Large Animals in Everyday Life

by Wendy Brenner

  I could hear his phone ringing as soon as I stepped into the hallway, and when I got down there it was impossible to talk to him. He opened the door for me but ran back to the kitchen, where he was trying to rig up an answering machine which the ringing phone kept fouling. The machine was a cheap model, I noticed, the same brand as my blow-dryer. For a moment I actually pitied Borden. “Big congratulations,” I said.

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said. Drops of sweat fell from his brow onto the blinking, clicking machine. “You’re not gonna have to worry about this, once I get it hooked up.”

  “That was a pretty smart idea,” I told him. “Leaving town.”

  “You bet,” he said. “The Lotto Commission advises it. To avoid unwanted solicitations and attention. From acquaintances, you know.”

  “Are you taking Frieda?” I asked. She was the only person I ever saw going in and out of his place, and I imagined she would look healthier with a nice tan to set off her hair. I wished that for her, honestly.

  “Even that I can’t say,” Borden said. “But I sure wouldn’t mind taking your friend. Listen, you mind if I just give you the key and show you the brine shrimp? I’m kind of busy. I think I’m gonna leave tonight. I really appreciate this, CeCe.”

  “Oh, no problem, I’m just so happy for you,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now, you ever hear the expression ‘Your eyes are bigger than your stomach’? ’Cause what you got to remember here is that the fishes’ stomachs are small, you know what I’m saying? If you look at their eyeballs, you’ll see what I’m saying.” He held his hand up to my face and showed me his finger and thumb pressed together, as though he were holding a tiny, invisible bead. Together we looked significantly at the invisible bead. Seconds went by, and finally he shook his head. “Jeez,” he said, “you just never know when the ball’s gonna roll your way.”

  • • •

  “Well, the fat’s in the fire now!” Jeannie shouted when I told her. Her voice was spotty with static because she was on the cellular phone the professor had given her, on her way to lunch at some Pavilion place. She always called from her car, even though the phone on her desk at the bank was unmonitored and had a hundred special features and worked fine, and she always shouted the whole time and complained about the bad traffic she was stuck in. We’d known each other too long for her to be showing off, but that’s what it was—like complaining that she looked too young and was always getting carded. She wanted me to say, again, how special the professor was, how lavish, but I refused. He was petite like her, always looked like he’d had his hair cut that same day, and spoke to me in a measured, modest little voice, as though my big bones offended him, as though my neurons and dendrites were large and ungainly and an embarrassment to neuroscience, his honorable chosen field. Delicate, well-groomed men often treated me this way, as though I were likely to breathe up all their air or just fall on them like a tree, but when Roger did it I had to pretend not to notice—we were supposed to become great barbecue buddies, in-laws practically. And yet even gleeful Jeannie toned herself down around him, I’d observed. He couldn’t possibly appreciate the real Jeannie, the Jeannie I’d known all my life.

  Now, on the car phone, she was her regular self, shouting that I should have drunk the Riunite. She meant the night I moved into my apartment, when Borden opened his door eight or nine times during my trips up and down the stairs, not offering to help but pretending to check different things: the mail, his dead bolt, a bulb that hung over the landing. After a half-hour of this he finally affected to notice me, and brought out the bottle. “You look like you deserve a glass of this,” he said. I shook his damp hand and told him I was allergic to sulfites. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I saw that on ‘Sixty Minutes.’”

  “You’d be having millionaire babies now, boy!” Jeannie yelled.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, and invited her over later to hang out at his place, to sit in the apartment of a millionaire.

  “I’ll break my hip in his bathroom and sue!” she shouted.

  “But don’t invite anybody else this time, okay?” I said. “We don’t want things to get out of hand. Reporters might be lurking around, or other, more dangerous people.”

