Still Life with Elephant

by Judy Reene Singer

  “No,” she said. “You have to pick one.”

  “Can I pick Tom?” I said. “He’s very nice.”

  “You can’t have Door Number Three,” she said. “That’s a different game.”

  “Anyway, Door Number Three rejected me,” I said. “I invited him into his own sleeping bag, and he turned me down to sit up all night on a pile of boots.”

  “He knew it was Rebound Sex,” said Alana. “And he didn’t want that. He probably wants you on his terms.”

  “It would have been Consolation Sex,” I said. “I’m not ready for Rebound Sex, because I’m not on the rebound yet.”

  “You’ll thank him later,” said Alana. “Besides, you don’t know if he’s in a relationship or not. You don’t know anything about him.”

  “I don’t seem to know anything about anybody,” I said. “Everyone’s just full of big surprises.”

  “Well, here’s another one,” said Alana. “I want you to find my kids a pony.”

  Reese surprised me, too, early that evening, with an anchovy pizza, so I wouldn’t have to cook, and a tape cassette he found somewhere, of old elephant theme music. I’m not crazy about either anchovies or Henry Mancini, but I’m less crazy about cooking. We finished the pizza with a bottle of wine, he told me the answer to his morning riddle was Campbell’s Cream of Elephant Soup, we listened to “The Baby Elephant Walk,” and I went to bed early. Grace and Alley were sharing my pillow, so I curled up with Matt’s pillow, trying to put everything together. I had to rethink Delaney; my mind danced around the idea that the horse just had a screw loose somewhere. I had to rethink Matt and try to decide if my marriage was worth pursuing. I had to rethink Alana, who had watched me ride all sorts of bad horses over the years and now was brave enough to let her kids start riding. And I had to rethink Tom. Was I finding meanings in his gestures that didn’t exist? I needed him to touch me. I needed to know that it was still possible. Was there anything wrong with that? What did I actually hope to prove?

  The tectonic plates were shifting all over the place.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  SHE WAS ten feet at the shoulder, a wall of thick, wrinkled gray skin with sparse, bristle hair. A week had passed by now, and it was early evening and my first night to sleep with her. I stood outside her enclosure and stared in, studying her. I had never been all alone, so close to an elephant. She stood on large, round platter feet and had four toenails, like teacups, on each front foot. She had tusks that curved outward, like crescent moons, and large palm-leaf ears the shape of Africa, and small, intelligent caramel-brown eyes that stared through the bars, stared right through me, stared far off, past the confines of the barn, seeking something else, perhaps the comforting trees and bush and tall yellow grasses of Zimbabwe.

  “You will be okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of you.” She lifted her great head, but she wasn’t really listening to me. She just stared through the bars, fanning her ears slightly, as though straining to hear the calls of her herd.

  I pressed my face against the bars and continued to speak softly to her. “Good girl,” I whispered. “Good Margo.” She was indifferent to my words. Depressed. Grieving. And I felt ashamed to be human in the face of her suffering. “No one will ever hurt you again,” I promised her.

  Her wounds were grave. Deep gouges that still oozed bloody fluids, washing away the traces of ointment that Matt had spread on them. He would apply more tomorrow, to help fight the infection, inch by inch, until the violated skin closed and healed. I stood there quietly, until she finally closed her eyes and dozed. I glanced at the IV, to make sure it was still in place, and wondered how I would ever reach her enough to gain her trust.

  I had read everything I could on elephant training, and most of it employed brutality: electric prods and sharp hooks and chains. I would have none of it. In the meantime, Reese’s jokes ran through my mind, and I couldn’t stop them. How do you train an elephant? Carefully. How do you know there’s an elephant in the room? By the peanuts on its breath. There were hundreds that Reese had been telling me, nonstop, since I got home from Zimbabwe. Now, standing next to a real elephant and looking at her wounds, I wondered where the joke was.

