When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  One night, after she had left, I confronted him in the kitchen.

  “Do you love her?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I think I could.”

  “Will you marry her?”

  “Lumen.” He leaned forward and touched my hair with his hand, as though trying to incant some long-lost version of himself and me. “I used to hold you on a pillow in my lap. Look at you now.”

  But when I gave him nothing but a cold look in return, he drew back his hand as though it had been bitten. He looked poisoned, miserable.

  “Look,” he said, and now there was nothing delicate about his voice. He had rarely in his life used this tone with me, and it had always made me feel criminal. He was explaining something, for better or worse, and whether I liked it or not was beside the point. I shrank back. “I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to hurt you. No one can replace your mother.”

  “No one’s talking about her. Who brought her up?” I was irritated at the way everyone was forecasting the damage I would suffer as a result of my loyalty to my mother. I didn’t like being second-guessed.

  “I’m just saying I was being careful. But now, now that you’re…growing up…”

  And that was it. It was his euphemism for breaching. We are always told that honesty and truth are the shining ideals. But sometimes the truth could be used as a punishment. That’s what I learned on that day.

  “Go away,” I told him.

  I wanted to hurt them. I wanted to hurt them all. My father and Margot Simons. Blackhat Roy and Rose Lincoln. Boring, bland Polly. Peter Meechum, who seemed ennobled by hurt. Even my mother, who left me early on rather than staying by my father’s side and being the one single love of his life—even my mother, the imaginary doll whose enfabulation seemed to grow more and more childish with each passing day. I wanted to hurt her, too, for not being real.

  * * *

  The kind of geologist my father was was an engineering geologist—which meant that he studied how characteristics of the natural landscape might affect the man-made structures that are built on top of it. He was a person who knew how to harmonize man and nature. He created elaborate three-dimensional simulations on his computer that spun freely in space. When I was a young girl, I admired them, wishing to be able to create such pretty artifacts of my own. He also had a whole set of magnifying lenses that I liked to observe the world through.

  Now, though, I tried not to go into my father’s office at all. A border, a line had been drawn between us. Also, I didn’t like to catch sight of the map I had made him, framed and hanging on the wall. All his creations were so pure and crystalline. Everything I made was corrupt.

  I was different now. And he was different, too, though he put on a show that suggested otherwise.

  We were all going on with our lives as though the world had not been burned to the ground, as though we had not all become grotesques in a pathetic and disgusting circus. Everybody pretended that everything was just as it had been before.

  But I, for one, was made sick by reminders of what the world used to be.

  I cleared my room of all its stuffed animals. I boxed them up and put them in the very back of my closet. Harmless animals with big baby eyes and soft, cuddly fur. It seemed like a cruel joke that I was only now beginning to understand.

  I sat in the middle of my empty bed then, my knees to my chest and my chin pressed into my knees, and I tried to think of my home as one of my father’s computer models—all straight lines and pure white planes. So clean, and everything calculated, accounted for. I could spin it in my mind, floating and free, with nobody but me inside.

  * * *

  Sometimes you were impatient for the full moon. Because you were just looking for a reason to run.

  I was growing sour to the appurtenances of civilization—the clerks at the stores, the way they smiled politely and bestowed pleasantries on you. The progressive roar of lawn mowers, the tittering of sprinklers.

  I went to the mine. It was between moons.

  I went to my holy place, the cistern, and I prayed my prayers down into the pit. There were two songs that my father used to sing to me when I was a little girl, and I sang them both down into the void. They echoed and disappeared.

  Nothing was the same as it had been.

  One day you were one thing, and the next day you were another.

  * * *

  Even now.

  I bake snickerdoodles for the meeting of the community league at Marcie Klapper-Witt’s house. I pile them high on a cut-crystal platter. Marcie puts them on a long table with other snacks brought by other upstanding members of the community. Fancy, Marcie’s daughter, walks up and down the side of the table, sampling the food. She borrows a brownie, takes one bite, and puts the remainder back on the tray. Same thing with the thumbprint cookies, then the cucumber sandwiches. No one watches her.

  There is a planter in the shape of a dachshund, and while the girl stands on tiptoes to reach a platter of truffles on the back of the table I take the planter and place it on the ground just to her right. When she moves to continue down the length of the table, Fancy Klapper-Witt stumbles over the dachshund and falls, the tiara tumbling from her head. She begins to cry, sitting there like a pale pork, her hands raised in supplication.

  Her mother rushes over, grabs the girl up in her arms, asks her why she moved the doggie planter.

  And me? I retrieve the tiara from the floor and deliver it back onto the feathery blond head of the little girl.

  Her mother smiles at me gratefully.

  My husband, Jack, does not attend these meetings—but I am surprised to see there a woman I recognize. It’s Jack’s colleague from school—the one who sits on his desk. Her name is Helena, I learn, and she teaches art. Her hands are speckled with dried paint, her fingernails short and scuffed. I don’t speak with her, but I put myself in position to overhear her conversations. She has a very melodious voice, and she is absolutely positive about the world. She just recently moved into the neighborhood from California, of all places. She misses the weather there, but she finds the people here delightful.

