against the railing. Just because it's three thirty, I shouldn't panic. He could be late. I'm sure he's still coming. I hope my hair still looks okay. I search off in the distance, hoping to see a red jacket. My heart thumps around at the thought of actually seeing and maybe talking to the real him. No one is around at all, and it's just me and all of the sounds around me. Rain falling, a strange twittering of some bird, the eerie warbling of another. I can hear water rushing somewhere, maybe from the brown bears' river, I'm not sure. I look back at the camera where it is perched at the corner of the elephant house, and I give a small wave to the me's out there who are watching.
Red jacket! I mentally call. Where are you? Only five minutes, but forever passes. I take out a Kleenex, blow my nose again, which is when he'll probably come.
But no.
I blow it again, just to give him a second chance to meet me the nature of jade 58
at a bad time. I hear an elephant trumpet, not Onyx, who is just standing under that tree, sniffing its bark. More twittering. The trees shh-shush with a bit of wind. One of the pigeons hops around by my feet arid pecks at pieces of dropped, soggy popcorn. God damn it, red jacket!
I sit back down. Go through the list in my head again. He's babysitting. It's his sister's baby. It's his baby, and he's married. Too young, unhappily. Happily married. Divorced, raising a baby alone. What I am doing here today
is a stupid thing. It's a brave and bold thing. I say the phrase over again, It's a brave and bold thing, count off the words using the fingers of one hand. It's is my thumb, a my forefinger, et cetera. I start again from the next finger and count until the sentence ends on my pinkie.
My butt is cold sitting on the bench, and so are my hands, shoved in my pockets. My Kleenex supply is dwindling. It's three forty-five, which doesn't necessarily mean anything, but probably does mean something.
I stand up again, hold the railing and lean back, face to the sky like he does, rain falling on my cheeks and eyes and chin. Maybe he's done with elephants, moved on to a different animal.
Maybe he's just moved on, period. Maybe I'd missed my chance by waiting too long. By just watching and not doing.
Four o'clock. He'd never been this late before, unless he came at night. I see the green pants and green shirt of the zookeeper who seems to be in charge of the elephants, an Indian man with a curving mustache and beard. He catches me watching him and waves and I smile. He disappears into the elephant house. I walk over to the house, peer inside at the glass windows of the huge stalls where Hansa and Chai and Tombi
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are snuggled, eating. The zookeeper isn't there, but a young woman feeds them something out of a metal bucket.
Outside again, the rain has turned from drizzly to insistent, consistent, drenching. I think maybe my chest feels heavy, a bit heavy--does it? From standing outside in the cold that long? That kind of heavy means a chest-heaving cough is coming on. Bronchitis, maybe. Pneumonia, my backstage mind says. There is not a red jacket anywhere, and my Kleenex is now a small, basically unusable wet ball, a soggy clump.
I walk away from the elephant house. My stupidity and I head home. We are both dripping wet, my hair becoming plastered to my face. In the zoo parking lot, I see Jake Gillette, the idiot genius, riding around on his skateboard in the rain, doing tricks, the parachute still attached to the back. That parachute looks optimistic in the gray wetness--trying hard even as it becomes heavy with rain--and something about this pitiful sight annoys me. I pass Total Vid, see Titus in his pineapple shirt behind the counter.