  I lowered the lights even more, so that the barn was dim and the shadows melded together, and then I sat down on my cot. Richie and I had given the baby a liter bottle of formula earlier in the evening, and she had finished most of it before she fell asleep in the hay. She was one very small, very sick baby elephant. Billy DuPreez had calculated her to be less than two months old. A mere infant. A two-hundred-pound infant. And she was underweight.

  Margo suddenly let out a long, breathy groan and sank to the floor. I jumped up and unlocked the gate and pulled it open, ready to summon Richie, but she only draped her trunk over the sleeping form of her child before she lay flat-out, next to her in the hay. Exhaustion, I realized, and I shut the door to leave them alone.

  A few minutes later, I was back on my cot, in the warm, elephant-scented air, and listened to the animals breathing next to me. I was trained to rescue, I thought. I rescue horses, and I used to rescue people. Now I even helped rescue an elephant. I lay on my cot, in the silent barn, without my radio. Without my music to fill my head. How would I manage the next twelve hours, I wondered, without my music? The room was filled with the breathing of elephants. The room was filled with their soft grunts as they slept. I pulled the blanket over my clothes and closed my eyes and listened to their sounds and hoped it would be enough to get me through the night.

  It wasn’t.

  I lay awake. I sat up. I lay down again. I finally got up and walked softly across the floor and rolled the barn doors open to reveal a warm night and a full moon. I slipped outside to stand under a pale-silver sky and wonder how this was all possible, this sleeping with elephants. I wondered what the stars looked like right now in Zimbabwe. I wondered where Tom was right now, and ran my fingers across my lips to capture what he had felt like. I wondered what the African day would reveal tomorrow. How many animals were waiting for help. Wondering what Tom was feeling.

  Wondering how both Africa and Tom had gotten so much under my skin.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  AT SOME point I must have fallen asleep, because Richie woke me up when he came in to feed. I jumped from the cot, embarrassed that I hadn’t already been up and checking on Margo.

  “How did it go all night?” he asked as he carried in several baskets of fruit from the back of his truck.

  “The baby finished two bottles,” I said. “And then they both slept pretty well.”

  He looked them over. “Good,” he said, and threw in fresh hay.

  Margo watched us vigilantly, always managing to place her large gray body between us and her baby. The baby who still needed a name. I could see the calf looked a bit stronger today, better than yesterday, maybe a bit more responsive. A week of care had made a real difference. She was standing more, and now she was peeping out from behind her mother’s knees, curious about me.

  “Hello, Margo,” I called out softly. “Hello, baby. Hello.”

  The baby flapped her ears and squeaked like a door hinge that needed oiling. That, I knew, was a greeting flap. Margo growled and flapped her own ears, before rumbling to her baby to stay put. That was a warning flap. I understood ears. Ears are terrific indicators of animal emotion. Horses and dogs and cats pin them when they are angry. Elephants flap. I stood, not moving a muscle, until the ear flapping subsided, and Margo browsed her hay again, daintily picking through it with her trunk and lifting it toward her mouth with a delicate finesse. She would have done fine, I thought, dining with my mother at the Hudson Inn. I wondered how I could join their small world. It would all depend on how fast Margo got socialized.

  “You know, we’ll be able to treat Margo without those leg bracelets,” Richie said, as though reading my mind, “as soon as you get her socialized.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Yep,” he said, “Wasn’t it your jo
b to train her? That’s what you signed on for.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I just have to figure out how.”

  Richie handed me some fruit. “First of all,” he said, “you can start trying to hand-feed her. Through the bars. Don’t get all brave and go in there by yourself.”

  “Like I’m just dying to get intimately acquainted with the bottom of those feet,” I said, holding a banana out to her, through the bars. She looked at me and then her baby, then back at me, suspicion and worry written across her face. She was afraid to leave her baby’s side, even though she seemed to want the fruit.

  I waved the banana again. She grunted and flapped her ears.

  “You have to command her respect,” said Richie. “Make yourself her target by calling her name, and then immediately reinforce it by holding out a piece of fruit.”