  I follow her from room to room, remaining unobserved. Helena is attentive and careful, much like me. Once, she goes into the kitchen, and I peek at her from around the corner. I see her rinse her glass in the sink—and then, thinking she’s alone, she picks something from between her teeth with her fingernail and flicks it into the sink.

  I like a woman who pays attention to her teeth.

  When the meeting itself gets under way, we all sit around in a big circle in the living room. I stay toward the back, leaning on a windowsill, directly to the right of Helena. She has marvelous ideas about the restoration of the local park. When she is lost in thought, I notice, her lips part slightly and she breathes out of her mouth.

  Only once do our eyes meet, and she gives me a small, indistinct smile, as though we were casual compatriots. I wonder if we are.

  * * *

  It was the middle of March, between moons, and our town had its first spell of spring. Afternoons, I would open the window of my bedroom and let the breeze curl the pages of my homework as I finished it. Then, thinking to avoid my father and Margot Simons, I returned to the mapping of the mines. There were too many people aboveground, too many rivalries, too many betrayals, too many suffocating passions—so I went below and found absolution in the pitch black of those lonely passages.

  Underground, the air was tight, and the empty spaces felt like a persistent ache—those crumbled walls, those low overhanging beams that were so soft they sometimes turned to wood dust in your grip. I did not mind stumbling upon dead ends, because it meant I could call an end to whatever tunnel it was on my map. I marked cul-de-sacs with special skull symbols. Pretty soon my map was filled with skulls. You could travel in many directions, but there was only one destination.

  That was why, one night, I went deeper into the tunnels than I ever had before. I was reckless with voids made out of possibilit
ies.

  Getting lost was not a problem anymore. I’d developed a distinct understanding of the dark, a natural sense of how the tunnels were built and which direction they were going. I could feel, in my bones, the elevation of the earth. I could sniff my way north, south, east, and west. I knew the way the breezes blew through those ancient causeways.

  But a human body was something I never imagined stumbling upon. Perhaps I was foolish. I don’t know.

  Still, in the middle of a running life, you sometimes discover death sitting peacefully, just around corners. Waiting for you.

  It was the body of a girl.

  Where I found her was a dead end, but this was unlike the other dead ends I had found. It wasn’t a collapse, it was simply a terminus. The tunnel widened slightly, like a little bulb-shaped room, and then it just abrupted—a round stone room.

  I could tell it was a blind tunnel because I knew that the dust hung heavier in the air in caverns that had no outlet. I could feel the end of things in my lungs. I had stopped, leaning one hand against the cold stone and bending double to cough the dust out of me. That’s when the dim glow of my penlight fell on her.

  Her hair was like wheat. Like dried hay in a barn. Her hair was like that. Like an empty barn on a day when you walk alone down the hill to discover the world for yourself.

  Her hair was like hay, and her skin was brittle and dry, like papier-mâché. Her skin was gray—and it was stretched and dried up and petrified by age. It did not give under my touch. When I put my cheek to her cheek, it felt like nothing human. It was the cheek of an old doll. Her skin, her hair—they were kindling for a fire that would burn down the world.

  The eyes were closed, the lids glued together by time. The lids were flat and sunken because, no doubt, the eyeballs underneath were shriveled grapes. They did not stare. There was no staring.

  Her mouth was the worst thing. And it did not speak.

  The skin of her face had dried and shrunk over the bone. Her lips pulled back, exposing two rows of white teeth. Her teeth were dusty. With my finger, I polished them, and they were perfect underneath the dust—rows of pearls. But they looked too big, her grin too wide. And no grin at all, not really. The dead don’t laugh. Their mouths are not expressive, they are just hungry. Her jaw hung open, her gaping maw stretched wide, as though she would swallow you. It looked as though she might be calling to me, as though she had something to say. But there was nothing. There were no words. She was dumb as bones.

  Hair like hay and her skin like paper. But her mouth was the worst part. It was the start of a dry passageway that went all the way down into the dry sack of her belly. The girl was her own abandoned mine shaft.

  She wore no clothes, but her body was half covered by a burlap sack. The burlap was stuck to her. It and her skin and the earth had all melted together and frozen. She leaned, half sideways, against the cave wall. It was an awkward eternity.

  She must have been cold. I tried to pull the burlap up to warm her, but it turned to dry shreds in my hands.

  * * *

  I had never seen death so up close. She was dried like a mummy in a museum, and I wondered who she had been in life. She was small—young, like me. I wondered if she had had friends like mine or enemies like mine. I wondered if she came here to be alone, as I did. I wondered if this meant that I was now friends with death itself.

  The other thing it meant was that I was no longer just a girl. It was the beginning of awful discoveries.

  It was the start of everything that came after.

  * * *

  I told Mr. Hunter that I was mapping the mines, but I didn’t tell him about the dead girl. When I told him, I watched him closely—expecting that he might scold me or try to persuade me to talk to my father about my self-destructive habits. But he didn’t. He leaned forward, in the dark of the auditorium, and he said, “Is it beautiful there?”

