by John Fulton
THE ANIMAL GIRL
Yellow Shoe Fiction
Michael Griffith, Series Editor
THE ANIMAL GIRL
Two Novellas and Three Stories
JOHN FULTON
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2007 by John Fulton
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
An LSU Press Paperback Original
First printing
Designer: Michelle A. Neustrom
Typeface: Whitman, Gotham
Printer and binder: Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fulton, John, 1967–
The animal girl : two novellas and three stories / John Fulton.
p. cm. — (Yellow shoe fiction)
“An LSU Press paperback original”—T.p. verso.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3294-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. United States—Social life and customs—21st century—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3606.U58A55 2007
813′.6—dc22 2007015679
These stories first appeared in journals. “Hunters” was published in The Southern Review (Autumn 2004), reprinted in Pushcart Prize XXX: Best of the Small Presses (Fall 2005), and selected as a distinguished story of 2004 in The Best American Short Stories 2005. “Real Grief” was published in The Greensboro Review (Fall 2004). “The Animal Girl” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review (Fall 2005) and received a special mention in Pushcart Prize XXXI: Best of the Small Presses. “A Small Matter” was published in Other Voices (Fall/Winter 2005) and “The Sleeping Woman” appeared in The Journal (Spring 2007).
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
For Zoë
CONTENTS
Hunters
Real Grief
The Animal Girl
A Small Matter
The Sleeping Woman
HUNTERS
Kate answered his personal ad in late summer, soon after she’d been told for the second time that she was dying. She had always thought of herself as shy, not the type even to peruse such ads. But the news had been jolting, if not altogether unexpected, and had allowed her to act outside her old ideas of herself.
The first time her doctor told her she would die had been two years before. The cancer had started in her left breast and moved to her brain. She’d had a mastectomy and undergone a full course of chemotherapy to no effect. A divorcée, she was close to only a few people: her sixteen-year-old daughter, Melissa, her widowed mother, who was now dead, and one good woman friend, all of whom she’d told. She’d worried about what to do with Melissa, then fourteen, whose father had been out of touch since he’d left them years before. And then, after worrying, weeping, raging, and undergoing the storm of insanity that, by all reports, was supposed to end in acceptance, she learned that her cancer had mysteriously retreated and that she would live. Her doctors hesitated to use the word “cured.” Cancers such as hers were rarely, if ever, cured. Yet they could find no signs of carcinoma cells in her system. She returned to work, got her hair done, went on shopping sprees, and thought about the possibility of reconstructive surgery for her left breast. Even a nipple, her plastic surgeon had informed her, could be convincingly improvised. In trying to explain her restored health to her daughter, her coworkers, her friends, she could find no other word than “cured.” And now, once again, the doctors were telling her she had tumors about the size of peas in her liver and spine. She would die in a matter of months.
The news silenced Kate. This time, she told no one.
She selected his ad because of its unthreatening tone. Others had intimidated her with their loud enthusiasm and confidence: “Young vital fifty-something looking for lady with love for life.” Still others sounded sleazy—“Master in need of pet”—or psychotic, even murderous: “Quiet, mysterious Lone Ranger looking for that special horse to ride into the night.” By contrast, his sounded distinctly meek: “Like books and munching popcorn in front of TV.” He tended toward “shyness with a goofy edge.” He sought “sex, but more, too. Tenderness without attachments.” That caught her eye. She wanted sex. She wanted “tenderness without attachments.” In the years since her diagnosis, she’d kept her maimed body to herself. Now a feeling of bodily coldness and desolation had come over her, and she wanted to be brought back to life. She wanted to be touched—maybe for one night, one week, one month.
Kate’s daughter heard his message on the answering machine first. “There’s a guy on the machine for you,” she said when Kate got home from work. Melissa stood next to her in the kitchen while she played it. “Kate,” a heavy male voice said, “Charles here. I look forward to meeting you. Gotta say I’m just a bit nervous. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never done this before. Not to say that I don’t want to. I do. I’m going on, aren’t I? Sorry. You’ve got other messages to hear, I’m sure.” He paused, and Melissa laughed. Kate wasn’t sure what to make of this halting message, though she liked the fact that he was obviously nervous; his voice was nearly trembling. “I guess I should tell you what I look like. I’m tall and have a mustache. See you on Saturday.”
