When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  So I liked thinking our breaching was related somehow to that antique practice.

  Of course the difference in spelling must have been significant. I looked up breach in the dictionary. “A legal infraction.” Definitely. “A break or a rupture.” Plenty was broken, plenty ruptured. “A fissure made in a fortification.” That one stumped me for a while until it occurred to me that the civilized world, the daytime world, is a kind of fortification against nature and night and brutishness—then it made sense.

  But it was the fifth definition of the word that intrigued me most. Apparently breach is also the word for what a whale does when it breaks the surface of the water and leaps into the air.

  I wrote that in a box in my research notes, and I drew a picture of a whale bursting from the surface of the ocean. It seemed at odds with the other definitions, and yet at the same time not.

  When I slept I dreamed of whales, huge seabound creatures, mustering their power, changing their course, diving deep and then swimming up in a straight vertical, from the dark depths of the ocean floor through the murk to where the light penetrates, up farther and farther, their bodies all muscle in the act of violating the logic of their natural home, thrusting themselves upward, crashing through the surface, feeling the unwet open air on their barnacled skin, taking flight for one tiny moment—taking flight.

  * * *

  Then it chanced to happen that my life became joined with the lives of others.

  That’s how it occurs, just like that, like the passage of midnight, the hand of the clock creeping past the midpoint of twelve. The minute before midnight and the one after are practically the same, except that they are a full calendar day apart. That’s what happened to me. One day things were different.

  It was in the tenth grade, and it happened, really, because of Blackhat Roy Ruggle. It was during lunch in the cafeteria, and I was sitting at the table next to Rosebush Lincoln’s when he approached her. Rosebush was in tears because earlier in the week her father had initiated divorce proceedings against her mother and had gone to live in a house the next town over, and earlier that day she had also received a C on an English paper.

  “What is she crying for?” said Blackhat Roy to anyone who would listen. He was gypsy dark, with black hair that was always a little greasy. He was short, but there was an inherent ferociousness in him that you wouldn’t want to see any taller. There might have been something handsome about him if it weren’t for the nastiness.

  Rosebush tried to ignore him.

  “No, seriously,” Roy went on, declaiming in a loud voice that hushed those within its range. “I want to know. What is she crying for? Is she worried she won’t get into Notre Dame? And then what? What’s a Rosebush who doesn’t go to Notre Dame?”

  “Stop it,” said Rosebush, hiding her face in the crook of her arm and allowing herself to be comforted by Jenny Stiles, who had the shortest hair of all the girls in school.

  “Oh, wait—I get it,” said Roy. “See, the last time I got a C, the principal gave me a fucking trophy—so I guess it’s all relative. And what she’s worried about, see—what she’s worried about is that if she gets a C, then that’s her first step to becoming like me.”

  “Cut it out, Roy,” somebody else said.

  “Stop it,” said Rosebush.

  But he leaned in close to her.

  “Take a look, Rosebush. It’s your future talking. After you fail out of school, we’ll get married and have a barrelful of kids. We’ll feed them cat food and squirrels and pray every night before we go to bed that little Festus won’t burn down the neighbor’s house. My father’s hit the road, so you won’t have to deal with him getting drunk and groping you at the wedding. Hey, wait a minute—do you think that’s why your dad left? Shame? Do you think he’ll give a toast at our wedding?”

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” cried Rosebush. She stood suddenly, escaped the grasp of Jenny Stiles, and began beating her little fists against Blackhat Roy, who backed away slowly, hands in the air to show he was not fighting back—a cruel, bemused expression on his face.

  Then, as I watched, others intervened. Petey Meechum was there first, pushing himself between Rosebush and Roy.

  “Stop!” he said to Roy. “Leave her alone, asshole.”

  There was a sudden stillness as everyone waited for Roy to explain himself. He looked around, and a sourness crept into his face. What he said was this:

  “Cunt.”

  That was another magic word, I realized that day, because of the power it had over people. They cringed as if struck, as if that single syllable were a weapon more powerful than teeth or fists. It was a dangerous word.

  Blackhat Roy walked away then, but I heard something else that maybe no one else heard. It was something he said to himself, under his breath, while everyone else was rushing to Rosebush to comfort her.

  “She doesn’t get to cry,” he said.

  I didn’t understand what he meant, but then again I did. Still, I felt sorry for Rosebush and her gone father and her C.

  It was the very next period when I did something I never would have done if I had had the time to really think it through. The class was history, and we were taking a test. Rosebush sniffled miserably over hers. Me, I answered the questions without much difficulty. It was all material that I had put on flash cards for myself earlier in the week, while, I imagined, Rosebush’s father had been moving from room to room in his house identifying what was his and what was his wife’s.

  Blackhat Roy was also in that class, and when he asked to use the bathroom I had an idea. I waited two minutes, then asked if I could use the bathroom as well.

