Life got lonelier after that. Even if only a few people had actually seen Dad crying at the dance, it was, after all, a junior high dance, and messages among thirteen-year-olds spread faster than fire on a parched prairie. Soon, the whole school knew. Violet Holmquist retreated to a safe and snooty distance. She joined the girls who stood in gossipy gaggles and whispered “weirdo,” “dad,” and “drunk” sharply in each other’s ears if I chanced to pass them. I did my best to feign contented absorption in a magical, private world of my own, wishing that someone would talk to me while also praying fervently to Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes and desperate cases, that no one would. Meanwhile, my cheeks flamed in the manner of Dad’s, and my feet felt far too big for my body. I buried my head in books.
WHEN I CAME HOME FOR WINTER BREAK after my first semester at college, I tried to be strong in the face of Dad’s floundering. On Christmas Eve we watched It’s a Wonderful Life and exchanged a few presents. I asked him if he wanted to go to midnight Mass, but he said no. We did pray together that night, though. I held his hand while we said the Our Father, and it didn’t feel anymore like my little hand in his, but like his little hand in mine. When I went back to school for the second semester, I was very sick.
3 GERBIL (Meriones unguiculatus)
AFTER I RECOVERED FROM THE MALADY that had inspired Simon to offer me his office sofa, he invited me to dinner. He wanted to take me to a restaurant he loved near the beach. I agonized over what to wear. I had never imagined, when I dreamed of dates on which I never went with college boys who never talked to me, that anyone would take me to an actual sit-down restaurant. The dark-haired dates of my daydreams unfailingly escorted me to one of San Diego’s numerous two-dollar taco stands, where my homespun sundresses were always appropriate.
But, of course, Simon Mellinkoff was not a boy. And he, the descendant of millers, had milled me in his office. And then, a few days later, he had written, in his standard red ink, a message at the bottom of my latest Latin quiz: “Will you have dinner with me?” (It had been a daring move on his part, I thought, considering that, had I been capricious or conniving, or simply regretful about what had happened between us, I could have handed that quiz cum invitation straight to the dean. Pretty complacent, I thought.) So I had to find something nice to wear, a task so challenging I actually solicited the opinions of my roommates.
“Um, who is the guy?” asked Amy, a pasty chemistry major who subsisted on sugary fruit tarts and never cleaned their gelatinous drippings out of the toaster oven.
“Oh, just somebody I met at school.” I cleared my throat. “In Latin.”
I held up my only two dressy dresses: a floral-printed polyester frock with a lace collar and sleeves that verged dangerously toward puffy, which I’d worn to my confirmation at Holy Rosary at age fourteen (I hadn’t grown much since then), and a vintage white sheath accompanied by a slender brass belt with a buffalo-shaped buckle that I had spontaneously and sneakily taken from Rasha’s closet over winter break.
“If he takes Latin he’d probly prefer the white,” opined Amy. “It’s sort of toga-like.”
Winnie was an exchange student from Taiwan who kept a pet gerbil in her bedroom. During one of our few social interactions, she had introduced me to the Double Happiness #1 Chinese Goods Emporium in downtown San Diego, where I’d bought a pair of intricately embroidered red cloth shoes that I believed by their brightness alone would bring me good luck. Winnie recommended the floral. “It will show him that you are a modest girl,” she said.
In the end, I wore neither of those dresses but instead made a harried trip to the mall, where I procured a black jersey va-va-voom with no sleeves at all, the most grown-up dress I’d ever had, and a pair of high-heeled peep toes. I little suspected when I bought the peep toes, for which I took the time to put a fresh coat of red paint on my biggest and second-biggest toes (remembering Simon’s feelings about feet), that I would wear them only once. But that was what happened because, after dinner, as he walked me to my station wagon with his arm wrapped around my waist, before whispering in my ear that I should follow him home, Simon looked toward the ground with a frown and asked, “Are those genuine leather?”
• • •
SIMON HAD CHOSEN A TINY MEXICAN PLACE for our rendezvous, but it was different from any restaurant I had ever visited because, as I discovered upon reading the menu, every dish was prepared without meat or dairy products.
