When We Were Animals

by Joshua Gaylord

  At Helena’s house, the porch light is on, but all the windows are dark. I would like to get a look at her fiancé, so I put my face to the glass of the front windows, but the house looks empty. I can see the dim outline of the furniture in her living room, but the glare from the street lamps is too great. I go around the side of the house to the back, where one of the kitchen windows is open a crack. There’s a fine smell coming from the kitchen, as though many healthful meals have been prepared between those walls, so I lift the window all the way, carefully remove the screen, and climb inside. Once in, I am conscientious in refitting the screen back into the window frame.

  I am accustomed to dark, empty houses. I know how to navigate them. You rely on your senses. You trust your widened pupils, your outstretched fingertips, your animal nose.

  I go upstairs. In her bedroom, I discover a picture of Helena and her fiancé in a frame by the bed. The picture is taken against the backdrop of some wide, forested valley—as though the only mountains worth climbing are the ones they climb together—and he is a very handsome young man with good eyebrows and an authoritative smile. She wears a baseball cap in the picture, and I wonder if I should get a baseball cap—though I would not know which team logo it should bear.

  I lie down on the bed and smell the pillow and try to imagine what it is like to see, every night, the moonlight cast its particular shadow dance over the contours of this room. I imagine what it is like to be pressed under the body of that imposing man in the picture.

  In her closet, I find her running shoes, set neatly beside each other, the laces tucked inside. When I put one of them to my nose, I smell nature, ruddy and bountiful. Her toothpaste, I am pleased to see, is the same brand as mine, though all the lotions and shampoos in her shower come in bottles that I’ve never seen on the shelves of our local grocery store. There is a little nest of her hair in the drain of the shower.

  But I am drawn again downstairs, to the kitchen, because that is where I suspect Helena truly lives. The refrigerator is filled with produce, with small cartons of yogurt, with milk on the edge of souring. There are no dishes in the sink. From the smell of it, the ones in the dishwasher are clean and ready to be put away. I run my fingers over the deck of china plates standing there proudly.

  In one of the cabinets, I find a jar of wheat germ that announces itself as an excellent source of folic acid and vitamin E. It suddenly feels like a tremendous oversight that I have never had any wheat germ in my house. It is clearly the source of so many good things. Wondering what new splendors might grow from the germ of wheat, I decide to take the jar with me. This will be essential to my friendship with Helena. This is what I have been missing—the key I have been looking for, the one that will unlock more conventional relationships with the world.

  Except Marcie Klapper-Witt’s neighborhood watch must have seen me when I climbed in through the window of Helena’s house—because when I leave by the front door, the police are there waiting for me, their hands poised and ready over their holstered pistols, the lights on their car flashing pretty against the treetops.

  Chapter 12

  The name of my birth town isn’t really Pale Miranda. That would be a very fanciful name for a town, and most towns are named in the service of either commerce or heritage. The town where I grew up is of the latter variety, and its real name is Polikwakanda, which is an indigenous name—supposedly from the Abenaki tribe, though I have never been able to find any reference to the word in my research of Native American languages. I don’t know what it means, and maybe it means “town where monsters live” or something like that, but the only sense my young girl’s tongue could make of the word was Pale Miranda, and so that’s how I thought of the place where I was raised—even beyond the time when I was grown old enough to know better.

  When I walked into the prom, there were banners everywhere that said, FAREWELL POLIKWAKANDA SENIORS!

  Farewell, Pale Miranda.

  * * *

  Dances in the town where I grew up were curious events. In other towns, the school dance is an opportunity to break free and go wild for a little while. But because our wildness was routine, because we were reminded of it monthly in cut lips and bruised thighs, our dances were tame. People stood around in compulsory clusters. They talked about dull things. No one tried to sneak vodka into the punch. No virginities were lost underneath the stage or in the backseats of cars in the parking lot. Virginities were simply not things toppled by clumsy, drunken lunging. Instead they were seized and forfeited in clawing battles under full moons while the naked apparitions of your friends looked on, howling. So it was.

  When people danced at the prom, they danced slowly, pressed together and rocking back and forth with the sweet romance of dispassion. The tissue streamers wafted to and fro like underwater weeds. The students chatted pleasantly with the adult chaperones. People yawned. They went outside and looked up at the sky because they missed the moon. They sat on curbs and waited.

  The previous year, I had gone to the dance with Polly. That now seemed like a very long time ago. We had already started pulling away from each other even then. I remembered seeing her across the gym, laughing at some joke told by a boy who, we had both agreed, was ridiculous. I remembered wondering about the integrity of Polly’s personality, because I did not understand how people could go for so long being one thing and then, overnight, suddenly become something else. Such behavior seemed unnatural to me. A year later, though, I knew the difference between unnatural and unliterary. The natural world, it turned out, was not very literary. You could say it had poetry, but it was a rough brand of poetry.

  So when I walked into the decorated gym, I entered alone.

  What I realized was how far from normal my connections with other people had become. My interactions were based upon spite or jealousy or rage or strange hungers—but whatever they were, they were not dance-going relationships.

