The Animal Girl

by John Fulton

  Kate slept with her daughter as often as three times a week. She slept with her until one night she opened the door and saw in the dimness a boy next to Melissa. She had met Mark only once before then and knew that he was on the swim team and played tenor saxophone for Central High’s jazz ensemble. His thick curly hair was on the pillow, his muscular back was turned to her, and his bare arm was wrapped around Melissa, protecting her from her sick mother.

  After that, Kate stayed away from her daughter’s room. She might have put an end to Mark’s sleepovers if she hadn’t been sick and, later, if Melissa and Mark hadn’t cooled off soon after the cancer disappeared. Mark no longer slept over, so far as Kate knew. But her cancer was back, and she could only expect the worst when her daughter found out. So she was finally going to put her foot down, never mind that what bothered her most was not so much their having sex—she had assumed as much before this afternoon—as her having seen the sex, and having seen Melissa’s dirty tennis shoes—that image returned now and made her wince—on her clean bed. Thrown, tossed with no concern whatever for her mother. “You two need to see less of each other,” she said. “It would be better for both of you. You can go out on Friday and Saturday nights. But weekday afternoons and nights are off limits. Got it?”

  Melissa looked at Kate with childish fury. “No,” she said.

  “Don’t say no to me.” Kate hardly recognized herself. She’d always been tolerant and open with her daughter. She’d always laid out options, pros and cons, and let her daughter make her own decisions.

  Melissa shook her head. “No. I’m saying no. We’re not going to do it.” She stood, took Mark forcefully by the hand, and led him up to her bedroom, where she slammed the door. Kate should have done something. She should have stood at the foot of the stairs and yelled. She should have gone up there and shouted through the door. But she was too tired to go on playing the role of parent. In any case, she wouldn’t be a parent much longer.

  Her second meeting with Charles took place at seven in the morning at a small restaurant across from the university hospital’s cancer center, where, among other procedures, she’d had her mammogram done seven times in one sitting. Kate had wanted to suggest another breakfast place, but she kept quiet. She didn’t want to have to explain herself. Not yet. A line of scarlet sunrise had just begun to wipe out the last few morning stars when they stepped out of the cold. All the same, waiting to be seated, Kate felt the presence of the black glass façade across the street and couldn’t help remembering the pink walls of the waiting booth where she’d spent almost eight hours with plastic pads stuck to her breasts. Only a floor above the mammogram clinic, she would lie on her back weeks later while a physician’s assistant slid a needle deep between two upper lumbar vertebrae to draw out the spinal fluid in which, it turned out, carcinoma cells were actively dividing. She was told to expect double vision, speech impairment, dizziness, partial paralysis, and any number of random sensations due to the tumor that was growing in her brain. And then there was the chemotherapy, the woman named Meg who’d died in the waiting room while reading Vogue. It was hardly an appropriate magazine for a cancer ward, Kate had been thinking when Meg slumped over in her chair and stopped breathing. Kate was amazed at her calm as she broke Meg’s fall, sat her upright, and held her in her chair until someone arrived and took her away.

  Once she and Charles sat across from each other in a booth, she was able to forget the hospital. A sheet of Levolor-sliced sun fell over their table, and billows of steam rose from their coffee cups in the brightness. He was jumpy, tapping his fingers against his cup, then running them through his hair. She was already getting used to the angularity of his face and finding it vaguely attractive. His blue eyes she noticed for the first time—faint, shallow—after the waitress set their menus down. “Aren’t you nervous?” he asked.

  She wasn’t, and she told him so.

  “I am,” he said, and she could hear it in his voice. “Doesn’t it bother you to see a grown man afraid?”

  “Apparently not.” She laughed, reached across the table, and took his hand for the first time. But when he didn’t loosen to her touch, she let him go.

  The next week, she dropped into his furniture store just before closing. Charles seemed to have a great deal more courage as he walked briskly through the endless rows of desks, filing cabinets, and computer tables to meet her. “Welcome,” he said, smiling, at ease in his suit and tie. He led her around and made her sit in multiple styles of waiting-room chairs and ergonomically designed stools for typists and receptionists. The repetition and sameness of objects—chair after chair after chair—spooked her a little. “You think it’s terrible,” he said. “What I do.”

  She denied it at first. Then said, “It does seem a little … lonely. All these human objects without the humans.”

  “You want to see lonely?” he said. He walked her into the back: a gray, dimly lit storage facility, in the middle of which stood a forklift surrounded by towers of boxes. The place was remarkably vacant of warmth and life, and a soft roar of wind and emptiness seemed to hum at its center.

  She admired his comfort here, his sense of dominion. “I don’t mind it. It’s quiet. It’s like going to the park. It’s an escape.”

  Later that week they strolled through the arboretum, where the trees had begun to turn and where they lingered beside a glassy, shallow stretch of the Huron River, the pink, unmarked evening sky laid out over its mirror. Two hippie kids in loose clothing sat on a log, holding each other, kissing, giggling. A muddy-colored dog with a red handkerchief knotted around its neck leapt into the river and began drinking. When Kate took Charles’s hand and pulled herself close to him, he was trembling. And somehow, just after Kate kissed his cheek lightly, she caught it, too; a rush of fear shook her. She was breathing shallowly when Charles bent down and kissed her on the lips. “I hope that was all right,” he said.