“Wow, this looks delicious,” I offered, genuinely intrigued by the prospect of potato-filled taquitos smothered in soy cheese. Simon nodded. He appeared as nervous as me and was charmingly tongue-tied. After all, we had only been alone together once before.
“Your dress,” he said, and then drifted off. We looked at the walls. They were adorned with Frida Kahlo prints and lots of old black-and-white photographs of soldierly sorts wearing big-brimmed hats and mustaches, all of them toting guns and bedecked in bandoliers.
Simon saw me studying them. “Zapatistas,” he said. Before I could respond, our waitress came. Simon ordered for himself and, just before I was able to tell her what I wanted, he ordered for me, too.
“How did you know I wanted the potato taquitos?” I asked. Warmth suffused my limbs, and my feet throbbed in their snug shoes. Simon shrugged, grinned, fiddled with the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. “Our waitress is so beautiful,” I said.
“She’s probably a vegan. It’s amazing how a woman can glow when she decides to stop consuming the products of cruelty.”
“Hmm.” I nodded. Again, my gaze drifted toward the wall decor, and Simon, growing more relaxed, went on.
“The Zapatistas. These were members of a guerrilla movement that formed during the Mexican Revolution almost a century ago. They fought for the rights of the Indians who had lost so much of their land. Brave people.” My eyes landed on an electrifying portrait of a young woman soldier dressed in men’s clothing. She stood with one hand resting sassily on her hip. In her other hand, she held an enormous rifle. “There were female Zapatistas, too,” Simon said. “One of them was even a commander in the movement,” he added. “A true warrioress.”
The tortilla chips in a basket between us were warm and fragrant, and their bready scent—so wholesome, safe, right, and good—hovered over our table, creating a kind of enchantment. “It’s one thing to have beliefs,” Simon continued. He crunched a chip between his teeth, swallowed, and lifted a napkin to his lips. “It’s another to actually act on them, fearlessly and passionately.”
I HAD BEEN TOO EXCITED TO EAT much during our date. But from that night on, Simon sought to nourish me, in his way. “I feel like you’re starved,” he said one night as we lay beneath his cool bedsheet. “Not so much foodwise,” he said, “but starved”—he rested his hand on my chest, where my heartbeat sped up slightly—“here”—then grazed the crooks of each of my elbows, which had so infrequently touched another body in an embrace—“and here”—then laid a palm on my womb, where my left ovary hummed—“and here.”
All the characteristics over which I had swooned as a shy smitten student—the dry jokes, the secret Russian surname, the parking tickets, the accent with its promise of mischievous midnight murmurs—came together in one multifaceted and radiant whole, and now that I was close enough, I could actually see them all, shining sharply like cut gemstones, when I stared into Simon’s eyes.
He hardly had to coax me to leave Amy, Winnie, and the gerbil to join him and Annette in their labyrinthine house in La Jolla. La Jolla was a quiet seaside town where none of the houses looked anything like the two-story rancher—which, in its pre-decay days, might have had an aesthetic best described as pseudo-Southwestern—that Dad and I had shared in the Tierra de Flores tract. They were sleek and shone like brand-new coins, and even the slightly shabby abodes among them looked as though their shabbiness was cultivated and carefully maintained, not a consequence of sadness. On the sidewalks, wealthy ladies walked little lapdogs with rhinestone-encrusted leashes.
There were art galleries specializing in dewy oil renderings of dolphins, and breakfast cafés with offerings like brie-and-wild-blueberry-stuffed pancakes. In spite of my delight at being taken in by Simon, I felt alien as a desert flower in that moist and misty enclave.
Simon’s shadowy dwelling was tucked away behind two doors: a heavy, dark outer door, which faced the sidewalk and opened to a courtyard, and an inner door, which opened to the house. Everything about the place was, as he termed it, “green.” There were energy-efficient bulbs in each lamp, and the heating and cooling systems were powered by the sun. The various trash cans were all individually designated for different kinds of waste: aluminum, glass, paper, compost. The linens were organic cotton and laundered with earth-friendly detergent. I scanned the gleaming nooks and corners for traces of Simon and Annette—a stray sock or a slip-on shoe, a fallen flaxen hair, an old newspaper—but there were none. All the incidental signs of their lives were swept into oblivion by a maid who appeared thrice weekly. “I think you’ll be comfortable here,” Simon said.