  “Alone’s better, actually,” she yelled, “because I need to talk to you some more about my wedding.” She hung up, and the rush of her traffic was cut off with a click. My living room swelled with quiet. I remembered I needed to launder my lace-collar dress to wear to work, where they planned to take my picture for the newsletter, for having earned this bonus. Only Saturday and Sunday were left of my vacation. If I shut my eyes I could see the days, like empty boxes, lined up in front of me.

  • • •

  We had all of Borden’s bug-flecked lights turned on, a bottle of his bargain gin opened in the kitchen, and we’d switched off the ringer on the phone; the little answering machine was clicking away on a corner table like the Little Engine That Could, silently recording messages. A pizza was supposedly on the way, though we’d had to fight with the man on the phone, who said he’d taken half a dozen orders for this address already. “A hundred pizzas,” he said. “A pizza with dollar bills on it. A Beluga pizza. Jesus, you think I’m an idiot?”

  “Look, we only want one,” I finally said. “We’re using a coupon.” That had worked.

  Jeannie was twirling shoeless across the rug, her lacy slip flashing white, and I remembered meeting her for the first time in fourth grade, her wearing slips under her plain school dresses even then, as though she were better than the rest of us. “I’m spiking these guppies,” she said, waving her drink over the tank.

  “Check out their eyeballs first,” I said. I was slumped on Borden’s low yellow sofa, my cheek pressed against the worn velour, which smelled, up close, not like spaghetti but like a stuffed terrycloth pony I’d carried around everywhere until I was eight or nine years old. I had sucked on its matted yarn tail whenever I needed it, and when foam pieces started leaking from the rump, my mother cut the tail off for me to keep and threw the body in the trash. I took gulps of Borden’s cheap gin, recalling how I had imagined the pony’s body being absorbed by the roots of a nice tree somewhere, being soaked up and incorporated into the trunk of the tree, the nicest thing I could imagine happening to trash.

  “Liven up, will you?” Jeannie said.

  “I’m just wondering what stupid Borden is going to do with all that money,” I said.

  “Well, let’s listen to that answering machine. Can’t we just turn up the volume, without messing things up?”

  “You better do it,” I said. “You know how to use a car phone. You know how to use a safe-deposit box. I can’t even get a job at the rodeo.”

  Jeannie gave me a look and adjusted the machine, which was in the middle of taping a message. “Mack Fine,” a man’s voice said. “Fine, Breen, and Janky, financial consultants. Flexibility is really what we’re all about, so don’t feel limited, say, by the list of services you see in our flyer.” The doorbell buzzed.

  “It’s Janky!” Jeannie screamed.

  I let in the flat-haired delivery girl, who was holding the pizza box propped against her hip like an empty cocktail tray. “Large mushroom onion,” she said. “Ain’t you the lottery girls?”

  “We is,” Jeannie said, “but you ain’t gettin’ no big tip.”

  “We flipped coins over who got to deliver this one,” the pizza girl said. “They at least want the lowdown on you two. You know the guy who won, right?”

  “I do,” I said.

  “I does,” Jeannie said.

  The pizza girl shook her head, and her stringy hair swung slowly. “What I wouldn’t give,” she said. “What’s he like? Is he your old man?”

  “Oh, well,” I said, feeling my gin a little, in the way I kept nodding my head to the rhythm of her swinging hair. “He’s a big guy, a stay-at-home kind of guy …”

  “… Dr. Stopes, I don’t know if you remember me,” came a sudden nasal voice from the answering
machine. The three of us stood still and listened. “The Dermatology Lab in St. Paul. You were here last March? How are your nevi doing, have you had any recurrences? Anyway, all of us here just wanted to say, you know, congratulations.” A high female voice yelped in the background. “Patty, who takes your appointments? Says congratulations. Anyway, we have some new samples of that fluoroplex generic we can send your way, so if you’re interested you can give us a call at your convenience. Congratulations again.” The machine clicked off and reset itself.

  “Man, doctor wants to do you a favor,” said the pizza girl.

  “Why are you even still standing here?” Jeannie said to her.