  When she nodded, he seemed immensely relieved, his step lighter now as they walked hand in hand, swinging their linked arms, up a dirt path until they came to a clearing in the trees. Startled, a deer sprinted through the high grass, dove into the trees, and was gone. In the orange evening light, Charles looked larger, less meek, and Kate couldn’t help wondering what this gentle man would be like with a gun. “What’s it like to kill something?” she asked.

  “You might not like me as much if I told you the truth.”

  Kate laughed and squeezed his hand. “I promise I’ll still like you.”

  “OK,” Charles said. “It’s thrilling. It’s why you go out there. It’s the fun part.”

  “It’s fun to kill?” If she didn’t like him less, it still wasn’t the most pleasant answer, nor one she understood.

  “Perhaps ‘fun’ isn’t exactly the right word.”

  On their walk back, the temperature dropped sharply, and Kate was shivering so violently that she had to wonder if her vulnerability to the cold had to do with her illness. Was she weaker than she’d suspected? When they parked in front of Kate’s house, she kissed him once, but pulled away when he wanted to continue. “I should tell you something,” she said, still shivering. The dark inside the car, the fact that she could see only the outline of his face, made it easier to lie to him. “I’m recovering from cancer. Breast,” she said, stopping so that odd word stood alone. “Recovered, I mean. I wouldn’t mention it, but I need to tell you that I have a scar.”

  “A scar?” he said.

  “I had a mastectomy. My left breast.” She hated the feeling of shame that accompanied what she had just said. It was merely a fact, and she should have had the presence of mind to treat it as such.

  There was a pause before he said, “I’m sorry.”

  Kate couldn’t see the expression on his face, but she sensed that something was different between them. An ease, an excitement was gone. “Does that change things?” she asked.

  Again, he took time in answering. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think s
o?” The anger in her voice half surprised her. She didn’t know him well enough to be angry with him.

  “It’s just that …” He stopped himself and reformulated his thought. “This was supposed to be a light thing. No commitment. Nothing serious.”

  “What does this have to do with commitment?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. Then he bumbled out, “It seems serious. It seems …”

  “All right,” she said. She got out of his car, and before she’d closed the front door behind her, she heard him say, “I’ll call you.”

  Inside, she found Melissa and Mark on the couch watching a movie in the dark. It was a school night, and they were openly defying the rule she’d set down. She turned the lights on, and they looked at her, squinting in the brightness. “Mark has to leave now.” Her anger was too pronounced, too obviously out of proportion. Their response to it was to remain frozen in each other’s arms. Kate wanted to throw something at them—a shoe, a book, even her purse would have worked. “I said now,” Kate said. Mark finally sat up and rushed to put his shoes on.

  “Did something happen on your date?” Melissa asked.

  “I didn’t have a date.”

  She expected a fight from Melissa. But instead her daughter sat up slowly and kept her eyes cautiously on Kate.

  Charles called all week and left pleas on the answering machine that Kate tried her best to ignore. He was blunt. He stuttered and repeated himself. He admitted that he’d been thinking of her. He regretted the words he’d spoken that night. “I’m calling from the back of the store,” he said in one message. “From the warehouse phone. You were right. It is lonely back here.” In another, he became almost desperate. “I guess I just miss you. I hope I’m not saying too much. I realize this is just an answering machine. I realize that I’m begging.” He sounded as hurt and alone as she had felt in the car that night. Nonetheless, she was done with him, until he made what was obviously his final call, the sad bass-tone of resignation in his voice. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” he said. When she picked up the phone, he began once again to express his regrets, and because she couldn’t listen to one more simultaneously rambling and halting apology, she said, “OK, Charles. Apology accepted.”

  He wanted to see her as soon as possible. That afternoon he and his son, Ryan, had planned to shoot skeet at the gun club. And so Kate ended up on the edge of town, shouldering a shotgun for the first time in her life and wearing wax earplugs as she blasted away at a “clay pigeon,” a little black disk, and tried to follow the instructions Charles shouted out at her to lead the pigeon by at least a foot. The gun club was in the center of an abandoned field, which looked dead, yellow, and already ravaged by winter. It was a gray day, the air like white smoke, and Kate was surprised by the pleasing and substantial weight of the weapon in her hands, the delicious, earthy odors of cordite and gunpowder after each blast, the sense—there was no mistaking it—of power and control the weapon gave her when she finally obliterated her target. She did so twice, then three times, awed as the disk disintegrated in the air. Behind her, a small boy of aboutten, who wore a camouflage baseball cap and chewed a huge wad of pink bubble gum, pressed a button that released the pigeon every time she shouted the word “Pull!” She handed the shotgun, its barrel hot as a stovetop, to Charles and stood behind him—“Always stand behind the shooter,” he’d told her earlier in a grave voice—and watched now as he meticulously hit pigeon after pigeon. She hadn’t anticipated her excitement at seeing Charles’s skill, the quickness with which he trained the barrel on the target and destroyed it. His arms seemed thicker, more powerful, his shoulders broader. There was no sign of weakness, of hesitancy or doubt, and she was awed to see this unexpected competence in a man who, as she was seeing that afternoon, could barely keep his son in check.