He bought me bolts of fabric so I could sew as many sundresses with straps that came easily untied as I wished. He paid for my yellow bicycle to have a tune-up. He stared at me with interest even when I was engaged in the most prosaic of activities, such as cleaning the crannies of my ears with a cotton swab or tugging a comb through my uncooperative curls. He listened when I recited the poems I loved best from my Intro to Japanese Poetry class. And he talked to me. He asked me all the questions he had wanted to ask when I had been nothing but a strange schoolgirl, when he had watched me just before class every day (yes, it had been every day) as I walked my bike across the quad while he sat on his stone bench surrounded by birds.
“Do you have any friends?”
This time I answered him. “No.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Not really.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Only you.”
“Do you know how absolutely lovely, winsome, and precious you are?” he said, bundling me in his arms, the way a person holds a baby, after my shower.
And it was only then that Simon set about enriching my education. He was impressed with my overall intelligence, and did not care to drill me further in Latin (despite the fact that my grasp of it faltered further with each successive chapter in Wheelock’s). Instead, Simon educated me about animals and their plight. He picked up where he had left off with the Gandhi quote he had recited in his office, handing me, one after another, all of the books whose titles I had read that day, followed by dozens more with a similar slant.
To feel seen was such a pleasure, and I supposed that if I let Simon make me into what pleased him most he would never stop looking. So I was Simon’s girl for the shaping, and I read the books he recommended. But even Simon, incisive though he may have been, couldn’t have predicted the depth of my response to all he showed me.
Dad had sometimes told me if I looked closely enough I could see that there was always a bit of heaven on earth. I knew he was right: I saw it easily in the orange blossoms, and in the sweet moments that sometimes flashed between us. But I had never considered that there was a bit of hell on earth, too, until I read about factory farms.
Those places, which produced most of the pork, beef, and poultry that I had long regarded as everyday sustenance, were home to practices so brutally inhumane I could hardly believe they existed in the twenty-first century. Personable pigs, gentle cows, and sensitive, sharp-witted birds who later became mere pieces of meat led, with far too few exceptions, completely confined lives full of emotional misery and physical torture.
I could no longer bear to eat the flesh of creatures who had known so much fear and anguish, who weren’t free to feel the sunshine, flap their wings, or even so much as take a step, whose bodies were cut up in countless ways—their beaks, ears, teeth, tails, and more all sliced off while they were still alive, without painkillers—who screamed and cried out to no avail, who were separated from their young or else forced to nurse without ceasing, and made to dwell in the dirtiest of environments, sometimes among the dead bodies of their fellows.
“The meat available at the market today is not anything like it was one hundred years ago before the advent of factory farms. These animals have a completely different quality of life—they have no quality of life,” Simon said. “Not that an animal’s good or happy life is any justification for eating it,” he added. “It isn’t. Ever. They aren’t ours to eat. The only solution is veganism.” After all that I had read, it was easy to agree.
Medical, psychological, and cosmetic testing on animals were, I discovered, equally problematic, and much of what went on in labs shocked and saddened me. The animals used in circuses, rodeos, horse and dog racing, and wildlife parks were exploited, and often mistreated. Oh, how my ovary ached. There were too many living beings who were treated as unfeeling objects—and all so people could have the luxury of eating favorite foods, using particular products, wearing certain clothes, or being entertained.
I deposited my genuine leather peep toe shoes, along with all my other animal-derived adornments (an angora cardigan, a wool coat, glossy oxfords, the fur-lined mittens with which Dad had gifted me one Christmas that I’d never had occasion to wear), at the Goodwill. I stopped, as Simon had put it, “consuming the products of cruelty.” My cheeks became silky, my hair shiny, my eyes bright.