  “That’s not the right word,” I said, because it was something other than pretty.

  I liked to tell him things, because he seemed to comprehend what things meant even before I tried to explain them. I felt no need to apologize for myself to him. I told him my stories, and his eyes went distant—as though he were recalling some long-ago memory. Sometimes his eyes even glazed over, and he would turn his head away. Sometimes his breath smelled of alcohol.

  At dinner one night, I asked Margot Simons about Mr. Hunter.

  “What’s he like?” I said.

  “How come?” she asked. “Have you got a crush on him?”

  I held my knife in a grip that whitened my knuckles. I imagined driving the blade between her ribs.

  After giving my father a playful glance, she responded to my question.

  “We don’t see each other that much,” she said. “Mostly he doesn’t hang around with the other teachers. But I like him. There’s something about him. Did you know he didn’t grow up here?”

  “I know,” I said, eager to show off the priority of my alliance with him. “He’s from East Saint Louis.”

  “But,” she went on, “he doesn’t seem entirely like an outsider. Does that make sense?”

  It made perfect sense. But I didn’t like that her evaluation of him was so parallel to my own.

  “Miss Simons,” I said, changing the topic. “Did you know that my mother never went breach?”

  “Yes,” she said, making her voice hard like a wall. “I knew that.”

  “So my father told you? He told you she was unique? Isn’t it interesting that she was unlike everyone else?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said again. She did not know the right way to respond. She looked helplessly at my father.

  “I thought I might be unique, too,” I went on. “I thought it might be in my blood. Do you think things travel that way? From generation to generation? Through the blood?”

  My father’s fork clattered down on his plate.

  “Lumen,” he said, “that’s enough.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “sometimes the world isn’t as honest a place as you would like it to be.”

  And then dinner was over all of a sudden. My father asked me to leave the table, and I did. There was a quiver in his voice when he said it, and Margot Simons wore a hard scowl that I knew later would melt into miserableness, and I felt tremendously sorry for her. Her lipstick was smudged at the corners.

  I should have been kinder. To my father, to Margot Simons, to Peter Meechum, to everyone.

  In English class, Mr. Hunter taught us Wuthering Heights. Violent Heathcliff. The smoky moors. Child Cathy tapping at the window, wanting to come in.

  He evoked that scene for us. He said, simply, “There is a difference between being inside and being outside,” and we knew what he meant. We all nodded our heads, and our eyes grew unfocused.

  When you are at a certain in-between age, you believe that adulthood is all about exclusion. You believe that what makes adults adults is that they are legitimized in their suspicions and hatreds. You exercise your own condemnations, and you believe this is the key to growing older.

  And what do I believe now—me, a mother and wife, a woman who keeps her past concealed from her adoring husband? Is there something of that mine-dwelling girl left in me, who stalks her husband from makeshift blinds? Or has that girl grown into someone else altogether, naked to hurt, diminished by love?

  Chapter 9

  When my husband goes to work in the morning, I leave our son at the neighbor’s and drive to our family doctor. There is nothing wrong with me, but Jack insists that we have regular checkups. So I sit in a cold room wearing a paper smock and smile up at the doctor and the nurses, and I try my best to do exactly what they ask of me. I breathe when they tell me to breathe. I lie back. I answer their questions.

  Sometimes I wonder if they will find something awful in me. I imagine the doctor taking me into his office, closing the door, sighing heavily, and diagnosing me with evil growing behind my sternum.

  I would assure him that no, it’s not growi
ng, it’s always been there. The same exact size, the same exact shape. In fact I’ve learned to live with it, my evil. There is nothing to be afraid of. I am a loving wife and mother, a perfectly normal person.

  To the doctors, you are a body tainted by imperfection. The only question they ask is how far you have strayed from the ideal. That’s why white and red are the colors of the medical world. White is the pure self, and red is the damage. That is medicine.

  But I am declared perfectly healthy.

  My doctor says, “You get an A plus for today.”

  I grin with pride.

  Afterward, I pick my son up. He rushes to greet me, clutching at my leg as though I were the only thing standing between him and rude death. I put my palm on the top of his head.

  “Mommy,” he says to me in his little voice.

  He is white and I am red. But one day he will be red, too.

  I take him to our neighborhood park, where he likes to fling himself treacherously around the monkey bars. I sit on a bench and look at the cloudy sky through the tree branches overhead.

  People like to run around the perimeter of the park, and one of those runners collapses on the bench next to me. Breathing hard, she removes the cap from a bottle of water and upturns it to her lips. The plastic bottle crinkles. I keep my gaze focused on the sky.

  “I know you,” she says.

  Only then do I realize it’s Helena, the art teacher who recently moved from California and likes to sit on my husband’s desk.

  “You were at the community league meeting,” she says. She wears tight leggings with a stripe down the side, and I can smell her sweat, sweet and pungent. “You know what? Somebody told me I work with your husband. It’s Jack—right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How funny! I teach art.”