  Outside the room, I turned left down the empty hallway toward the boys’ room rather than right toward the girls’. I could smell the smoke coming from the restroom, so I knew he was in there. There was a fire alarm on the wall to the left of the door, and then I watched my hand rise up and pull the red lever down. I ran the other way down the hall so that I could be seen emerging from the girls’ room while everyone poured into the hallways amid the screeching bells.

  Funny. Sometimes the whole world moves just for you.

  But why did I do it?

  For one thing, it saved Rosebush. The history test, having been compromised, would need to be rescheduled. But that wasn’t really why I did it. Not really.

  What happened was this. The principal called Blackhat Roy into his office and accused him of pulling the fire alarm. No one thought to accuse me of anything, even though I was also out of the classroom at the time the alarm went off. I was Lumen Fowler. I was a good student. I was childlike of stature, and I was unimpeachable.

  They couldn’t prove Roy had done anything, but they didn’t need to. In the process of being accused, he grabbed a glass paperweight from the principal’s desk and threw it through the window of the office onto the lawn outside, where it almost struck a fourth grader passing by. That was enough to get him suspended for two weeks.

  Rather than simply being subject to them, I had wanted to know what it felt like to be one of the forces in this world.

  * * *

  But Petey Meechum saw. The next day he found me tucked into the back carrel of the library, where I liked to be with my books.

  “You did it,” he said. “I saw you.”

  I panicked. I gathered my books, stuffed them quickly into my knapsack.

  “Why did you?” he said. “I just want to know. Did you know he’d get in trouble?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to get around him. I didn’t like being cornered.

  “Wait a minute,” he said as I pushed my way past him. “I won’t tell anyone,” he called after me. “I just—I didn’t know who you were.”

  Of course we had known each other for many years, but he meant something bigger. See how easy it is to become someone else? It happens all of a sudden—just like that. A ticktock of motion.

  So who am I now?

  * * *

  The year that Polly w
ent breach, I had not yet figured out that life sometimes requires contingency plans for the loss of those close to you—that the more people you have buffering you against solitude, the less catastrophic it is when one of them disappears. Among people my age, I only really had Polly—and when she went breach, I no longer had her. She didn’t turn on me. It’s not that. She had simply been initiated into a corps I wasn’t part of. More frequently than not, our casual conversations in the school hallways (usually on the topic of test scores and the relative fairness of teachers) were interrupted by other students who shared giddy stories with Polly about what outrageous things had occurred during the most recent full moon. These others acknowledged me always with a curious, questioning look in their eyes, as if they were too embarrassed to admit they didn’t know my name.

  As it turned out, though, Petey Meechum, who had also not yet gone breach, had taken a strange interest in me after the day I had run away from him in the library. Except he liked to be known as Peter now, in the same way that Rosebush, perhaps as a result of her parents’ divorce, was demanding that she be called Rose. Apparently we were outgrowing the names of our childhoods. I was always Lumen. There was no evolution in my name. Well, there wasn’t until later, after I had left the town behind—and then I started calling myself Ann. Ann Fowler. I’m sure there are hundreds of Ann Fowlers in this world. You would have no reason to single me out. My husband, he believes Ann is my only name and that I have no middle name. He knows no Lumen. It is a secret I keep from him, because when he comes home he tells me about the troubles of his day at work—and Ann Fowler is a remarkably good wife.

  So it was Peter Meechum who frequently came to my house to study in the afternoons. Unlikely as it was, popular Peter Meechum came to me for help with geometry. Golden-haired Peter. Peter, whom all the girls ached for in school, and somehow he had delivered himself to me. Peter Meechum in my very own home, where I would make us a snack of carrot and celery sticks and French onion dip. I would pour him a glass of orange juice, and he would drink it all in one long gulp—and then I would pour him another, and he would make that one last awhile.

  I wondered how long it would be before he discovered any number of other taller, prettier girls to help him with math. But somehow one of my childhood incantations had borne him to me, and I relished it with the desperate appetite of someone fated to die the very next day.

  “It’s an offense to my masculinity is what it is,” he would say dramatically. “My having to be taught math by a wee girl.”

  He said it in a way that made me not mind being called a wee girl.

  “We’ll have to compensate,” he went on. “After you explain tangents, you have to promise to let me beat you at arm wrestling.”

  “Tangents are easy,” I would say. “It’s just relationships. Angles and lengths. If you have one, you also have the other. I’ll show you.”

  In my room, sprawled out on the carpeted floor, I drew diagrams for him on blue-lined notebook pages.

  “How do you draw such straight lines without a ruler?” he asked. “Your triangles are amazing.”

  He ran his fingertips lightly over my triangles, as though geometry were a tactile thing.

  “They’re perfect,” he said.

  “They’re not perfect.”

  He eyed me.

  “Maybe you don’t know what perfect is,” he said. “Those right there—that’s what perfect looks like.”

  That was something about Peter. His language made things happen. Things became funny when Peter laughed, and they became ridiculous when he labeled them so. He seemed, somehow, to belong prematurely to that category of adults—people who drove the world ahead of them, like charioteers, rather than being dragged along behind.