  Some people said hello to me. Polly made brief conversation—and even Rose Lincoln, whose arm was still in a sling, wished me well in a way that made me think magnanimity was her newly forged weapon.

  Somehow, without realizing it, I had become everyone’s odd cousin. I existed as a nagging, peripheral figure in their lives—recognized only in specialized circumstances. I had become occasional. To leave a conversation with me was to return to real life.

  No one asked me to dance, and I sat for a long time on the bleachers, alone on the dark periphery of the gym, watching the figures of my peers sway back and forth in each other’s arms, hating them for all their pretty pretenses.

  When a group of boys passed by, I could hear them talking about Mr. Hunter, who was supposed to be one of the chaperones. I hadn’t seen him all night, but these boys had observed him walking the grounds of the school, cursing aloud. He swayed as he walked, said one. He was drunk, said another. The boys laughed.

  “Where?” I asked.

  “What?” they said. They were startled to notice me there in the dark.

  “Where?” I said again. “Where was he going?”

  “I don’t know,” said one of the boys, shrugging as though to suggest he wanted no part of whatever freakishness Mr. Hunter and I shared. “Looked like he was going toward the football field.”

  * * *

  I walked down to the field, the crinoline of my pink prom dress rustling against my skin. The field was not lit, but a glow reached it from the school grounds behind me. I was conscious of looking ridiculous out there, where no one was.

  I didn’t see Mr. Hunter at first, but I found him by the sound of a glass bottle being tapped with steady persistence against a metal rail of the bleachers. He was up in the very top row, gazing out over the field and the stars in the sky beyond.

  “There she is,” he called out when he saw me. I hiked up my dress and climbed to the top of the bleachers.

  “Do you want to hear a story, Lumen?” he said when I reached him. “Now it’s time for me to tell you a story. I quit my job. I quit it.
I’m leaving. I’m going as far as I can go. Maybe Tibet. Have you ever eaten Tibetan food?”

  “You’re leaving? But why?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t get it back,” he said, “once it’s gone.”

  “But you left once before.”

  He drank from the bottle.

  “You have to be dauntless in this life. If at first you don’t succeed at quitting, try, try again.” Then he looked at my dress and seemed to notice it for the first time. “What are you dressed up as?”

  I sat on the cold metal bench beside him, and the folds of my dress creased uncomfortably beneath me.

  The moon was overhead, a waxing crescent, and he asked me if I weren’t afraid to be alone with him.

  “Jesus, girl,” he said. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to hang out with drunk, lying reprobates on emptied-out school property? You’re going to stroll yourself into victimhood one of these days. Aren’t you afraid?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should be.”

  He stood suddenly, wobbly with drink. Leaning over me, he gripped the bar behind me on either side of my head and brought his face down close to mine. I could smell the thick, acrid stench of alcohol. He licked his lips and smiled a threatening smile, and the bleachers tremored under his grasp.

  I closed my eyes. I waited for whatever was coming.

  There was another sound, and when I opened my eyes, he was standing upright, looking down at me with trepidation, even a little disgust.

  “Goddamn it,” he said, seething. “Goddamn you! No fear. Not an ounce of fucking fear. You invite—you invite—destruction. What’s the world to you, huh? A place to die in? You aren’t even a girl—you’re a…you’re a tragedy. There isn’t a monster in the world—not a monster in the world till he meets an eager victim.”

  He reeled backward, and I thought he might fall, but he recovered himself.

  “How come?” he said, almost pleading now. “How come you aren’t afraid?”

  I wanted to tell him that I was afraid. But his fury was wide—he raged against things larger than just me.

  “You can’t—” he started, then he used his sleeve to wipe his mouth. “You can’t rub yourself against death like that. You just can’t.”

  He wanted me to understand. There was a desperation in his eyes. He shook his head, and he collapsed onto the bench again. For a long time he said nothing but just looked out at the scattered stars.

  Then he said:

  “Your mother, she was the same way.”

  “You weren’t lying, were you?” I said. “I mean, the things you said about running with my mother. Those weren’t lies.”

  He just looked at me for a long time. I wondered what he saw in that frilled pink gown. Whatever it was, he must have deemed it fit.

  He drank again and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “All right,” he said then. “Time for another story. Last one. Are you ready?”

  “Yes.” I held my breath. I clutched at the fabric of my dress, wanting to tear it.

  We sat side by side. He looked straight ahead, and I looked straight ahead, and it was no conversation. It was a kind of shared aloneness—words dropped in the void, verbal flotsam for whoever might see fit to collect it.

  “She never went breach,” he said. “You were right about that. That was a true thing. She was never a real breacher. It was something wrong with her maybe, her genes. Something didn’t click like it was supposed to. She didn’t feel the drive. No natural love of the night. But this is what you didn’t know. She pretended. It was when it happened to your father. She wanted to run with him. So she pretended, and he kept her secret. Nobody knew. She took her clothes off, just like the rest of them, and she ran. You think about it the right way, it’s romantic. Her and him—the night.”

  He paused and sniffed once.