  “That was compassionate,” I said to Jeannie after we’d let the girl out. I was back on the smelly couch, picking the oily onions, her idea, off my slice.

  “Me?” she said. “What’s wrong with you anyway? You’re probably turning into Mrs. Borden sitting on that couch.”

  “And I’m also sick of looking at that Victoria’s Secret shit, by the way,” I said. “Am I supposed to be aroused or something?”

  She came over and stood in front of me and raised her skirt, holding the hem by two fingers so that her slip hung there in my face. I felt like I was watching a blank projection screen, waiting for a movie to start. I remembered a fight we’d had in fourth or fifth grade in which I had called her “prostitute” and she had refused to reply, to that or to any of my insults, except to say, “Good.” That had been our last real fight, now that I thought of it. “Is this how you’re going to behave at your big important wedding?” I said.

  “You’re not really joking, are you?” she said. She looked at me and let her skirt fall. “Well,” she said, after a while, “and I don’t even feel bad telling you this, anymore, the way you’re acting, but you’re no longer maid of honor. Roger’s sister is back in the country.” Roger’s sister didn’t like Jeannie and had once given her a bad haircut on purpose.

  “You could have just told me that on your cellular,” I said. “In fact, you could tell your whole life story on your cellular.” In a flash I saw Jeannie and me on the school playground in our green Girl Scout uniforms, forming the letters of the alphabet with our small, slender bodies, acting out for own amusement the physical progression from A to B to C, cocking our knees and elbows at bizarre angles, getting tangled in our sashes and laughing so hard at each other that we couldn’t speak. For the first time, I saw that I had always operated on the unconscious assumption that our slow, steady movement away from childhood was arbitrary—that, like an amusement park ride, time would eventually pause, or halt, or even reverse itself and take us back in the other direction.

  I heard the fierce scrape of Jeannie striking a match in the kitchen. “You can’t smoke in here!” I yelled. “Borden says the mollies—not guppies—won’t breed properly!” I had to take practically a whole breath to say each word, as though something large, an invisible Borden, had settled down on me; it was hard to hold things in my mind. A woman’s voice on the answering machine was saying something about never forgiving, and I thought: security. Then I realized I had them reversed; the phone woman was talking about securities. “Never forgiving” had come from me. A knock that seemed to have been going on for some time got louder, and I got up to answer the door, but no one was there. The pounding came again, from somewhere over our heads, definitely inside the building. “Jeannie, get out here,” I said. “Someone’s doing something. Something’s happening.”

  “It almost sounds like it’s coming from your place, doesn’t it?” she said. She came through, not fierce at all but oddly languid, blowing smoke at the aquarium. The knocks stopped. “I’ll go up there and check,” she said.

  “Don’t leave me here alone,” I said. “I’m serious.”

  “Here, give me your key,” she said, talking as one would to a child.

  I locked the door behind her and went to wait by the window, craning my neck to see if someone who wanted to kill us was pressed up against the building, but all I saw was the empty, darkening view down the street. Two old men were attempting to wheel themselves out of the nursing home at the end of the block, ignored by a group of nurses laughing and smoking cigarettes under the security light. I saw this all the time, had called to complain about it, and I wondered if Borden ever watched it; through this window he had the exact same view I did. The glass was greaseless, spotless. I imagined what our two faces must look like from the outside, one on top of the other, peering through our windows with the blank, identical expressions of passengers on a train. The other units in the fourplex faced north, looked out over a frontage road that led to a mall, though the tenants on that side of the building changed frequently and weren’t around much while they did live there: young couples getting through the winter before they got married, attractive divorcees getting back on their feet, graduate students finishing up their dissertations. I never noticed any of them looking out their windows.

  I waited, watching the nursing home and listening to Borden’s messages; four more financial advisors called, and then a woman who had to be Frieda came on, though her voice was more formal and youthful than I had imagined. “I never know what to say on these machines,” she said. “I hope you’re having a lovely time, you deserve it, Tom. Well, I thought it would be nice for you to have a message when you get home. I’ll sign off now. Have a lovely vacation.” The click and silence after her call filled me with sadness: poor Frieda had been left behind, the way we were all going to be left behind, only in her case it was worse because she probably loved Borden, in her own drab, faded way. Goddamn Jeannie, I thought, as though she had something to do with it.