  Ryan was a tall kid with deep-set eyes that seemed on the edge of rage every time he looked at Kate. His mohawk, high and stiff and died salmon pink, and his multiply-pierced ears, lined with studs and hoops, made him seem menacing, especially when he took the shotgun in hand. On the way out to the club, when Charles had stopped for gas and left Kate and Ryan in the car alone, the boy resisted her every attempt at conversation, and then, after she had given up, he smiled at her and said, “Are you fucking my dad yet?”

  “I’m not going to answer that question.”

  “None of my business, right?” he said. “You’ve probably already seen that he’s a wimp. He lets people do whatever they want to him. He just takes it.”

  “I’m not that kind of person,” Kate said.

  Ryan nodded. “Sure you’re not.”

  Whenever Ryan missed his target that afternoon, he cringed and swore, sometimes under his breath, though more often out loud. “Fuck me,” he half shouted once, to which Charles merely responded with a warning glance. Kate would have sent him to the car at the very least. Ryan had certainly been right about his father: He did seem willing to take just about anything.

  Kate was relieved when they dropped Ryan at home later and went out to a pleasant dinner with wine. When late in the meal Charles sighed and said, “I’m too easy on Ryan. I let him get away with everything,” Kate lied.

  “I’m not so sure that’s wrong,” she said. “Every kid needs a different approach.”

  He shook his head. “My motives aren’t that noble. I just want him to like me again.”

  They joined hands across the table now. Kate felt terrible for this worried father, this man who just wanted to be liked, and her pity quickly transformed into attraction. She knew already that she wanted to sleep with him that night. She was blushing when she stammered out an invitation. “You can say no,” she added.

  But he didn’t say no. Kate hardly knew how she’d imagined herself behaving then, though she hoped that passion and desire would take over, that she’d know what to do. Instead, she and Charles waited for the bill in utter silence, which persisted as they drove toward Kate’s place, the black trees and the proper Victorian homes rising on either side of them in the dark. “Let’s talk,” Kate said.

  “OK,” Charles said. But they didn’t say another word until they stood facing each other across Kate’s bed. For a change, Kate was relieved that Melissa had once again defied her and was out that night. “We don’t have to do this,” she said.

  “I want to,” he said, though he didn’t sound as if he did.

  When she came out of the bathroom wearing a man’s white T-shirt that fell to her thighs, she didn’t feel at all attractive. Charles sat on the edge of the bed in his tank top and boxer shorts, his legs skinnier, paler, more covered in thick, dark hair than she’d imagined. His arms were crossed, as if protecting himself from her. “I don’t care about your scar,” he said.

  Kate knew he’d meant to say something that would sound nicer, more romantic. “I want to keep this on,” she said, pointing to her shirt.

  In the dark, everything became a little easier. He began to kiss her—her face, her neck, her arms—all the while carefully avoiding the place of her absent breast. His mustache tickled. She found his erection without meaning to. It was just suddenly there in her hand, and she couldn’t help but think of the shotgun she’d been handling earlier that day. Guns and penises. She let out a silly, adolescent laugh. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “I haven’t done this in so long.” Now that she held him, she didn’t quite know what to do with him. She tried the very act she’d seen her daughter perform only weeks before, but she was indelicate and Charles let out a whelp of pain and then began to laugh.

  “Is this all right?” he asked when he finally mounted her.

  Her left thigh began cramping, but she nodded as the pain gathered into a dense ball. “It’s all right,” she said. His caution, his concern moved her. If not passionate, it was deeply tender, just as he had promised, and she lifted herself a little to kiss his shoulders, his neck and cheeks. It took him a while—Kate could have hoped for a briefer first time—but as soon as
he was finished, he rolled over and said, “You didn’t, did you?”

  “I will next time.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was …” She paused, looking for a word, and when she finally said it, the fullness and enthusiasm in her voice embarrassed her, “Lovely.” She felt a deep and heavy laziness of body. Their legs were tangled. Off in the darkness beside her, the fingers of her hand caressed Charles’s neck. She had forgotten for a moment what was happening to her. She was dying, she remembered now. Again. For the second time. And for some reason, it was easy to know. She wasn’t afraid, even as she was certain that the fear would return soon. For now she lay next to a man who must have been as spent and physically oblivious as she since he let out an enormous, accidental belch. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Half-asleep, Kate giggled lazily. “I’m happy,” she said.

  The next morning, she was dizzy and experiencing double vision. In her bathroom mirror, she saw that her left eye had fallen toward the lower outside corner of its socket. She looked monstrous, and she wanted Charles, who lay slumbering in her bed, out of the house. When she prodded him awake, he rolled over and smiled at her, seeming to expect the kisses and friendliness of a lover. His breath was less than pleasant and his hair was lopsided. She kept a hand over her eye, and when he asked about it, she said something about an infection and eye drops that he didn’t question. “I’ve got to get to work,” she said, after which she stood by him while he dressed.