  The truth is, I was in love with him—Petey Meechum, who was now Peter, who held a carrot stick in the corner of his mouth like a cigar while he was lying on his stomach on the floor of my room complimenting my triangles.

  He sighed heavily and rolled over onto his back. He raised his arms toward the ceiling and used his splayed hands to make a triangle through which he peered, squinting, at the overhead light.

  “After I graduate high school, I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “New York.”

  I didn’t ask why New York. He would tell me without my prompting him.

  “It’s like a city on fire,” he went on. “The streets are always smoking from underground furnaces.”

  “Steam,” I said. I couldn’t help myself.

  “What?”

  “It’s not smoke. It’s steam.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I looked it up once. I saw it on TV and wondered what it was. There’s a steam-heat system under Manhattan. Sometimes it leaks.”

  His hands fell to his chest, and he was quiet. I felt bad for knowing more about his dream city than he did.

  “What will you do in New York?” I asked, trying to resuscitate his vision.

  “Lumen, don’t you ever feel like you want to leave?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this place. This weird little town with its weird little traditions. Other places aren’t like this, you know.”

  “Every place has its own ways,” I declared reasonably.

  He rolled over again, back onto his stomach, and there was something beseeching in his tone when he spoke again.

  “But don’t you ever just want to get out? To go somewhere else? To be somebody else—even just for a little while?”

  I looked down at the triangles in my notebook. The secret to drawing straight lines is that you use your whole arm, not just your hand and wrist. My father taught me that.

  “I like it here,” I said.

  “What do you like about it?”

  I wasn’t prepared for follow-up questions. Part of me always resented having to justify my likes and dislikes. Other people didn’t have to. No one ever asked Blackhat Roy what it was he liked about hunting knives. Everyone just knew he kept a collection of them, all oiled and polished, in his bedroom.

  “Come on,” I said to Peter. “You have to understand tangents. They’re going to be on the test tomorrow.”

  * * *

  “I never see you in church,” he said on another afternoon.

  My father and I were not churchgoers—but we had frequently driven by when services were being let out, and I wished sometimes to be among those enlightened folk who had occasion to dress in finery in the middle of a plain Sunday morning.

  Peter had taken to removing his sneakers when we were studying together. He tucked the laces neatly inside and set them side by side by the door. I liked seeing them there—that one touch of alien boyness that transformed my bedroom into something less than familiar.

  “My father never took me,” I said.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Kind of.”

  “You kind of believe in God, or you believe in a kind of God?”

  I didn’t know what to say. How do you tell a boy who takes off his shoes in your bedroom that God is a thing of the mind—but a very, very lovely thing of the mind? I stuttered along for a few moments before he let me off the hook.

  “You know, I didn’t used to believe in God.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Huh-uh. For a long time I didn’t. And then one day I did. Just like that. Does that ever happen to you? You’re going along, minding your own business, seeing things the way you’ve always seen them—and then all of a sudden those things look different to you?”

  The way he was looking at me made me wonder if he was talking about something other than God. Or if maybe God and the way he looked at me with those voracious boy-eyes were related. I wanted more of it. His boy-eyes—his godliness, which I felt deep down, like a surge.

  Then he leaned back, as though something had clicked shut all at once.

  “Never mind,” he said. “I’m just feeling philosophical today. If you can h
elp me pass this geometry test, I’ll give you a present.”

  “What present?” I pretended to shuffle through the pages of my textbook, because I didn’t want to show him that I was out of breath.

  “I don’t know—I’ll build you a house on the lake.”

  “On the east shore, so I can watch the sunsets?”

  “Sure. And another on the west shore so you can watch the sunrises. And a canoe to go back and forth between them.”

  “Just a canoe?”

  “Come on, I already built you two houses.”

  “Fair enough.”

  * * *

  In school, Rose Lincoln leaned over to my desk during history.

  “I heard you’re tutoring Peter,” she said.

  I said nothing.

  “Well, is it true?”

  I shrugged. “We just study—” I had meant to say, “We just study together,” but the together suddenly sounded, in one way or another, too complicit and damning.

  “It’s okay,” she said with a laugh. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. It’s not like he’s interested in you or anything. You know Peter—he’s a flirt. The other day he told me I looked nice in yellow. He let Angela Weston give him a back rub in the cafeteria. Carrie Bryce said he brushed her butt when she walked by him in the hall. And you know it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, I look so like hell in yellow. It’s just the way he is. The reason he likes me is that we understand each other.”

  I wrote Rose Lincoln’s name in my notebook and spent the rest of the period crosshatching over it until it was an ugly blotch of shiny ink that bled through to the other side of the paper—and I thought that would do for a curse.

  * * *

  But I feared that what Rose Lincoln said about Peter and me was true—that I was just a functionary to him.

  It was a few weeks later. We were in my bedroom, and he was looking at a framed picture on the wall. The picture was of my mother and father when they were very young and just married. Peter had been spending the afternoons with me in my bedroom, and we had played many games of Parcheesi between studying sessions—but he had made no move to kiss me.