Simon and I talked about animals every evening. “You’re so beautiful. Your heart is so wide open,” he said, looking amorous and awed after I summarized (with tears spilling from my eyes) the travesties about which I had most recently learned, or read aloud from an animal rights–angled essay I had written for one of my classes (“An Unnatural Life: The Practice of Beekeeping in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina”).
Annette observed us quizzically from her perch in front of the extravagant three-story dollhouse her maternal grandparents had presented to her after her mother’s passing. Sometimes she interrupted us with questions (“What is a ‘bucking strap’?”), and sometimes she crawled onto my lap to comfort me, patting my forehead and cheeks and singsonging, “Don’t worry, Margie. Everything dies at some time.”
About six weeks after I moved in, Simon decided I had graduated from my survey of Crimes Against Animals and introduced me to what, were it to be included in a course catalog, could only be described as Collaborative Fieldwork.
“I can see you have a feeling about all of this, a genuine feeling, as I do,” he said one night while I cleared the table of our dinner plates, which still held mostly untouched portions of a tempeh-and-fennel casserole that resembled shredded paper. (I had agreed to prepare our nightly meals but was new to the art of vegan cooking. “Dad, I’m still hungry,” piped Annette, chewing on a fork tine.) “I lead an activist organization called Operation H.E.A.R.T.,” Simon continued. “That stands for Humans Enforcing Animal Rights Today. It has a small student membership. Would you like to take part?”
A FEW DAYS LATER, I PUT ON my lucky red Chinese shoes and Simon took me to Gelato Amore, a two-story café I had never before visited in San Diego’s Little Italy neighborhood. Bluesy tunes came through the sound system. Upstairs, a narrow-faced fellow wearing a tweed newsboy cap sat alone, chewed his bottom lip, and studied a big book entitled America’s National Parks. A smiling young man in a torn T-shirt came up the stairs with a tub full of dirty dishes and disappeared into a hidden kitchen, leaving an inexplicable smell of gardenias in his wake. A group of five college students sat around a table in an obscure corner. They heralded our arrival with a few waves. Simon introduced me. “We have a new crew member,” he said with one hand resting impersonally on my shoulder, betraying no hint of his familiarity with the rest of me. “This is Margie Fitzgerald.”
The members of Operation H.E.A.R.T. had all renamed themselves after creatures. There was a pretty blonde with a flower in her hair named Bear, a bespectacled gentleman in a wheelchair who called himself Ptarmigan, a girl with a bl
ue-black bob who strummed a guitar and said her name was Raven, and a sturdy tomboyish type who tipped her hat and introduced herself as Orca. “And I’m Bumble B.,” said a red-haired boy with baby dreadlocks just starting to appear in his hair. He set aside the digital compass with which he’d been tinkering. “That’s ‘B’ with a period, not ‘B-E-E.’ ” He shook my hand.
AS SIMON HAD EXPLAINED TO ME EARLIER, Operation H.E.A.R.T. had recently scored some significant coups against both local and large-scale animal exploiters. The slatternly owner of a puppy mill in Poway—into which the Operation crew had snuck one balmy night—appeared on the local news after she awoke to find her front door emblazoned with the purple-painted phrase “Kanine Killer!” (“The intentional spelling error made it more memorable,” Simon noted). After neighbors told curious cops that the sounds and smells coming from the mill seemed “off,” it was investigated and, because of its pitiful preponderance of malnourished pups, shut down. Then the Operation created a pamphlet entitled The Circus: Hell for Animals, and distributed thousands of copies of it citywide to coincide with the arrival of Barnum & Bailey. The size of the crowd inside the colorful tent, the San Diego Sun reported, was noticeably modest compared to previous years.
My first mission with the Operation concerned a Pacific Beach pet store that the crew had staked out for two months: Azar’s Pet Palace. During that period, spies (Ptarmigan and Bumble) posing as shoppers had observed that numerous birds, including canaries, finches, and parakeets, had died from dehydration and unsanitary living conditions. The owner of the pet store, though generous with seed, was less conscientious when it came to refilling water cups and cleaning out cages.
The Lovebird Page 3