  Upstairs, the energy of real fear surprised me. My apartment’s door was unlocked and I let myself in, trying to comprehend that something terrible, life-changing, could be waiting, just moments ahead of me in time. I stalled there by the door, switching my three-way lamp twice through bright, brighter, brightest, and then Jeannie padded in, blinking and nude, her skinny body, tiny breasts exactly the same as they’d been in sixth grade. For a second I thought rape, hostage, help, but then I saw her expression and something deflated in my chest. “Bachelor party hijinks,” she said.

  “Hey!” the professor called from my bedroom in his proper, lecture-hall voice. “Is that CeCe? CeCe, come in here! CeCe, I want to say hello!”

  “You were in my bed?” I said.

  “This wasn’t my idea, honest,” Jeannie said. “I didn’t even know it was him until I got up here.”

  “CeCe! CeCe!” Roger called. He said my name like it was hypothetical, a joke.

  Jeannie stepped up and tried to hug me. “Just ignore him,” she said. “They were drinking Rumpelmints. He thought we were at your place. He tried to beep me but my battery was dead.” I tried to push her away, but she got her skinny arms over my shoulders, her chin against my ear. “It’s okay,” she said, her oniony mouth warm against my cheek. “Nothing is going to change, we’ll see each other all the time, nothing will be any different.”

  “Jesus, you have a beeper?” I said. I couldn’t get her arms unlocked from around me.

  “CeCe!” Roger shouted. “Let me see those boots of yours! I wish Jeannie would get some of those!”

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Jeannie was whispering, only it was no longer Jeannie, and no longer me. I shut my eyes and put my hands on her bare back, hypothetically, feeling her ribs, her smooth sides and small breasts, her onion breath in my hair, and I thought, This is what Roger does, this is what he gets, and I tried to imagine what kind of luck he thought he had, getting this. It no longer had anything to do with me. Then I imagined Borden imagining this, sitting by the window wanting this, at the expense of poor, polite Frieda. And who could blame him? Everyone wanted it. I pushed Jeannie hard and she stepped back.

  “What,” she said. “What is your problem? Is it the lottery? Any of us could have won the lottery.”

  “Do whatever you want,” I said. “I’m going back
down to Borden’s.” Prostitute. She followed me out into the hall and stood there naked, blabbing away like an anchorwoman.

  “CeCe, nothing substantial has changed since yesterday, or the day before that, or the day before that,” she was saying. “You are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy!” “Fine, good,” I heard her say, when she thought I was finally out of her range.

  • • •

  In a dream the sailor came back to me. We sat side by side on a dock overlooking some calm water, and he helped me put back together the pieces of a paper horse I had accidentally torn up. The pieces of the horse were small and he took them in his hands with great tenderness. I turned to look at him, filled with feeling, and the gold buttons on his uniform caught the sun, blinding me. Through the explosion of light I reached for him, unable to see my own fingers, and then the spaghetti smell was there, as close as my own mouth. It was Borden, his face right there, the lamp switched on behind him, and I pushed back at him frantically. “Hey, pussycat, pussycat, take it easy,” he said. He was sitting against my hip, pressing me into the back of his sofa, grinning down at me with gray teeth. Chest hair bloomed in a small bouquet from under the neckline of his T-shirt. “Don’t touch me,” I managed to say.

  “Hey, okay,” he said, raising his hands as though I’d pointed a gun at him. He stood and shuffled off toward the kitchen, his thighs whiffing against each other. “Jeez, I live here,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. It was late, three or four, and Borden’s living room seemed calm, even peaceful, the mollies moving slowly up and down in their tank. I pulled myself into a sitting position and looked around for my boots.