  “Right,” I said, but couldn’t help thinking that becoming the target of a wild elephant might not be the best career move of my life. I took a deep breath. “Margo,” I said commandingly, holding the banana up so she could see it.

  She let out an angry trumpet and several impressive ear flaps before rushing the side of the enclosure and giving my hand a hard slap with her trunk that knocked the fruit across the floor and left my fingers stinging.

  It’s not that I thought any of it was going to be easy—I wasn’t picturing the two of us running toward each other through a field of daisies, my arms outstretched, her trunk waving at me—but I was hoping for some sign of recognition. She trumpeted again and finally did give a sign, of sorts. She turned her rump to me and dropped a large mound of poop. I decided that was my signal to leave.

  “Coming back tonight?” Richie asked as I walked out with him. “She didn’t get to you?”

  “Of course.” I replied. “I’ve had plenty of shit in my life, these past few months. You think one more pile is going to discourage me?”

  “Great,” he said. “That’s what she needs. Daily contact, so she can trust you enough to let you work with the baby. You have to blow very gently in the baby’s trunk so that she’ll always recognize your scent. I already did it.”

  “You’re kidding. Like playing a trumpet?”

  He nodded “Almost.” Then paused for a moment. “Listen, why don’t you come by a little earlier than usual, like around four?”

  “Isn’t that when Matt usually gets here?” I asked, squinting with suspicion.

  He shrugged and gave me a lame grin. “I’m still trying to help you two,” he said. “I don’t hold out much hope, but I’m still trying.”

  How can you tell if an elephant’s been in the refrigerator? By the footprints on the butter. What do elephants take when they get hysterical? Trunkquilizers. Reese thought that one was especially funny. I found an elephant cap with big plastic ears and bouncy accordion-folded trunk that Reese had bought in a dollar store and left on the kitchen table along with a five-pound bag of peanuts tied with a pink bow. I found a banana propped in my coffee mug. Elephant socks on my dresser. A stuffed gray-and-yellow-checked elephant on my pillow. I knew Reese was doing his goony best to cheer me up, but I really wished to be alone, so that I would have the luxury of brooding over the fact that I was alone. I finally told him so.

  I had worked the horses for the day and showered, and now Reese and I were having an early dinner that wasn’t pizza. It was a bag of McDonald’s. In an hour or so, I would have to return to the barn for another night with Margo. I was trying not to gulp down my cheeseburger; Reese was savoring his, wearing the elephant hat.

  “I think that one should always dress formally for dinner,” Reese commented, opening the wrappings on his second burger.

  “Don’t you have a life?” I replied.

  “Mom thinks I should hang out here for a while,” he replied. “She thinks you could use a campy Rottweiler.”

  “Is that a recognized breed?”

  “Company for a while,” he repeated. “Honestly, Neelie. How did you ever get along in Zimbabwe with your hearing problems?”

  “Except for one or two skirmishes with Matt and Richie, I had no problems at all,” I said. “None.” And then I put my cheeseburger down and thought about how odd that was.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  “WHAT DO you think of ‘Dorothea’?” I asked my mother. “I might name the baby Dorothea.”

  We were having lunch again, at the Hudson Inn. She was sipping a Bay Breeze, I had a vodka martini.

  “The baby?” She put her drink down and looked at me. “Did something happen in Africa that you’re not telling me?”

  I gave her a big smile. “For the baby elephant,” I said. “I have to name her.”

  “Dorothea is a lovely name,” she said. “Your grandmother’s name. I thought you were going to save it as a middle name for your first daughter.”

  “This baby is,” I said. “Kind of.”

  “And do you think your grandmother would be honored to have a…a…wild animal named after her?” she asked primly. “I think it would have broken her heart.”

  “It’s a very nice elephant, and she’s going to grow up big and strong,” I said, slugging back the martini. “Big elephant, big honor.”

  “I’d be embarrassed to death to have an elephant share my mother’s name.” She stabbed up a tiny forkful of salmon.