  “The problem was,” he went on, “she took to it. I mean, eventually she liked it. After your father’s year was up, well, she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She kept going out. It had bored itself into her some way. It wasn’t about instinct for her. It was about taste.” He licked his lips and thought for a moment. “That’s the difference. It came from a different place inside her. Your father, he tried to get her to stop. Like an addiction. She got pregnant with you, and he thought that might settle her down. But it didn’t. She went out anyway, her belly all swollen up. What I heard is that people revered her, almost, like she carried the full moon inside her. I was still too young to go out myself, but I heard.”

  He paused again briefly.

  “She was still going when I went breach,” he said. “This was, you know, three or four years later. Everybody knew her secret by then. They’d all gotten suspicious when it went on so long. They figured it out—that she was a pretender. But there wasn’t any…disparagement in it. See, she chose the thing that was forced on the rest of us. We—we loved her, even, because she loved us. I’m not saying you have to understand it. I’m just telling you how it was. Your mother, she was—she was rare.”

  I looked over briefly to see his face in the darkness, the glistening orbs of his eyes. I caught a quick glimpse, then looked away again. His story was a private one.

  “You,” he said. “I saw her in you. Ever since I got back. You want to know the truth? The truth is I don’t want to see her anymore. It’s been too long. The time comes you have to stop looking at ghosts.”

  It was a long time before he spoke again. For a while I thought he had forgotten I was there, but I waited patiently—as one does for revelations.

  He eventually went on. “Did he…your father…did he tell you how she died?”

  “Car accident,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. “That part’s not true. But he can’t be blamed. Sometimes the lie’s necessary. Sometimes the truth is nocturnal. The light hurts it.”

  He paused again, sighing. I thought he might stop there, but then I realized the story had gone beyond him. The story would get told, as sometimes stories do, one way or the other, regardless of willful human instruments.

  “It wasn’t any car accident,” he went on. “It was the third night of the Lacuna.”

  The Lacuna was the sixth full moon of the year, the still midpoint around which the rest of the year rotated. June, when the fireflies were out.

  “We were down at the quarry. Your mother was there. You were at home, asleep in your crib. She was real still and quiet that night. I remember it. She had this grin, a faraway grin, like she was laughing at some joke nobody else heard. The rest of us, we were at each other one way or another. You know how it is. Foul. But she was a spark, a glistening thing in the middle of us all. She reminded us that we didn’t know a thing about love. It was like that.”

  There was a catch in his voice, barely perceptible. A tiny tremor, the kind that means a massive fissure has quaked open somewhere deep, deep underground.

  “That’s where we lost her. We hunted for her. We did. The police came the next day. And firemen. But nobody could find anything. Maybe, we thought, maybe she’d come home to us. We liked to think it. Your father thought it. He thought it for a long time.”

  Then he was quiet, and I wondered if he was done. But after some time had passed, he rose up again, and this time he leaned over and pointed a long, wavering finger right in my face, as though condemning me for reminding him of my lost, moonlit mother.

  “But this is what I’ll have you know,” he said, his voice hard. “She was better than us. Better than all of us. She went after the real thing of what the rest of us were just playing at. And she found it. God help her, she found it.”

  So there were others who felt the loss of my mother, maybe even more than I felt it, because I had only known the myth of her. Maybe that was what I saw in the eyes of those storekeepers who gifted me with free ice cream or barrettes or jars of maraschino cherries. Maybe in me they saw the reflection of my mother, whom they had lost on the narrow horiz
on.

  And maybe that was the peculiar smell that I breathed in from the purple giraffe I had cuddled to my chest on many nights of my childhood—the odor of loss, which is like sumac and fallen leaves.

  “But where?” I said, my voice small. “Where did she go? Where did you lose her?”

  There was the quiver in his voice again, and a sound in his mouth like it was chewing on something—but I understood that he was only chewing on his own story, trying to swallow back down what was getting retched up.

  “It was that mine,” he said.

  The mine. Map the mine. Hair like straw. Papier-mâché skin. Gray. A mouth that would swallow you up. I felt sick.

  “She just got up and walked away,” Mr. Hunter said. “That’s how it was. She rose up, and everyone stopped and waited, because it seemed like she might say something—and we listened when she said things. But she didn’t say anything. She stood up, and she turned her back on us, and she walked into the mine. See? The dark got her.”

  Those sunken eyes that looked only inward.

  I wanted to run. I wanted to be split from my own skin.

  “It was done before we knew it,” he said. “When we realized she didn’t intend to come back, we went in after her. But those mine tunnels—you’ve got no chance. There are shafts sunk everywhere that go straight down into nothing. You can’t see two feet into the mouth of the thing. She didn’t pause or turn around, she just walked forward. And then we couldn’t see her anymore.”

  Sometimes death is a found mother.

  And that’s how I found mine.

  * * *

  Then I ran. The moon was not full, but it did not matter. Still outfitted in my papery pink party dress, I ran—I ran through town to the other side, against the headlights of the cars, into the woods, all the way to the quarry and the abandoned mine, where the wind played a shivery kind of music as it dove down into the deepest parts of the earth.