“A mustache?” Melissa smiled suggestively. “I didn’t know you were looking for someone.”
“I’m not,” Kate said. Her daughter had the wrong idea. She’d assumed Kate was searching for a companion, was healing and moving on with what would be a long life. It wasn’t fair to leave her with false impressions, but Kate couldn’t go through all the tears again. She wanted her privacy for now. “Don’t, please, get any ideas.”
“No ideas,” Melissa said, laughing. “I think it’s great. I think it’s what you should be doing.”
Kate hardly expected to be afraid. She took every precaution. She’d chosen a popular coffee shop, often crowded on Saturday afternoons, which seemed the safest time to meet a stranger. Ann Arbor was hardly a dangerous town. It was clean and wealthy and civic-minded, she reminded herself. It was an especially hot September day, over ninety degrees, but the air-conditioning in the café was crisp and bracing. Kate selected a table in a sunny corner, beside two elderly women wearing pastel sweat suits and gleaming white orthopedic tennis shoes; they made Kate feel still safer. One of the silver-haired women was babysitting an infant and kept her hand on a baby carriage, now and then looking down into it with a clownish face. Students sat at other tables and read books. A toddler ran past Kate, its father in pursuit.
She heard him before she saw him. “Are you Kate?”
She stood, and he presented her so quickly with a red carnation that it startled her—the redness of it, the sudden, bright presence of it in her hand—and she giggled.
“I’m Charles,” he said. He wore nice slacks, a button-up shirt, and a blazer; and was suffering—his forehead glistened—from the extremely hot day. His face was thin, his bony nose and cheekbones complex and not immediately attractive. But it was his hair that surprised her most. Thick, gray, nicely combed: it was the hair of a pleasant, not unattractive older man, a man in his fifties, as his ad had said. Kate hadn’t dated for more than six years; her divorce and then her illness had made sure of that. And now, at forty-five, she was shocked to think that this middle-aged man might be her romantic prospect.
When they sat down, Kate noticed the rapid thudding of her heart. She picked up her coffee and watched it tremble in her hand before she took a sip. For some reason, the table was shuddering beneath her. “I’m sorry,” Charles said, putting a hand on his knee to stop it from jiggling. “I’m terrible at handling my nerves. I’m no good at meeting people. I
t’s not one of my skills.” He took a folded white handkerchief from his back pocket and neatly wiped the sweat from his forehead.
His obvious fear assured Kate that he was harmless and maybe even kind. “I meant to say thank you for the flower.” She looked down at the wilted carnation.
“It’s not very original of me.”
When she picked her coffee up now, her hand was steady. Clearly one of them needed to be calmer. “I liked what you said in your ad about tenderness,” Kate said. “That’s why I called.”
“I’m not usually this adventurous.” He looked over his shoulder and then at her again. “I’m still getting over a divorce. I guess that’s why I’m so jittery about all this.”
Things weren’t going well, Kate knew. And for some reason, she wanted them to go well with this timid man, and so she continued to be brave, to say what she was thinking. “‘Tenderness without attachments.’ That sounded nice. None of the other ads talked about that. I thought that was original.”
He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief again. “I just don’t want anything serious. But I don’t want it to feel, you know, like just an exchange of … of …”
“Bodies?” Kate said. He sat back in his chair, as if struck, and she felt her face deepen in color. The thought that they were here, in large part, for the prospect of sex was out on the table now. It was a bold and raw motive, for which neither of them, middle-aged and awkward, seemed well suited. But the awkwardness and shame were refreshing, too; Kate hadn’t blushed in years.
“I guess,” he said. He patted his mustache gently, as if drawing composure from it. “Not that we have to ever get there. We might just become friends. We might just enjoy each other’s company.”