  “Or Amanda,” I said.

  “Now, there’s a good idea,” she agreed. “Your dad’s mother. I wouldn’t have any objections to that.”

  I pushed away my Caesar salad—I had little appetite for it—and waited impatiently for my mother to pick through her salmon. She looked up at me.

  “Are you in a hurry?” she asked.

  “What makes you ask?”

  “I hear your feet tapping on the floor,” she said. “Are you too much in a hurry for dessert as well?”

  The jelly-donut tradition. “I have to work three horses this afternoon and teach two students,” I said. “I spent the whole morning with the elephants, and my workday is only one-third over.”

  “Aren’t you spreading yourself too thin?” she asked, taking another morsel.

  “Listen, are you going to finish your lunch?” I asked in exasperation. “I can’t spend much more time.”

  “We can always skip going to the donut shop,” she said.

  “No, we can’t,” I said.

  We wound up skipping sitting with coffee, though I did buy a bag of donuts. I grabbed them from the shop clerk and practically pushed my mother out the door.

  “So what’s happening with you and Matt?” she asked, following me as I race-walked to my truck.

  “I have no idea,” I said, peeking inside the bag to make sure I had been given six raspberry jellies. “I don’t even think about him.”

  “You can’t hide behind this elephant forever,” my mother chided, kissing me good-bye. “You have a space flight.”

  “A space flight?” I asked. “Are we going to the moon now?”

  “Face life,” she said. “Face life!”

  “I am facing life,” I said to her. “In my own peculiar way.”

  I spent that afternoon being alternately disgusted and jubilant, depending on who I was riding. Delaney was still a problem child—riding well, then spooking across the ring. I couldn’t get a handle on him. I tried being firm, strong, demanding, as well as sympathetic, and I was still hanging on for dear life as he skittered away from something that existed only in his mind. Isis, on the other hand, was giving me more and more piaffe steps, in perfect rhythm. Soon it would be time for her owner to take lessons on her. That was great, because I would get paid not only to train the horse but also for training the owner to ride the horse. And getting paid was a very good thing.

  “That’s your dinner?” Reese asked me with alarm, when I put all six jelly donuts on a big plate, with a mug of warm milk, in preparation for eating them in bed. I had finished a week of sleeping with the elephants and was greatly looking forward to actually sleeping with my mattress.

>   “That’s your dinner?” I asked, pointing to the pizza with mushrooms and pepperoni that he had just brought home.

  “At least mine has vegetables and protein,” he said. “So it’s healthful.”

  “And mine has fruit and grains,” I said. “Equally healthful.”

  We stared at each other for a moment, then took our respective dinners to our respective bedrooms for a night of TV and junk food. I was very tired. Tomorrow I would rise at dawn, race to the sanctuary to try to get Margo interested in fruit, race back to clean my barn, then work Isis and Delaney. I had no time for my own horses; Mousi was giving me lonely looks over his fence, whereas Conversano seemed to be firmly convinced that his life of loafing was just about perfect.

  I was up to donut number three, and watching people eat worms on television to prove how brave they were, when the phone rang downstairs. I ignored it. I had taken the phone out of my bedroom right after the first phone call from Holly-Hateful. I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  “It’s for you,” Reese said through my door. “Tom something?”

  I leapt to my feet and opened the door. “I’ll take it in here,” I said, grabbing the phone from him with shaking hands and shutting the door again for privacy.

  “How are things?” Tom asked after I said a breathy hello. I was surprised by how glad I was to hear his voice.

  “Margo’s doing okay,” I announced, settling back against my pillow. “She’s eating her elephant chow and alfalfa hay and—”

  “I meant you,” he said.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, then, I’d better come by and check on you,” he said with a little laugh. “Maybe we can meet at the sanctuary tomorrow and go for a proper dinner?”

  “I’d like that,” I said. “I kind of miss the barbecued warthog.”

  “I don’t know if I can promise you that, but there’s got to be a nice restaurant somewhere in your region.”