“Sure,” she said, though in fact she felt an unexpected pang of rejection. Was this skittish man already running from her bed?
She changed the subject then, telling him about her job as a loan officer, a serious job that had always suited her rather too serious character; her love for fresh food and cooking; her sixteen-year-old daughter, who right now was a little too absorbed in her boyfriend. “I wish my kid would fall in love,” Charles said, smiling. “He’s angry. His mother gave him up when she gave me up. I understand the anger. I’m angry, too. But there’s something mean in him that I’d never seen before this.” Ryan, Charles’s son, had a mohawk that changed colors—purple, yellow, blue—at least once a month and a lizard tattoo on his forearm. Charles owned an office furniture and supply store. “It sounds boring, I know. But I actually sort of enjoy it.”
It did sound boring to Kate, who was much more interested to learn that Charles enjoyed hunting. It hardly seemed like something this concerned father and furniture salesman would do. “You kill things?” Kate asked. “You enjoy it?”
He confessed that he did, though he didn’t hunt large game. “Deer and elk are beautiful animals and too much of a mess. Field dressing a deer can take the better part of a morning.”
“Field dressing?” she asked.
“Gutting them, removing the organs. You need to do that soon after a kill, before you cure and slaughter it. It’s a real mess. I used to hunt large game as a boy with my dad. It’s not for me anymore.” He shook his head in a way that allowed Kate to picture this mess: the blood, the entrails, the carcass. “I just hunt upland birds now: pheasant, woodcocks, grouse. It’s not so much the killing as it is the stalk, the chase. Being out in the open air, seeing the land.”
“But you do kill them?”
He nodded. “I suppose you’re against that sort of thing.”
Kate thought about it a moment. “Not really. Though I’d say I’m not for it either. I find it odd.”
Two hours later, when they walked out of the café, a hot wind was blowing down Washington Street, and the concrete beneath her felt as if it were baking through her thin-soled shoes. She felt lightheaded, buzzed from three cups of coffee, and nervous about what would happen next, how they’d say good-bye. Would they kiss? She couldn’t imagine it and was relieved when he reached out with his sweaty hand and shook hers softly. “I enjoyed meeting you,” he said. A train of running children shot between them, and they both took a step back. She half thought he’d turn away then and walk off, and she’d have to wonder why he put her through two hours of conversation about his divorce, his son, about slaughtering and field dressing deer. But then he asked her if he could call again, and she couldn’t—hard as she tried—suppress a smile and the obvious eagerness in her voice when she said, “I’d like that.”
* * *
Kate didn’t feel sick yet. She’d felt healthy now for months, light of body, energetic, strong. She tried not to think of the fatigue and pain to come. But the week the heat wave lifted and the first cooler days of fall arrived, Kate succumbed to fear.
She’d been approving a loan for a pregnant couple when it happened. The woman wore a purple maternity dress that said “Mommy” at the place where her belly showed most. She carried her weight with an intimidating, ungraceful physicality, and her face glowed with acne and oil and a smile that was almost aggressive. The woman’s scent of flowers and sweat filled Kate’s small office, the air suddenly feeling close and tropical. She kept saying “we” in a way that left Kate feeling bereft and excluded. “We’re looking forward to our first home. This is just what we need right now.” The woman looked down at the roundness where she had just placed her hands. “Three more months,” she said. The thoughts came to Kate before she could anticipate them. Would she be bedridden by then? Would she be gone? Could she already feel the beginning of fatigue? Would the symptoms she’d experienced last time—the headaches, the facial paralysis, the double vision—begin that very day?
Claiming illness, she left work early that afternoon only to discover Melissa and Mark in her bathroom. The shower had been on, which was no doubt why they hadn’t heard Kate climbing the stairs. When she walked into her room, Kate saw steam curling out the open bathroom door before she saw her sixteen-year-old daughter, naked save for the pink strip of her Calvin Klein panties, balancing on her knees and giving pleasure with too much skill, too much expertise, to her standing boyfriend. She took it in for a moment: the bodies moving together in practiced motion, the flayed brown and white of tan lines, her daughter’s breasts, mouth, and hands, the curve of her back. “Melissa,” Kate said.
Melissa stopped, and Mark grabbed his crotch and turned his shuddering backside to Kate. “Mom!” Melissa’s naked body lunged at the door and slammed it in Kate’s face. “I can’t believe you, Mom!”
“Put your clothes on now!” Kate shouted at the door.
“We can’t,” Melissa said. “Our clothes are all out there.”
Kate turned then and noticed the storm-strewn boxer shorts, Levi’s, soiled white socks, Melissa’s blouse and bra, even her pink Keds. Why were Melissa’s shoes on Kate’s bed? She picked them up, tossed them to the floor, and then started crying. She hardly knew why, though it had something to do with the pregnant woman and the surprise of her daughter, her body so womanly, full in the hips and breasts, more beautiful than Kate had ever been, engaged, absorbed in what Kate could only think of now as an adult activity. Her loss of control left her feeling even angrier at Melissa. “I want to talk to you both downstairs in five minutes!” she shouted.
After doing her best to cover up all signs of tears, Kate sat across from Melissa and Mark in the living room. They had a messy, postsex look about them, their hair mussed and their clothes, if secure and in place, somehow looser on their bodies. “I don’t know what to say,” Kate began.
“We’re being careful,” Melissa said. “I’m on the pill, Mom. I’ve had my first pelvic exam. We’ve both been tested. I’m doing everything I should be doing.”
“You were in my bathroom,” Kate said. These words made Mark, a tall, good-looking boy, broad in the shoulders and not usually meek, look down at the floor.
“You have the large shower,” Melissa said. “We were going to clean
things up. You weren’t supposed to be home yet.”
“Your clothes were all over my bed. Your shoes were on my bed.”
Melissa smirked and flashed her blue eyes at Kate. This was her most charming and practiced gesture, and though it usually made Kate fall instantly in love with her daughter, she resisted it now. “Well,” Melissa said, “we were in a hurry.”
Kate felt her face go red. “You should have been studying.”
“We still have time to study,” Melissa said.
“You need all the time you can get. You have to apply to schools and prepare for the college boards.”
“That’s next year,” Melissa said.
Kate took a deep breath. She was about to do something she had been afraid to do for months. “I don’t think what you did was wrong. I’m more concerned about the irresponsibility of neglecting the rest of life so that you could do …” Kate couldn’t name what they’d done, nor could she keep pretending to herself that it didn’t bother her. How could her child, her teenaged daughter, take on this responsibility? How could she lie on her back in a doctor’s office with her legs in stirrups so that she could, as safely as possible, give herself to a boy? A boy who made her lose so much presence of mind that she would throw her dirty shoes on her mother’s bed, use her shower, and maybe even afterwards use her bed. Kate had terrifying visions of what would become of these two after she was gone. They’d end up in ten months with a baby and stuck in subsidized housing somewhere. It was possible. But what frightened Kate most was the fact that she herself was responsible for pushing these kids—and they certainly were no more than kids—into each other’s arms with her own desperation, her own intensity.
Two years before, the first time Kate thought she was dying, she’d panicked. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stand the aloneness, the waiting, the nights of insomnia. Kate clung to Melissa and made her go everywhere with her—the doctor’s office, the grocery store, the post office, the accountant’s. It didn’t take long for Melissa to disappear. She joined the swim team, the debate club, and the school newspaper. In the meantime, Kate kept dying. She suffered from headaches, double vision, loss of balance so extreme that she’d have to lean against the nearest wall to stay upright. Kate saw Melissa only in the late evenings when she’d sit at the kitchen table, her hair stringy from chlorine, wolfing down cereal, toast, and cookies. And so when Kate woke at night and the hours alone in the dark became intolerable, she walked down the hallway to her daughter’s room, gently moved aside the large stuffed bear her then fourteen-year-old child slept with, and got into her bed. She tried not to cry, but failed. Melissa said nothing, just stiffened and moved to the edge. At first light, Kate quietly got up and returned to her room.